Reformed Theology: 1. God, The Beginning

Welcome to the Basics of the Reformed Faith. Today's topic is going to be in the beginning God. The Bible opens with a remarkable statement in Genesis 1 .1, in the beginning God, that could probably be one of the most popular or well-known verses in all of Christendom.

God’s Eternal Existence Before Creation

This simple assertion is packed with meaning. Some of the most fundamental truths of the Christian faith are found in this short declaration, and it is important to give them due consideration. Our theology begins with God.

The first thing this passage tells us is that before anything was created, God already was. He was in existence. In fact, God always was without beginning or without end. This is also known as the acety of God, which means the mode of being that which is underrived from anything or anyone else.

It's independent existence or existence by self-origination, which is what the word ase means, of self. Since God alone is uncreated, we speak of him as eternal. God exists before time itself and is not bound by the succession of moments as we are.

As the creation account unfolds in the subsequent verses of Genesis 1, we learn that the eternal God creates all things. Whatever now exists, exists only because God created it. There is no such thing as eternal matter.

There is no eternal realm of mental forms or ideas as Plato led us to believe. There is no eternal convulsing of matter, ever expanding, ever contracting, as taught in much of contemporary science. The bottom line is, it's in the beginning God, not in the beginning the particles.

Particles, in and of themselves, couldn't bring anything else into existence because they are dependent on something else. There is only the eternal God who created all things and who already was in the beginning.

This indicates that nothing exists apart from the will of God, and all created things, the heavens and the earth and humans as well as angels, are necessarily contingent and dependent on God for their existence, while God is not dependent on anyone or anything for his.

The Creator-Creature Distinction

Unlike his creatures who are bound by both time and space, God has no such limitations because God is unlike us in this most fundamental way. He must be distinct from that which he has created and can in no sense be dependent on created things.

God has no needs, as do we. God has no parts, as we do. Although he is personal, he does not have the kind of passions or emotions that we do as creatures. This is the God who gives orders to the sun and the stars, who gives life to inanimate matter, as when he made Adam from the dust of the earth in Genesis 2 -7, and who is Lord over death.

God utterly transcends his creatures. He rises well above anything and everything he created. He exists outside of that. The otherness of God, also known as God's holiness, the distance between God and his creatures, is known as the creature-creator distinction, and this is very, very important.

This distinction is one of the most fundamental points of Christian theology and must be clear to us before we can meaningfully talk about any other aspects of the Christian faith. If you don't understand the creature-creator distinction, you may blur the lines, or worse yet, put the creature above the creator and think that the creator is dependent on the creature, whether it be the creature's decisions, the creature's thoughts, or the creature's actions.

Knowing God by General and Special Revelation

How can finite creatures, bound by both time and space and prejudiced by sin, truly know and correctly understand anything about a God who is so transcendent that he cannot be seen or observed? The answer to this dilemma is that such an infinite God cannot be known by his finite creatures unless and until he chooses to reveal himself to his creatures in such a way that we can know and understand this revelation.

This is exactly what God does through both nature, general revelation, and scripture, special revelation, when God draws near to reveal himself to us. God drawing near to us, being close to us, is called his imminence.

As creatures, we will always be dependent on God for our very life and breath, but we are also dependent upon his self-revelation if we are to have any meaningful knowledge of him. The realization of this fact is the beginning of a proper understanding of spiritual things.

This is why we must strive to understand who God is by directing our attention to those two places where God reveals himself, through that which has been made, the natural order, and through the supreme revelation of himself in his word.

God’s Eternal Sovereignty and the Christian Life

A. W. Tozer says, the most important thing about you is what you think about when you think about God. So let's just do a quick review. First, God is in the beginning. He has existed always and is the beginning and end of all things, and we can see that in Revelation 22 -13, where God says, I am the alpha and omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.

God is a spirit. He's infinite, eternal, and unchangeable. God is not bound by time and space. God has no needs, parts, passions, or emotions. God is personal, yet transcends all of creation. God is the creator, and we are his creatures.

We can only know God by his revealing himself to us through nature and scripture. We are dependent on God for everything, and he's dependent on us for nothing. Everything that exists is contingent, and exists because God willed it and created it.

Well, that's it for now. Thanks for joining us in this lesson.