In the beginning God. . .

Okay, I've got to post this. It may not seem like much to you all, but it was a big answer to prayer for me.

One of my major prayer requests lately has been that God would show me how He applies to what I'm learning, (especially in my classes at HACC since the professors are not likely to do that for me!). Last night He did. As I've been taking this one course in philosophy, I've had this feeling that there was some underlying theme behind all the philosophers we were covering, but I couldn't place my finger on it. Last night, for some reason, God put the pieces together for me, making it so clear that I don't see how I could have missed it before.I don't have time to post the whole thing, so this will be the somewhat condensed version.

“In the beginning God.” I'm beginning to swing over into Mr. Curtis' point of view and agree that this might be one of the most important phrases in the Bible. Here's why. Yesterday my philosophy proffessor was talking about the Greek Gods and saying how they were so different from our conception of God today. First, there were many of them, and second, they tended to act a lot like spoiled little kids than powerful rulers. So, how do we know our God is different from theirs. I know He is, but how do we know and how do you explain that to other people?

The philosopher I was covering was called Descartes. His theory was that man can easily be decieved, and therefore the best way to find the truth was to doubt absolutely everything. (Yeah, he was somewhat of a nut case) However, even with his messed up reasoning, he, and all other philosophers, come face to face with the subject of God. By doubting everything, even reality, Descartes came to the famous conclusion that the very fact that he could be deceived proved that something existed because you can't be deceived about nothing. (He coined the phrase “I think, therefore I am” and yes, he might have been slightly insane when he did it!) Even so, his conclusion that something exists is very important. Why? Consider this. The very best of logic proves that nothing can come from nothing. It has never happened in history and the odds against it are insurmountable. The closest we could come to explaining it would be magic, and even magic requires a magician. (Oddly enough, evolution, a theory supposedly based in science and logic, defies this logic in it's very premise!)

So, nothing can come from nothing. This means that something had to exist before nothing, something uncreated. . . eternal. . . immortal. This is the exact definition of God. The word God has come to be associated with myth and fable, sort of like the Greek gods. But the word God quite simply means something that could exist uncreated. Again, “In the beginning God.” (Hooray for Mr. Curtis! He's spent a lot of his life defending this statement, and I'm now inclined to agree it is one of the most important phrases in the Bible. (Again, hooray for Mr. Curtis! He's spent a lot of his life defending it.)

So if nothing can come from nothing, and therefore God (an uncreated being) had to be there in the beginning, that means God was the first cause. This is quite important to philosophy because as the first cause, He is the basis for any theory. Also, as the first cause, we can know two things about Him. He is alone, and He is unchangeable.

He is alone because if there were other gods, He would either be the cause of them, or they would have been the cause of Him. Either way, it points back to ONE God as the first cause. He is unchangeable not only because He tells us so, but because change is the result of an outside force, and there is no force outside of God. As the first cause, He is the consists of all things that are, which means He can't be influenced by anything because He is everything. Just as the universe is, by definition, unchangeable because it includes all that is or ever could be, even so God is, by definition, unchangeable. In short God is the universe. As the first cause, He is the reality of everything that is, was, or ever will be. Basically, nothing comes from nothing, but clearly there is something, so clearly something existed uncreated,which is by definition God, which places Him as the first cause, which means both that He is alone and that He is unchangeable (which also happens to be my favorite attribute of God so you can see why I was glad to see it backed up, and how's this for a run-on sentence!!)

I realize these are not new theories, but it was the first time I saw them all in context with the Bible and the logical thought of early philosophers. No matter how they tried to avoid Him, they couldn't get around Him and eventually were forced to accept Him or ignore Him. Two other verses that are really good as well that point to God as the first cause are Colossians 1:17 (“And He is before all things, and by Him all things consist”) and Rev. 21:6 (“I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.”) Anyway, I was pretty excited to see God put it together, and I now have the topic for my essay on the course, both of which were big answers to prayer. A big thanks to whoever was praying for me last night!:) It helped more than you know.

Mike