Thus, the most fundamental distinction in all of reality is that between creator and creature. God and that which God has made are distinct; One has made the other; One rules and the other obeys; One exists a se (from himself), the rest ab alio (through another).

To our modern ears, it is easy to miss the significance—the radicalness even—of the Christian view of creation. In the ancient world creation stories were often viewed as religiously unimportant. As C.S. Lewis states, ancient creation stories “are on the fringe where religion tails off into what was perhaps felt, even at the time, to be more like fairy-tail”[1] For example, in one Egyptian story a god called Atum came out of the water and begot and bore the two next gods. In a Babylonian myth, before heaven and earth were made beings called Apsu and Tiamat begot and bore further gods, which in turn begot and bore further gods, and we eventually learn of the creation of the heaven and the earth through the strife caused by all these gods. Greek mythology starts with the heaven and the earth already in existence. When considering the ancient creation stories, Lewis observes:

When the curtain rises in these myths there are always some “properties” already on the stage and some sort of drama is proceeding. You may say they answer the question “How did the play being?”[2]

But the Christian doctrine of creation asks a very different set of questions:

“How does a play originate? Does it write itself? Do the actors make it up as they go along? Or is there someone—not on the stage, not like the people on the stage—someone we don’t see—who invented it all and caused it to be?”[3]

These questions are rarely asked and answered in ancient creation stories. We do of course find in Plato a clear theology of creation in the Christian sense, “but this is an amazing leap . . . by an overwhelmingly theological genius; it is not ordinary pagan religion.”[4]

This is a radical doctrine—a doctrine of creation unheard of in the ancient world—and its importance cannot be underestimated for at least two reasons.

First, the doctrine of creation empties Nature of divinity.  To say that God created Nature is to separate one from the other. What makes and what is made are two things. Thus, to pay reverence to the sun or moon or stars as the ancients (innocently enough) did, is now properly understood as idolatry. It is the worship of created things instead of the creator. The Psalmist cries out:

The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it; for he founded it upon the seas and established it upon the waters. (Psalm 24:1-2)

God owns it all—it is all His, and to worship some created thing as a god is to ascribe divinity to the non-divine. It is a kind of stealing, taking something that only belongs to God—worship worthiness—and ascribing it to another.

Second, the doctrine of creation makes Nature a symbol, a manifestation, of the Divine. Nature is full of manifestations of God—ever revealing His “eternal power and divine nature” (Romans 1:20). We see God’s handiwork all around us—the beauty of a sunset, the majesty of the mountains, the ferocity of an earthquake or a tornado, the peace of a cascading waterfall, the rhythm of the seasons and the song of the animals in a field. They one and all point to their maker. As Lewis states, “By emptying Nature of divinity—or let us say, of divinities—you may fill her with Deity, for she is now the bearer of messages.”[5]

And what is that divine message that cries out from all God has made? It is an invitation: “Come to me” (Matthew 11:28), God beckons, for “you are mine already.”

For my post on the inescapability of the creator-creature relation, see here.

For an excellent discussion of the biblical doctrine of creation, see Paul Copan and William Lane Craig’s Creation out of Nothing.

First, the idea that God creates His own nature offers a unified theory of creation, a theoretically elegant theory, and that counts in its favor. “If such a view can be upheld then these properties [that is, those properties that make up the divine nature], along with any further abstracta we might construct out of them, would be found to have the same status that . . . pertains to all [distinct reality: God is the creator of all], making for a simpler and more persuasive theory.”[1] The idea is that it is better to hold that God is the creator of all abstracta, including those abstracta that compose His nature—attributes such as being omnipotent, being omniscient, being wholly good, being the creator of all, etc.—instead of just those abstracta that are not about God.  Such a picture is simpler, it possesses a kind of theoretical uniformity that is attractive.

Second, the idea that God creates His own nature is attractive because it upholds the absolute sovereignty and aseity (self-existence) of God. “The sovereignty-aseity intuition excludes any suggestion that properties pertaining to God’s nature . . . have being in some sort of independent Platonic realm, or that their existence in such a realm might be ontologically prior to God’s own existence, so that he would be dependent on them or their availability in order to be what he is. . . . Also excluded is the possibility that from God’s point of view his nature . .  counts all the same as a given: that is, as an ontological reality that God simply finds manifested in himself, and over which he exerts no control.”[2] The idea is that if God is not creatively responsible for His own nature, then He is not absolutely sovereign.

Are these good enough reasons to think that God creates His own nature? I’m not so sure.

What about the claim that such a view is theoretically simpler than the view that God creates all reality except His own nature? This theoretical virtue needs to be weighed against other considerations, including accuracy, scope, and fruitfulness. It could be that on balance, the advantages of theoretical simplicity are outweighed by other factors. For example, McCann claims that God’s nature is a matter of God’s will, but that suggestion seems to suffer from a devastating worry—incoherence—for how could God bring about His nature unless he already possessed the essential property of being able to bring about His own Nature? But then, it seems God does have a (thin) nature prior to His creation of a compleat nature. And if part of God’s nature is ontologically prior to God’s creating the “rest” of His nature, then we no longer have a theoretically simple view.

Secondly, and more importantly, the aseity-sovereignty doctrine does not require (contra McCann) that God create His own nature. All the aseity-sovereignty doctrine requires is that all distinct reality is created by God.  That is, all reality that is “outside God’s borders” is created by God. As Brian Leftow recently put it in his magnificent book on theistic modal metaphysics, “God is (directly or indirectly) the Source of All that is ‘outside’ Him.”[3]

Back to the our ultimate chicken and egg question. I say: Neither God nor God’s nature are existentially prior to the other (I do think that God is explanatorily prior to His nature in one sense–God is the final cause (not efficient cause!) of His nature and all His essential properties, but that discussion is for another day). Rather, God and God’s nature exist a se (uncreated and necessarily) and all reality distinct from God (including the abstracta that exist in Plato’s heaven) are created by God. Thus, we maintain the sovereignty of God without violating the commonsense intuition that no one, even God, is responsible for the nature it has. This view, which I call Modified Theistic Activism, is defended by Richard Brian Davis and myself in a forthcoming book Beyond the Control of God? Six Views on the Problem of God and Abstract Objects (Bloomsbury Publishing Group, forthcoming in 2014).[4]

For my reviews of McCann’s and Leftow’s books, see here and here.

As Plato put it in the Republic, those who have no experience of reason or virtue are

never reaching beyond [the stream of experience] to what is truly higher up, never looking up at it or being brought up to it, and so they aren’t filled with that which really is and never taste any stable or pure pleasure. Instead, they always look down at the ground like cattle, and, with their heads bent over the dinner table, they feed, fatten, and fornicate. (586a)

 Feed, Fatten, Fornicate.

Plato (as often as not) describes our culture quite accurately.

And we are miserable.

We no longer (at least since the modern era and the revolution in ethics therein) are concerned with living a virtuous life for its own sake. Happiness is now viewed as a kind of personal fulfillment, a kind of sensual satisfaction, and it remains elusive. Yet we continue to run after more…we lust for more…and when we find it, it is spirited away, like water through a sieve.

And we cease to exercise that part of us that is most distinctively human: our rational faculties. Two implications of living a sustained feed-fatten-fornicate lifestyle are that, as a culture:

• We become conceptually illiterate. We no longer have the patience, the courage, and the discipline to cultivate intellectual virtue. Thus, we become sloppy in our thinking, unable to reason rightly about things that matter most. We become guided more by feelings than right thinking.

• We become morally confused. We reduce ethics to Mill’s pleasure principle—the good is that which brings pleasure, the bad that which brings pain. Virtue is out (for it is not sense perceptible); deontology (or subscription to rules) is out, since there is no authoritative and objective source for such rules—and anything goes. 

And those who try and push against the grain—those who like Socrates are a kind of “gadfly” within the culture (including the Church in her prophetic role) are often viewed as priggish, Old Fashion, Antiquated, Traditional (a pejorative word). And this is no accident:

As C.S. Lewis observes (picking up the Platonic thread) in The Screwtape Letters,

The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle onto the Enemy’s own ground [the enemy being GOD]. He [the prospective Christian] can argue too; whereas in really practical propaganda of the kind I [senior devil] am suggesting He has been shown for centuries to be greatly the inferior of Our Father Below. By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result? . . . you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it “real life” and don’t let him ask what he means by “real.”

Sometimes I find it a struggle to keep my head up. I know there is more to life than the stream of experience, yet I continue to fix my eyes on it. Perhaps you struggle with this as well. Do you, as do I, long for the clean air and sweet reasonableness of a life of intellectual and moral virtue? This is where Plato can only get us so far. We can’t pull ourselves out of the mire by our own bootstraps. We need a power that is greater than ourselves to change us, to lift our heads, and to turn our souls in the right direction. What is this power? It is the person of Christ. Christ lived a life of intellectual and moral virtue. And he died for you and me—so that we too can find Real Life in Him. Jesus is the good in all good things, the beauty in all beautiful things, and the truth in which all reality points. In Him we truly do find Real Life (John 10:10).

For more on this topic, seem my related post: We are not brutes.

It seems that there are only two options: rest and trust in God or revolt and reject God; a turning toward or away; an opening of self or a closing of self.

But, in revolting and rejecting God, how does one deal with pain and suffering? It seems there are two options here as well: either deaden the pain by swimming in a sea of pleasure (that is, by embracing Epicureanism) or by gritting one’s teeth and bearing the pain as bravely as possible in a godless world (that is, by embracing Stoicism).

First a couple case studies:

The Plague in Athens. It was during the second year of the Peloponnesian war, in 430 B.C., that the plague struck Athens. As the deadly disease rampaged through the packed city, killing over 1/3 of the population, the historian Thucydides reports that everyone began to live for the pleasure of the moment since they were going to die anyway. “No one held back in awe, either by fear of the gods or by the laws of men: not by the gods, because men concluded it was all the same whether they worshipped or not, seeing that they all perished alike; and not by the laws, because no one expected to live till he was tried and punished for his crimes.”[1]

The Jewish Holocaust. As a young teenager, Elie Wiesel was a faithful, God-fearing Jew. But, as he and his family, along with his fellow Jews, were deported from their homes and brought to Auschwitz in 1945 his life took a drastic turn for the worst. On his first night in the death camp, he came face to face with utter evil…yet God remained silent, and he turned away from God. “For the first time, I felt revolt rise up in me. Why should I bless His name? The Eternal, Lord of the Universe, the All-Powerful and Terrible, was silent. What had I to thank Him for?”[2] Wiesel understandably walked away from God, and never looked back.

Either way, hope is dashed on the cold rocks of fate and man’s problem of pain and suffering remains unanswered. Man attempts to drown out the silence of God by a kind of closing of self, a turning of the soul away from God. But toward what? One is reminded of Bertrand Russell’s quip: If atheism is true, than all we can do is build our lives on the firm foundation of unyielding despair.

There is an answer to the problem of man’s suffering and God’s silence. It requires rest and trust. It requires the opening of self, not a closing; a turning of soul toward God. For in doing so, we are led not to an answer, but to the answerer.

What is God’s answer to the problem of man’s suffering? It is a person—Jesus…on a cross. Christ on the cross—that is God’s answer to the problem of pain and suffering. He has opened himself up to evil, and ultimately has taken it all upon Himself on the cross. It is the cross then, that is the victory of God over pain and suffering, and the only place for men and women to find peace, hope, and comfort from its sting.

And this does justice to the problem doesn’t it? For the problem of suffering is more than just a philosophical problem (it is no less)—it is something we all deal with at the level of our lives. As such, it demands an existential response. As the late Harvard theologian Arthur C. McGill puts it, “If the existence of Christians is oriented toward Christ as the life and light of God, it is in movement away from evil and death and darkness. In other words, the Christian is on the way from evil to good, from death to life, from darkness to light. He finds himself in a state of pilgrimage.”[3]

For more thoughts on the problem of evil, see my post here as well.

Those, like myself, who are stubborn enough to continue to believe in God in the face of such rhetoric may rightly wonder what is going on here. It is as if the volume in the God debate as been turned up in the last decade—in no small part because of the few (and vocal) new atheists such as Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and Dennett.

We (us recalcitrant theists) are told (by Dawkins and other “new” atheists) that belief in God is akin to belief in fairies, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. (for Dawkins’ latest claims see here)

We (recalcitrant theists) are told that Darwinian (unguided) evolution is a fact and those who hesitate are inexcusably ignorant. Says Dennett:

To put it bluntly but fairly, anyone who doubts that the variety of life on this planet was produced by a process of evolution is simply ignorant—inexcusably ignorant.[1]

Notice, it is not that you disagree with Darwinian evolution, but that you merely doubt Darwinian evolution—as if the epistemic certainty of Darwinian evolution has been established to the level of a mathematical proof! Surely, this claim is too strong. But, I’m not concerned in this post with the issue of evolution. Alvin Plantinga’s recent book Where the Conflict Really Lies has done a nice job in showing that if evolution is the sober truth, there is no necessary incompatibility between belief in God and belief in evolution (shorn of its naturalistic baggage of course).

What I want to consider is the heightened rhetoric of claims like this—the utter arrogance, to be blunt, of atheists who make such claims. What gives? Why the intellectual bullying?

Interestingly, C.S. Lewis’s reflections on “The Cursings” found in the Psalms sheds light on our contemporary situation. Lewis observes the following:

This makes sense. If there is no God, then physics has to explain the origin of the universe (or multiverse). If there is no God, then evolution has to explain the origin of life, species, and humans. If there is no God, then there has to be a naturalistic explanation for the origin of everything—the stakes are high indeed! No wonder the new atheists seem so angry (to me at least). If inexplicabilism isn’t the best explanation for the universe; if Darwinism isn’t the best explanation for the origin of life, species, and humans, then the game is up! But not so for the theist, if evolution is true, well… that is compatible with belief in God, and so too with inexplicabilism. (Granted, if inexplicabilism is true, then we do have an at least one incompatibility here—for inexplicabilism is incompatible with the theistic claim that God is the creator of the universe. Still inexplicabilism isn’t incompatible with belief in deity.)

So, how should us recalcitrant theists respond to intellectual bullying? Well, with charity and humility. The Golden Rule applies here, as it does elsewhere. We are called by God to patiently love our neighbor. This doesn’t mean, of course, that our neighbor get’s a free pass—we are to call out their arrogance, their narrow-mindedness, their error—but with gentleness and respect; with a posture of intellectual modesty. One thing we cannot do however, is uncritically be moved by their rhetoric; or cower into thinking we need to give up the game and surrender to whatever naturalistic science or scientists “says is the case.”

Undaunted, we continued on to the English department. Our experience was much different. The first door we knocked on found a professor who writes fictional works that explore spiritual issues. So, she was happy to chat. The conversation jumped all over the map—and it was clear by the end that this professor was indeed very nice, open, and in fact comfortable holding many views, some of which were contradictory. The next door, another willing professor. He answered our questions thoughtfully and indicated a desire to meet again and continue the conversation at another time. We walked to the next office down, and found a professor of Rhetoric. We began to talk and he pulled out a paper he had just written examining the rhetoric of the evolution-creation debate. It was a fascinating discussion. We left with the promise to come back again and continue exploring these issues. And I walked out with my little hypothesis confirmed—people are shaped by what they think. Of course, not all science professors are cold, calculating, and disinterestedly rational. I know many who are kind, engaging (and still the paradigm of rationality). The same for humanity professors—many are engaging and do hold very consistent beliefs. But I think the general point holds, or at least it did that day: what we think about shapes us (to some degree or another).

I’d like to add to this hypothesis: our lives are shaped by what we think great. That which is ultimate in our lives will shape us. We are shaped by what we know and by what we consider ultimate in our lives. Ask yourself:

• What do you think great? What competes in your life for greatness?
• Are you convinced that God is greater than anything else that you might embrace to draw life from or find joy in?

Be careful of “should” here. Of course, God “should” be greatest in our life, right? But, is God actually greatest in your life? Is God enough? In your heart of hearts, do you believe that there is nothing you need besides God and His approval for eternal joy?

The reality is, God is enough. God really is Great—it all really is about God and His glory. Are you convinced that only in God we can find wholeness, satisfaction, and peace? Does the primary text (the words and actions you actually speak and do) as well as the subtext (what you actually communicate with your words and actions) of your life communicate “God is great”? Do you believe that? My hope is that my life and yours would ring out with the message of the psalmist: “For great is the Lord and most worthy of praise; he is to be feared above all gods.” (Psalm 96:4)

For more on the Greatness of God see here and here.

As a foil, I want to use Frederick Buechner’s excellent (and highly recommended) book: Telling the Truth. In it, Buechner describes tragedy as follows:

[Tragedy] is the news that man is a sinner, to use the old word, that he is evil in the imagination of his heart, that when he looks in the mirror all in a lather what he sees is at least eight parts chicken, phony, slob. That is tragedy”[1]

The first act of the gospel story is man’s tragedy—something has gone drastically wrong, the world is not the way it is supposed to be. But next—the divine comedy—God’s answer to man’s tragedy.

The Tragic is the inevitable. The comic is the unforeseeable. How can Donald Duck foresee that after being run over by a steamroller he will pick himself up on the other side as flat as a pancake . . . but alive and squawking? How can Charlie Chaplin in his baggy pants and derby hat foresee that though he is stood up by the girl and clobbered over the head by the policeman and hit in the kisser with a custard pie, he will emerge dapper and gallant to the end, twirling his invincible cane and twitching his invincible mustache?…it is the news that [in spite of ourselves] we are loved anyway, cherished, forgiven, bleeding to be sure, but also bled for. That is comedy.[2]

The incarnation and atonement are God’s response to man’s tragedy—and it is unexpected, unforeseen, it is high comedy. Who would have predicted that God becomes man? It would be like C.S. Lewis entering Narnia (as a talking animal undoubtedly), or J.R.R. Tolkien entering Middle Earth (surely as a Hobbit)! It is utterly unexpected. And it sets the stage for the next act, the unending fairy story:

What gives [fairy tales] their real power and meaning is the world they evoke. It is a world of magic and mystery, of deep darkness and flickering starlight. It is a world were terrible things happen and wonderful things too….Yet for all its confusion and wildness, it is a world where the battle goes ultimately to the good, who live happily every after, and where in the long run everybody, good and evil alike, becomes known by his true name.”[3]

Living happily ever after…isn’t this how all fairy stories go? They don’t end, they continue on forever. And this is the “good news” of the gospel—the sudden joyous turn that is God’s overwhelming love and mercy to us on the cross provides the means for man to live forever as originally intended. Tragedy does not get the last word!

This story—the gospel story—is a story that we all long for; we long for a world that is supernatural, where death is cheated, love is unending, victory is snatched out of the hands of defeat, and goodness wins in the end.

We all long for it—but, importantly, is it true? Two comments. First, I suggest we pay attention to our longings, because our longings reveal something that we have lost—we were created to know God, to experience life as it was supposed to be—and because of tragedy—because of sin and death and destruction—we have lost our way. So, pay attention to your longings—let them awaken you out of slumber. Second, we know the gospel is true because of Christ’s resurrection from the grave. Because of the resurrection, the gospel story is not one more good story that we enter into for a time, only to re-emerge into “the real world” when we put the book down, or walk out of the movie theatre. Because the resurrection happened, Jesus has punctured a hole between life as it is and life as it will be—between what is the case and what ought to be the case—and He bids us to come follow Him.

Here is an excellent discussion by Tim Keller on Tolkien’s use of fantasy to highlight the gospel story:

This is a step beyond Anselm. Anselm argued that God is not only the greatest being (a theme I’ve discussed here and here), but God is the greatest possible being. So, God is the greatest possible being, and He has created a world in which we can enter into the greatest possible story (note: I’ve not committed myself here to the Leibnizian claim that this is the best possible world, but more modestly—the claim that of all of the best possible worlds that God could create, no other great-making property can match the Christian story). As Plantinga puts it:[1]

. . . perhaps all the best possible worlds contain incarnation and atonement, or at any rate atonement. But any world that contains atonement will contain sin and evil and consequent suffering and pain.

Thus, we have a reason why God allows sin and suffering—for in allowing the human freedom that is a precondition for self-determination and genuine relationship with God and fellow man, we also find the possibility of sin, of evil—and the need for atonement. In the atonement we see God’s overwhelming love and mercy on display as He enters into His own Creation and pursues us—what an unmatchable story!

I think Plantinga is right—not only is Christianity the greatest story ever told, but it is the greatest possible story ever told. If true, then all of the best stories we find in our western canon—Homer’s Illiad, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Victor Hugo’s Les Miserable, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and many, many more are good stories because they point to THE STORY: all good stories point to an underlying reality that is the gospel—and that is why they are so compelling to us, they are all variations of the ONE STORY that is alive and that understands you and me.

Contrast this with the story that we are told on atheism, according to Alex Rosenberg is his book The Atheist’s Guide to Reality (and make ready your prozac!):[2]

Scientism requires that we be able to see through the superficial charms of narrative . . . . Real science is much more a matter of blueprints, recipes, formulas, wiring diagrams, systems of equations, and geometrical proofs. . . . That means that when it comes to science’s understanding of reality, stories have to give way to equations, models, laws, and theories. . . .By the time we get to the end of this book, we’ll see that science beats stories.

Really?! This is the story we are supposed to believe—that there is no overarching narrative and that science is to give us “meaning” (there is none) and “purpose” (there is none) in a godless universe? Don’t be misled! This smug atheism/scientism is as much a story as any—it’s a false story—and worse, it’s not even a good story.

My challenge: Ask, is there a story that is alive and understands you? I say, yes: the gospel understands you, and in it you meet the divine word (LOGOS)—the person of Jesus—He whom all good stories point. Next time, I’ll continue unpacking this idea of story by explaining in more depth the gospel story as a three act play: Tragedy—Comedy—Fairy Story.

We learn in Hebrews 1:3 that “the Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word.” And in Colossians 2:9 that, “in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form.” Christ Himself claims to present accurately and authentically the character of God (see e.g., John  14:6, 14:9 and 17:7). Of course, as J.B. Phillips points out, being limited in space and time, “he cannot present the whole of God, but he can present in human form a character that may be understood, admired, loved, respected—or even feared and hated.”[1]

And the singular testimony of Jesus is that He is greater than anything else. While talking to some of the religious leaders of his day (the Pharisees), Jesus makes the most astounding claim: “I tell you that one greater than the temple is here.” (Matthew 12:6) The extraordinary character of this claim can only be understood in light of the importance of the temple in Israel. The temple represented the center of Israelite national life. It was a gathering point for all the people of Israel, a symbol of their unity in the worship of their God, whose presence was found within its walls. So, in what way is Jesus greater than the temple? The answer is that in Jesus God’s presence is now not only found in the temple and for one people, but is accessible to all people everywhere.

Continuing on in Matthew chapter twelve, Jesus argues that He is not only greater than the temple, but is also greater than Jonah:

Then some of the Pharisees and teachers of the law said to him, “Teacher, we want to see a miraculous sign from you.” He answered, “A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a miraculous sign! But none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh will stand up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it; for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and now one greater than Jonah is here.” (Matthew 12:38-41)

 To see how it is that Jesus is greater than Jonah, let me briefly summarize what happens in the book of Jonah. Jonah is told by God to go preach to Nineveh; and Jonah fled by boat to Tarshish. Eventually Jonah was thrown overboard and swallowed up by a great fish (Jonah 1). Next we read how Jonah prays from the belly of this fish and God commanded the fish to vomit him onto dry land (Jonah 2).  Then, Jonah goes to Nineveh and the wicked city actually listens to him and repents before the Lord (Jonah 3). However, in the final chapter we read that Jonah was angry with God for having compassion on the Ninevites (Jonah 4). And now we can see how Jesus is greater than Jonah. While Jonah proclaimed the message of God out of obedience, Jesus proclaimed the message of God out of pure love.

Finally, Jesus is not only greater than the temple and greater than Jonah, Jesus is also greater than Solomon:

“The Queen of the South will rise at the judgment with this generation and condemn it; for she came from the ends of the earth to listen to Solomon’s wisdom, and now one greater than Solomon is here.” (Matthew 12:42)

We learn in 1^st Kings 4:29-34 that Solomon was the wisest man who ever lived. The Queen of the south, Sheba, went to Solomon to test him and to see if he truly was as wise as people say. After “grilling” him with hard questions, she concluded that he was indeed wise—and this led her to give glory to God (see 1^st Kings 10:1-9). So, how is Jesus greater? The answer is that Jesus is the essence of wisdom itself. In fact, in John 1:1 we learn that Jesus is the Logos, which in the ancient world, had come to mean the rational organizing principle of the universe. In John we learn that the Logos is a person—the person of Christ—that He is the source of all wisdom.

So, Jesus is greater than the temple because He is the presence of God embodied and available to all, He is greater that Jonah because He proclaims the message of God out of love (and not just obedience), and He is greater than Solomon because He is the very fountain of all wisdom. Jesus is Great. And Jesus is God. Hence, God is great.

In my next post, I’ll consider further why it matters that we think of God as great.

Check out this video: Jesus, He’s My King:

A culture of empty selves shrink-wraps the concept of God to fit its own hollow image—and then cries “foul” when such a “God” does not satisfy. As the title of J.B. Phillips classic book suggests, the god of contemporary culture is too small.[2] The antidote? We must begin to restore a vision of God as great. God alone is worship-worthy. God alone is worthy of our allegiance. And God alone can make us whole. Everything else is truly trivial in relation to the greatness of God.

God reveals His greatness to us primarily in two ways: through creation and through His Son, Jesus of Nazareth.[3] Consider first the created universe. Psalm 95 sings out this triumphant affirmation:

For the Lord is the great God, the great King above all gods. In his hand are the depths of the earth, and the mountain peaks belong to him. The sea is his, for he made it, and his hands formed the dry land. Come, let us bow down in worship, let us kneel before the LORD our Maker. (Psalm 95:3-6)

From atoms to galaxies, our universe is one of many scales. To see just how incredible our universe is, imagine a rather common snapshot, taken from a few feet away, of a man and a women standing in front of a tree.[4] Next imagine the same scene, each time from a successively more remote vantage point, each exactly 10 times further away than the previous one. The second frame reveals a patch of grass on which they are standing; the third shows a public park; the fourth reveals some tall buildings (perhaps they are in central park!); next the whole city; then a segment of the Earth’s curved horizon. Two further frames reveal the entire earth – its continents, oceans and cloudy atmosphere. Three more frames show the inner Solar System, including the Earth orbiting the Sun; the next shows our entire Solar System. Four frames on (now a few light years away), our Sun looks like a normal star within a neighborhood of stars. After three more frames, we see billions of similar stars in the flat disc of our Milky Way, stretching tens of thousand of light-years apart. Another three steps away the Milky Way and now the Andromeda are revealed as spiral galaxies. Continue on another leap and these galaxies are shown to be just two among hundreds of others –outlying members of the Virgo Cluster. One further leap and it is revealed that the Virgo Cluster is itself a rather modest cluster among others. The final frame (on this obviously imaginary telescope) would reveal an entire galaxy as a barely detectable smudge of light.

Consider again the same snapshot of a man and a women standing by a tree. This time, imagine the same scene, now each frame zooming inward rather than outward 10 times. From less than three feet, we see an arm; from a few centimeters, a small patch of skin. The next frame takes us into the fine texture of human tissue, and then into the individual cell. Next, as we approach the limits of the microscope, we reach the realm of the individual molecule: the long, tangled strings of proteins, and the double helix of DNA. The next ‘zoom’ reveals individual atoms. From here on out, within the realm of quantum mechanics, things get a bit fuzzy. Still, substructures of the atom over 100 times smaller than the atomic nuclei can be investigated by studying what happens when they collide with other particles at extremely high speeds. Perhaps the fundamental microphysical particles are, as physicist currently suspect, little ‘strings’, on scales so tiny that they would require seventeen more zooms to reveal them. As the Astronomer Martin Rees points out, the above considerations “highlights something important and remarkable, which is so obvious that we take it for granted: our universe covers a vast range of scales, and an immense variety of structures, stretching far larger, and far smaller, than the dimensions of everyday sensations.”[5]

I would agree, and add that, for the Christian, a moment’s reflection on the vastness of God’s handiwork reveals His greatness. His greatness is magnified even more when we consider that God is not only the creator of the physical universe, but of all immaterial reality, including souls, spiritual beings, abstract entities (propositions, properties, and numbers, to name a few common examples), and so on. Our God is a great God, and when we consider his works, we are led, along with the Shepherd David, to praise and awe: “the heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge.” (Psalm 19:1-2) The apostle Paul concurs, “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities- his eternal power and divine nature- have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made.” (Romans 1:20) Part of God’s purpose then in creation is to show us something of Himself—His greatness. In my next post, we’ll consider how God has revealed His greatness through His Son.

Here is a short video–consider the wonder of all the God has made: