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Isaiah 40:28–29
“Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might he increases strength.”
Quite plainly, Scripture teaches that God makes choices, that He wills certain things and does not will other things (e.g., Deut. 7:6). Of necessity, He wills His own goodness as the standard of goodness, for He is the greatest good, and so it would be a sin not to will Himself as the highest good (James 1:17). Other things, however, the Lord wills not by necessity but freely and voluntarily, being compelled by no other to make the choices that He makes. Here we are thinking about the existence of created things and the events that He has ordained in history. God did not have to create or to ordain history as He has; He could have done otherwise. He freely does whatever He pleases (Ps. 115:3).
In light of the Lord’s free creative acts, we should consider God’s work of creation and His title “Creator.” We could hardly overestimate the importance that the Bible places on the truth that God is the Creator. The title itself appears in several places, including today’s passage, and Scripture makes frequent references to the Lord’s acts of creation. Knowing that God is Creator is so important that the very first thing God’s Word tells us about Him is that “God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1).
As we think about what it means for God to be Creator, let us first be clear that the Lord did not create because He needs creation to be truly happy or complete. His divine goodness is so complete that it can—and at one point did—exist without the created order. God is self-existent and perfect, in need of nothing to be who He is or to delight in who He is (Ex. 3:14; Deut. 32:4). His goodness is complete and was not augmented by His work of creation. Thomas Aquinas writes that “since, then, the divine goodness can be without other things, and, indeed, is in no way increased by other things, it is under no necessity to will other things from the fact of willing its own goodness.”
Second, while there are some similarities to God’s works of creation and our drive to create things, the Lord is a very different Creator from us. He is the source of existence; we are not. God created the world ex nihilo, out of nothing (Heb. 11:3); we can do no such thing. When we create, our mental and physical strength is diminished by the effort, but the Lord “does not faint or grow weary” at any time (Isa. 40:28–29). Any one of us could cease to exist and the world would remain, but if God did not exist, nothing would exist.
Coram Deo Living before the face of God
We can hardly understand who we are and our place in the universe if we do not know that God is the Creator of all things. Such knowledge should lead us to humility and cause us to worship the Lord with reverence, awe, and gratitude. It should not surprise us, therefore, that the unbelieving world often attacks the very notion that God created the universe. We cannot compromise this foundational truth.
For further study
- Ecclesiastes 12:1
- Malachi 2:10
- 1 Timothy 4:4
- 1 Peter 4:19
The bible in a year
- 1 Chronicles 17–19
- John 10:1–21