How Can God Make Something Out Of Nothing?

HOW CAN GOD MAKE SOMETHING OUT OF NOTHING?

If God and nothing else existed prior to the creation of the world, the universe came into existence from nothing.

Isn't it absurd to say that something can come from nothing?

It is absurd to say that nothing caused something.

Because nothing doesn't exist and has no power to do anything.

But it is not absurd to say that someone – God – brought the universe into existence from nonexistence.

Nothing cannot make something, but someone – God – can make something out of nothing.

If the universe had a beginning, as demonstrated in WHO MADE GOD? and WHY COULDN'T THE WORLD ALWAYS HAVE EXISTED?

Then there was once no universe.

And then there was.

After God created it.

This is what is meant by creation “out of nothing”.

There was God and nothing else.

Then God brought something else into existence that had not existed before.

God did not create out of something else that already existed.

This is creation out of something preexisting matter outside of God.

Not creation out of nothing.

Neither did God create the world out of Himself.

God did not take part of Himself and make the world out of it.

Orthodox Christian God has no parts.

He is a simple whole that is absolutely one.

There is no way God could have taken part of Himself and made the world.

“God is infinite and the world is finite. And no amount of finite parts can make an infinite, since no matter how many parts or pieces one has, there could always be more. But there cannot be more than an infinite.  Hence, no amount of parts could ever equal an infinite. So God could not have created the world out of part of himself.”

Norman Geisler

The world came from God but is not of God.

He is the cause but not the substance.

We came to existence by Him but we are not made of Him.

But since the world was not created out of God, or out of something else existing alongside God.

It must have been created out of nothing.

There is no other alternative.

God made something that didn't exist before.

This is Good God Questions Monday. A series dedicated to those good, and difficult, questions about God, universe, life, sin, Christ, love, and everything related.

Why is it so important to answer questions about God?

“but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect”

1 Peter 3:15

Even little children can ask tough question, but there are good answers for all of them. The Bible exhorts us to find them and give them.

“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.”

Colossians 4:6

This post is based on the book “How Made God? And Answer To Over 100 Other Tough Questions Of Faith” by Ravi Zacharias and Norman Geisler.

The First Monday we wondered:

WHO MADE GOD?

The Second Monday we wondered:

WHY COULDN'T THE WORLD HAVE ALWAYS EXISTED?

The Third Monday we wondered:

HOW CAN GOD MAKE SOMETHING OUT OF NOTHING?

The Fourth Monday we wondered:

WHAT WAS GOD DOING BEFORE HE MADE THE WORLD?

The Fifth Monday we wondered:

HOW CAN THERE BE THREE PERSONS IN ONE GOD?

The sixth Monday we wondered:

HOW CAN A GOOD GOD SEND PEOPLE TO HELL?

The seventh Monday we wondered:

HOW CAN GOD BE BOTH LOVING AND JUST?

Worshiping, Seeking, Singing Church

“How tragic that we in this dark day have had our seeking done for us by our teachers. Everything is made to center upon the initial act of “accepting” Christ (a term incidentally, which is not found in the Bible) and we are not expected thereafter to crave any further revelation of God to our souls.”

A. W. Tozer

When you come near to the holy men and women of the past, you will soon feel the heat of their desire after God.

They mourned for Him,

They prayed and wrestled and sought for Him.

Day and night,

In season and out,

And when they had found Him,

The finding was all the sweeter for the long seeking.

Moses used the fact that he knew God as an argument for knowing Him better.

David’s life was a torrent of spiritual desire and his psalms ring with the cry of the seeker.

His psalms are also filled with the glad shout of the finder.

Paul confessed the mainspring of his life to be his burning desire after God.

Knowing Him was the goal of his heart.

And to this he sacrificed everything.

Sound Bible exposition is an imperative must in the church of the Living God.

Without it no church can be a New Testament church in any strict meaning of that term.

“… the whole testimony of the worshiping, seeking, singing church on that subject (of seeking Go) is crisply set aside. The experimental heart – theology of a grand army of fragrant saints is rejected in favor of a smug interpretation of Scripture which would certainly have sounded strange to an Augustine, a Rutheford or a Brainerd.”

A. W. Tozer – Pursuit of God

We need our pastors to give us the Word of God.

We need the sermons.

We are called to be together as a congregation.

We need to taste, to touch, with our hearts, to see with our inner eyes the wonder that is God.

To deliberately seek with mighty longing after God.

Why Couldn't The World Have Always Existed?

WHY COULDN'T THE WORLD HAVE ALWAYS EXISTED?

Christians believe that there must be God because the world had a beginning.

And everything that has a beginning has someone who begins it, a beginner.

But how do we know that the world had a beginning?

Maybe the world always existed…

According to the famous agnostic Bertrand Russell either the world had a beginning, or it did not. If it did not, it did not need a cause (God).

If it did, we can ask, “Who cause God?”.

But if God has a cause, he is not God.

In either case, we do not arrive at a first uncaused cause (God).

The answer to this question is that is meaningless.

It wrongly assumes that everything must have a cause, when what is claimed that everything that has a beginning has a cause.

These two are quite different matters.

Of course, everything that had a beginning had a beginner.

God does not need a cause because He had no beginning.

We need only to show that the universe had a beginning, to show that there must have been a cause of it.

“I never asserted so absurd a proposition as that anything might arise without a cause.”

David Hume

According to the second law of thermodynamics, the universe is running out of usable energy.

According to astronomer Robert Jastrow “Once hydrogen has been burned within that star and converted to heavier elements, it can never be restored to its original state.” So “minute by minute and year by year, as hydrogen is used up in stars, the supply of this element grows smaller”.

But if the universe is running down, it cannot be eternal.

Otherwise, it would not run out of energy, you cannot run out of unlimited amount of energy.

But it does not take forever to run out of limited amount of energy.

“If the overall amount of actual energy stays the same but the universe is running out of usable energy, it has never had an infinite amount – for an infinite amount of energy can never run down. This would mean that the universe could not have existed forever in the past. It must have had a beginning.”

Norman Geisler

According to the second law of thermodynamics, since the universe is getting more and more disordered, it cannot be eternal.

Or it would be totally disordered by now, which it is not.

Hence the universe must have had a beginning – one that was highly ordered.

For it to have the initial amount of energy there must have been a moment when it was given that energy.

When the universe begun.

And whatever has a beginning must have a beginner.

So, the universe must have a beginner, or God.

The world has not always existed.

But God has.

This is Good God Questions Monday. A series dedicated to those good, and difficult, questions about God, universe, life, sin, Christ, love, and everything related.

Why is it so important to answer questions about God?

“but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect”

1 Peter 3:15

Even little children can ask tough question, but there are good answers for all of them. The Bible exhorts us to find them and give them.

“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.”

Colossians 4:6

This post is based on the book “How Made God? And Answer To Over 100 Other Tough Questions Of Faith” by Ravi Zacharias and Norman Geisler.

The First Monday we wondered:

WHO MADE GOD?

The Second Monday we wondered:

WHY COULDN'T THE WORLD HAVE ALWAYS EXISTED?

The Third Monday we wondered:

HOW CAN GOD MAKE SOMETHING OUT OF NOTHING?

The Fourth Monday we wondered:

WHAT WAS GOD DOING BEFORE HE MADE THE WORLD?

The Fifth Monday we wondered:

HOW CAN THERE BE THREE PERSONS IN ONE GOD?

The sixth Monday we wondered:

HOW CAN A GOOD GOD SEND PEOPLE TO HELL?

The seventh Monday we wondered:

HOW CAN GOD BE BOTH LOVING AND JUST?

Smell, Taste, Hear And Experience God

“It is a solemn thing, and no small scandal in the Kingdom, to see God’s children starving while actually seated at the Father’s table.”

A. W. Tozer – Pursuit of God

There are people athirst for God, around us.

And they will not be satisfied till they have drunk deep at the Fountain of Living Water.

There is a lot of talk about the state of the world.

Great sadness on how everything is only getting worse.

But the truth is that there are persons whose religious lives are marked by a growing hunger after God Himself.

They might not be everywhere.

But there is no age when true faith was universal.

True Christians, dedicated to their King, have always been few.

Most of the so called Christians lack the radiant wonder which should accompany faith in Christ.

But is it their fault?

According to A. W. Tozer, “To great sections of the Church the art of worship has been lost entirely, and in its place has come that strange and foreign thing called the “program”. This word has been borrowed from the stage and applied with sad wisdom to the type of public service which now passes for worship among us.”

Is the church a building, or the body of believers?

Is the church the conventional and traditional program we are used to seeing and receiving?

Do we desire God above all?

Are we athirst to taste for ourselves the piercing sweetness of the love of Christ?

“We taste Thee, O Thou Living Bread,

And long to feast upon Thee Still:

We drink of Thee, the Fountainhead

And thirst our souls from Thee to fill.”

St. Bernard

Or do we go to the Church to belong?

To be among our neighbor, to be just like everyone else?

Because it is a tradition and costume in our family, in our community, in our country?

Do we need all the traditions?

And most of all, what it the center of our Church?

What is the most important thing there?

Is it the tradition or God?

“For it is not mere words that nourish the soul, but God Himself, and unless and until the hearers find God in personal experience they are not the better for having heard the truth.”

A. W. Tozer – Pursuit of God

It is not enough to hear the sermon and to be in the church on Sundays.

It is the commitment of the heart that matters.

“The Bible is not an end in itself, but a means to bring men to an intimate and satisfying knowledge of God, that they may enter into Him, that they may delight in His Presence, may taste and know the inner sweetness of the very God Himself in the core center of their hearts.”

A. W. Tozer – Pursuit of God

We do not worship the Bible, nor do we worship the Church.

We worship the Living God.

And in worshiping Him, we develop a true relationship with Him.

We are able to communicate with Him, to have conversations with Him, and to taste, smell, hear, and experience Him with our senses.

Do you go to the church to experience God?

Who Made God?

WHO MADE GOD?

No one did.

He was not made.

He has always existed.

Only things that have a beginning – and end – need a maker.

God has no beginning, or no end, so He doesn't need a maker.

He is the maker.

According to the first law of thermodynamics “Energy can neither be created nor destroyed”.

But this is a philosophical and not scientific assertion.

Science is based on observation, and there is no observational evidence that can support a dogmatic “can” or “cannot” implicit in this statement.

Rather we should say:

“As far as we have observed, the amount of actual energy in the universe remains constant.”

No one has observed any new energy coming into existence or going out of existence.

But this says nothing about the universe being eternal or having no beginning.

Energy may or may not have been created.

The first law of thermodynamics simply states, that as far as we can tell, if the energy was created, the actual amount of energy that was created has remained constant since then.

“If the universe is not eternal, it needs a cause. On the other hand, if it has no beginning, it does not need a cause of its beginning. Likewise, if a God exists who has no beginning, it is absurd to ask, “Who made God?” It is a category mistake to ask, “Who made the Unmade”, or “Who created the Uncreated?” One may as well ask, ”Where is the bachelor’s wife?”.”

Norman Geisler

According to the philosophy there could not have been an infinite number of moments before today.

Otherwise today would never had comes, which it has.

This is because by definition an infinite can never be traversed.

It has no end or beginning.

“The temporal world has a beginning. An infinite number of real parts of time, passing in succession and exhausted one after another, appears so evident a contradiction that no man, one should think, whose judgment is not corrupted, instead of being improved, by the sciences, would ever be able to admit it.”

David Hume

But since the moment of today has arrived, there must have been only finite, or limited, number of moments before today.

Time had a beginning.

But if the space-time universe has a beginning, it must have been caused to come into existence.

There must have been a creator of the space-time universe we call the cosmos.

This cause of everything else that exists, the beginner, the creator, is what we call God.

God exists.

And since He is the cause of everything else.

He is the beginner, the one who made everything to exist.

It is meaningless to ask “Who made God” since He has always existed.

This is Good God Questions Monday. A series dedicated to those good, and difficult, questions about God, universe, life, sin, Christ, love, and everything related.

Why is it so important to answer questions about God?

“but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect”

1 Peter 3:15

Even little children can ask tough question, but there are good answers for all of them. The Bible exhorts us to find them and give them.

“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.”

Colossians 4:6

This post is based on the book “How Made God? And Answer To Over 100 Other Tough Questions Of Faith” by Ravi Zacharias and Norman Geisler.

The First Monday we wondered:

WHO MADE GOD?

The Second Monday we wondered:

WHY COULDN'T THE WORLD HAVE ALWAYS EXISTED?

The Third Monday we wondered:

HOW CAN GOD MAKE SOMETHING OUT OF NOTHING?

The Fourth Monday we wondered:

WHAT WAS GOD DOING BEFORE HE MADE THE WORLD?

The Fifth Monday we wondered:

HOW CAN THERE BE THREE PERSONS IN ONE GOD?

The sixth Monday we wondered:

HOW CAN A GOOD GOD SEND PEOPLE TO HELL?

The seventh Monday we wondered:

HOW CAN GOD BE BOTH LOVING AND JUST?