Who
is God?

“In the Beginning, God.”

When the beginning began, God was already. Gives Him a somewhat different perspective on everything that He created. He is not a reaction but the cause of the beginning and knows all there was to know before anything exists besides Himself. He has no beginning, has always been God, isn’t changing, getting better, finding room for improvement. How do you challenge the Creator of all who has the capacity to know all when you have such limited frame of reference. He even knows Why.
Infinite? He has all knowledge (omniscience), ability (omnipotence), presence (omnipresence) and sentience (omnisentient) without corruption of any of these traits. While infinite He only acts within His determinant character and will.

Imagine that—something before anything. Part of my formal training was in science and it has been fascinating to watch generations of learned people postulate how everything or anything began. Also has been a little humorous. We always get back to the beginning and the unanswerable “what before” dilemma. We know that we exist but we can’t ‘prove’ how. We know all sorts of details but the more answers we have, the more questions are left unanswered.

The Bible never presents itself as a history book although it is historical; it doesn’t claim to be a science, math or arts guide but it does give us information on all of those disciplines. But that isn’t the point of the Bible—It is distinctly about God and not just any god. The God of the Bible reveals Himself as the I AM which is sometimes represented by the letters YHWH or Jehovah. He does not portray Himself in this autobiography as the God who becomes whatever we ask Him to be to suit our image of ourselves.

The Bible does not go in any length about what was before the heavens and the earth were created and does not give a timeline. If you find year dates in a Bible, they are not original to the text. Bishop Ussher, Catholic Primate of Ireland, coded the dating of Creation as was clocked on the Julian calendar at about 6 p.m., October 22, 4004 B.C. His dating was by placing all the chronologies of the Old Testament sequentially back from Jesus’ birth. This was an honest effort to include something wondered but not stated—not all of the names in the chronologies are sequential and parts of the creation record do not indicate days as we think of twenty-four hour days. Take it as possible but not inspired.

What the Bible does present is that God Himself directed and designed the process of creation and validated His work, that all of the Godhead was involved according to the Genesis text and the Gospel of John with confirmations from many other books. He knew what He was doing, did not do it by happenstance or chance but with purpose and design. As you read the Bible you will find that His gift of choice to created sentient—able to perceive and make choices— beings was not used by them according to His desires and yet it is obvious that He was not “surprised” by this failure and the consequences. Just as in both of the ‘original’ sin scenarios where the created thought that they could supplant the Creator simply by ‘knowing’ more, trying to understand the infinite or eternal by the use of a finite and temporal reasoning only takes away from any relational intimacy with God.

“and they hid themselves”

God began as the Revealer but Mankind insisted on going outside His revelation to gain knowledge on their terms. Yes, we still do.