Creation of God a matter of faith
JIM DAIL
For The Californian
Christian-based religions all share at least one core belief: God is the creator and he sent his only son to Earth to die on the cross for the sins of man. But picture a small child attending his or her first Sunday School class. What if that child asks, "Who made God?"
Certainly, the Bible leaves no doubt in who created Earth, heaven, man and Jesus Christ. The problem lies in that the Bible does not explicitly tell Christian followers that anyone or anything created God, only what God made.
"There was nothing until he created it," said the Rev. Mike Rogers, an assistant pastor at the non-denominational New Covenant Fellowship in Temecula. "We must believe he is and those who do will be rewarded."
Indeed, The Bible calls on followers to have faith in God's existence.
"No one made God; he just was," said the Rev. Larry Koger, pastor of Hope Lutheran Church in Temecula. "We have to have faith in him."
Leaders from local Jewish, Mormon, Presbyterian or Jehovah's Witness congregations did not return calls.
The need to have that faith is pointed out in the New Testament's Book of John. John 1:1 instructs that "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God."
In discussing a person's need to rely on faith, the first teaching must be that God is supernatural and has always existed.
"I would tell a person curious about who made God that since they believe in the word, they must believe that God is eternal," said Monsignor Tom Wallace of St. Martha's Catholic Parish in Murrieta.
That point is a common thread among local clergy.
"We hold that God is all reigning and has always been there," said the Rev. Blake Withers, senior pastor of the Las Brisas Bible Fellowship, a Southern Baptist church in Murrieta. "We teach that God is all powerful, sovereign and all-existent."
But what of a person who questions that which he cannot see?
"There's always someone who will say 'Now wait a minute. There's always a start to something,'" Rogers said. "We just have to rely back on the Scripture that he's an eternal being. Man's lifespan is small, but God is an eternal being ---- never started and never ends."
Indeed, all theories of Earth and man's creation rely on a super force of some kind pre-existing. Even the Big Bang theory requires the presence of an explosive, creative force that existed before the planets and all that is part of them.
One old argument is that even scientific forces sometimes cannot be seen. People do not actually see gravity, only the result of it. We have, in a sense, faith that gravity is behind an apple falling to the ground.
That point is addressed again in the Bible. Hebrew 11:1 reads "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."
In other words, some things do not have an obvious visual answer.
"We can't always explain everything to our satisfaction," Wallace said. "We, as Catholics, simply believe that God is eternal ---- no beginning and now end."
As a result, clergy ask their congregations to have strong, unyielding belief in their faith.
"We must trust God's love in the way God speaks to us through family," Koger said. "There are things we can't see or understand, but they do exist."
6/14/02