In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…
If God, being Himself uncreated, self-sustaining, self-existent and self-satisfying, at perfect harmony within Himself and without need for anything, created something….then wouldn’t that indicate a lack of or need for something within God? If God is perfect and in want of nothing, then what reason would He possible have for creating something? Throughout the Bible the picture of God’s reason for creating the universe is clear: He created the universe for the praise of His glory.
But how does that solve the problem? Doesn’t that make God seem, in the words of C.S. Lewis, “like a vain, old woman seeking compliments?” If God created a universe to praise Him, wouldn’t that indicate that God somehow needed our praise in order to be complete? (As a side note, God’s destruction of the wicked proves this is false; if God needed our praise, He would be push-over and give people what they want regardless of the consequences…that’s the difference between a complete, perfect, self-satisfying God who creates for His praise and an emotionally unhealthy people-pleaser. God destroys those who throw evil in the face of God’s glory even if others think Him evil because of it. God is not a doormat)
The diamond:
How wonderful and valuable is a perfect diamond? A diamond is the hardest natural substance on earth, scratchable only by another diamond. Its clarity, its play on light, its molecular structure, is all unsurpassed in this world. While a perfect diamond has been this way for all of its existence, it is not until the diamond is mined and drawn out of the earth and set in a display that it can be seen as wonderful, valuable and immensely hard. The diamond did not need mined. The diamond’s properties do not change after its discovery; it is not any better or worse than it was before it was brought out into the light. But until it is mined, it carries no descriptive words, no adjectives, no praises. It is unvalued; not because it is un-valuable, but because it has not yet been valued. Value is dependent on observability. .
Words like worth and value, and their representative concepts, are assigned to something when created by its desirability. The market value of a diamond is created by what people are willing to pay for it. Therefore, an unmined diamond, no matter how perfect, has zero market value because its existence is unknown.
In the same way is God. God’s properties remain the same, His attributes the same, His character the same. He is no better and no worse off before than after creation. But how valuable is an unobserved God?
God has intrinsic value to Himself, existing in three Persons who have loved and adored and praised each other from forever…so why create? God created the universe as a theatre in which the play of His glory is performed to the amazement of everything and everyone within it. To take it one step further, to use Paul’s words in Ephesians 1:5, the universe is a theatre made for “the praise of His glorious grace.” This is His reason behind it all.
Observing God through the ages:
To Adam and Eve, before their fall into sin….how valuable was God? We don’t know for sure, but we do know that they were easily swayed away from seeing Him as valuable. They had only known Him as Creator and King and themselves as His co-regents to represent Him as a Creating God to the world. They knew Him well, but they were led into rebellion against Him fairly easily. Fast-forward to a later time. To those who believed in God in the time of Moses, or the time of the prophets…how valuable was God? They gave their lives for Him…they viewed Him as awesomely valuable. God had re-commissioned people as royal subjects and co-regents even though they had rebelled against Him. He had mercy and issued a promise of grace; He reached down to a small, undeserving people and chose them to represent Him as a Saving God to the world. They failed again. Fast-forward again… To those after Christ…us…how valuable must we see God? Given what God has revealed about Himself through the pasts ages of world history, we must view God as exponentially more valuable than either the first people or those of the Old Covenant time. Before the murder and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, the world had not seen the display “ of His glorious grace,” as we have. God remained the same. His attributes the same, His character the same…but through history God has mined Himself out as a diamond, bringing Himself out to the light, showing Himself in different ways to the world, “to the praise of His glorious grace.”
God did not need to be seen, but by creating a universe of people He could be valued properly…but in no stage of human history has God ever been properly valued. Never have we seen God so fully as to praise Him and value Him to the proper level for everything He truly is and does. He has not fully revealed Himself to the world. And there is still another stage coming…at least that we know of. At the end of the age, Jesus and His church will be united forever in a new heavens and earth, new bodies, in a whole new kind of relationship. Speaking of that time, Jesus said, “To him who overcomes, I will grant him to sit on my throne with me as my Father granted me to sit on His throne with Him.” The fullest depths of “His glorious grace” have not yet been mined.
So now we look to our redemptive future. What other attributes of God do we have yet to discover? We can only speculate.
Michael Durso Blog 