In the beginning God…
…and that is how our known history begins.
We sometimes need to go back to the beginning of things in order to understand the reasons for our present. If there are questions still unanswered by the bright minds of this world, with all the advances of science and knowledge, about where it all started, you can surely have these on your list:
- Where did we come from?
- Where and when did life begin?
- How did energy come to exist?
- Where did matter come from?
There have been attempts to answer these questions during the entire human history, with very limited and vague conclusions. Darwin and others marked the current thinking of evolution, though the conclusions they got to, are very new and fragile even for the ones sustaining related theories (<150 years). In fact, all these “discoveries” brought to even more questions instead of answers. Some current theories conclude life began with bacteria, but that doesn’t explain how the bacteria got to have a biological life in the first place, or what is the source of energy causing things to have movement.
Did you know a gram of soil typically contains about 40 million bacterial cells? I personally love science, because each time there is a new discovery, the only thing demonstrated is how complex life is, how limited we are and how dependent and fragile we are. There must be something, somebody keeping us from auto-destroying ourselves. Finally, after every attempt to out-explain the God of the Bible from His own creation, the only thing remaining is – the outstanding, incomprehensible and eternal glory of God –
“I tried to understand all that happens on earth. I saw how busy people are, working day and night and hardly ever sleeping. I also saw all that God has done. Nobody can understand what God does here on earth. No matter how hard people try to understand it, they cannot. Even if wise people say they understand, they cannot; no one can really understand it.” Ecclesiastes 8:16-17 (NCV)
I like to think of it this way: How can a hamster limited by his small cage, presume to possess not only the cage itself in but also the ambient where it is placed in and think in itself to be bigger than the owner that possesses him and placed him within that cage’s limits? I mean, come on, living in a cage is not the best scenario for anyone :p. We’ll just change the “cage” to a “protection environment” for example’s sake. When the hamster understands this, he may limitedly understand some reasons, that his owner wants to protect him from the dangers out there, incompatible with his survival chances, that he will have constant sustain for life and love from the owner. As much as he would like to be something else, he is a hamster and he will not evolve into anything else.
I surely hope that hamster gets to the right conclusions, but aren’t we similar many times? In the name of freedom(that certainly and truly God in his grace gave us to be able to have a genuine relationship with Him), we want to break the limits and think of ourselves to be much greater than we truly are, and there is where the problem lies. Pride made Lucifer think he was bigger than God and we all know how that ended, humankind now, under his rule, is marked and controlled by the same way of thinking.
Science itself is not wicked, God wants us to know and enjoy His creative work, ultimately knowing Him better. But if science or any other expression of human capabilities are focused on out-explaining the Creator himself from His own work, then it’s all ends in vanity and it becomes senseless.
– God is still God and He will always be the Eternal. The best thing that can happen to us is to acknowledge this fact –
“He knows how we were made; he remembers that we are dust. Human life is like grass; we grow like a flower in the field. After the wind blows, the flower is gone, and there is no sign of where it was.“ Psalm 103:14-16 (NCV) The best thing that can happen to any human being is to know God, enjoy his amazing grace and love, for us, His work of art. Christ is the way to a new beginning in your life. Through His sacrifice for our sins and by faith in Him, He wants to reset our way of thinking and restore us to the privileged state God intended for us to be in the first place.
“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” 2 Corinthians 5:17 (ESV)