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THE
NEW LIFE by
John Marshall
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Chapter
22 • OUR
GOD AND FATHER
At
a distance in time that is beyond human thought, God once
existed alone; that is the sense of Genesis 1:1. "In
the beginning God (Elohim) created the heavens and the earth."
Whilst Elohim is a plural form it can, depending on its context
or the verb that goes with it, be understood as singular.
Thus "The Hebrew word 'created' is in the singular and
precludes any idea that its subject Elohim is to be understood
in a plural sense".
It was the marvellous wisdom of God alone that created "the
dust of the world", the atoms, the infinitesimal whirling
universes that carry His mighty power; too small to be seen
by the naked eye; too fast and too elusive to be trapped in
their motion by the most powerful electron microscope, through
which they can be seen only as a flash across a screen. Yet
such atoms went into the making of each star or planet, as
well as into every physical manifestation of animate and inanimate
life. And in the whole of creation there is an order which
is so mathematical in character that it makes it possible
for men to land a spaceship on the moon with a greater accuracy
in timing than is sometimes possible in a train journey.
This is the kind of God of power that He is, and it is quite
impossible for us to express in words the majesty of a Creator
whose Universe is so vast that it has been estimated that
there are probably 60,000 million galaxies (groups of millions
of stars) spread out in space, one of them being the "blanket"
of stars which we see at night and which we know
as the Milky Way. Our solar system is part of this galaxy.
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References
The Pentateuch and Haftorahs, Dr J.H. Hertz pg2,
Prov 8v26
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Chapter
22 • OUR
GOD AND FATHER
God and Man
The tune came that on one tiny planet, earth, in this vast sea of
galaxies God (Elohim) created man. By this time God was no longer
alone: a host of immortals had become part of His expanding glory;
the angels were His worshipping servants and messengers, hence the
revelation: "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness
. . ."
In spite of so much evidence of the awesome majesty of God, and
of the beauty and glory of His creation, Adam and Eve sinned: a
proof of how easy it is for man to become so rooted in earthly desires
as to forget that He is there; that He sees and hears all; that
there is not a thought in our minds, or a word on our tongues that
He is ignorant of; nor a sparrow that falls, or a hair on one's
head that is outside His knowledge. This is the extent of His power,
for He does inhabit every atom!
The creation of Adam foreshadowed the true man in the image and
likeness of Elohim, the last Adam, Jesus, the Christ. And out of
all the suffering, joys and sorrows of mankind came the one who
was to lead a host out of the Egypt of sin "to sit with him
in the heavenly places".
In a world in which the desires of men are supreme, and the wishes
and disciplines of God count for little or nothing, we need, more
than the saints of any age, to be on our guard against our minds
becoming rooted in the attitudes of the modern world. We need to
lift our eyes "unto the hills from whence cometh our help"
and our minds to the God who made us, so that we may be still and
know that "The Lord of hosts is with us".
Few of us rise to such a realization of the majesty, power and might
of the Lord that it fills our hearts with a fear to offend Him in
any word or deed. And all of us will fall short of the "weight
of glory" which is ours now, in this life, in that God, our
Father, has chosen us to join "the many sons" of whom
His beloved Son is the first-born.
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References
Gen 1v26, Psa 139v1-4, Matt 10v29-30,
Eph 2v6, Psa 12v1, Psa 46v10,
2 Cor 4v17, Rom 8v29
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