Over the years I’ve done a lot of reading about how the Bible speaks to technology, money, and wealth — including digital technologies like Bitcoin. Sometimes people get really excited when they discover the verses that condemn one way of handling these things and commend another. “Unjust scales are an abomination to the Lord,” we read, and we nod along. “The Lord delights in honest dealings,” and we cheer. And those are good instincts, because the Bible really does have a great deal to say about what we should and shouldn’t do.
But if we go straight to the commands and the prohibitions, we can miss something bigger. Behind every “do this” and “don’t do that” there is a whole story — the story of who God is and what he is doing in the world through Jesus. If we’re going to live rightly in God’s world, we have to understand everything in light of who he is. So before we get to inflation, or saving, or Bitcoin, or any of the practical questions, we have to start much further back. This is the first in a series of talks about understanding our technology and our wealth in light of the biggest picture of all: that God is the Creator, and that he made the entire world.
Creation out of nothing
Theologians often describe creation as the first of God’s external works. When we speak of God’s internal life, we’re talking about who he is in himself — the eternal love and delight of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, one God in three persons, perfectly content in his own triune fruitfulness. But God also acts outward, toward something other than himself. The first of those external works is creation: his making of the entire world.
The very first verse of the Bible puts it plainly:
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
Genesis 1:1
And it goes on, day by day, with God simply speaking and things coming into being: “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” The theological term for this is creation ex nihilo — creation out of nothing. The rest of Scripture makes the point even more clearly. The psalmist says of God:
For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm.
Psalm 33:9
And the apostle Paul, reflecting on how God gave Abraham and Sarah a child long after it was naturally possible, describes God as the one “who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Romans 4:17). That is where we get this idea that God created everything out of nothing.
This is genuinely different from every other account of where the world comes from. Whether we look at ancient myths or modern secular accounts, they all begin with some reality that has simply been there forever. In many ancient stories, the foundational reality is chaos, and gods rise up out of the chaos, or do battle against it, in order to make the world. In the modern, materialist picture, there’s really no answer to where it all came from at all — people point to a big bang, to some primordial concentration of the universe, but no one can say why it was there to begin with.
The biblical account is something else entirely. God has always been himself. There was a beginning to the universe, a beginning to time, a beginning to space — and God spoke all of it into being according to his own desire. The universe did not emanate out of God; the world is not an extension of God, or a part of God, or God slowly coming into his own. Nor is it a world that simply evolves on its own, mindlessly, with no design or plan behind it. It is a world that a personal God called into existence from nothing.
A Creator with no rival
Because God spoke the entire universe into existence out of nothing, it means he has no rival. There is no dark god fighting him for control. He isn’t battling chaos or locked in some cosmic struggle against forces that might overpower him. And that means God is absolutely supreme over everything.
In some ways, that very first verse is the most controversial sentence in the whole Bible. If God created everything out of nothing, then this world is his. Everything is accountable to him. It all works according to his rules, his law. We answer to him. And he can do whatever he wants with his own universe.
One of the ways the Bible expresses this is to call God the owner of everything — the ultimate landlord of the entire universe. In Genesis 14, when the mysterious priest Melchizedek meets Abraham after a battle, he blesses him like this:
Blessed be Abram by God Most High, Possessor of heaven and earth.
Genesis 14:19
The word translated possessor is a rich one. Sometimes it means to make or to create something, but it often means to buy, to acquire, to own. Melchizedek is describing God as the one who ultimately possesses everything. A few verses later, Abraham says the very same thing to the king of Sodom: “I have lifted my hand to the Lord, God Most High, Possessor of heaven and earth” (Genesis 14:22). And why is the whole universe God’s possession? Simply because he made it. We owe everything to him. This is his world. We hear it again from David:
The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein, for he has founded it upon the seas and established it upon the rivers.
Psalm 24:1–2
All things through the Son, and for him
In the New Testament we get even more clarity about what this ownership means, and it comes into sharpest focus on the Lord Jesus himself. The New Testament reveals that there is one God who has always existed in three persons, and that the second person, the Son, has taken on human flesh in Jesus Christ. And it repeatedly says that it is through the Son that the Father created the universe, in the power of the Holy Spirit — and that the Son is therefore also the heir, the owner, of it all.
In these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world.
Hebrews 1:2
Paul says the same thing even more fully:
For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him.
Colossians 1:16
Notice both halves of that. Christ is the agent of creation — all things were created through him. But all things were also created for him. The creation is his. It belongs to him, and it answers back to him.
The theater of God’s glory
Over these next few talks I’m going to lean quite a bit on the theologian Herman Bavinck, a Dutch theologian and professor who lived about a hundred years ago. I’ve found him enormously helpful for understanding what the Bible teaches about God, and what it means to live in his world. Here is how Bavinck summarizes all of this:
The idea of an existence apart from and independent of God occurs nowhere in Scripture. God is the sole, unique, and absolute cause of all that exists. He has created all things by his Word and Spirit.
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics
And again:
God is the unrestricted owner of heaven and earth. There are no limits to his power. He does all that he sees fit to do. The world is the product of his will, the revelation of his perfections, and it finds its goal in his glory.
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics
So God’s creation is not only his possession; it is also there for his own sake. God creates the world to reflect his beauty back to him. The French reformer John Calvin famously called creation the theater of God’s glory. And because this world is the theater of his glory, Bavinck says, we should be delighting in it and using it in a stewardly manner. We delight in God’s world because, as we delight in it, we delight in him — it shows us his beauty, his glory, his attributes. And we care for the world as stewards, as people entrusted with something that really belongs to someone else. Our wealth, our possessions, our families, our jobs, our homes — they are given to us on loan from God. We are his stewards.
He didn’t need us — he wanted to
Put all of this together and you arrive at something wonderful: God didn’t create the world because he was missing something, or lonely, or unable to help himself. Through all of eternity past he has been perfectly content to enjoy his own beauty within the love of the Trinity — Father, Son, and Spirit. He did not need to create in order to behold his own glory. And yet he chose to create the world, to reflect his beauty back to him. Paul captures it when he writes:
Yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.
1 Corinthians 8:6
Look at what Paul does there: he takes Jesus and places him at the very level of the Father, because Jesus is God and shares the Father’s identity. Together they are the one God through whom all things were created and for whom all things exist. As Bavinck puts it, the creation “proceeds from the Father, through the Son, and in the Spirit, so that, in the Spirit and through the Son, it may return to the Father.”
This means the world is not ruled by chance, and it is not ruled by impersonal energy. God did not create the world and then step away from it. Bavinck says it beautifully in another of his books, The Wonderful Works of God:
There is no accident and no necessity, no arbitrariness and no force, no mere caprice nor iron destiny that controls the world and its history and the life and lot of mankind. Behind all secondary causes there lurks and works the almighty will of an almighty and faithful God and Father.
Herman Bavinck, The Wonderful Works of God
So whose world is it?
The world belongs to God. He is its possessor because he is its Creator, the one who made it out of nothing. And because it is his, he has made it for his own purposes — to shine his beauty and his glory to us, his creatures, and especially back to himself.
That is why, in all of our work, with all of our wealth, and with all of our technology, we should be striving to glorify God and to draw attention to his beauty and his splendor. It’s why we should be looking out at the world for signs of his glory — not only in the world of nature, in mountains and rivers and sunsets, but also in the world of culture and of technology. Even human culture and human technology are meant to be, more and more and better and better, a reflection of the beauty and the glory of God.
That’s the foundation for everything else in this series. Next time we’ll turn from the Creator to the creature, and ask what it means to be human in God’s world — that we bear his image, and what that means for our relationship to the world, to technology, to wealth, and to culture.