In this episode, Nate and Ben discuss New City Catechism Question 2:
What is God?
God is the creator and sustainer of everyone and everything. He is eternal, infinite, and unchangeable in his power and perfection, goodness and glory, wisdom, justice, and truth. Nothing happens except through him and by his will.
They dig into the meaning of the answer, as well as how it helps form us in ways that cut against dominate views in our modern culture. They also address how an understanding of this question gets to the heart of the gospel, and how we can use it in our discipleship.
In this episode, Nate and Ben discuss New City Catechism Question 2:
What is God?
God is the creator and sustainer of everyone and everything. He is eternal, infinite, and unchangeable in his power and perfection, goodness and glory, wisdom, justice, and truth. Nothing happens except through him and by his will.
They dig into the meaning of the answer, as well as how it helps form us in ways that cut against dominate views in our modern culture. They also address how an understanding of this question gets to the heart of the gospel, and how we can use it in our discipleship.
Welcome to another episode of the All of Right Podcast. I'm your host, nate Playboy, here once again today with Benjamin Kemp. How are we doing, ben? Doing well, nate.
Speaker 2:Looking forward to talking to you and with you about what is God that's our question to you.
Speaker 1:That's right. Question two it seems like just last week we were talking about question one, that's right.
Speaker 2:So what is God? This is the answer, according to the New City Catechism, for question two. God is the Creator and Sustainer of everyone and everything. He is eternal, infinite and unchangeable in His power and perfection, goodness and glory, wisdom, justice and truth. Nothing happens except through Him and by His will, or, for the children, it's. God is the Creator of everyone and everything.
Speaker 1:The children's one cuts right to the point. Right, that's right. There's a God. He's the Creator. You're not.
Speaker 2:Him. That's right. Well, it's interesting to think about understanding God based on what God has done, and that the starting point in the Bible at least how the Bible begins this question is by saying, in the beginning, god created Right, and so the Catechism is taking the Bible's cue to start. Where the Bible starts on introducing us to this being that is God right and so that God is the Creator of everyone and everything is actually so simple and yet so profound and deep at the same time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I almost think of it. It's a summary of Genesis one. There's a lot of different, there's some battles over how to understand Genesis one, but the main takeaway is very much that all these things in our universe that we can look at we can look at the sun, the stars, the animals, the trees, the ocean all of those things are made by God and serve a purpose that he intends for them.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 2:Which a few things that I think are so important there One is I believe it was CS Lewis who famously said if you only had the first two chapters of the Bible to understand who God is, you would come away understanding that God is an artist, god is a creative being.
Speaker 2:God is incredible in the design and the brilliance and the wisdom in which God makes everything. So the idea that we start with the fact that God is the Creator of everyone and everything, to your point, everyone, every person and everything in the creation actually tells us something about God. So we can learn about who God is by looking at the sunrise and seeing its beauty, or the sunset and seeing how God paints these colors across the sky every day, or seeing the way in which the human body is designed, or the way in which the cosmos just seems endless and its vastness, and all of these things tell us something about God, which I think is a big deal that we can learn. We can answer the question what is God? And we can learn about God by looking at what God created, what God made.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's almost suggesting that anything we learn at all is in some ways connected to God. Yeah, that's good, so you can read something about His world, or it's about things that creatures that he's made have made.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, that's well said. So in theology this is important there's something called the creator creature distinction. So I want everybody who's listening to repeat that with me Creator creature distinction Okay, very good. And our professor, uh, both of us have learned quite a bit from, I mean, in John frame.
Speaker 2:Uh, when I had class with him, he would take, uh, a piece of chalk or a or a whiteboard, uh, and he would draw two big circles, one circle on top and then a smaller circle under it, and they were not overlapping, they were one was above the other, uh, and then he draw two lines kind of connecting them in the middle, and the big circle on top was God and the smaller circle was everything else, and the two lines of connections were that God has revealed himself to, uh, his creation and that his creation can interact, or, or uh, pray, or dialogue with God.
Speaker 2:So these two lines are kind of the back and forth of our conversation and communication with God. And I love that, because what it means is that there is God and there's everything else, and everything else is dependent on God for its existence, and that that's actually really important, because what that means is God doesn't need you. Why is that? That seems a little bit off-putting to say it that way. Yeah, it does, but what I mean by that is God doesn't need you, so that means that God wants you.
Speaker 1:Mm, hmm.
Speaker 2:God wasn't like. He had some uh you know, uh, he wasn't lonely, uh, and he wanted to create humans to be friends with. Uh, the father, the son of the Holy spirit were always which is next the next question, question three the father, son of the Holy spirit, were always enjoying friendship and fellowship and enjoying that with one another. So why did God create us? Why is there this? Why is there God and everything else? And the answer has to. It cannot be because God needed his creation, because God had some sort of a lack in God that he was trying to make up for in creating us.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, and some of the things that are in the second half of the answer point to that is that God couldn't be perfect if there was something missing that you know he's not perfect until he has a creation to compliment him. That's right In some way.
Speaker 2:So what does that mean for us? It means that our relationship with God is based on his enjoyment of us, his desire to have us, rather than a need for us, which I think is a big deal. You don't offer God anything that he does not already have in and of himself, so it kind of gets us off the hook, Whereas other religions that have other gods, false gods. They have to feed that God. They have to even some of them have to kind of clean up after that God. They have to tend to that God. That God has needs that are unmet unless the humans do what they need to do to appease that God. This God is fundamentally different from that. That's a really big deal when we say God is the creator of everyone and everything.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, and it also separates him from his creation in that he can't be identified with any part of it. That's right. Which you mentioned, these gods that you know as we read the Old Testament, as we were in the book of Exodus last fall, all of these other gods of other nations are somehow tied to some part of the world around us that you know.
Speaker 1:It's the sky, god, or it's the river God, and it's if God is the creator of everyone and everything then, he's over and above all the things that you might see and you can't make a one to one connection between God and anything in the creation.
Speaker 2:That's right, which means two things. One, the sun is not God, but the sun tells us something about God, just like a beautiful painting or kids, anything that you might make at school and bring home to your parents. Those things tell us something about you, but they are not you. They let us know something about you, but they are not you. You are so much greater and more important and more significant than the finger painting that you made that you brought home.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:So then the question is how does this make us a counterculture for the common good? In other words, how is this going to be different from, maybe, what some of our neighbors think or believe? Well, the first thing is is that there is a God. Not all of our neighbors believe that there's a God and that there is only one God, and this one God is the creator of everyone and everything. So any other beings that exist that includes angels and demons and humans, and whales and stars, and everything that exists was created by this one God, and so plenty of our neighbors don't necessarily believe that there's a God at all, and so, to your point, they don't learn about mathematics, for instance, or science, expecting to learn something about God as they're studying these things.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, I hope this isn't too fine of a distinction either, but there is a difference between creation and nature, and most of our neighbors would look at the world around them and say this is nature. It's the natural world, which implies something about. This is just the way the world is supposed to be. So, if that's the way the world's supposed to be. If there's brokenness, if there's disasters, it's like no, that's just that's nature, Nature you know the famous phrase red and tooth and claw.
Speaker 1:Is this nature? Is this dangerous place? But creation is different than nature. Creation didn't have to be there. Creation, it has to have a creator connected to it. So you can't affirm creation and not affirm God. But if you affirm God, then you affirm creation and not just nature.
Speaker 2:That's so good. And so here's a really, maybe helpful example here On Saturdays, at the camp family home, we do something called Science Saturdays, nice, and it always starts by me saying to Augustine Augie, my little boy, I say Augie, why do we do Science Saturdays? And I've catechized him. He responds great are the works of the Lord studied by all who delight in them? Psalm 111, 2. He says that back to me, and so I'm trying to teach him that science is this studying the works of the Lord, studying the things that God has made, because we delight in those things, because God made them, and the more we learn about those things, the more we learn about God. So hear us saying, kids, as you grow up and as you're in school and like study, well, like, learn math, learn science, learn literature, learn these various things, because they actually help us to understand who God is, which is beautiful.
Speaker 2:And so then, maybe the last question here that we like to ask is what does this mean for our discipleship, what does this mean for our following Jesus? And I want to go back to the longer definition, which says nothing happens except through God and by his will, and I want to say that, if God is the creator of everyone and everything and he upholds and sustains the universe. It means that we can experience God at work in everyday life and we can learn to trust his providence. That's the fancy kind of Bible word or theology word for this is that God is a provident. He has providential care over the world. He provides for us, and so if something has happened in your life that's really painful, there's this understanding that nothing has happened without God's will being involved with God, in other words, god is not kind of off duty when bad things happen to you. God is actually alive and well and active and involved and allows certain things to happen in our life.
Speaker 2:And so there's a woman named Joni Erick Santata who I've learned a lot from in this regard, and she's one of the longest living quadriplegics on record. In other words, her body is broken from her neck down. It doesn't work properly because of an injury she has. And she says this God allows what he hates in order to accomplish what he loves. And so why does that matter? Well, because some of us experience things that are not part of creation. They're actually a part of what we would call the fall. They're part of evil and death and suffering and sin coming into the world, and yet God allows them. He allows these things that he hates to accomplish what he loves, and the best example of that in the history of the world is that God allowed his own son, jesus Christ, to die as if he was a murderer, as if he was somebody who deserved death, even though he's completely innocent. This is the greatest evil that's ever happened, but he accomplished what he loves through that which is bringing us back to himself, and so the fact that this question says what is God and ends the answer by saying nothing happens except through him and by his will gives us a confidence that I think is best summarized in the words of a hymn called this is my Father's World.
Speaker 2:Again, if you're driving in the car and you can put on Apple Music or Spotify, listen to this hymn. It's brilliant. And it says this this is my father's world. The birds, their carols, rise, the morning light, the lilies, white, declare their makers praise. This is my father's world. He shines in all that's fair, in the rustling grass. I hear him pass. He speaks to me everywhere. This is my father's world. Oh, let me never forget that, though the wrong seems off so strong. God is the ruler. Yet this is my father's world. Why should my heart be sad? The Lord is king. Let the heavens ring. God reigns. Let the earth be glad. This is the God who is the creator of everyone.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, I think that's a powerful way to end, and so we'll wrap it up there and we'll look forward to talking again next week about question three.