To Whom Do Our Children Belong? (6)

Today we are pleased to share the sixth instalment of an important work from Geoff Thomas, “To Whom Do Our Children Belong?” The first five are available here and here and here and here and here.

Geoff was the pastor at Alfred Place Baptist Church in Aberystwyth, Wales, for fifty years. He is retired, and the author of many books and articles, having been a frequent speaker at conferences throughout the world. He still preaches at the Chapel he attends in London, as well as travelling extensively to speak in different churches.

In the previous instalment, it was established that Our children do not belong to themselves.

To Whom Do Our Children Belong?

Our Children Belong to God because He Created us.

Our children are God’s by right of creation.

Imagine expressing a belief that men and women will never find any reason whatsoever for their existence in this cosmos, concluding that our lives were totally a matter of chance. What are we believing? That somehow, out of nothing, quite spontaneously, without any external pressure (because there was only unimaginable and absolute nothingness) a lump came into being, and in that lump was Leonardo da Vinci, and John Wayne, and Mozart, and Isaac Newton, and Winston Churchill, and Shakespeare, and the apostle Paul, and Thomas Telford, and Einstein, and Jesus of Nazareth, and Vermeer, and Dickens, and the Beatles, and Nelson Mandela, and Fred Astaire, and Rembrandt, and you and me also. We were all there, in the twinkling of an eye, in that lump.   There was this nothingness whatsoever, just a fleeting second beforehand, but then, with no possible explanation – boom – the Lump! 

Believing that is what happened, that lump would be worshipped, and that is exactly what men and women have been doing ever since. They owe their existence and all that is lovely in their lives to that unbelievably ‘lucky’ event, and they bow down before it. “We all came about by a definitive, sheer, chance event billions of years ago, and by a trillion times trillion, and trillions and trillions of other following chance occurrences ever since, and they together have made us and the cosmos as we understand it today. That’s our origin, and what made the universe, and that is also what is sustaining us. Chance and aeons of time is ultimately what it’s all about.”

We find that utterly irrational and unbelievable, that it goes against everyone’s experience of life. We believe that in the beginning there was not nothingness.  There was an omnipotent personal God who had no beginning but already existed as an unoriginated being in the beginning. He was not part of the Lump. He is exalted, absolutely free, apart from and above all that is. He is the source of the cosmos and we survey his handiwork wherever we look, in the heights or depths, in the molecule or the galaxy. That explains who we are.

Without a Creator we would not be as creative as we are. Without a triune God we would not be so interdependent, spending our lives communicating and yearning for communication from others. We speak because this God spoke. There is marriage because there is this Triune God. Without the sacrifice of the loving Son by the saving love of the Father for selfish and violent men and women, we would not be the beneficiaries of the self-denying lives of others, laying down our lives for those we love. Without the unchangeable God who is from eternity to eternity, we would not have our faith in the future, and be dreaming and hoping and planning and bringing children into the world. Without faith in the intelligibility of the Creator we would not do science. There is right and there is wrong because God is light and in him is no darkness at all. There is life and there is also death because of the righteousness of God. We had a purposeful beginning, and so everything follows from that.

So our constant observation of a rational world, and the deity of the Creator revealed in his cosmos and in special revelations, and the voice of our conscience commending or condemning our lives, leads us to a careful and rational conclusion. We are constrained to believe that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth and all that is in them, and that he who made them all sustains and directs them all.

Today, this very moment, as you are reading these words, such an activity is not because of chance, not at all, but the living God has led you to do this, and he is giving you some illumination and conviction of the truth of what you have found here.  The impossibility of mere luck making the complex glory and magnificent richness of this universe has driven us to the reality that it was made with a purpose, and that we know who is the great Purposer and what is our end in life, because the God who made it all is not silent but has spoken to us all by Moses, his prophets and his apostles, and most powerfully by his incarnate Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. He is involved in his world and in the lives of little people. We can address him and we matter to him and he gives us daily bread and shows compassion to us.

Next time:  “Our Children Belong to God because He made Us in His Image”