“Of old You laid the foundation of the earth,
And the heavens are the work of Your hands.
They will perish, but You will endure;
Yes, they will all grow old like a garment;
Like a cloak You will change them,
And they will be changed.
But You are the same,
And Your years will have no end.”
Psalm 102:25-27

The greatest cosmological discovery of the twentieth century was possibly the discovery of the finite universe. Before Edwin Hubble discovered “Hubble’s Law,” that essentially empirically confirmed that our universe was expanding, science regarded the universe to be static and eternal. However, the logical conclusion of reverse engineering Hubble’s Law was that if the universe is expanding, then at one point in time it had to have had a beginning. Along with the corroborating evidence of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, the undeniable conclusion that our universe had a beginning came crashing down on the scientific community like the proverbial ton of bricks. The implications were colossal. If the universe had a beginning, then that means it had a cause. However, if there was nothing there before the universe began, the logical conclusion seemed to be that there was a transcendent causal Agent who got the whole thing going.

Forty percent of scientists today are Theists, meaning that they acknowledge there is some intelligent Designer behind the creation of our universe. Why do they believe this? Simple! The science leaves no room for any other reasonable answer. The fine tuning of the expansion rate of the universe, along with a host of other factors, is so incredibly precise as to defy any possibility of randomness. In fact, the evidence of the fine-tuning of the universe led famous English astronomer, Sir Fred Hoyle, to say, “A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.”[1]

The evidence to support Hoyle’s conclusion has only grown in recent years. In short, science is more in favor now of what is popularly called the “God Hypothesis” than ever before. Of course, what has taken scientists years of observing a huge and expanding preponderance of evidence to acknowledge, the Bible has declared from the beginning. The Bible says, with no apology and without regard to the doubts of Darwinists, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). That means before everything that we can observe through our telescopes was created, God was there. Before there was space, matter, or time, God was. That’s hard to wrap our minds around, just as it is hard to conceive of the eternality of God. It’s not like God has been around for a long, long time. Rather, He sits outside of time and is wholly unaffected by it. That is what we call transcendence. He is above and beyond…everything. He is independent outside of His creation: eternal, immutable, omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent.

In verses like the Psalm quoted at the beginning of this article, the Bible reveals to us God’s transcendence, and, in doing so, testifies to its own credibility. After all, if the writers of scripture were making all this up, they would have invented a God that would have been easier to comprehend, like the Greeks and Romans, who worshipped gods who behaved much more like us, with their conniving and capricious behavior, than what we would expect from a “supreme being.” Instead, the Bible describes certain characteristics about God, such as His triune nature, that have puzzled and perplexed the brightest of minds for centuries. However, instead of undermining the case for the Creator, these difficult aspects of His Person described in the scriptures serve rather to authenticate their account of His existence. After all, if we are talking about a Being who spoke billions of light years of universe into existence and sustains it all without so much as breaking a sweat, we should hope that He defies easy explanation. Nevertheless, He reveals enough about Himself to us that we might begin to comprehend His majesty and understand His nature.

The very fact that He reveals Himself at all tells us something more about Him. He wants to be known. The Bible itself claims to be an inspired transmission to us from God, given that we might understand Him, and ultimately, come to know Him (see 2 Timothy 3:16-17 & 2 Peter 1:20-21). These scriptures do not merely reveal a God of power and genius, but One who is relational. In fact, while science can begin to explain certain aspects of the physical creation to us, it can never answer the more important question: why did God make it all in the first place?

The Genesis story of creation does not take place somewhere in the physical center of the universe, but rather from the vantage point of the earth, a seemingly insignificant planet, orbiting an average star in an unremarkable part of our galaxy (one among an estimated five hundred billion galaxies, by the way). Yet, it was on this planet that the story of God and man took place – a story with many chapters, filled with sorrow and death but also of redemption and hope. It’s a masterful story in which we all play a central part as the objects of God’s love. In fact, because He is transcendent, He saw you and I coming a long way off and made provision for us to be reconciled to Him, even before we ate the forbidden fruit that caused us to lose our place in paradise. In the end, it’s a story of two trees: one where we fell, and one where He raised us up. The one in the Garden was where we died, but the one on Calvary was where His Son died, that we might be reconciled to Him.

None of the billions of starts in all the billions of galaxies are as important as those three rusty nails and that old rugged cross, for it was there, at Calvary, that God’s grace met our need. It was there that the transcendent, eternal Creator of the universe entered time and space to become one of us, that we might become one with Him.

[1] “Fred Hoyle, “The Universe: Past and Present Reflections,” Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophyics 20 (1982).”