Deity
“In the beginning, God created…”
Throughout history and across cultures, religion has been a pattern of life that has captured the minds of men. From the earliest flickers of civilization, life has revolved around the central theme of man’s relationship to higher powers. Each city of early Mesopotamia had a different god that they worshiped and petitioned for their livelihood. Indeed, all of the traditional hotbeds of civilization (Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, China, and Greece) have a tradition of theistic religion. Only in recent centuries have the ideas of atheism and agnosticism become major philosophical contenders for the allegiance of men.
In all of these religions, the deity has been a mad, vengeful god (except for in Egypt where their economic advantage, the Nile, precipitated a more favorable view of their gods). By no means would a Mesopotamian stonecutter have a relationship with his god, much less a good friendship. So just in a casual discussion of the holistic history of religion, we find a distinction we can make between the gods of the world and the God of the Bible.
Every theological myth has a creation story of some sort but does not have a god that desires a relationship with its creation. Most are viewed as reluctant helpers rarely in a good enough mood to do so. We see something, though, in the first five words of the Bible and then later on throughout the rest of the Bible that gives us great detail into the nature of our God.
First, in the words of the great lay theologist, C S Lewis, “He is the opaque center of all existences, the thing that simply and entirely is, the fountain of fact hood. And yet, now that He has created, there is a sense in which we must say He is a particular Thing or even one Thing among others. To say this is not to lessen the immeasurable difference between Him and them. On the contrary, it is to recognize in Him a positive perfection which Pantheism has obscured; the perfection of being creative. He is so brim-full of existence that He can give existence away, can cause things to be, and to be really other than Himself.”
I find in a lot of discussions that people forget God’s nature, attributes and character when they use the word “God”. It is left in the abstract of our imagination instead of the verified evidence we find in scripture. We somehow separate His creativity from His Sovereignty, His Justice from his Love, and in everything we forget that there are some attributes of God that define Him. Without them, He wouldn’t be God nor would we trust Him. These attributes are Faithful and True. (2 Tim 2:13)
If God were not always truthful, we would have no reason to believe Him and if He went back on His word, we would have no reason to trust Him. The good news is that not only is God truthful but He is Truth, so to lie is to deny Himself, just as to be unfaithful is to deny Himself. Hebrews 6:18 tells us that it is impossible for God to lie, and in fact, He is unchanging even when we are unfaithful.
In particle physics, there is a particle, the strange neutral B meson, which reverses its identity 3 million times a second. It spontaneously transforms into its antiparticle and back 3 million times in the blink of an eye. Yet in contrast, God stays the same no matter how many times one blinks or how many generations of men for millennia blink. Surely, God is the same as He was before He created time and He will remain the same even after Time is no more.
“God is not a man, that he should lie, neither the son of man, that he should repent; Hath he said, and will he not do it? Or hath he spoken, and will he not make it good?” Num 23:19
“…in hope of eternal life which God, who cannot lie, promised before time began,…” Tit 1:2