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OF MONKEYS AND MEN #10

GOD CREATES BUT DOES HE CARE?

There’s a heartbreaking line in the Christian film Shadowlands, where writer C. S. Lewis had just lost his beloved wife, Joy, after a brief but passionate marriage. Now cancer had taken her away, and this aging don, who had been a bachelor, faced a bleak future of loneliness.

If you know the story, “Jack” Lewis had preached powerful messages about how God allows suffering for our own good. “Pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a sleeping world,” he had glibly said . . . back in a former life where all was well, where students hung on his every word, and where royalties rolled in from his Narnia series. Now he knew what it was to have loved and lost, and he also sensed the stupid emptiness of his former teaching. God’s megaphone? At that moment, pain was an divine anvil landing on his head; it was a silent, unresponsive, unfeeling deity who bolted and double-bolted the door and said: “Go away.”

And there’s a heavy moment when a Christian friend moved in to put the proverbial arm around Lewis’ shoulder. “God knows all about it,” the cleric said, trying to help. And the grieving widower turned on him. “Yes,” he snapped in anger. “God knows . . . but does God care?”

We’ve spent nine days on this series, OF MONKEYS AND MEN, trying to build a bridge of understanding that will help us trust in a Creator God. And let’s say that you’ve gotten to that island of faith. You believe that the designed things in this universe, including yourself, came from the hand of a designing God.

But let’s take it a step further. If you concede the Bible version of events and say, “All right, God did make the universe,” then we still have to know: what does it mean to us? To paraphrase that cry by C. S. Lewis, “God makes, but does He stick around to care?”

Friend, I want you to remember that God creates because He does care. Clear back in the 26th verse of the Bible, the Father and Son and Holy Spirit – this loving, unified trinity of three – said to each other:

“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.”

God made us for fellowship; He made us because He loves us and is interested in us. In fact, the first chapter of John makes it plain that Jesus, our Friend and Savior, is actually the one who did the creating.

“All things were made through Him,” it says in verse 10,

King David writes in Psalm 100:3:

Know that the Lord is God. It is He who made us, and we are His; we are His people, the sheep of His pasture.”

So if you do believe that God loves us, as it says in John 3:16 – For God so loved the world – and again in I John 4:8 – God is love – and Jeremiah 31:3 – Yes, I have loved you with an everlasting love – then we need to accept that His love and His creative power and His creative interest in us are all absolutes.

You see, friend, the various theories of evolution all paint a picture of sputtering, fluttering, unattended momentum, where processes just clunk along, and we hope the molecules don’t burn out before we do. The Darwinian worldview is that you and I are totally on our own here, that this universe “came from nothing, by nothing, for nothing,” as one philosopher put it. The most generous allowance an evolutionist will make is where a disinterested God did some big-bang creating of His own millions of years ago and then walked off. From that day on, all of you blobs of protoplasm sitting next to your radios have been on your own. But the Bible presents a diametrically opposed worldview . . . where God is actively engaged, where His love for us is present, and eternal, and ongoing, and undeniable. Psalm 100:5 says:

The Lord is good and His love endures forever.

And I know many of you have sat in churches and sung that great chorus:

“O love of God, how rich and pure, how measureless and strong. It shall forevermore endure, the saints’ and angels’ song.”

Tell me. Is your love and my love pure and measureless and ever-enduring? It isn’t, is it? We walk off the job all the time. Even though there’s a bit of a casino cloud over it just now, I still appreciate some of the things William Bennett wrote in The Book of Virtues. He tells how he went once to a wedding where the couple naively promised in their vows to love each other “as long as our warm feelings of unity shall last.” Something like that. And Bennett joked: “I gave them paper plates as a wedding gift.” Because our warm feelings and our interest in others sometimes fade away, don’t they? But the God of Genesis 1 is a present Friend and Helper. The same God who spoke a word and caused galaxies to spring into existence out of nothing is willing to speak a word in your defense right now, on this very Friday.

As we step back from the surging ocean of this Bible topic, and begin to head over to new adventures in God’s Word, one thing I still hope with all my being to express to you – right now and as long as I sit in front of this microphone – is how eternal and real God’s love is for you. And that if you enter into a relationship with Jesus – as your Creator and your Redeemer – then you can feel safe and secure and protected in that relationship. Friend, if you were to get saved today. If you accept Jesus as the Lord who made you and loves you, then you can know that you have it. You can know that salvation is yours. John 5:24, one of my favorite verses, has Jesus saying to His friends:

“I tell you the truth, whoever hears My word and believes Him who sent Me has eternal life and will not be condemned; He has crossed over from death to life.”

And the Bible doctrine of creation also makes it clear that a God with that much love and power – those two things, love and power – just will not let you go. You can know that you are His; you can know that your salvation is safe with Him. Romans 8:38:

“I am convinced,” Paul writes, “that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

We began this radio series telling you about a grieving dad who lost his boy over in the dust and the bloody battlefields of Iraq. Death seems so permanent at a time like that. But the creative power of God is enough to bring young Kendall Waters-Bey back to life. That chair at the great banquet table doesn’t have to be empty for all eternity, because the same Creator who brought those cells together the first time can just as easily do it again. Isaiah 26:19 says:
“But your dead will live. Their bodies will rise. You who dwell in the dust, wake up and shout.”

Maybe someone listening right now had a loved one in the twin towers on September 11. Or on one of those four planes. And when the hijackers’ planes sliced into the World Trade Center, someone you loved was just suddenly . . . GONE. In one fiery moment . . . GONE. There wasn’t anything left: no traces, no DNA, no cells and no record. We all read how those firefighters – truly “New York’s finest” – wrote their names and Social Security numbers on their own forearms, just in case someone later had to hunt through rubble for their remains. But here your loved one is simply GONE. Nothing is left for God to work with. How can He clone or recreate them?

Well, friend, “Let not your heart be troubled.” Does God need a lab? Does He need DNA? Did He make Adam out of DNA? Or can He just speak the word . . . and have the person you love and miss so much instantly come back to life? Maybe they were lost at sea; maybe they’ve been resting in a casket for many years now. That is not a problem for God. Because He is a Creator God who loves to create – and REcreate – life for those who love and worship Him.

There’s a marvelous promise of God’s creative power AND enduring love found in Isaiah 65. Here it is:

“Behold, I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind. But be glad and rejoice forever in what I will create, for I will create Jerusalem to be a delight and its people a joy.” And for all of you who have a tombstone in your life, what beautiful words these are: “I will rejoice over Jerusalem and take delight in My people; the sound of weeping and of crying will be heard in it no more.”