Where did God come from?

Could a creator who made the earth out of nothing come from nowhere? Even a lowly mosquito doesn’t just happen without a spawning pond or puddle.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a believer. I see the logic of believing in a first cause great enough and personal enough to explain everything that exists.

But when it comes to the origin of such a Person, who can figure? That’s not all. What was God doing in eternity past? How will He keep us satisfied and challenged in an endless future? Why would He make billions of people He knew were going to reject Him?

Who, while trying to understand the existence or ways of God, hasn’t shuddered like a car driven beyond its limits? Who, while trying to absorb the meaning of an eternal, uncaused, first cause, hasn’t found his or her sanity tested by the thought of a never-ending past, or future?

So why would anyone punish themselves with such imponderables?

One reason for asking these questions is that such riddles bring us not only to the end of ourselves but also to the beginning of a new understanding of God. From the first words of Genesis, we are introduced to a God who makes no effort to answer all of our questions. Instead, He gradually leads us to conclude that only when we have exhausted the limits of our own reason can we learn to trust the One who asks, “To whom then will you liken Me, or to whom shall I be equal?” (Isaiah 40:25).

This is not to say that belief in God depends on an escape from reason. Spiritual insight is not found by emptying our minds of questions. According to the Book of books, spiritual renewal follows the invitation, “‘Come now, and let us reason together,’ says the Lord” (Isaiah 1:18). In the pages that follow, the prophet Isaiah goes on to quote a God who appeals to the minds and thoughts of His people. Over and over the God of the Bible asks His people to do their best thinking, so as to trust Him for answers that He alone understands.

Only after appealing to the highest reason and best judgment of his hearers does the prophet go on to ask, “Have you not known? Have you not heard? The everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, neither faints nor is weary. His understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the weak, and to those who have no might He increases strength. Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall, but those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint” (Isaiah 40:28-31).

When read in context, Isaiah’s invitation to acknowledge the imponderable nature and existence of God is not a call to empty our minds and embrace the irrational. Rather, his challenge is to use our best thinking to put ourselves at the mercy and service of the One who has left His signature and fingerprints all over our world.

Lesser gods do not give us reason to rest in the presence of questions we cannot answer. When we have mastered them, smaller gods, like good jobs or bank accounts, replace our desire to have with a fear of losing. Little gods, made in our own image, are all impostors and liars. They rob our strength without renewing it. This is the mindless legacy of the idols we carve for ourselves in the presence of our Creator (Isaiah 40:18-25).

In this “information age” it’s important for us to be reminded of the limitations of our own understanding. Faced with the phenomenal growth of the Internet and the explosion of information services, we could be tempted to think that in time an exploding technology will unravel the problems and imponderables of life. We might forget the wisdom of Moses who wrote, “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but those things which are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law” (Deuteronomy 29:29).

For some of us, the World Wide Web has become a substitute for the Word of God. The worship of information has become in some ways like a modern “tower of Babel” (Genesis 11:6). With a vision of “global access to all knowledge,” humanity is hoping, through shared knowledge, to solve the ultimate problems of aging, birth defects, disease, and mortality. Once again we are tempted like our first parents to trade trust in God for a pursuit of knowledge that is beyond our ability to manage.

Yet, there is another option. After we have done our best thinking, we could choose to be like the family dog who sleeps peacefully at our feet.

Dakota, Doc, and Duchess aren’t known as “man’s best friends” for being foolish. Admittedly, they don’t know what we know. They don’t understand our reasons, dreams, or concerns. They don’t even care where we get the money to buy their food. But they do know us. They sense when we drive in the driveway at the end of the day. They greet us at the door and are willing to rest at our feet while our minds go places they have never imagined. They trust us for some of the same reasons we can trust our own Master and Provider.

Father in heaven, You deserve so much more than we have given You. We know that our problem is not that we cannot understand You. Our sin is that we have no good excuse on earth! For You have said, “I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against Me; the ox knows its owner and the donkey its master’s crib; but Israel does not know, My people do not consider” (Isaiah 1:2-3).

Forgive us for thinking that we cannot trust what we do not fully understand.