The Existence of God

Basic Christian Doctrines 11

 

1.   God Is.

God is. He is there. He is the real God, the God who really exists. He says of Himself, "I am what I am" (Ex. 3:14). He is the great "I Am". God is God. He exists eternally without origin or change. He self-exists. He has necessary existence, not conditional or contingent existence. He really exists, in fact  and not merely as a human thought or word. He has perpetual existence in and of Himself. He has pure existence, compared to whom everything else is but a shadow.

 

2.   God is Life.

 

God not only exists, He lives. A stone exists, a person lives. God is the living God, as opposed to the false and dead gods of pagan religions. He is life itself, self-life. He has life in Himself, not from another. He is the source of all life. He has aseity, or life in Himself (John 1:4, 5:26). He has permanent and perpetual life. God is pure life. Therefore He is immortal. One of the greatest blasphemies ever uttered was the 60s heresy, "God is dead." God cannot die. He had no birthday, therefore no father or mother; He has no death-day, therefore no undertaker.

 

3.   God is Uncreated.

 

God is the creator of everything else (Gen. 1:1). Creator of all, created by none. He is the first cause of everything else, but caused by nothing. God is certainly not the creation of Man. Man did not create God by imagination, nor by projecting himself to the cosmos, as atheists suggest. Nor is it true, "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to create Him." The non-existence of God is impossible. Nor is God self-created. He simply exists and lives of Himself.

 

4.   God is Not the Universe.

The Creator is not the Creation. Idolatry worships the Creation rather than the Creator (Rom. 1:25). He is separate from His Creation. The universe is not an extension of God's being, like an arm or leg. We are not part of God. Nor is pantheism true when it says, "God is all and all is God." Nor is pantheism true when it says that God is in the universe and the universe is in God. God is everywhere, but is not everything. He has a separate and divine substance that is fundamentally different from the universe. God is not an ethereal "Force" that permeates all things, as in the New Age Movement. Monism is also wrong to suggest that all things are one, i.e., God.

 

5.   All Men Know that God Exists.

Romans 1 and Psalm 19 state that God has made His existence known to all men. They automatically know God exists, by a "sense of the divine" kind of internal intuition as well as by external evidence. He is a fool who tries to deny this (Psa. 14:1). Therefore, there are no real atheists or agnostics. They already know God exists. They are merely lying in order to try to run from God. We do not have to try to prove God's existence to anyone, for they already know it. We merely build upon what God has already revealed about Himself in Natural Revelation by bringing Special Revelation. See Acts 17. Indeed, a God whose existence needed to be proved would not be the true God. It is an insult to God to attempt to prove His existence, for that doubts the fact that He has already made His existence known. Man already knows God exists, but he must acknowledge this openly in order to come to know God personally (Heb. 11:6).

 

6.   God is Personal.

 

God is not an impersonal force or thing (indeed, God is not a "thing" at all. He is God.). Liberals and philosphers think it unbecoming for God to be personal, so they denigrate Him to such things as "the Ground of Being" or "Raw Existence". But God is personal. Not exactly like we are personal, but more than we are. Specifically, as we shall see later, God is actually Tri-personal in the Trinity. God is a He, not an It. God is also a He, not a She. He is a Father, not the Mother Goddess of pagan religions, such as Mother Earth, Gaia, Sophia, Ishtar, etc. He is personal in that He speaks, feels, thinks, remembers, recognizes, etc.

 

7.   God is Incomprehensible but Not Inscrutable.

God has told us He exists and also gives us the privilege of knowing Him personally. God is knowable. Agnostics and Deists are wrong to say God cannot be known. Yet we can never know everything about God. Finite Man can never know all about the infinite God, not even in eternal Heaven. It would take a second God to know God fully. His attributes are beyond full knowledge (Eph. 3:19). God is incomprehensible to us (Job 11:7-9, 36:26, 37:5, Isa. 40:28, 55:8-9, Rom. 11:33-34, Psa. 71:15, 139:6, 17-18, 145:3, 147:5). There will always be something about God that only God knows (Rev. 19:12). Nor will we know God as God knows Himself.

 

8.   Knowing God is the Meaning of Life.

Man in sin does not know God (2 Thess. 1:8). God remains "the Unknown God" to sinners (Acts 17:23). The basic message of Ecclesiastes is that life has no meaning, only vanity, without knowing God. God created Man to know Him, and Man has a dreary existence without knowing God. God has allowed Himself to be known personally. This is only possible through Christ (Matt. 11:27). Knowing God is eternal life (John 17:3), in contrast with meaningless existence.

 

9.   God is Perfect.

 

God is perfect (Matt. 6:48). He is complete in every way. He needs nothing. He does not need to be fed. He does not need Man. He lacks nothing in any way. He has perfect life and existence, and does not grow. He is absolute perfection. He is "actus purus", pure actuality, nothing potential or tentative or merely possible. Therefore, God is perfectly happy in Himself. God is not lonely. He did not create Man because He was lonely. There was perfect happiness, fellowship and love within the Trinity. Nothing outside of God is ever perfect in the sense God is perfect. Yet we find a degree of perfection when we are in the right relationship with God as we ought to be, lacking nothing, Happy at last.   

 

10. God is Essentially Different from Us.

 

There are two truths, which must be kept in balance. On the one hand, God created us in His image (Gen. 1:26). Therefore we resemble God in part. God thinks, we think. God feels, we feel. Specifically, we are to imitate certain attributes of God, which we call the Communicable Attributes. We are to be holy, truthful and loving, for God is holy, truthful and loving. On the other hand, God's essence is different from ours. We do not nor ever can have self-existence, infinity, eternity, immutability, omniscience, omnipotence or omnipresence. These are Incommunicable Attributes. God is "wholly other" in His existence. God is not of the same quality as Man. He is not a "Big Man"; He is not a Man at all. We greatly err in supposing that God is altogether such a one as we are (Psa. 50:21). Even our similarities with God point to the essential differences (we know, God knows; but we know by learning, God knows all things already perfectly, and so on). God exists as only God exists, which is to say God alone is God.