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Creation 34(3):36–39, July 2012

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Who made God?

By Gordon Howard

Published in Creation 34(3):36–39, 2012

“You’re out!” shouted Tom.

“That’s not fair. I bumped into the post,” complained Matt.

“Yeah. It makes me laugh every time you do that,” replied Tom with a grin. “But you still missed the ball, so you’re out. That’s the rule.”

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“OK, it’s the rule, but I hate that post. I wish it wasn’t there.” The boys’ favourite place for handball was under their classroom at school, but that post sometimes got in the way.

“Well, you can’t do anything about the post,” explained Tom. “It’s been there forever.”

“Nothing’s been here forever,” said Matt confidently. “Someone must have made it sometime. Someone designed the classroom. Someone built it.”

“Yeah, Smartie-Pants,” said Tom. “Well who made the builders?”

Here, Matt was very confident. “God made the builders,” he announced.

“Well, who made God, Mr Know-It-All?” asked Tom sarcastically.

Now that was a question too hard for Matt, so he suggested they go and speak to Mr Wiseman, their teacher. He was a good teacher, always keen to answer questions from his class, so they went up the old, worn steps of the school to find him.

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“My, what a question!” he exclaimed when they put it to him. “What made you ask that?”

“Well, we know our classroom was made by somebody,” began Matt, “and God made that somebody. And God made the stuff the school is made of, because it is all part of the universe that God made. But who made God?”

“Well, the answer’s easy, really,” said Mr Wiseman with a twinkle in his eye.

“Actually, nobody made God.” The boys looked surprised, and even more surprised when Mr Wiseman added: “He didn’t need anyone to make Him.”

“How come?” they asked together.

“A couple of reasons,” he said. “Perhaps the easiest one to understand is to realize that the world we live in is made of stuff that wears out. People always notice how worn the steps are, coming up to this classroom. But our whole world is wearing out like that. The Bible says it, and science agrees. It’s like the world is running down, like a battery does. It must have been fully charged in the beginning, but one day it will come to an end. If it has a run-down end, it must have had a charged-up beginning, so someone must have made it. But … ”

Mr Wiseman paused and looked at the boys carefully, to see if they were following his thinking, “ … someone has to make something only if it does have a beginning. If something doesn’t have a beginning, it doesn’t need a maker, does it?”

The boys thought hard about that. Mr Wiseman continued: “Now the Bible says that God doesn’t have a beginning or an end, so no one needed to make Him. Not only that, but there was no one there to make Him anyway.”

“But how come He doesn’t wear out?” asked Matt, after he had thought about this for a while. He had realized that if God wore out, like us, He would have an end, just like the world.

“Good question, Matthew,” said Mr Wiseman. “I know it might be hard to understand, but God is not like the universe He made for us to live in. He made the universe of stuff we call ‘matter’, but He is very different from matter. He is ‘spirit’, and spirits don’t wear out. God will never wear out or grow old. He lives forever.”

Tom’s brain was working overtime. “How come we can’t see Him?” he asked. “How can He be real if we can’t see Him?”

“Think about the rules you have for your handball. Are those rules real?” Mr Wiseman asked.

“Of course,” said the boys.

“But we can’t see them,” added Matt thoughtfully.

“And God is like that,” said Mr Wiseman. “The Bible says that, in the first place, God made the whole world out of things that we can’t see.”

“OK,” Tom admitted, “but I still don’t understand how there is no beginning, even for spirits.”

“Perhaps we need to think about time,” suggested Mr Wiseman. “You see, we can measure time by things that move, like the earth around the sun, or the moon around the earth, or the vibrations in a crystal. That means that when God created the universe, He created time with it automatically, but He still lives outside of it, because He created it.”

“Wow. That’s heavy,” said Tom. “So, if there’s no time, there’s no beginning. So, no making either. God didn’t have to be made. No one made God.”

“Correct.” Mr Wiseman’s eyes sparkled as he saw that the boys had understood.

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