Chap 4 Excerpt -- Knowledge

 Excerpts from a writing project so far, God with Ten Words

• Mystery
• Love
• Power

__________________________

The fact that God created the world out of nothing has even more profound implications when we think about God’s knowledge. We could use the analogy of cooking. If I were to cook something, perhaps something very bizarre and random indeed, how it tastes is ultimately “baked into” the ingredients and rules of chemistry. I might have no cooking knowledge or skills whatsoever and still cook something delicious by accident. I didn’t make the rules of ingredients and mixture.

When we say God created the universe out of nothing, we are saying something quite different. We are saying that God invented not only the ingredients but the rules of the universe. Again, God may have created countless other universes that behave by quite different rules. We have no point of reference to have any comprehension of what that might look like. We can imagine simple changes, like a place where people can fly and you can teleport from one place to another. But God no doubt can invent “things” that are unspeakable and unrepeatable (2 Cor. 12:4).

Therefore, it makes perfect sense that God would know everything about this universe. Certainly God knows every possible thing about this universe. We mentioned in an earlier chapter that God invented math. There is no discovery of science that God does not already know. There is no equation yet to be formulated that God did not formulate before the creation.

The implications go even deeper. Sometimes people imagine that God learned what it was like to be human when Jesus came to earth. Some imagine that God learned what suffering is on the cross. All these pictures forget that God created the world out of nothing. They confuse God with the creation and make God into a Zeus. God invented the possibility of humanity in every respect. God invented the possibility of suffering in every respect. Indeed, God invented the possibility of evil, a fact that we will discuss soon enough. When we say that God has all knowledge, we mean that God has all knowledge.