Our Great God: Creation

Our Great God

Allen Snapp

Grace Community Church

January 11, 2026

 

Our Great God: Creation

I was listening to the worship initiative devotions last week and featured song was the timeless hymn How Great Thou Art. That hymn has a special place in my heart because it was my dad’s favorite hymn. It is an amazing hymn because the hymnist sees the greatness of God displayed in creation: the planets and stars and all of nature. He then sees the love of God in the salvation He has provided for us through Christ. And he then considers that great day when Jesus will return to take us home.

I want us to take the time to consider the greatness of our God and over the next few weeks we’re going to consider God’s greatness in creation, salvation, and the consummation of all things at the end of the ages.

I want to start our journey with Psalm 46. Ps 46 tells us what to do when our world is falling apart, whether literally or it just feels that way. When it feels like everything we thought was secure is shaken and our lives are in upheaval and chaos is all around us and in us. When trouble and turmoil hit us hard.

That might be someone here this morning. Your heart is heavy or sad or worried or frazzled and what you’d really want is a message that speaks to the burdens you are carrying, not a message about distant stars and rolling thunder.

Psalm 46 speaks into all this trouble and turmoil with this advice:

Be still and know that I am God. (Ps 46:10)

God says, be still. Quiet your heart. Soul. And know that I am God. Anchor your soul to God. When the earth gives way, God never does. When the mountains fall into the raging sea, God is the One who says “peace, be still” and the raging waters are calmed. Be still and know that I am God – and the more we know Him, the more confident we’ll be that our great God is all we need.

1. Our great God is the Creator

“For in him (Christ) all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him.” – Colossians 1:16

“Through him (Christ) all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.” – John 1:3

God is the Creator of all things. Nothing that exists wasn’t created by God. And we see in these verses that Jesus, our Savior, the second Person of the Trinity, is the prime Agent through whom all things were created and for whom all things were created. Jesus is Lord of all creation.

Genesis 1 speaks with stunning simplicity and elegance how everything began: in the beginning God

created the heavens and the earth. Sincere believers can differ over whether the earth is millions of years old or only thousands of years old, but in my opinion it is problematic for Christians to believe in theistic evolution – the idea that God started life and over billions of years it has evolved. The Bible doesn’t say that Adam and Eve evolved from lesser life forms, it says God created them in His image.

The good news is that Christians don’t need to feel like we need to deny science to believe in the creation account in Genesis. There is a significant movement among scientists to reject Darwinism as a plausible explanation for life and are acknowledging that evidence strongly points toward an Intelligent Designer – a Creator. God. There are resources out there I can point you to if you’re interested. But throughout creation see the hand of the Creator!

2. The heavens declare the size, power and energy of God!

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Ps. 19:1

My son Jared loves to go out on a clear night and look at the moon and planets and distant stars through his telescopes. It is mind-boggling to consider God’s power displayed in the heavens. Consider our nearest star, the sun. The sun has a surface temp of just under 10K degrees. The core, where nuclear fusion occurs, reaches temperatures around 27 million degrees Fahrenheit. The largest star we know of is the UY Scuti estimated to be over 1700 times larger than our sun.

The sun is the center of our solar system. Our solar system is in the Milky Way galaxy, a galaxy being a system of stars, planets, and celestial bodies bound together by gravity. The Milky Way galaxy is estimated to have a hundred billion stars. The Andromeda Galaxy is estimated to have a trillion stars. Scientists believe there may be as many as a trillion galaxies in the universe.

Thy power throughout the universe displayed indeed! Consider this: the cause is always greater than the effect. All these stars in all these galaxies producing all this nuclear energy combined is less than the power and energy of their Creator, God.

Lift up your eyes on high and see who has created these stars, the One who leads forth their host by number, He calls them all by name; because of the greatness of His might and the strength of His power, not one of them is missing. Isaiah 40:26

The heavens declare the glory of God, the sky proclaims His handiwork. But when we look into the night sky, we can’t help but wonder, what does the vast universe say about us? It’s hard not to feel completely small and insignificant in view of the vastness and power and coldness of the universe. King David echoes this feeling in Ps. 8

When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, ⁴ what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them? Psalm 8:3-4

What is mankind? Who are you, who am I that God should care for us? Creation doesn’t just proclaim the greatness of God’s power and size.

3. Creation proclaims God’s love and compassion for all creation, but especially for mankind

It’s true that when we look into space, with its cold vastness, it seems so impersonal and our lives so inconsequential. Richard Dawkins, British biologist and author, wrote this about the universe:

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

Dawkins is being consistent with his evolutionary belief system. If everything is the result of time and chance then there can be no purpose or design or evil or good. The universe and this world would indeed be blind, pitiless, and indifferent to our puny, insignificant lives. Everything about our lives – our hopes, dreams, loves – and ultimately our death – none of it has any purpose or meaning if the universe is blind, pitiless and indifferent.

But is pitiless indifference really what we observe? I think that’s Dawkin’s worldview speaking more than science. From the Bible and from what we see, God the Creator is a loving and wise Creator who has imparted beauty and diversity and wonder into the world!

A Creator who fine tuned the universe and this planet to not only sustain life but for life to thrive! Stephen Hawkings admitted that “the constants of physics seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life.”

We see the loving intelligence of our Creator when He designed DNA – known as the “blueprint” of life. Bill Gates, after looking at the complex coding in a DNA molecule said, "Human DNA is like a computer program, but far, far more advanced than any software we've ever created." ~ Bill Gates

The Bible tells us we aren’t the product of pitiless indifference, we are the work of a loving Father.

For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb.
¹⁴ I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works;
my soul knows it very well. ¹⁵ My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. ¹⁶ Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them. Ps. 139:13-16

When we look at the power of God displayed in the universe and feel insignificant, we need to know

that we were handmade by God. You are unique and uniquely special to God. No one on earth has your fingerprints but you. God has the hairs on your head numbered.

God has your days numbered. Before you lived your first day, God had written them all out. When we look up in the night sky, we see how small we are, but when we know God’s love for us – most powerfully displayed at the cross – we don’t feel insignificant, we feel loved. We don’t feel alone, we know that our great God is with us.

When we sin and fail and fall short – and we do every day – we aren’t condemned or rejected by God because we believe that Jesus took our sins upon himself, paying the price so we wouldn’t have to. Why? For God so loved the world He gave…

We see God’s fingerprints in all the beauty in the world. He didn’t have to put so much beauty in the world. Buzz Aldrin, the second man ever to walk on the moon, called the moon a “magnificent desolation”. It’s a type of beauty, but it’s a cold and cruel beauty. It is magnificent in its desolation.

Not so the earth! Beauty is everywhere we look! Sunrise, sunset, blue sky, cloudy skies, trees and oceans and lakes and mountains and on and on. We see beauty in the animal life and beauty in how it is all woven together in magnificent interdependence. I love watching nature shows because it is truly amazing how perfectly designed animals are to survive. Even these shows acknowledge the beauty and complexity, only they attribute the intricate design to “nature”.

Finally, do we see “indifference” in creation? Indifference, not hate, is the opposite of love. If the universe is just random chemical reactions, with no design, purpose, good or evil, only pitiless indifference, than there really is no such thing as love.

But we know there is. We know that love is at the core of the meaning of life. Our lives are richer when we love people. And our love is a reflection of the image of God in us. Because God demonstrates His love in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Greater love has no man than this, that they lay down their life for a friend.

Jesus turned the cruelest, most horrifying means of execution ever devised – the cross – into the greatest demonstration of God’s sacrificial love in all of history. Jesus will forever have the nail wounds in his hands and feet – not because God couldn’t have removed them, but because they will forever remind us just how much God loves us.