CHAPTER 2
THE CREATOR
He left not Himself without witness, in that He did good, and gave us rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with gladness.
Acts 14:17
1. THE GOODNESS OF GOD
An astute and witty observer of life has speculated that the last reality a fish would discover is water. A fish could easily notice the water plants swaying with the currents, and other fish gliding around him, he could easily see. Sol’s bright light and the dark floor beneath him, any fish would perceive. Even garbage tossed into the fish’s home would attract his attention. But that unseen, life-sustaining, life-enveloping substance surrounding him, that absolute necessity for his very existence – water – a fish might never discover at all.
Of course, this is a parable concerning mankind. For in a sense which is not far from literal, we all swim out our lives in the pervasive, sustaining, enveloping goodness of God. To the philosophers of Athens, Paul said of God,
“He gives to all life, and breath, and all things, … that they should seek the Lord, if perhaps they might feel after Him and find Him, though He be not far from any of us. For in Him we live, and move, and have our being.”
Acts 17:25b, 27-28a
As with the fish, the mundane realities of our world hardly escape our notice. Other people and the concerns of daily living demand much of our attention. Human garbage, literal and figurative, is commonly and easily seen. But that upon which our very life rests, that “first cause”, that elementary reason for our being – the goodness of God – is often among the last things realized or appreciated by men. Some, alas, never discover it at all.
Nevertheless, it is only of God’s goodness that life on earth continues. It is God “who gives rain upon the earth, and sends waters upon the fields” (Job 5:10). It is God who “makes His sun to rise upon the evil and the good” (Mt. 5:45).
He causes grass to grow for the cattle, and herbage for the service of man, that he may bring forth food out of the earth, and wine that makes glad the heart of man, and oil to make His face to shine, and bread which strengthens man’s heart.
Psalm 104:14-15
How true are David’s words: “The earth is full of the goodness of the LORD” (Ps. 33:5)!
Because God Is Good
If mankind merely evolved, if our existence is the result of pure chance, then we are not alive because God chose for us, especially, to live. If mankind is simply another plateau of an ongoing evolutionary process, then God is just as pleased that we not be, is just as pleased that some other temporary specimen of evolutionary impulse exist in our stead. There is not in that case any bond of love between God and
