AW Tozer once said that what comes to mind when you think about God is the most important thing about you. Why? Because the way you see and think about God shapes the way you see and think about everything else.
If you answer the question “who is God?” with “the giant dictator in the sky,” your behavior, how you move through your day, will probably be marked by fear and hesitancy, hoping you don’t mess up and get smited for it. If you answer that question with something to the effect of a friendly neighborhood grandpa, you will probably end up engaging with God kind of like Santa Claus—the guy you only talk to when you have a particularly strong wish you hope will come true.
How you see God determines how you see everything else. So how can we make sure we are seeing God rightly? The good news is that from the beginning of time God has gone to great lengths to reveal Himself to us, and the first thing God shows us is that He is the Creator of everything.
Why is this significant? Why does God open with this?
Because God wants to lay the right foundation for us to build everything else on top of. God as Creator means He is the definer of reality. All that is good, right, and true flows from Him. God as Creator also means He gets to define us, not the other way around. Put bluntly, because God created it, He gets to define it. And the way God defines creation? Repeatedly, God looks at His creation and calls it “good.” The light is good. The land is good. The creatures that inhabit the earth are good. Then we get to people and the description changes slightly but significantly.
God forms mankind in His own image. We are a unique combination of the dust of the earth and the breath of God. And He says that we are very good.
Before anything else was true about you, the Creator of the universe called you very good. When God looked at His creation, He didn’t see a mess, He saw a masterpiece. That’s a big deal. Hang onto that.
Another significant thing about God introducing Himself as Creator is the relational vulnerability it shows. How can we see that? Isn’t speaking a universe into existence the ultimate display of power, not vulnerability? Well, yes, but also creativity itself is a form of vulnerability. This beautiful fact is clearly evidenced in God’s original creative act.
God put Himself on the line when He created the universe. How so? Because God created human beings with the freedom to choose. By definition, that means we have the ability to choose life with God, or to choose life apart from God. He created us, knowing we had the potential to rebel against Him. Not only did He know of this possibility; He saw its certainty. Yet, He still chose to create. He opened His heart to the greatest kind of pain for the chance to know you and me; to breathe life into us and be in relationship with us. That is true vulnerability.
The Creator of the universe wants to know you. God is self-sufficient. He didn’t have to make this universe or mankind. He didn’t have to weave it together in such a way that so obviously displays His glory. He didn’t have to actually get His hands dirty when it came to forming us. But He did.
*An excerpt from a Bible Reading Plan on the YouVersion App by the same name*