NASHVILLE (BP) – This weekly Bible study appears in Baptist Press in a partnership with Lifeway Christian Resources of the Southern Baptist Convention. Through its Leadership and Adult Publishing team, Lifeway publishes Sunday School curricula and additional resources for all age groups.
This week’s Bible study is adapted from the MasterWork curriculum.
Bible Passage: Colossians 1:15-17
Discussion Questions:
- How does God fit into most people’s lives? How does God fit into your life? Is that even the right question?
- Are there people in your life who feel there is no room for God in the explanation of the universe? How do you handle those discussions?
- How has the idea of information become intricately linked to science?
Food for thought:
Some think of God only when life and existence have no other explanation.
Unbelieving scientists tend to look on this view as evidence that the gaps are narrowing between theism and science. “Give us enough time,” they might say, “and humans will be able to explain how everything in the universe works.”
This point of view would not square with the description of the Creator. God, who made this world, is not only its Creator but also its Sustainer. “He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17). The universe would fall apart without the sustaining power of the Creator. A scientific mechanism showing how the universe is sustained is not the same as sustaining it. This view of an active Creator involved continually in the creation is called theism.
Suppose God would take His sustaining power from the universe and “let the clock run down.” Let’s give that a thought! As Phillip Johnson says, this would mean God made the laws, set up the physical structures, and then retired. This view is called deism.
A common question asked is, “Could God have made the world but used the process of evolution?” One necessary question in response would be, “What is meant by evolution?”
By its common definition, evolution is a mindless, unguided, purposeless and solely material process. God does not fit into this definition!
The concept of God’s initial act followed by the gradual unfolding of creation is referred to as gradualism, a theory that, according to Johnson, is not supported by the fossil record. “If God did [create the universe using evolution], He also chose not to leave the evidence of it lying around,” Johnson writes in “Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds.”
God would have no place in this process. Nor does the biblical account of a personal God fit this image.
Theism, on the other hand, sees God as both Creator and actively involved, in a supervisory role, in the world and with the people He made, according to Hugh Ross’ “The Creator and the Cosmos.” God is invisible but nonetheless real and involved with this world.
Advances made recently in the fields of genetic engineering, microbiology, astrophysics and so forth are evoking undreamed of possibilities and possibly new questions for science. Three insistent thoughts center on the key word information:
• Life consists of not only matter (chemicals) but information.
• Where (or from whom) did the information originate?
• Complex, specified information comes from an intelligent mind.
The advances in science give credence to the fact that life did not come by blind chance but by an intelligent mind, the result of superior knowledge. Recent discoveries would argue for theism rather than its opposite.
And of course, what is the source of the original elements of life? Could they have merely evolved? “The soup theory,” the posit that life began in a primordial sauce of chemicals, is being questioned. The most logical explanation is that God created those elements.
MasterWork
MasterWork is an ongoing Bible study curriculum based on works from a variety of renowned authors and offers pertinent, practical messages that adults will find uplifting and enriching. The list of authors and their books to be studied in upcoming months can be found at Lifeway.com/masterwork.
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