Shalom everyone,
This blog post is about the question, “Why did God create the Universe and the Earth”? Or put another way, “Why is there something as opposed to nothing, other than God?”
My gut-feeling is that the answer to this question is ultimately known only to God.
The Inner Mind of God
Our God, Yahveh, is a knowable God (Jer 31:34, Hos 2:20, Hos 6:3, 1Sam 3:7), but there are still many areas of knowledge that God withholds from us. In Yahwist Israelite mysticism, there is something called, ‘ha-sōdh Yahveh’, which literally means, ‘the inner-council of Yahveh’. In Job 15:8 and again in Jer 23:18, the rhetorical question is asked, ‘Who has stood in the inner council of Yahveh? Who has listened in on the mind of God, or been privy to God’s secret plans?’ The obvious answer is, ‘No one has’. No one in this mortal realm knows the inner Mind of God.
The belief in Israelite mysticism is that, once we return to heaven, having spent our time and completed our assigned work on earth, our reward will be to be admitted into this inner council of Yahveh, and thereby we will finally understand the mind, the secrets, and the eternal plans of Yahveh. This is part of what is known as, ‘union with Yahveh’, or, ‘being one with Yahveh’.
The sōdh Yahveh (pronounced sowth, rhymes with ‘clothe’), is like the private, inner council-chamber of God. This is where the archangels, the serafim and kheruvim dwell before their Sovereign, alongside the souls of the righteous who have died and gone to heaven (the ‘holy ones’ mentioned in the Hebrew Bible). It is on behalf of this inner council that God speaks with the royal ‘we’ in Genesis.
Why we don’t know
It is possible that the reason why we don’t know the answer to certain questions in life, is because we might otherwise act differently if we did know. I have seen enough time-travel films and TV series, to be aware that knowing the future outcome, will always affect how you behave in the present. Consequently, the general rule with time-travel, is that you don’t tell someone in the past anything about the future.
This makes me think that it is important that we fulfill our lives without a detailed, intimate knowledge of God’s Mind. I think one result of this, is that in order to understand our place in God’s Universe (and we all have one, every single one of us), out of sheer necessity we need to remain close to God, and to God’s ways. And so, even if we personally never get to fully understand what God has sent us here to do, nevertheless, simply by being close to God, we will always end up fulfilling our purpose in God’s Divine Plan anyway.
It is not vital to understand our part completely, but it is vital to strive to walk with God, in order to do God’s will. Not knowing certain things gives us a hunger and a yearning for God, and a desire to understand the nature of that yearning. That’s an important part of our journey too.
What can be known
Having said that, there are some things we can know, and some things we can speculate on to serve as guidelines, so that we don’t stray too far from the path God has set for us.
What we can know is that God doesn’t need the Universe. Yahveh is not dependent on Creation existing, and the Universe was not created because of some deficiency on God’s part. We can also know that God did not create the Universe specifically for human beings, because the universe is not measured by the nature of humanity – human beings are not the pinnacle of all Creation. We can also know that, whatever may be the reason God created the Universe, it was ultimately an act of love – this we can know from the underlying message of the Six Days of Creation.
Every time God created something, God looked at it in wonder and love, like a parent looks at their newborn child. That is what the following, oft-repeated formula in Genesis chapter 1 actually means: ‘And God looked at the xxx, and God saw that it was good’. God looked at every creation with the wonderment and love of a parent, because God saw how pleasing each of these things were.
We can know that the children of Yahveh are meant to be ambassadors of the love with which God created this Universe – messengers of God’s tenderness, God’s compassion and God’s affection for all of us, regardless of what religion we follow, or the colour of our skin, our gender, or any other defining identity we might have. That means practising our faith with kindness, and in a way that reflects positively on God, thus increasing people’s wonder in God’s infinite majesty.
Compared to the greatness and majesty of Yahveh, and the awesome splendour of the Universe, human beings are next to nothing. That thought should humble us, bringing down the prideful, and the haughty who think that creation exists for them to use and abuse as they wish. King David remembered this, but was comforted by the thought that despite our irrelevance compared to the size and immensity of the universe, Yahveh our God still loves us and cares about each individual one of us (Ps 8:4-5).
Because of this love, God intimately knows everything we go through, even all our pains, trials and suffering. God does not have to suffer with us, to know what we are going through and actually feel what we are going through – just as a parent feels the very pain of their dear children, even though they are not actually suffering the same thing with them. God knows, because God is God; God doesn’t need to suffer and die in order to gain this knowledge. God feels with us, because God loves us.
What Science might know one day, will still not be everything that is to be known
We can also know that the more you know about Creation – the more you know about the science and physics behind it all, and about the laws that Yahveh our God was Author of – we come to realise how much greater Yahveh is than all of these things. We know from Ps 19:1 that Creation is meant to give us a sense of awesome wonder in the magnificence and glory of Yahveh; and if God created as small a thing as Israel for God’s glory (Isa 43:7), how much more so did God create the entirety of the Universe for such a purpose!
No human mind can ever completely comprehend all of Creation, because the more we know, the more we realise how small and insignificant we are compared to the Universe. Instead, our individual importance comes from the purpose that Yahveh has given us, out of love for each and every individual. Every human being is a beloved creation of God, and don’t let hateful religious fundamentalists tell you otherwise!
There are many things about the Universe, even now, that science doesn’t completely understand. I have often heard it said that the mysterious things which happen, are simply things that Science doesn’t yet have the knowledge (or equipment) to explain.
However, I suspect that as the collective sum of human knowledge grows – as we learn more about our own dimension in space-time, and about the other dimensions and parallel universes that exist – that our knowledge will ultimately lead us, in time, to discover God – I mean, that one day, I believe Science will actually discover and be able to somehow detect God, but it will be at a time when we have grown sufficiently in knowledge and wisdom to be ready for such a discovery (i.e. God will not allow us to attain such knowledge before we are ready). At present, I don’t think that human science is even close to such a stage, where it even has the means to be able to comprehend what God is, or the language to describe God scientifically, let alone comprehend what they might be detecting!
Nevertheless, I do believe that one day, in the far distant future, Science will have reached the stage where they will be able to detect God. Even then, while we still exist in this mortal realm alone, I suspect that God would still wish to withhold some knowledge from being discovered by scientists. What God withholds, is entirely up to God to choose, and not for religious fundamentalists to decide; God reveals God’s plans only to those whom God chooses (Amos 3:7). Yahveh is ultimately Sovereign even over science, because Yahveh created all the laws of science.
When that time in the future comes, there may be some religious fundamentalists who will think to themselves, ‘How dare those scientists come close to detecting God! How dare they come close to having instruments which will be able to explain God!’ I can confidently predict that their fear will actually be out of jealousy, because they themselves have never experienced God; and that the God whom Science finds, will not be the God they believe in, and that the supernatural realm which scientists find, will not be the one they have been preaching. Ultimately, it will be up to God to reveal, and up to God to withhold; for those who love Yahveh, we have nothing to fear.
In science, there are many suppositions and hypotheses to explain everything in the universe – theories known by many different names, but one theory to link everything together, a unified theory of everything. However, there is one thing that undeniably unifies all, that points to the existence of all, and which brought everything in the Universe into being: Yahveh’s Love.
We can delight in all the things that can be known, and learn to be comfortable with what we don’t yet know. Humanity will know, when we are ready to know.
Peace and blessings to you all
your brother
Shmulik