What do you think when people start to talk about the ‘bigger questions’? Things like: what is the point in life? Where have we come from? What happens when we die?

Often these questions seem to have little relevance to everyday life. But whether you think about it or not, you do have an answer to those questions, even if it's simply that you think they're largely outdated issues.

On the Big Idea in 2007, the evening talks looked at the view the Bible takes of these issues. Do the answers it gives have any relevance to everyday life? I believe the effects of the Bible's message are life-changing. In this series we'll be touching the surface of why its message is so powerful, even today.

Accident, created or what?

We often start thinking about Christianity as if God need explain himself to us. But the Bible starts with God, and then explains us. Have a glance through Genesis chapter 1 (look at the Weblinks section for a link to the Bible online).

God Alone

The phrase ‘And God…’ is repeated many times throughout the passage. God is the only agent in creation, and he is powerful enough to do the whole work of creating the universe.

The power of God is manifest—‘He also made the stars’. Such a little verse, yet if we reflect on its meaning, that God created every one of the billions of stars that we can glimpse when we look up at the night’s sky (and think of the readers of this passage, who could have gazed up without any light pollution).

Ordered

God's work of creation is described in an ordered and consistent way. The creation takes place in clear steps; it's orderly and deliberate. An important application can be made here about the place of science. The Genesis passage clearly points to God as the only creator, and describes the creation as ordered, yet diverse. It is this order that science relies on to discover meaningful things about the universe—what laws there are in place, for example.

Science has also furthered our ability to trace backwards to the universe’s beginnings, but it can’t take us all the way. Instead, science is an incredibly useful tool of observation, but the message of Genesis says clearly that it is not itself the creator, because it only observes what has already been created.

It is because of this that Christians look beyond science to the one who designed the universe, wrote the laws and holds everything together. Johannes Kepler, a German astronomer who formulated three laws of planetary motion) put it this way: “Science is thinking God's thoughts after him”.

Diverse

The ‘Who’ of Creation and the World