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Maybe it’s just me, being a writer and all, but I find clues about a creator by looking at his creation. So when I want to determine what kind of personality God has, I look at the universe.
Clearly, God thinks big. He’s created countless galaxies that revolve through endless space. He likes to have a lot of everything and spread it out over a big span.
But space isn’t the only thing that’s big. NASA says that the universe is at least 13 billion years old. Clearly, God was thinking beyond seven days of creation when he triggered the Big Bang. He built the universe with big time in mind.
At the same time, he thought small. Infinitesimal, in fact. God has designed the details of existence down to subatomic particles. Walls of steel are made of stuff so tiny and insubstantial that it barely exists. Surfaces that seem slickly flat turn out to have endless bumps and dents. Everything in the universe is made of smaller things, and nothing is quite as solid or simple as it seems.
Nor has God stopped there. He likes variety. The Environmental Literacy Council says that there are 300,000 species of beetles — or maybe more. The Earth may have up to 100 million species of living things. Add in the nearly infinite variety of minerals, liquids, gases, and other substances (remember, boys and girls, that no two snowflakes are alike), and you’ve got quite a lot of diversity. And that’s just one planet.
What’s more, the universe is constantly shifting. The hardest rocks expand as warm daylight strikes them and contract in the cool night. Living things are always looking for other things to eat, drink or mate with. The mighty stars, sources of all energy and life, eventually die out. Gravity moves galaxies. Clearly, God likes activity, motion and change.
He also likes rules — but he allows change and variety there as well. The laws of gravity are a universal constant, providing that what goes up must come down, but we build rockets that can escape Earth’s heavy pull and escape into space. Everything that lives must die, but if you eat right and exercise and watch where you step in traffic, you’ll probably die later rather than sooner. God made the rules, but he made them flexible and dropped in an exception here and there.
So it’s hard for me to believe in preachers who insist that God wants all people to believe in just one creed and conduct themselves according to one inflexible way of life. The God of my universe has a bigger viewpoint than that.