What Was Before the Beginning?

From Gospel Translations

Four Ways to View God (and Life)

“What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” So said A.W. Tozer in Knowledge of the Holy. He wrote, “We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God” (13–14).

Tozer is right: We are inevitably shaped by whatever we consider to be highest, purest, best. This is true whether we claim to believe in the God of the Bible, in Odin, or in more secular-sounding powers like fate, physics, or finance. We all have a “God,” and this “God” orients us in the world. Yet the same dynamic also works in the other direction. Yes, our mental image of God shapes our desires and choices. But our desires and choices shape our picture of God too. And by nature, fallen humans make God in our image since our minds are, in John Calvin’s words, “a perpetual forge of idols” (Institutes 1.11.45). We imagine convenient gods and act accordingly.

This imagining happens at the cultural level as well as the personal. Have you ever noticed how warlike peoples worship warlike deities? Philosophers imagine divine minds. Groovy dreamers dream of groovy gods. It’s like the heavens are a giant mirror. I claim to see into divine reality; in truth, I see only myself. I might say “God,” but I mean “ME” — all caps. This means that God-talk is both inevitable and fraught. How can we get at the truth?

‘In the Beginning’

One way to unveil your vision of God is to ask this question: What do you think was there “in the beginning” — before peoples, planets, and protons? If you could hit rewind on the history of the universe and go back as far as possible, what would you find?

I think there are four main answers. They’re not exclusive; they can overlap. But in everyone’s view of ultimate reality, some combination of these four possibilities is at play.

1. Nothing

When asked, “What came before the universe?” many will say, “Nothing. The universe is everything!” As common as the answer might be, it’s worth considering how utterly non-obvious it is.

Picture nothingness. Not a cavernous expanse of empty space. Not a dark, echoing void. Not a vacant lot upon which the cosmos might be constructed. Nothing: perfect negation. No thing — no thing at all. Then, suddenly, nothing turns itself into everything — for no reason. When you think about it, it’s the most extraordinary happening ever proposed. As a Christian, I believe in the virgin birth of Jesus, but this would be the virgin birth of the cosmos — and without a virgin! It’s the ultimate magic trick: nothing up the sleeve, no sleeve, no magician, no explanation. Just pure magic, out of nowhere.

Even if such a miracle is granted, what would follow from this? How should we consider life’s meaning if we’ve all emerged from nothing? Perhaps we too should try to fashion something out of nothing. But it’s hard to escape the conclusion that, at bottom, it’s all meaningless.

2. Chaos

Perhaps, underneath it all, it’s random. There are forces at play, swirling around with no rhyme or reason to them. We often hear “scientific” versions of the chaos story: In it, there are explosions and wild coincidences. On the other hand, there are religious versions of the story as well, full of capricious deities and endless battles. Whichever kind of story is told — the scientific or the spiritual — humanity is stranded in the cross fire. Some get lucky; some get even; everyone gets caught up in the chaos.

If this were the ultimate story of the world, what is life’s meaning? Fundamentally, it’s struggle.

3. Power

Here is a popular alternative to the chaos story. In this vision, reality is ruled by powers far above — iron laws of nature, let’s say. If this is the case, then our psychology boils down to biology, which boils down to chemistry, which boils down to physics — molecules clacking together like billiard balls.

Religious people can believe in the power story too. The religious are very prone to imagining God as the Almighty Loner in splendid isolation. The God of Solitude simply is power. Once creation occurs, the possibility for love might arise, but it’s only and always secondary to power. And so life in this universe is, ultimately, slavery.

But this is not Jesus’s view of things. According to Jesus, in the beginning, there was love.

4. Love

When we talk about “the beginning,” it’s speculation. When Jesus talks about “the beginning,” it is eyewitness testimony. Jesus says he was there.

The night before he died, Jesus prayed,

Father . . . you loved me before the creation of the world. (John 17:24)

Jesus reckons he is older than the universe — as old as the Father to whom he prays. And the picture he paints is that of an eternal fountain of love and joy teeming down from the Father to the Son. In the beginning, there was not nothing, not chaos, not power, but a Niagara Falls of love and delight. And in the very same breath, Jesus prays that his followers would join him in this life of love:

Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am. (John 17:24)

This is a stunning vision of ultimate reality. And it grounds our deepest intuitions. We all feel that love is the greatest. But with Jesus, we can know why it’s the greatest — because God, the greatest one of all, is himself love. And therefore, what is life’s meaning? To find our place in this love and then to pass it on.

Heaven Has Opened

Tozer is right. Our picture of God is the most important thing about us. If we think that, at bottom, ultimate reality is nothing, life is meaningless. If it’s chaos, life is only struggle. If it’s power, life is slavery. Which is why it’s crucial for the real God to show up. Divine revelation is our only salvation from man-made gods and dismal views of life. And so we are eternally grateful that, at the Jordan River, heaven was opened.

When Jesus was baptized, immediately he went up from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him; and behold, a voice from heaven said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” (Matthew 3:16–17)

Here is the Niagara Falls of love: the Father full of delight in his Son, filling him with the Holy Spirit. If you hit rewind and bring all things back to “the beginning,” you can never get before such love. If you press fast-forward and speed on to eternity future, you will never get beyond such love. In Jesus, we have an unparalleled and unimprovable vision of God. There is a perfect unity before and behind the universe: one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

And Christ came not merely to show us this vision. The perfect Son of God joins us in baptism that we might join him. He is united to us in solidarity that we might be united to him. And in the waters of baptism, we are invited to stand with Jesus — to stand under an open heaven. We see what Jesus sees, and we hear what Jesus hears. In Christ, we receive his Spirit as our Spirit. We receive his Father as our Father. And the love of eternity becomes ours.

Everyone has a god of sorts. We all think something is tops — and that something shapes all that we do, say, feel, and think. So, the question is not, Do we have a God? The question is, What kind of God do we have? With Jesus, we see into heaven, and the view is breathtaking.