The First Cause

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Transcript:

Well, I was going to tell you a story, and it involves me and my dad, and I forgot about him being here when I decided I was going to tell the story. He probably wishes he wasn’t. No, it’s not a bad story.

Last fall, Dad and I were deer hunting down along the Ouachita River, and we had had absolutely no luck. I was hunting, he was along for the ride, But we’d had absolutely no luck all morning in the blind. Hadn’t seen anything except squirrels, which naturally just appear out of nowhere at deer season.

Had had no luck at all. So after a while, we decided let’s pack up the blind, let’s put that all back in the truck, and we’ll go out and see, we’ll go walk around and see what we can find. And so we’d been down in this hilly area and walking through marshes and all this, and we were following some tracks.

And it looked like it was going to be a pretty big deer by the size of the tracks. And we’re following it all down this trail until we come, I don’t know, several hundred yards into the forest, and we come into this clearing, and we’re looking around trying to figure out which direction the tracks have gone now because it’s not muddy in that spot. which way did, which, like Bugs Bunny, which way did he go, George?

Trying to figure that out. And I look over off to my left, and I see something purple. Now, those of you who have been out deer hunting in October know there’s nothing in nature that should be purple out there.

So I look over, and it’s, it appears to be one of those big Rubbermaid tubs. Well, that’s odd looking there, so I, you I know there’s not a person over there, so I’m looking down the rifle scope at it. Yeah, that’s definitely a tub, and it looks like it’s taped up or something.

I said, Dad, what is that? He says, I don’t know. I said, I really would like to know what it is, but I don’t want to go over there.

He said, I’ll go over there. So he walks over, and I’m covering him with the rifle. Because in my mind, now, I find out later, Dad’s thinking, you know, somebody just dumped it out there.

I’m thinking, I’ve watched enough episodes of Unsolved Mysteries in the forensic files. There’s going to be a head in that tub. And I don’t know exactly why I would need to cover him with the rifle for that, but I did.

Dad’s just thinking somebody’s dumped a tub. I’m thinking, what have they dumped in the tub? And so I’m standing back and letting him go check it out.

and I’m covering him. Well, he walks over there and sure enough the tub is on its side and it appears to be sealed up and he said, there’s some kind of pipe coming out of it. I said, well, that’s not good.

I can’t think of any reason why I would run a metal pipe out of a plastic tub. And then he says, there’s all sorts of empty bottles of, I don’t know, alcohol and bleach and all kinds of household chemicals. And he walked back over to me and we discussed it very quickly and decided that there was either somebody was out there making pipe bombs or a meth lab of some sort.

And we decided we were done deer hunting for the day. And quickly, I mean, it took us probably 30, 40 minutes to get out to where we were. And we got back in about 10, back to the truck and hightailed it out of there.

I mean, and then you had to drive several miles before you got back civilization. But we got out of there. We decided no more walking around in the woods, no more deer hunting.

We’re going to go have a Whataburger and just thank God that we’re alive. And see, we weren’t scared of the tub itself. Even if we’d found a head in the tub, I mean, what is the head going to do to us?

We weren’t scared of the tub itself. At least I wasn’t. I didn’t think about pipe bomb.

I was thinking either head or meth lab. I wasn’t scared of what was in the tub. I was scared of who put the tub there.

Especially if somebody’s out there cooking meth out in the woods, they don’t want us to have stumbled onto their laboratory, so to speak. I wasn’t scared of the tub. I was scared of who put the tub there, because I realized tubs just don’t grow in the forest. There’s a cause.

Somebody put that there, and that’s what I was worried about, because we know from experience. Effects have a cause. If there’s something there, there’s a reason for it being there.

There’s got to be some explanation for why it’s there. Now, I told you as we go through this series of messages, we’re going to look at some of the reasons for believing Christianity, some of the arguments, some of the evidence, just in general, some of the reasons. And if people say to you, hey, do you really believe there’s a God?

Well, sure I do. Well, why? That might be something that trips us up from time to time.

Why? Well, we got to have a better reason than just, well, that’s what I was taught. And I will tell you that the concept of cause and effect is one of the arguments that we have on our side.

It’s one of the reasons for believing in the existence of God. I told you we talked for a few weeks about reasons for believing the existence of God. We’ll We’ll talk about evidence for the resurrection later on today.

I want to talk about evidence for God, arguments, reasons. And when I say arguments, by the way, I don’t mean fighting with each other. I just mean a well-reasoned argument.

I have a reason for what I believe. One of the arguments for God comes from the concept of cause and effect. And we know this just from regular life, okay?

You see a tub out in the woods, you know somebody had to put it there. You know there had to be a cause for the tub being out there. And, like I said, we know from experience that effects require a cause.

And our understanding of this concept of cause and effect is part of the way that we learn to understand the world around us. Charlie has not quite learned yet that trying to climb over the baby gate will get him a spanking. He will not have learned how to understand his world until he makes that connection.

Either that or he’s just so stubborn he doesn’t care. That may be it as well. But we learn from cause and effect.

We learn from, oh, you know what, if I drive too fast when it’s icy out, bad things happen. We learn from cause and effect. It helps us understand the world.

And this cause and effect is at the heart of one of the most enduring arguments for the existence of God. Now this argument for the existence of God in some form or fashion has been around even before Christianity. The ancient Greeks used to debate what we call the cosmological argument.

Now don’t zone out on me just because we’re using big words here. Cosmological argument just means it’s the argument from the existence of the cosmos, the universe. It’s the idea that we can look at the existence of the universe and get from there to the fact that God exists.

And they’ve been talking about this since the ancient Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle. It was heavily debated in the Middle Ages. It’s still being debated today, and people go back and forth on it.

So the fact that people still debate it, I’m not telling you it’s a foolproof argument. I’m not telling you that there’s any one silver bullet that you can take out that is an argument that at every time and in every place is going to convince everybody that God exists, is going to convince everybody of the truth of Christianity. There’s no single silver bullet foolproof argument.

But for me, it’s about the abundance of evidence and the abundance of reasons. And what we see is Christianity provides enough evidence to convince people who are willing to accept it. but it requires just enough faith to dissuade those who are determined to reject it.

Now, I wrote that out because I wanted to say it specifically the way I said it, but I took that idea from a friend of mine in Arkansas, very wise man. He lived up in the mountains, and you might not know he was a wise man until you took the time to talk to him, but he talked to me a few times about the evidence for Christianity, and he said, you know, there’s enough evidence out there that if you want to believe, you can believe. But it requires just enough faith that if you don’t want to believe, you’re not going to.

And I think that’s one of the wisest statements that anybody’s ever made to me. So we’re looking today at some of the evidence, this idea of cause and effect. And you may hear, especially from somebody who’s not real familiar with the argument, or somebody who just wants to attack Christianity, You may hear that this cosmological argument is the idea that everything requires a cause, and so the cause of everything must be God.

And that’s a way too simplistic version of the argument, because what it does is it opens up to attack. People rightly come and attack this argument, which I don’t know anybody. I don’t know any philosophers or theologians who believe that the argument should be everything that exists requires a cause, and the cause must be God.

But it opens you up to attack from people who would say, well, would God need a cause then? If everything that exists needs a cause, then God would need a cause. And that’s a problem, because God, by definition, is eternal. God, by definition, doesn’t depend on any of us or anything else for his existence.

So if God needed a cause, then God is not God anymore. And so it can’t be quite that simple as to say everything that exists needs a cause. There’s almost as many ways to state the argument as there are people who’ve made the argument.

But my favorite way of making the argument is this, and I’ll explain this to you. All things that have a beginning require a cause outside themselves sufficient to explain their existence. I think that’s in your notes, but let me give it to you again.

All things that have a beginning require a cause outside themselves sufficient to explain their existence. And what that means is you need a cause if you are not eternal. If you have a beginning, you require that something else caused you, caused you to exist. We know that we have a cause. Our parents, there was DNA that combined and here we are.

We understand that there’s a cause for us because we had a beginning. There was a point in time before we existed. But they require a cause outside themselves, meaning I can’t cause myself to exist. I’d have to exist to be able to cause myself to exist. You can’t do that.

And it has to be sufficient to explain it. There has to be sufficient power. There has to be sufficient intelligence behind it.

Why was I scared of that tub? Because I knew no deer had left that tub in the woods. As far as I know, deer haven’t developed the capability to have plastic factories.

Plus, their hooves aren’t really designed for carrying those handles. So I knew that a deer hadn’t put that out there. Now, there needed to be a sufficient cause.

A person took that out to where it was. So this argument for God says that everything that has a beginning requires a cause outside itself sufficient to explain its existence. And what we see is that Scripture, both the Bible and a lot of the prevailing scientific theories, say that the universe had a beginning.

You know, for years, Christians have been scared of the idea of the Big Bang, which I think they have different ideas now besides the Big Bang. But we were scared of the idea of the Big Bang. Oh, the Big Bang didn’t happen.

Well, the Big Bang didn’t happen the way they said it did, but to my mind, what they were saying was the universe had a beginning. The universe had a beginning. There was a time before there was something, and it all exploded into everything.

Now, I believe that that happened when God said, let there be, is when everything came into being. But what science was doing was telling us, just like the scripture says, that the universe had a beginning. And a lot of the prevailing scientific evidence tells us today that the universe had a beginning.

And the universe, because it had a beginning, then it requires a cause. It requires something that made the universe happen, all right? And it had to be something that’s not part of the universe, because the universe couldn’t cause itself to exist. And it had to be something, folks, that was big enough to explain the universe.

That’d take a pretty big cause, right, to explain the whole universe. And something else I discovered today as I was reading more, it has to be a personal cause, not just an impersonal cause. It couldn’t be something like energy or gravity, because we have things that are personal and impersonal forces.

And impersonal forces do what they do just when they’re there. They don’t have a choice about when to act. As long as gravity’s there, you’re going to fall if you come off balance.

All right, gravity doesn’t make a decision and say, you know what, I’m going to make Julie fall and not Greg. There are other forces involved there, but gravity is always at work. And so if there was an impersonal force, it would start and it would cause the universe just as soon as it came into existence.

But wait a minute, that would mean if there was a time the universe didn’t exist, then there was a time that force didn’t exist, that cause didn’t exist, and then we need a cause for that because it has a beginning. I hope I’m not going too far into this for you, but this to me is really exciting stuff, okay? And so what that tells us is the cause has to be somebody there making a decision and saying, now I’m going to cause the universe.

And when you start putting all this together and saying, we need a cause that didn’t have a beginning. We need a cause that’s eternal. We need a cause that’s personal and intelligent and can make choices and decisions. And we need a cause that is not material and physical like the universe.

And we need a cause that’s big enough to explain it all, well, that starts to sound like somebody we know, doesn’t it? And I’ll tell you, this cosmological argument doesn’t lead you immediately to the God of the Bible, but it’s not too big a leap to get from one to the next, because we Christians believe that that cause of everything is the God of the Bible. Now, some people will attack this, and we’re going to get to the text here in just a minute.

Some people will attack this and say, well, what if we just had causes going back all the way, all the way back. Now, that doesn’t work in philosophy. That doesn’t work even in logic.

Somebody had to start it. I mean, you can’t just say we’re going to go forever back and pretend that that eliminates your problems. And in this case, why wouldn’t God need a cause? Because we believe God’s eternal, and you only need a cause if you have a beginning.

So it makes sense logically. It’s consistent with what the Bible tells us about God, And we know that the physical universe did not come from nothing, because we see all the time. You don’t get nothing from something.

So I want us to look this morning at how the Bible describes God. Folks, the Bible describes God throughout. But I want to look at this passage and see how the Bible describes God in this passage.

And you’re going to see that what I’ve just been talking to you about, about this argument, for this first cause, fits perfectly with what the Bible says about who God is. So we’re going to look at Psalm chapter 102. If you haven’t already turned there with me, I’d invite you to do so.

Psalm chapter 102, and we’re going to start in verse 24. It says, I said, Oh my God, do not take me away in the midst of my days. Your years are throughout all generations.

Of old, you laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands. They will perish, but you will endure. Yes, they will all grow old like a garment, like a cloak.

You will change them, and they will be changed. But you are the same, and your years will have no end. Now, we don’t know exactly who wrote this psalm.

It might have been David. It might have been one of the other court poets. We don’t know.

But writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, this person wrote a song to God, praising him for who he is. And we see an interesting description of who he is in the text. And there are three points that I give you in the notes, but there’s the other one that I thought about this morning.

The fact that God is personal. He would be a personal cause to the universe. He’s not some impersonal force just sitting back and having no choice or no will in anything, like gravity. No, God makes decisions.

And we see that because the psalmist says in verse 24, I said, oh my God, do not take me away in the midst of my years, and otherwise don’t let me die before my time. And why would we implore God, why would somebody like the psalmist implore God not to take him away before his time if God had no choice in the matter? It’s like you go to a store and you need to return something, and you talk to the clerk and they say, well, that’s not up to me, that’s not my job.

You ever get tired of hearing that, that’s not my job? They say, oh, you’ll have to talk to the manager about returning that item. And yet we still go on talking to the clerk and begging the clerk.

Oh, please, would you take the item back? Look, I don’t have the authority to decide that. That’s up to the manager.

That makes as much sense as talking to God and saying, would you please spare me if God weren’t making decisions about how he runs the universe? But it does make sense because God does make decisions. He’s a personal God who relates to us, who has a will, who makes decisions, and who has a plan for each of us and has a plan for all of us.

And so the psalmist asked God, spare me. Don’t take me away in the midst of my years. Don’t take me away early.

As he’s talking about God’s role in the universe, he’s asking God to make a decision to spare him. And we see this picture of God being a personal being who chooses. And now to get to the notes.

He goes beyond that in verse 24. It doesn’t just say, do not take me away in the midst of my days. He says, your years, your years are throughout all generations.

Now a skeptic might pause there and say, well, that doesn’t say God’s eternal. Because that’s my point in this. God is eternal. He had no beginning. Now that verse there doesn’t necessarily say God is eternal. It says his years are for all generations, so as long as mankind has been around, God’s been around.

See, you’ve got to understand something about the Hebrew language this was written in. It’s very poetic. And for them to say, you’ve lasted throughout all our generations, wasn’t a precise dating of things like they would say, like if this was written in Greek.

Oh, you’ve lasted exactly that long. What he’s saying is we just last for a short period of time. This man who’s asking God to spare him a little while longer says we last just a short amount of time, but God has lasted throughout all eternity.

He’s not saying you literally have existed only as long as mankind has existed. He’s saying you outlast all of us because he’s looking at God as somebody who’s eternal. And we see that throughout the rest of the scriptures that God is from everlasting to everlasting. I believe it’s even in the book of Psalms where it says, from everlasting to everlasting, you are God.

He always has been. He always has been. There’s never been a time, there’s never been an instance before time.

We don’t even have the words to really talk about this. There’s never been an instance even before time when God did not exist. Everything we see about God in the scripture says he always has been. And that’s important because we don’t want to serve a God.

We don’t want to serve a God who ever wasn’t. Because if he ever wasn’t, that means he’s dependent on somebody else. Somebody else brought him into existence.

Somebody else made him God. And in that case, he’s not all-powerful. He’s not God as we understand him to be.

He says, your years are throughout all generations. Not just that they last during man’s generations, but they run the spectrum. God always has been.

God is eternal. And we see that God is the creator. God caused the universe. He says in verse 25, of old, you laid the foundation of the earth.

He laid the foundation of the earth. That means God was involved in the making of the universe from beginning to end. You know, I’ve known people that have tried to build their own house.

But they’ve had to have somebody else come in and pour the foundation. They’ve had to have somebody else come in and design it, even at the foundation level. And then they come along and they do some of the framing, but maybe they need help with the wiring.

When he says God laid the foundation of the earth, he means God was involved in the creation of the earth from the very beginning. When it was still in the planning stages, if we want to put it that way, God was involved. God planned it.

God started it. And God saw the construction through. And that fits with what we were talking about, about this first cause, that it would be somebody sufficient, somebody sufficient to cause the universe.

And right here the psalmist said, God caused the universe. He did it. And one of the things I told you was that the cause would have to be somebody outside of the universe.

Because again, I can’t bring myself into existence. I can’t cause myself. Because I’d have to exist before I existed to cause myself to.

. . sitting there thinking, okay, that’s way too confusing.

That’s the point. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t compute.

We see that God is different from his creation. He’s not the same as us. He’s independent of the universe.

You know, before the universe existed, there was already God. He was already there. And he was every bit as much God before there was a universe as he is now and as he always will be.

And the psalmist writes about this in the last two verses of the passage we’re looking at. He says, they will perish, meaning everything, the foundations of the earth, the work of his hands, the heavens, everything, all the universe. And by the way, I kind of skipped over the work of his the heavens being the work of his hands part, that wasn’t on purpose.

It’s saying God laid the foundations of the earth, he started it, and he put the finishing touches on it. The stars in the heavens, he put all the finishing touches on the universe. And looking at all that that God made, the psalmist says, they will perish.

They will perish. One day all these things are going to stop. I believe it’s in the book of Hebrews where it describes Jesus folding it all up like an old garment.

So one of these days, all of this is going to be done. This is going to stop. They will perish, but you will endure.

God will continue to exist, and God will continue to be God even after the universe, as we know it, has ceased to exist. Because he’s not the same as the universe. I hear this all the time. Well, you know, the universe wants this.

Or, you know, I really want this. I’m just going to put my request out there in the universe, or the universe has a plan for me. Folks, people are trying to make the universe a substitute for God.

Let me tell you, why would you worship the universe that God made instead of the God that made the universe? They’re not the same thing. The universe is nothing without God who made it, and God who sustains it, and God who ultimately will bring it to an end.

He said, they will perish. The universe will perish, but you will endure. Yes, they will all grow old like a garment.

Do your clothes ever wear out? Some of you say, no, I bought these pants back in 1956 and they’re just as good today, right? I buy most of my clothes at Goodwill, and they’ve already been worn once, so they tend to wear out a little faster.

Eventually our garments wear out. That stuff that was just pretty and brand new when we bought it eventually gets threadbare and worn and stained, and it wears out. And he says the universe is going to do the same thing.

It’s going to grow old like a garment. Like a cloak, you will change them. And God’s going to change everything like we would change clothes.

And they will be changed. But you, he says, but God, you are the same and your years will have no end. There’s no end to God and there’s no changing to God.

As the universe decays and wears out, God never decays and wears out. Because God’s independent of the universe. He’s different from his creation.

And it’s important that he is, because otherwise he couldn’t have created it. He couldn’t have been the cause. And so what we see here is the picture that’s presented in Scripture of God as this personal God, of this powerful God, of this creator, as this eternal being, as this one who exists outside of creation, fits precisely with what we would expect, looking at the universe and saying there’s got to be a cause for it.

So why do I believe in God? Why do I believe he exists? Well, one of the many reasons is the fact I look at the universe and I say there’s got to be something that could cause that.

Just like that tub in the woods. There’s a reason that’s there. And it would be foolish of me not to consider that there’s a reason that that’s there.

And in the case of that tub in the woods, my consideration of the reason was to get out of there. And I’m asking you today, maybe if you’re sitting in here and you’re a skeptic, maybe somebody dragged you to church, that’s fine. We’re glad you’re here.

But maybe you’re sitting there saying, I don’t believe any of this. Why should I? I’d ask you to consider the fact that the universe exists and there’s got to be a cause for it.

A cause that’s sufficient to explain it. And I submit to you that that’s God. Some of you already, many of you, most of you I’m sure, already believe that God exists.

So what does this have to do with you today? Well, apart from giving you a reason, one of many reasons, but a reason, to share with somebody in your world who’s looking for answers, and don’t you want them to know the God of the universe? Not just come around to your way of thinking, but to come to know the God who made them and be reconciled to him through Jesus Christ. Don’t you want that?

It starts with maybe being able to give them a reason why they should consider that God exists. So if you’re sitting there thinking, I already know God exists. What does this have to do with me?

I’ve just given you something that you can take and hopefully, I don’t expect you to remember everything I’ve said, but hopefully you can share some of this, some of your reason with people who need to hear it. And maybe somebody’s sitting out there thinking this morning, I already know God exists, but I feel like he’s distant. I feel like I don’t know him.

You know, we’ve talked about God being a personal being, somebody that we can know, somebody with a will, somebody with a plan for us. And maybe you’re sitting there saying, that God sounds like y’all know him, but he feels really distant to me. Well, part of the reason for that is that God is different.

God is different from his creations. God is holy, for starters. God is holy.

God is perfect and without blame. And the reason for the decay in our universe, the reason why everything, and scientists do agree that the universe looks like it’s winding down. Things are slowing down.

part of the reason for the decay in our universe, the reason for the death and the destruction and the things winding down and the fact that this is all going to be wrapped up one day and the universe is going to wear out and God’s going to fold it up and be done, the reason for that, all of that entered into the world because of sin. And when Adam and Eve chose to rebel and to sin against God, they introduced sin into the world. And when they introduced sin into the world, death and suffering and sickness and decay came right along with it.

And it’s been passed along to each of us. We’ve all inherited that sin nature from them, and so we sin, and that sin affects everything else, everything else in creation. But God alone remains holy because he’s outside of his creation.

So you and I are separated from God because of sin, because God is absolutely holy, And he can’t just say, oh, that sin’s fine because then God’s compromising with sin and he’s no longer holy. If you’re sitting there saying, I believe in God, but he feels distant, it’s because of sin. Our sin has separated us from him.

And God as a righteous judge has to judge our sin and has to punish it. And for us, the punishment would be eternal separation from him in a place called hell. But God is also loving and looked at us and said, you know what, there’s another way.

I’m going to make another way. Not because we deserved it, not because we’d earned it, but because God is loving, because he loved us enough. He sent his son, Jesus Christ, to come to earth to live a perfect sinless life so that he could die in our place, so that he wouldn’t have to be punished for sins of his own, but he could be punished for our sins.

And that’s exactly what he did when he was nailed to the cross, and he shed his blood, and he died. He died in our place and took the punishment for our sins. And three days later, he rose again from the dead, proving that he was God the Son and had power over life and death and that he had the power to forgive sins.

And this morning, God offers you forgiveness. The God of the universe, the God who made you, the God who to some of you may feel so distant, gives you an offer and invites you in and says, you don’t have to be my enemy. You don’t have to just be my creation.

You can be my child. I’ll adopt you into my family. I’ll forgive your sins.

I’ll give you a place with me in heaven. Folks, that doesn’t come about because we earn it or deserve it. It comes about because Jesus paid for our sins in full.

And this morning, if you’ll recognize that you’ve sinned against God, if you’ll recognize that you’ve violated God’s law and you’re separated from him because of your sin, and you’ll believe that Jesus Christ died to pay for your sins in full, put your trust completely in him as your Savior, and ask God to forgive you because of what Jesus Christ did, you can be saved this very morning.