Is God the first cause?

There is, in the very nature of things there can be, but one First Cause of everything. There is such an One — the living and true God. He is, self-existent, never had beginning, eternal; never ending, everlasting; the alone infinite in power, and therefore irresponsible, and knowing no check or impediment to His will or action, save that of His own character and essential goodness and truth. "The right" is always His, Himself is the standard of what is right; He is the One First Cause, originating source of everything that ever was brought into creature-existence, Sustainer in being, and Controller here or elsewhere, of everything, the End for whom it was formed, to be to His glory and praise.

He has been pleased to act, and to speak in and by — creating, providing, and ruling all things; and man down here on earth.

The water, the air, and the atoms were all created by God. He is the living originator of all things—the intelligent “First Cause” of everything.

Beginning without a cause being impossible, save only in the case of the absolute origin of existence, gives the thought there must be a first cause; all the rest is creature, i.e., has a cause, and shows us we cannot know that first cause. I was arrested by the difference of a thing's existing and beginning to exist; but I thought there was some fallacy here. I do not know what "absolute commencement" means - it has no sense to my mind; and though "beginning to exist" makes it more sensible, yet it is not beginning which is the impossible idea, but existing without a cause. I can understand continuance, because what I see or hear, I may yet see or hear, etc.; but when I think of existence continued or beginning, I must have a will - that is what it is impossible to avoid supposing. Now this is more sensible at the beginning, because existence requires a will for it to be - before a thing existed it could not have a will to exist, therefore there must have been another. It is just as true of subsistence every moment, but not so sensibly true. Hence existence without a will, i.e., a cause of existence, is inconceivable by me; hence I know God must be, because a will must be, and I cannot know Him because He subsists without a cause, as we speak of causes, for such a term has no real application to self-subsistence.

He is a Creator. I do not say that simple existence can be proved to be a matter of creation by logical deduction. But simple existence is an abstraction. Man sees trees, planets moving; in a word, evidence of design, and that, which has been so often argued, involves a designer. The distinct knowledge of a Creator is a matter of faith. Yet if man does suppose the abstract existence of matter without a cause, he violates the first principles of necessary thought. He is accustomed to see man form many things out of comparatively formless matter, so he has an idea of this latter. But if he begins to think of why anything existed, he cannot avoid the thought of a cause. Why, implies it? and I can say Why? and it is my nature to say Why? I am so constituted as to look for a cause. I may not be able to define cause, nor can I conceive creation; but I cannot conceive, on the other hand, a thing existing without it. My mind may be inert, and so far take what exists as I find it; but as soon as it is in activity, it looks for why a thing exists. The same thing proves I cannot know a first cause, but only that there must be one. I cannot conceive a thing existing without a cause, therefore I say there must be one. But a first cause means what exists without one. That is, I cannot conceive it. Hence, too, I cannot conceive creation, though I know there must be a Creator. It is merely saying, I am a creature, and must think in the order of my being.

"And the earth was without form, and void." This is a second fact. There is no limitation of the space that intervened between the original creation of heaven and earth in verse 1, and the dreary ruin depicted in the earlier clause of verse 2. We are not told what were the grounds on which God dissolved the fabric of the earth He had created, and brought it into the chaotic condition so strikingly set forth. But I repeat my assertion that the creation of a chaos, or the existence of a chaos as a primeval state, is a heathen and not a biblical thought. What the Bible says is quite inconsistent with such an idea. "Heaven and earth," we have seen, does not mean chaos, but a state of things with an order necessarily distinguishing them. What use God may have made of the earth as it originally came from His fiat is another question, and our curiosity is not indulged by the Bible. The fact, however, is certain; and it is a fact of the utmost moment, and of very great interest in its place. All the facts that have been discovered of the earliest conditions of the earth fall in with it; that is to say, they point to a time when the animal, or even vegetable kingdom, when life in its lowest forms as yet had no existence on the globe. Is there no difficulty then? I grant you that man has the utmost possible difficulty in arriving at anything more than a First Cause. What the nature of that First Cause is, how can he tell? The very same principle that leads him to feel there must be a First Cause forbids his understanding it. The reason of this too it is not hard to see. Man himself infers a first cause, but he, a caused being, never can per se understand a first cause that is not caused. It is outside and above the sphere and nature of his own being. There man feels, and, alas! would hide, his own ignorance. But here in Scripture all is plain. We are told that all things above and below had a First Cause, and that He who caused them to be was God, who by the absolute act of His own will was pleased so to create (verse 1). Then (verse 2) follows another fact — all the earthly part of the creation completely dissolved, and in hopeless confusion. I shall prove that Scripture refers to the same words elsewhere; never as the original state, but a state to which God was pleased to reduce the object in question. The importance of this cannot be over-estimated in such a theme as the present.

Everything in the Fathers world is eternal. In that world nothing had beginning, neither shall anything there have end. Believers were chosen in Christ before the foundation of this world (Eph. 1). God calls those things that be not as being (Rom. 4:17). Our minds are finite, and from our standpoint we cannot see things in connection with eternity, we are compelled by our own limitations to connect all things with time. We are certain that everything we see had a beginning. We can better understand a thing having no end, because this thought does not compel us to force our thoughts out of the stream of time. With us it is still time lengthened out indefinitely. If we think of God, we know that He cannot have had a beginning, and yet we find in our reason a substratum of rebellion against this thought, for it is utterly foreign to our mode of thinking, and entirely beyond our comprehension. And yet the conviction is forced upon us that there must be a first cause of all things, and here again our finite minds rise up against the Infinite, which we cannot understand. But how could the creature understand the Creator?

The philosophies, as well as the religions, of antiquity were wholly ignorant of creation. Of God, of the "beginning," they knew nothing. Dreams of evolution were the earliest folly, and, among the Ionic school, Anaximander and Anaximenes followed Thales, each differing, all blind. Anaxagoras let in with mere matter the idea of mind, but no creator. It is useless to name others; even Plato and Aristotle, rivals too, had no real light. They, more or less openly, all held eternal matter at bottom; and though the philosophers boasted, as they still do, of their knowledge and logic, they failed to see that they could not prove it, or even that it is to mere mind unthinkable. To the believer it is the simple yet deep truth, that a beginning was given to everything that exists; if God says it, he perceives that nothing else can be true. For it is impossible to admit an effect without a cause; but reasoning can never rise at best beyond. There must be a First Cause; it can never say, There is. This God alone can and does affirm: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." God brought the whole ordered system into being. The form, nature, and aim, are not here explained: such a detail had no proper place here. That He created all is a primary and momentous truth.

The ordinal of "one" is "first." If we apply this in the sphere of Nature, it is plain that what is first — the true beginning of all (and science does not now doubt a beginning ) must be, without doubt, the cause of all; the first, if we really get back to that, is cause; and the first of all is thus the cause of all.

Satan's great effort has been to obliterate this thought from the mind of man, and in the multiplication of heathen deities we see him apparently successful; but even in these heathen mythologies there lurks behind all the fantastic, numberless gods, the one supreme Author and Source of all things. Thus the thought is marred indeed and blurred so as to be practically valueless; but God has stamped this for us upon the very nature of man, so that conscience as well as reason cries aloud that it is true. If God be thus alone and with no other, so that He existed before all time, "from everlasting to everlasting," then it follows that everything else that has been called into being is His work. He is the Creator. This suggests the truth which we gather from the ordinal of one — First.

A first suggests not only pre-eminence, but authorship. As the First, our God has brought into being the whole universe of material and spiritual existence. The first excludes from its own domain a second, and yet there would be nothing with which to compare it were there no second. All that follows, therefore, is in that sense in subordination to Him that is first.

The passage then states, not simply that there is one God—the Apostle had already stated this in verse 4—but "there is but one God, the Father." And then these most significant words are added: "Of Whom are all things and we for Him." What is the force of this? "The Greek preposition ek (of) expresses the source of being, the origin of all things." Now, when did the Father become "the source of being, the origin of all things?" Was it only at the Incarnation? How preposterous is such an idea. No reading backwards will avail here. For what is stated here is in the most distinct and absolute way predicated of God the Father alone and as such. He is declared to be the source of all things. Such a declaration could not apply to time merely.