Jehovah—The Grand Creator

When you think of that word, creator, what comes to your mind? Especially today, there are many creators. People create things all the time. You create things. You probably create pictures or videos. Maybe you share them with others. Some people create music. Some people create skyscrapers. All of these things are impressive and beautiful in their own way. But all human creators have limitations. For example, a friend explained to me that a person who creates bourbon may only be able to hone their craft a few times in their life, because good bourbon can take years to age. One of my favorite bands only ever actually made one album that I love. Obviously I wish they would make something else like that, but they probably won't. Maybe you can relate. There's a Creator who doesn't face these limitations though. He created the things that we take pictures and videos of. He created the physics that are required for skyscrapers to exist. He created all of the subtle chemistry and sensory experience that allow us to enjoy things like bourbon. He did not leave us with one measly album of music; he created music itself. Who is this Grand Creator? The Bible tells us that his name is Jehovah, and we also call him God.

There are many things that set Jehovah apart from any human who creates things. For one thing, unlike us, Jehovah had no beginning. How so? According to scientists, there is abundant evidence that our universe had a beginning; that it must have originated from a source of pure energy. The Bible reveals that Jehovah was this energy source. Jehovah created everything, including time itself, and nothing created Jehovah. That's how he had no beginning. The Bible fittingly refers to him as the King of eternity.

God gave us the desire and ability to live forever. And yet, he created so many things with so much complexity, that even after an infinite amount of time, we will still have things to learn.

The first thing he created was another person. This person is almost exactly like him, except of course, he did have a beginning. He called this person his Son. Then, with his Son as his helper, he created more persons like him. We refer to Jehovah and these others as spirits. According to the Bible, they may number into the millions. Then he did something interesting. He created the material universe, where everything is made of stuff. That's where we live. We're used to everything being made of stuff. But it must have been wild for the other spirits to watch. The universe is a sort of sandbox where all sorts of interesting things are possible. Jehovah created the earth, then he started putting all sorts of living creatures on it, countless different animals, each beautiful and impressive in their own way. Maybe at this point the other spirits thought that this must have been the icing on the cake. But Jehovah was not done. He actually still had something totally new in store: humans. Why are we unique? The Bible says we were made in God's image. That makes us similar to the spirit creatures, except we live in the material world where everything is made of stuff, and we are made of stuff! The animals were not made in God's image. So we are the only creation like that. We're like Jehovah, but we live in this world. The Bible also indicates that this universe, where so many things are possible, was intended to be a gift for us. What an honor to have been created this way!

One person who felt a great deal of gratitude for these gifts was the Bible writer David.

David felt that, even without words, creation speaks, revealing knowledge and glorifying Jehovah. It's certainly true that you can get to know a creator by observing their creation. If you're really into music or art, you may even know your favorite artist well enough to feel a certain closeness with them. This is even more true in the case of Jehovah. His creation is all around us and he wants us to get to know him.

David specifically mentioned the heavens and the skies above—and for good reason. We can learn a lot, particularly about Jehovah's power, from what we see in the sky. Take the sun for example. The sun is a star, and a star is a massive object in space that releases a huge amount of energy. We take the sun for granted, but how big and powerful really is it? Here is an image of the sun and the earth next to each other, to scale:

So the earth is that tiny speck in the lower right corner. Your whole world, every place you've been to, is on that speck. Of course, although this image is to scale, we are much farther away than that. Actually, we are 93 million miles from the sun. That's so far away, that at the speed of an airplane, it would take you 20 years to get to the sun. And yet, it is so powerful that you can go outside on a sunny day and directly feel its warmth on your skin. That energy made it all the way to you from millions of miles away. These days, we sometimes talk about how humanity in general uses a lot of energy. We manufacture, we burn fossil fuels, we use a lot of electricity. But our total energy consumption is around one trillionth of the total energy output of the sun. Of course most of that energy is just radiating into space. We only experience a fraction of it. It's funny, sometimes we make it sound like you have to look far into space to find something crazy, but even one of the closest objects to earth is mind-blowing when you take a closer look.

As big and as powerful as the sun is though, it must not have been that hard for Jehovah to create. Why do we say that? Because scientists estimate that there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on the earth. So how much energy is that? We already established that the sun puts out about a trillion times as much energy as we use. And now we're saying that there are countless stars like the sun; more than there are grains of sand on the earth. We could do some more math and come up with a number with dozens of zeros, but it wouldn't mean anything to us. We would have nothing to compare it to. Jehovah himself has a comment on this. Would you like to hear it?

He's basically asking who or what can you compare me with?. We just encountered this challenge. Our numbers and units lost their meaning when we tried to measure Jehovah's power. So, to his question, we really don't have an answer. The power output of all of the stars is so incomparable that it might as well be infinity. And that's the point. Jehovah has made it very clear that he will never run out of energy.

Remember too that, this is a person who wants to be your friend and wants to help you. Do you think that your problems are too difficult for him? I think another quality we can appreciate from this is Jehovah's generosity. I mean why did he make space so vast? He could have made the earth with a ceiling a couple miles up, and that's it. We would all still live our lives. But obviously, Jehovah did not want us to feel bounded at all. We keep developing better ways to look at the sky, and we just keep finding more. If the universe has an edge, we can't see it. How generous!

A house is pretty self-contained, right? Especially nowadays, you don't even really have to leave your home. But what if you suddenly had no water, no sewer, no trash pickup, and no deliveries. Just power. How long could you stay in your home then? The earth is kind of like your home in this scenario. The only resource it gets from outside is power from the sun, and no waste products leave the earth. But there's lots of activity on the earth. Trillions of creatures are living, breathing, and eating all the time. How does the earth not run out of these resources, or become covered with waste?

Jehovah designed every resource on earth to be recycled forever. Every essential resource is 100% recyclable and 100% recycled. For example, our bodies convert oxygen and glucose into energy, carbon dioxide, and water. This process is called respiration. Plants carry out an equal and opposite process, called photosynthesis. Photosynthesis converts energy, carbon dioxide, and water into oxygen and glucose. One thing that impresses me about this cycle is that each process uses the exact byproduct of the other, with no awkward remainder. It's not like, Yeah they're mostly balanced but photosynthesis also produces a small amount of uranium—No. There's no toxic leftover. How wise!

Let's meet some of the creatures that make the air we breathe. Can you guess which one produces the most? Maybe you're thinking about trees. And they do make a lot of oxygen! But the title of biggest producer actually goes to something that's not big at all.

This is prochlorococcus. You've probably never seen or heard of them, but these little guys are your friends. They live in the ocean, they're tiny, and there are a lot of them: hundreds of thousands can be found in one drop of seawater. They may be the most populous species on earth. There are more of them than there are grains of sand. (Huh, maybe the actual lesson from that illustration is that there's not as much sand as we had thought.) Prochlorococcus are responsible for 20% of the oxygen production on Earth. Small but mighty! Before I started researching this talk, I had never heard of prochlorococcus, which I thought was kind of surprising, since they're obviously so significant. But it reminded me just how much Jehovah has made. What do you think: will we ever run out of things to discover?

That's super cool, but you probably don't have a tank of prochlorococcus at home as a houseplant. If you do, I'm coming over because I want to see. But let's meet a photosynthesizer that's a little closer to home.

This is a spider plant. They're very common as housplants. Actually who here has a spider plant? Yeah all the plant moms raised their hand. Did you know that the spider plant is another heavy hitter in the clean air game? Not only does it produce oxygen, but it also removes toxins from the air. It's effective enough that NASA included it in a study that was looking for plants that could be used for clean air in space. I bet you're glad to have one in your house! Yep, it's a clean air machine. You know, humans make machines, and we're pretty good at it. But although our machines get the job done, a lot of them are ugly and noisy. But your spider plant doesn't kick on every few hours like (insert air conditioner sound here)—No! The spider plant does its job while sitting still and looking pretty. Jehovah doesn't have to choose between form or function. Maybe you didn't even know it did that, which is also pretty typical of Jehovah's designs. They don't demand your attention. They're just there. But if you decide to take a closer look there's always something beautiful to see.