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.

He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has even put eternity in their heart; yet mankind will never find out the work that the true God has made from start to finish.

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.

The heavens are declaring the glory of God;

The skies above proclaim the work of his hands.

2 Day after day their speech bubbles forth,

And night after night they reveal knowledge.

3 There is no speech, and there are no words;

Their voice is not heard.

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? What is the total energy output of all the stars? 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?

To whom can you liken me to make me his equal? says the Holy One.

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.

Lift up your eyes to heaven and see.

Who has created these things?

It is the One who brings out their army by number;

He calls them all by name.

Because of his vast dynamic energy and his awe-inspiring power,

Not one of them is missing.

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!

Let's talk about something else. A house is pretty self-contained, right? Especially nowadays, you can basically get away with staying home all the time, if you wanted to. We pretty much tested that during the pandemic. 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. (Man, 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.

Yes, the earth is simply full of beautiful things. But how beautiful would these things really be if there were no intelligent creatures who could see, hear, and touch? We don't have to hurt ourselves trying to answer that, because we are here. But it kind of reminds us of that saying, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Jehovah designed both the beauty and the beholder. So let't talk a bit about us. How were we designed so that we could appreciate the world around us?

The main way we take in the world around us is through our eyes. What makes them special? When you take a video with your phone, what is the result? It looks good, but it's not quite the same as what you saw. The image is shaped like a rectangle. That makes sense because the camera sensor must have an edge. But the sensors in our eyes have edges too. Why isn't it noticeable? I can't see the edge. It kind of feels like my field of view goes on forever. Interesting isn't it? Your field of view doesn't actually go on forever though. Actually, each of your eyes has a circular blind spot just outside the center of your view. There's a really fun experiment you can try later where if you close an eye and put your thumb out in front of you in just the right spot, your thumb will disappear. It takes a couple tries though so please don't do it now! This blind spot is where a blood vessel delivers nutrients to your eye, so it's not sensitive to light. Both your eyes have this. But if it's really there, how come we've never noticed it? Actually, the only part of your eye that sees full detail and full color is the part that sees directly in front of you. It's called the fovea and in your field of view it's about the size of your two thumbs together at arms length. The rest of your field of view is limited color and limited detail. How have we never noticed the blind spots or lack of detail in our peripheral vison? Your brain is really good at filling in the missing information. For one thing, usually your eyes are moving around. Your brain collects the information from your fovea, the detailed part of your view, as the eye moves, and it is able to remember and estimate the parts you can't currently see so that, to you, it appears that your vision is boundless and incredibly detailed. Your vision has limitations, but obviously Jehovah did not want you to notice. Isn't that loving? He wanted us to see the world with clear, unobstructed vision, and he made it so.

Yes, our amazing sense of sight is a joint effort between our brain and our eyes. Interestingly, in the world of digital cameras, there has been a shift away from making cameras with better and better sensors, to instead attaching the sensors we already have to faster computers for better processing. What kind of computer is our brain? The real impressive thing about our brain is it's efficiency. I'm sure I don't have to tell you about the advancements that have been made in artificial intelligence. But even the best artificial intelligences yet are only just barely starting to be able to think like a person. We're just scratching the surface. Still, these are room-sized machines that use tons of electricity and also water to stay cool. On the other hand, your brain is many times more capable. It's about the size of a jar of peanut butter, and it operates on about 20 watts of power. That means that your consciousness and all of your thoughts, emotions, and experiences are happening on the same amount of power as a light bulb. Impressive indeed. Let's read a scripture.

You are worthy, Jehovah our God, to receive the glory and the honor and the power, because you created all things, and because of your will they came into existence and were created.

Amen. Not only did Jehovah generously, wisely, and lovingly create all of these things, but he created us to live forever on the earth in peace. But, we don't live forever, and the earth is not a peace. Why is that? Sadly, one of the spirits that God created rebelled. He called Jehovah a liar and decided to do things his own way. We don't know his name but he is called Satan or Devil. The first humans that Jehovah created, Adam and Eve, sided with Satan instead of Jehovah. Since we are descendants of Adam and Eve, we came from a family that is opposed to Jehovah. Our family as a whole, is not on Jehovah's team. As a result of our distance from him, we have all sorts of problems, and instead of living forever, we all eventually die, just like Adam and Eve did. But after talking about Jehovah's wonderful creation, do you feel moved to side with him instead of Adam and Eve? Can we do that?

Right after the rebellion occurred, Jehovah decided that it should be possible for any one of Adam and Eve's children to switch sides and join him if they want to. What is his solution? A new government, unlike any other. On one hand, all of the rulers in this government would be people who have walked this earth and faced the same problems you and I do. Which is appealing isn't it? It makes sense that someone who has walked in our shoes would be qualified to rule us. On the other hand though, this government is also 100% fair, and it has the power to fix every problem in the world. Well how is that? We have plenty of governments that are ruled by people like you and me, and they certainly can't fix every problem. No human ruler could. As the Grand Creator, Jehovah responded to this problem by creating something totally new. He hand-picked humans who would be qualified for the job, and he turned them into powerful spirits that can do things humans can't do. This is in the Bible; take a look at 2 Corinthians 5:17.

Therefore, if anyone is in union with Christ, he is a new creation; the old things passed away; look! new things have come into existence.

The first human to be turned into a spirit was Jesus, which is why the scripture says that anyone else who becomes the new creation is in union with Christ. The Bible calls the place where spirits live heaven. So this government rules from heaven rather than Earth. The Bible also tells us that, besides Jesus, there will be exactly 144,000 of these rulers. That may sound like a weird, arbitrary number. But think of it this way. If you had to plan a new government to rule the whole world, would you know off the top of your head how many offices this government would need? Jehovah did. He said, "Yep, we'll need exactly 144,001 rulers."

So how is this going to play out? Currently, Satan is working hard to influence as many people as possible to side with him and not Jehovah. That influence must be done away with. The Bible tells us that Jesus, as king of the new government, will break up the works of the Devil. So that is an essential first step. Next, we need to be fixed. We are broken people. We grew up in this messed up world. We are supposed to live forever, but we don't. So God's government is going to repair and bring us back to the way we were supposed to be. Jehovah never intended for anyone to die, so he has given Jesus the authority and power to bring back people who have died. Even some people who did bad things will be resurrected and given a chance. We'll say, How would you like to join us? I think a lot of them will say yes.

Do you see what Jehovah is doing here? By no fault of his own, things did not go to plan. When we make a plan and it doesn't go the way we wanted, we kind of just have to live with that. But since Jehovah has the power, he's just hitting that undo button. He's just going to keep pressing it until we're back to the way things were supposed to be.

Jesus said to them: Truly I say to you, in the re-creation, when the Son of man sits down on his glorious throne,

You see, the Bible even uses the word re-create to describe what Jehovah is going to do. He's going to re-create the perfect world that he made for Adam and Eve, and we will live there forever, just as he intended for us.

Do you feel grateful to Jehovah, for what he has done and is doing for us? How can we show that? One way is to get to know him. You may have questions that were not answered in this talk. If so, please talk to us after the meeting. As part of our non-profit Bible education work, we provide free one-on-one disussions where you can ask all the questions you'd like and get to know Jehovah personally. You'll learn what you have to do if you want to switch to his side. (Spoiler alert: It's not as hard as you might think. He wants everyone to be able to do it.) Show your appreciation by getting to know him and joining his side, and the Bible says that you will find your greatest joy in living forever.