Genesis 1:1 announces God’s creation of heaven and earth. The very opening verse of the Bible is a breathtaking declaration. All things begin with God, but God himself had no beginning. In this video, Pastor David Platt explains the very nature and divinity of God in order to define the depth of what denying the existence of God truly means. Platt rules out the notion of denying the existence of God, as it would inherently imply that we have all knowledge and all divinity, thus making us “God”, and inevitably denying our own existence and divinity.
- Unsustainable Negation
- Denying Divinity
Watch Full Message of The Story of Scripture and the Questions of Life
Denying the Existence of God
God is the supreme creator. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The opening verse of the Bible is a breathtaking declaration that all things begin with God, but God had no beginning. He was in the beginning. He was and always has been, and always will be, which is different from everything else in the universe. All the stars and all the sky, all the oceans and all the galaxies, all the vast expanse, they all had a beginning. There was a time when they were not, and God created them. This is huge. I don’t have to tell you that we live in a culture that says there is no God and we were not created. So let’s just quickly unpack those two ideas.
You can not Deny God’s Existence
So first you really can’t say definitively that there is no God. That would be an unsustainable negation. Think about it. If you say something is not there, you have to have searched out all possibilities that it might be there. If I were to say something is not in the room where I’m standing right now, I would’ve to have searched all this room to see if it is there. So in the case of God, to say that God is not there, is to say you’ve searched all knowledge to see if God is there. And if you’ve searched all knowledge, then that means you have all knowledge, and by definition that makes you God. You deny your own divinity with your own statement that there is no God.
David Platt serves as a pastor in metro Washington, D.C. He is the founder of Radical.
David received his Ph.D. from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and is the author of Don’t Hold Back, Radical, Follow Me, Counter Culture, Something Needs to Change, Before You Vote, as well as the multiple volumes of the Christ-Centered Exposition Commentary series.
Along with his wife and children, he lives in the Washington, D.C. metro area.
