God, the One and Only

Mark begins his book with this statement, “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”

He opens with this hypothesis; there is one God who had a son who came to earth and his name was Jesus. The rest of the book gives evidence to support this statement.

The God He is referring to is the one identified in the opening verse in the Bible, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” That God.

That God is described by Steven R. Mosley in God a Biography.

“Try taking a mathematical stroll out into the deep black of space. You start by blasting away from the 25,000 mile circumference of the earth. That kind of size is in itself hard to grasp. But then you approach the sun, a blazing fireball one million miles across. If the sun were the size of an orange, the earth would be a grain of sand.

Traveling out from the solar system farther into space, you see that the sun which so dominates our heavens is only a midsized star. Others are so large they could hold 500 million suns the size of ours.

Moving through the vast hazy field of stars that is our Milky Way, we have to talk in terms of light years (distance traveled in a year at a 186,000 miles per second clip) between the pin pricks of light. They seem packed together, but the average distance between starts in our galaxy is four or five light years. And there are two hundred billion of them swirling through the Milky Way’s incomprehensible spaces.

Then we have to try to think about the billions of other galaxies sprawled across the observable universe. These immensities chill our brain. Yet even more remarkable is the fact that all these heavenly bodies travel in precise, predictable paths. They don’t just tumble through space undirected, crashing into each other. Even galaxies sweep their load of stars in graceful spirals. There is a majestic order to the movements in the heavens.

Our own planet, for example, moves in several separate, synchronized ways. It spins on its axis at precisely one thousand miles per hour, producing a nice mix of night and day to modulate our climate. The earth also orbits the sun at eighteen and a half miles per second, its journey of millions of miles never varying more than a fraction of a second. Somehow all this motion is synchronized. All the orbits within orbits proceed on track, on time.”

That God gave Moses ten commands and the first one was, “I am the Lord your God….you shall have no other gods before me.” I’m it. The one and only.

From Genesis to Revelation this is repeated. The mighty angel in Revelation “ stands on the sea and on the land lifting his right hand to heaven. And he swore an oath in the name of the One who lives forever and ever, who created heaven and everything in it, the earth and everything in it, and the sea and everything in it.”

This God says, “I am God, there is no other; I am God and there is none like me.”

Isaiah announced Jesus’ birth hundreds of years prior to his coming when he said, “The Lord Himself will give you a sign; Behold, a virgin will be with child and bear a son and she will call His name Immanuel,” which means God is with us.

This is the same God John talks about in John 1. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being by Him and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being…..And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

You cannot separate the two. They are one.

This is so much bigger than sweet baby Jesus in a manger.

You have to start with God. You have to start with this God because the author identifies a specific one who claims to be the one and only. Not Buddha, not the thousands of gods of the Hindu, not me, for I can be my own god, calling my own shots, making up my own mind, deciding what I think is true or right, how to conduct my own life.

This one is big enough to hang in there and read this particular book about the one He sent to earth. Remove all the trappings of all you’ve ever heard and read and just read the book. Put out of your mind those you’ve met over the years who claim to know Him and have often made you want to just puke. If He’s big enough to create the heavens Mr. Mosley talked about, then He’s big enough to convince you of the validity of His claims.

This will not be an ah ha moment of, “This makes sense.” This should be an ah ha moment of, “This is really true.”