All things exist because of Him, but He is not the deistic idea of the great Watchmaker, forming the cosmos and then leaving creation to its own devices. No, God actively upholds and sustains His creation. He spoke light into being, and light continues to shine throughout the universe because God is still speaking. Paul affirms this truth to the Athenians by taking the words that a pagan poet used to describe Zeus and rightly applying them onto the one, true God: “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).

Although this is the second question, it is perhaps the most important question that we could ever seek to answer. The reasons are many, but perhaps the most important is given to us by Jesus whenever He was praying to the Father in John 17:3, which says: “And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” God is not merely the granter of eternal life; rather, knowing Him is eternal life. Also, by implication, to be ignorant of God is to be divorced and cut off from life everlasting. What then could be more important than knowing God? And what better place to begin than with the question before us: what is God? The answer that the catechism gives contains three sentences, which easily gives a three part structure to our meditation.

First, “God is the creator and sustainer of everyone and everything.” This truth is so fundamental to our understanding of the person and the very idea of God that it expressed clearly within the first verse of the Bible: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). As many scholars have noted, the phrase ‘heavens and the earth’ is a merism that means all things, just as a common merism used today is to search high and low for something, which means to look everywhere. Thus, with its opening words, the Bible establishes God as our Creator, and it reinforces that truth continually. Consider Psalm 100:3 as an example: “Know that the LORD, he is God! It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people and the sheep of his pasture.”

But notice that He is not simply our Creator; He is also the Sustainer. All things exist because of Him, but He is not the deistic idea of the great Watchmaker, forming the cosmos and then leaving creation to its own devices. No, God actively upholds and sustains His creation. He spoke light into being, and light continues to shine throughout the universe because God is still speaking. Paul affirms this truth to the Athenians by taking the words that a pagan poet used to describe Zeus and rightly applying them onto the one, true God: “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).

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