Read an Excerpt
Activating the Power of God's Word
By Kyle Winkler Charisma House Book Group
Copyright © 2017 Kyle Winkler
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62998-972-3
CHAPTER 1
THE POWER OF ONE SPOKEN SENTENCE
The voice of God is the most powerful force in nature, indeed the only force in nature, for all energy is here only because the power-filled Word is being spoken.
— A. W. Tozer
When I look at your heavens," David expressed to the Lord, "the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?" (Ps. 8:3–4). David's words reflect his awe of God's creation and the perspective we all should keep. We would do well to make it a practice to look beyond our cityscapes with their skyscrapers, our celebrities and their fame, and our fashions and possessions — the works of human hands — and stand, as David did, in wonder of what God has made.
I intimately understand David's sentiments. Exploring and musing at God's creation is a passion of mine too. I love to take in the vistas of the natural wonders. Perhaps there are few things more breathtaking to me than the majesty of the mountains, the vastness of the ocean, the colors in a summer sunset, or the serenity found in a fresh blanket of new-fallen snow. What can equal gazing up on a clear night and getting lost in a sea of countless stars?
David's words are profound in noting that humanity and all its devices are futile in comparison. Certainly God's theater puts on a daily show infinitely greater than anything we could ever produce.
However, David minimized God's power, even unintentionally, by his words. He inaccurately described the grandeur of creation as "the work of [God's] fingers." To understand my daring accusation, we must go back to the beginning to read the biblical account of how the heavens, the earth, and all that is in them began.
In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep.
— Genesis 1:1–2
Here the Bible depicts the earth before creation as a "formless void." Don't allow the meaning of this to get lost in translation as some do. A "formless void" doesn't compare the creation to a piece of clay yet to be molded by a potter's hands. No, the original language gives a sneak peek into something much more fascinating and even more miraculous. The Hebrew words here are tohû and bohû, which can be translated as "nothing" and "empty." To put it plainly, before creation the earth was nothing with nothing in it!
The implications of this are tremendous. Unlike you and me, who can create things only by using preexisting tools and materials, God had nothing to work with. Notice that the creation story doesn't recount that God devised a set of blueprints and went to work to build the cosmos. It doesn't report that He programmed lines of code or that He even lifted a finger at all. This is why David is mistaken in his description of the creation as the work of God's fingers. God didn't create with His hands; He created with His voice.
Here is how creation all began: "God said, 'Let there be light'; and there was light" (Gen. 1:3). That's it. The creation of everything was that simple yet that incomprehensible. Our human minds can't understand creation ex nihilo — that is, creation "out of nothing." And we certainly can't grasp the power of a spoken word creating anything. Yet this is the miracle of creation. God spoke and it was done instantaneously. The stars were hung. The planets were aligned. The earth was established. The boundaries of each were set. In total God made eight powerful declarations through which He immediately brought forth light, the sky, land, the sea, the sun, the moon, stars, living creatures, vegetation, and humankind.
The Power of God Embedded Within Creation
Words do no justice in depicting the might of our God who can create everything with only words. And I believe the author of Genesis tried to relate this awesome power to us by the name he chose to describe God — Elohim. In each of the eight declarations it was Elohim who spoke. There are many names given to God by those who encountered Him throughout the Old Testament. To be sure, each represents the same God but simply illustrates different attributes of who He is. These include El Shaddai, the "all-sufficient God"; El Elyon, the "most high God"; Jehovah Rapha, the "Lord that heals"; and Jehovah Jireh, the "Lord will provide," among others.
The designation of Elohim to describe the one who spoke all creation into existence must be intentional. Elohim is the plural of El, which scholars trace to mean "strength," "might," or "power." In other words, God's attributes of strength, power, and might are responsible for the conception of the cosmos.
As with any conception, the father's DNA is embedded in His creation. With His spoken Word His powerful, creative, and boundary-setting characteristics were planted deeply within the creation. These qualities are in the foundation of everything He fashioned. Perhaps this explains the power within natural resources to support and sustain life: how oxygen powers the cells of organisms, why water energizes our muscles, or how sunlight transfers energy. Perhaps this is how we harness their powers in our technology. Is this how gasoline converts into chemical and heat energy to fuel our vehicles? Or the molecules in the air provide for the travel of frequencies and radio waves of our cellular networks? I believe these natural resources, such as air, water, sunlight, plants, and oil, all work the way they do, even allowing us to tap into their power, because they contain the DNA of their almighty Creator.
The Dependable Laws of God
The universe is filled with constants. We call these phenomena laws. We take it for granted that these rules will be the same today as they were yesterday. These laws are the reasons behind many natural phenomena:
• Gravity continues to hold objects down to earth.
• The speed of light remains constant at 186,000 miles per second.
• The earth rotates in twenty-four hours.
• Your hot coffee always cools off after sitting on the table for a while.
Adding astonishment to these facts is that these laws don't hold true only on earth. No, as American author and physicist James Trefil admits, these laws are in effect throughout the entire universe. He says, "The laws of nature we discover here and now in our laboratories are true everywhere in the universe and have been in force for all time." How amazing! The laws of nature that we depend on here on earth are the same laws that govern the stars some billions of light-years away.
Scientists are desperate to make sense of these laws and to uncover the origin of their behaviors, but their efforts to do so have only frustrated them. I recently stumbled across an online article titled "Scientists Baffled by Laws of Nature." Scientists say, "Doesn't it seem strange that our universe is so orderly?" To the secularists who refuse to acknowledge any divine source, this is all reasoned away through a broad stroke of nature's evolutionary process.
But not all scientists are so cavalier to discount the consistency of creation to the equivalent of scientific fairy tales. Many see the miracle in it all — that the unchanging, dependable laws of nature reflect the qualities of a lawgiver. But not just any lawgiver, for these are the same qualities the Bible uses to describe God.
For I the Lord do not change.
— Malachi 3:6
Jesus Christ [God in the flesh] is the same yesterday and today and forever.
— Hebrews 13:8
The Bible asserts that God's qualities never change. His character, dependability, and power remain constant. We should not be surprised then that His creation reflects the same. This is the solution that dozens of famous historical scientists, such as Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and Pascal, proposed. In fact, their studies were all influenced by their faith. They believed that because God is steady and consistent, His universe must also be orderly and mathematically precise. And as time and technology have proven — it is!
What Holds Everything Together?
Let's go a step further now. There is something even more fascinating than observing God's DNA in the laws of the universe. A mind-boggling scientific belief is that sound waves are at the very foundation of everything.
Without boring you with too much technical jargon, allow me to explain such a curious statement. Consider the basic science we all learned in high school — everything is made up of matter. I am made up of matter and you are made up of matter. Yes, everything that exists is made up of matter. Get the idea? This came from Einstein's proposal; remember E = mc2? Basically Einstein suggests that matter consists of energy, which means that nothing in the universe is still. Instead, everything is actually vibrating to some degree. It is these vibrations that create sound waves.
Others have since advanced Einstein's ideas in what is now referred to as superstring theory. I won't get into the details; I am not a scientist myself. But perhaps the simplest way to illustrate the concept is through something we all can imagine — a guitar. You tune a guitar by stretching the strings. Depending on the tension of the string and how it is plucked, the strings produce a variety of notes. According to the theory, creation is held together by "a symphony of vibrating strings." All matter is made up of vibrations, all at different tones and melodies.
Have I lost you? Fear not. The essence is this: scientists believe that everything in existence today — from the most microscopic elements to stars, planets, and galaxies — were all formed and continue to be sustained by sound waves.
Did you get that? Everything in creation was created by and continues to be held together by sound.
The notion is staggering. Take a moment to look around from where you are right now. What do you see? This book? A chair, a couch, or a bed? A computer or a phone? A pet? A tree? Certainly your own body. Whatever you see, at the foundation of it — the glue that holds it together even now — is a sound. How unfathomably awesome!
One Spoken Sentence
Perhaps it seems as if we have cracked creation's code here, but this isn't a mystery only recently discovered by brilliant minds and modern technology. No, the truth behind creation has been right under our noses for some time now, boasted countless times per day throughout secular culture in our schools, in textbooks and magazines, and on television programs. The truth is found in the word we all use for the cosmos — universe.
Don't miss the spellbinding reality found in this word. Universe is derived from two Latin words: unus, which means "one," and versus, from which we get verse, which denotes a spoken sentence.
Let's put this together now. Plainly defined, the universe is "one spoken sentence." Let that sink in! With this, we need not wonder how or what made the universe exist because the answer is found in the word itself. The universe is one spoken sentence. It came into being by one spoken sentence. And as we have seen so far, everything in it is upheld by one spoken sentence.
I even dare profess to know the exact sentence responsible for the creation and the One who spoke it. Elohim, our Creator, almighty God of infinite strength, power, and might, declared into the void, "Let there be ...!" Instantly the power of who He is, activated by His spoken Word, went to work to create the heavens, the earth, and all that is in them.
Isn't this astonishing? I marvel how God seems to set up these things so that all throughout the world people are constantly proclaiming the truth that He created everything by the power of His spoken Word.
The Ultimate, Supernatural Law
As we have learned, sound is simply made up of vibrations. When a bell rings, a drum resounds, or someone speaks, the vibrations put out by the instrument cause the air around to vibrate, including the air inside your ears, creating sound. We know that eventually the sound dissipates and can no longer be heard. This is great news in many cases! Still, while the noise diminishes, the sound waves are actually converted into energy. And this energy remains in existence — forever!
Though we no longer hear the actual voice of God declaring His creating words, the power from them still exists. Like an infinite echo the power of God's Word still reverberates throughout the cosmos. And now, so many years later, the power of His words still holds all things together.
Scientific discovery is slowly catching up to what is already recorded in Scripture! Notice how everything we have explored so far is described throughout the Bible.
• Everything was created by the power of God's Word. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
— John 1:1
By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.
— Hebrews 11:3, esv
By the word of God heavens existed long ago and an earth was formed out of water and by means of water.
— 2 Peter 3:5
• Everything is upheld by the power of God's Word. He is the reflection of God's glory and the exact imprint of God's very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word.
— Hebrews 1:3
It is evident that God's Word is the most powerful force in the universe. I like to think of its power as a supernatural law. Embedded into everything from the beginning, it is what established all the other so-called laws of nature. Therefore, it is certainly the most foundational. What else in nature can create from nothing? Nothing! Nature can only reproduce from something that already exists. Nothing else holds together and sustains all things. Nothing is as dependable. Not gravity. Not the tides. Not even the speed of light. The attributes displayed by God's spoken Word are all nothing short of supernatural. Nothing else can accomplish what the Word does.
"Let There Be ..." in You!
God spoke and His will was done. That is limitless power. As A. W. Tozer profoundly said, "In the beginning He spoke to nothing, and it became something. Chaos heard it and became order, darkness heard it and became light." I envision God's spoken Word as a container of strength, power, and might. The Bible assures that the release of His Word from His mouth is the activation of a force that goes to work to do whatever He sets it out to do.
So shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.
— Isaiah 55:11
There are no ifs, ands, or buts about it — God's Word works! Let's summarize its powerful work in what we observe through the creation story.
God's spoken words at creation established tangibles such as the stars, planets, dirt, animals, and people. And it continues to hold all these together. But as we learned from the chart above, it also created things that may be harder to see but are just as important: attributes such as identity, peace, light, structure, boundaries, life, and authority.
We have just explored the limitless power of God's spoken Word at creation. But now consider that God has spoken many more words, all of which are equally as powerful. We need not search high and low for these words as if they are lost and need to be found. No, He has given us countless more, all inspired (spoken from His mouth) and placed in plain sight within our Bibles. These words, put into sixty-six books, are collectively known as the Word of God.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Activating the Power of God's Word by Kyle Winkler. Copyright © 2017 Kyle Winkler. Excerpted by permission of Charisma House Book Group.
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