Q: Isn’t God just the sum total of everyone and everything in the Universe—he or she is the creation itself?
A: That is not the teaching of the Bible.
It is a ‘pantheistic’ perspective of God which is what a lot of Eastern religions teach. Also modern environmentalists and some ‘new agers’ talk about the Earth as being ‘mother god’ or Gaia.
That perspective only really works in a Universe that was always there –with no beginning. In that model God is part of creation—part of space and time. So what is going to happen to that One when the Earth or the universe as we know it goes out of existence?
Plus the way environmentalists talk about mother Earth and Gaia, Humans seem to be characterized as some sort of virus or infection that is destroying or killing that all encompassing powerful Pantheistic Being. In which case humanity seems to be more powerful than the supposed creator—after all, mother nature must be saved by all of our ‘global warming’ measures. We must save the world—Gaia—or she is going to destroy us instead?
That is not the all-powerful God of the Bible.
I’m not even interested in that kind of god—mother nature might be able to affect me in this life but is bound by time and space and can do nothing to me or for me in a life to come—after death–outside of time and space for all eternity.
Only the God of the Bible claims to have that power.
Also, with the Hindu and Buddhist gods you are constantly being recycled until you finally get it right– lose your identity and become downloaded into the greater world itself—sorry, that possibility has no appeal at all for me nor is it taught anywhere on the Bible.