Nate and his co-host react to this episode's biggest questions: is God perfect, why bears mauled 42 children, and Psalm 137's dashing babies verse.

If God Is Perfect, Why Did He Create the World? Skeptic Calls It His Best Answer

A caller named V opened this episode of the Ask A Christian Podcast asking the question theologians have wrestled with for centuries: is God perfect if He still wanted to create the world? Nate’s answer, rooted in the difference between need and want and the self-sufficient love shared eternally within the Trinity, landed hard enough that V admitted on the spot it was the best response he had ever heard. Settling whether is God perfect actually requires never creating anything took about six minutes. What followed took closer to an hour and a half, working through Psalm 137’s infamous dashing babies verse, a bear attack that may or may not have involved actual children, a Trinity challenge from a Oneness Pentecostal caller, and a debate over whether God commands evil at all.

Is God Perfect? The Biblical Bottom Line

Scripture never treats perfection as an absence of desire. Genesis 1 shows a God who creates deliberately and calls the result good, not a God patching some deficiency. In Christian theology, whether is God perfect turns on holiness rather than an exhausted list of possibilities. God does not sin, and that is not the same as being incapable of wanting or acting. Because the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have eternally existed in loving communion, God needed nothing outside Himself to be complete, so creation flows from overflow rather than lack. That same is God perfect logic threads through the episode’s harder questions, including why an imprecatory lament like Psalm 137 was never a command from God (GotQuestions.org has a thorough breakdown), and why David faced severe discipline over Bathsheba in 2 Samuel 12. For the fuller doctrinal picture behind these convictions, see our statement of faith, and browse related deep dives in our Theology Unpacked category.

When Orcish Comes Up in a Bible Study

Midway through the discussion of Elisha and the bears, a caller stopped Nate mid-Hebrew word study to ask if he plays Dungeons and Dragons, because Nate had just described the crowd of forty-two as something out of Orcish. Nate copped to it immediately, the caller lit up over catching the reference, and the room settled the matter with a firm keep it Christian. It is a small moment, but it captures the show’s rhythm: rigorous Hebrew lexical work one second, a fantasy-nerd tangent the next, and back to Scripture without missing a beat.