The Maker—In the Beginning

 I believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.

            The very first thing Christians affirm about their God is that He is the Creator. This is not some odd, peripheral doctrine; it is the consistent testimony of the Scriptures: from Genesis to Exodus to the Psalms to the Prophets to Jesus to the letters of Paul to Revelation.

            In our age, this assertion often turns into a debate about creation versus evolution. A couple of things: I’m a theologian by training, not a biologist or physicist. Still, I’ve read a bit around the biological side of the evolution debate, and I can’t see how it holds up as settled science. It’s as much ideology as anything. If you want to talk about that, give me a call…

            The ancient Christians who formulated the Creed were not thinking about Darwinian evolution., but they were thinking about ancient paganism—as were the authors of the Bible. In ancient paganism, the world and the gods and humans were all part of the same scale. For example, in Greek mythology, the heaven (Uranus) and earth (Gaia) were considered eternal. They conceived the Titans, who in turn gave birth to the Olympian gods. The point is everything was integrally connected to the other; some were more powerful, some less, but all were basically of the same material.

            The God of the Bible, however, is in Himself and alone, the only eternal thing. He called everything else into being. “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, their starry host by the breath of his mouth…For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm” (Psalm 33:6, 9). Whereas the ancient pagan would see everything existing on the same line; the ancient Israelite (and Christian) would draw a great, big, thick line between God and everything else.

            So, nothing in nature is endowed with divine qualities. The true God made it all. And any rebellion against the true God is ultimately foolish (over against the ways that younger generations of pagan gods are always making war and defeating more ancient generations.) And the true God orders the world according to His good and gracious will; there’s no arbitrariness in Him. And when the true God calls the world into being, He makes humans in His image, as caretakers of His creation, delighting both in humans and in the rest of creation.

            All of this—and more—is at stake in the confession that our God is the maker of heaven and earth.