Affirming the Apostles ’ Creed (6 page)
1 TIMOTHY 4: 4
Maker of Heaven
and Earth
I
n the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth”; so begins the Bible. (“The heavens and the earth” is Bible language for “everything that is.”)
It is arguable how much (or how little) Genesis 1 and 2 tell us about the
method
of creation—whether, for instance, they do or do not rule out the idea of physical organisms evolving through epochs of thousands of years. What is clear, however, is that their main aim is to tell us not how the world was made but who made it.
I
NTRODUCING THE
A
RTIST
The solution-chapter in one of Dorothy Sayers’s detective stories is called “When You Know How You Know Who.” Genesis 1 and 2, however, tell us
who
without giving many answers about
how
. Some today may think this a defect; but in the long perspective of history our present-day “scientific” preoccupation with
how
rather than
who
looks very odd in itself. Rather than criticize these chapters for not feeding our secular interest, we should take from them needed rebuke of our perverse passion for knowing Nature without regard for what matters most—namely, knowing Nature’s Creator.
The message of these two chapters is this: “You have seen the sea? The sky? The sun, moon, and stars? You have watched the birds and the fish? You have observed the landscape, the vegetation, the animals, the insects, all the big things and little things together? You have marveled at the wonderful complexity of human beings, with all their powers and skills, and the deep feelings of fascination, attraction, and affection that men and women arouse in each other? Fantastic, isn’t it? Well now, meet the one who is behind it all!” As if to say: now that you have enjoyed these works of art, you must shake hands with the artist; since you were thrilled by the music, we will introduce you to the composer. It was to show us the Creator rather than the creation, and to teach us knowledge of God rather than physical science, that Genesis 1 and 2, along with such celebrations of creation as Psalm 104 and Job 38-41, were written.
In creating, God was craftsman and more. Craftsmen shape existing material and are limited by it, but no material existed at all until God said, “Let there be...” To make this point theologians speak of creation “out of nothing,” meaning not that nothing was a sort of a something(!) but that God in creating was absolutely free and unrestricted, and that nothing determined or shaped what he brought into being save his own idea of what it would be like.
C
REATOR AND
C
REATURE
The Creator-creature distinction is basic to the Bible’s view of God’s lordship in providence and grace, and indeed to all true thought about God and man. That is why it is in the Creed. Its importance is at least threefold.
First,
it stops misunderstanding of God
. God made us in his image, but we tend to think of him in ours! (“Man made God in his own image” was a crack by Voltaire, rather too true to be good.) But the Creator-creature distinction reminds us that God does not depend on us as we depend on him, nor does he exist by our will and for our pleasure, nor may we think of his personal life as being just like ours. As creatures we are limited; we cannot know everything at once, nor be present everywhere, nor do all we would like to do, nor continue unchanged through the years. But the Creator is not limited in these ways. Therefore we find him
incomprehensible
—by which I mean, not
making no sense
, but
exceeding our grasp
. We can no more take his measure than our dogs and cats can take our measure. When Luther told Erasmus that his thoughts of God were
too human
, he was uprooting in principle all the rationalistic religion that has ever infected the church—and rightly too! We must learn to be self-critical in our thinking about God.
The world exists in its present stable state by the will and
power of its Maker. Since it is his world, we are not its
owners, free to do as we like with it, but its stewards,
answerable to him for the way we handle its resources.
Second,
this distinction stops misunderstanding of the world
. The world exists in its present stable state by the will and power of its Maker. Since it is his world, we are not its owners, free to do as we like with it, but its stewards, answerable to him for the way we handle its resources. And since it is his world, we must not depreciate it. Much religion has built on the idea that the material order—reality as experienced through the body, along with the body that experiences it—is evil and therefore to be refused and ignored as far as possible. This view, which dehumanizes its devotees, has sometimes called itself Christian, but it is really as un-Christian as can be. For matter, being made by God, was and is
good
in his eyes (Genesis 1:31) and so should be so in ours (1 Timothy 4:4). We serve God by using and enjoying temporal things gratefully, with a sense of their value to him, their Maker, and of his generosity in giving them to us. It is an ungodly and, indeed, inhuman super-spirituality that seeks to serve the Creator by depreciating any part of his creation.
Third,
this distinction stops misunderstanding of ourselves
. As man is not his own maker, so he may not think of himself as his own master. “God made me for himself, to serve him here.” God’s claim upon us is the first fact of life that we must face, and we need a healthy sense of our creaturehood to keep us facing it.
F
URTHER
B
IBLE
S
TUDY
God the Creator:
Genesis 1-;2
Q
UESTIONS FOR
T
HOUGHT AND
D
ISCUSSION
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us,
and we have seen his glory, glory as of the
only Son from the Father, full of grace
and truth.
JOHN 1: 14
And in Jesus Christ
I
believe in God the Father... and in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord.” So the Creed declares. When it called God “maker of heaven and earth,” it parted company with Hinduism and Eastern faiths generally; now, by calling Jesus Christ God’s only Son, it parts company with Judaism and Islam and stands quite alone. This claim for Jesus is both the touchstone of Christianity and the ingredient that makes it unique. As the whole New Testament was written to make and justify the claim, we should not be surprised when we find the Creed stating it with fuller detail than it states anything else.
C
HRIST AND THE
C
ENTER
This claim is central to the layout of the Creed, for the long section on Jesus Christ stands between the two shorter sec tions on the Father and the Spirit. And it is central to the faith of the Creed, for we could not know about the Trinity or salvation or resurrection and life everlasting apart from Jesus Christ. It was Jesus Christ, in his redemption of all God’s people, who was the revealer of all these truths.
See how the Creed presents him.
Jesus
(Greek for Joshua, meaning “God is Savior”) is his proper name. It identifies him as a historical person, Mary’s son from Nazareth in Galilee, a Jewish ex-carpenter who worked for three years as a rural rabbi and was put to death by the Roman authorities about a.d. 30. The four Gospels describe his ministry in some detail.
Christ
(literally, “the anointed one”) is not a surname, except in the old sense in which surnames like Smith, Taylor, Packer, or Clark declared a man’s trade or profession. “Christ” is what Presbyterians would call an “office-title,” identifying Jesus as God’s appointed savior-king for whom the Jews had long been waiting. Since the Christ was expected to set up God’s reign and to be hailed as overlord throughout the world, to call Jesus
Christ
was to claim for him a decisive place in history and a universal dominion that all men everywhere must acknowledge. The first Christians did this quite self-consciously; one sees them doing it in the speeches recorded in Acts (see 2:22-36; 3:12-26; 5:29-32; 10:34-43;. “To this end Christ died and lived again, that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living” (Romans 14:9). “... so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow” (Philippians 2:10).