CREATION

“By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.” (Hebrews 11:3 NIV)

“And it is after all only by faith that our minds accept as fact that the whole scheme of time and space was created by God’s command – that the world which we can see has come into being through principles which are invisible.” (J.B. Phillips)

Stephen Hawking, in A Brief History of Time writes, “But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary, or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?”(p.141) John Polkinghorne, in The Faith of a Physicist, answers, “Every place – as the sustainer of the self-contained spacetime egg and as the ordainer of its quantum laws. God is not a God of the edges, with a vested interest in boundaries. Creation is not something he did fifteen billion years ago, but is something that he is doing now.” (p.73)

In the Apostles’ Creed we say that we believe that God is the Creator, that the universe is his idea, and that it is good. The creation story of Genesis makes it very clear that when God created the universe he saw that it was very good. The universe is the good gift of a loving God. This has all sorts of implications for our lives.

William Barclay says that belief in creation raises three questions which affect our everyday lives:

1. Which kind of a world do we believe in?

2. Why did God make the world?

3. How did God create the world?

Let me take them in order.

1. Which kind of a world do we believe in?

The Creeds were written to counter misunderstanding. There were two main theories about the relation of God to the world. One was pantheism, which held that in some sense everything is literally God. God is the world and everything that is in it. This was the view of the Stoics. They believed that every person, creature, down to the soil and stones, has the divine spark in them. This view is found in certain New Age and Buddhist thinking today. Its conclusion is that the universe is God, that the universe is eternal, without beginning or end, that there is no individuality, and no distinction between human and divine.

The second theory is its opposite. The Gnostics and Manichaeans believed in dualism, the two principles of light and darkness, spirit and matter. They viewed the material creation as evil and either rejected the physical side of life through ascetic behavior, or thought salvation was entirely a matter of the spirit, and that it did not matter what they did with their bodies, so they became promiscuous. This theory separated God from the universe, and denigrated the value of the physical creation. Christianity, on the other hand, affirms the material world.“For everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, because it is consecrated by the word of God and prayer.” (1 Timothy 4:4)

The Creed reminds us that God is both involved in the world and yet is above and beyond it. God is both immanent and transcendent, in and beyond the world, continually creating the world and directing life. The Christian believes that God is neither contained in the world nor divorced from the world.

2. Why did God make the world?

What purpose the universe? For some people there is neither rime nor reason to the universe. It is all random, where chance rules. This is the big question which faces us all: why the universe, why does life exist at all, what are we doing here, is there any sense to history? If there is no God then there is presumably no eternal reason for life. But if we believe that God creates this universe, all the life in it, then presumably there is a reason. My professor of theology at Durham University, Charles Cranfield, put it like this:

“We believe that God, constrained by no need, necessity, or loneliness, being eternally rich, blessed, and perfect in himself, of his pure grace, his love, which knows no cause outside itself, decided in his freedom not to be for himself alone but to create human beings to be the witnesses, and the whole universe to be the theater, of his glory…..in which the drama of God’s praise is to be enacted, and that all the manifold life of nonhuman animate nature has its functions to fulfill as a magnificent chorus in the drama in which humanity as the chief actor has its own special rational part to play.” (The Apostles’ Creed, p.17,18)

Cranfield uses the analogy of the artist who is writing a play in which the whole universe has a part. Every day we wake up to play our part in this drama of creation and salvation. We are put into situations in which the storyline develops. We improvise within the limits prescribed for us. We do not see the limits, and do not realize that we are on stage. Unselfconsciously we choose our roles and cooperate with, or resist, God in his production. When the curtain comes down on our lives, we get to read the reviews written by the author and perfecter of our faith.

The creation is designed for God’s glory, and the salvation of the people he loves. Everything that happens in life, is meant to move God’s purpose towards completion. There is a reason, a purpose, a meaning for this world in which we live. The knowledge of this makes all the difference in how we make sense of our lives. If we know that God is working towards our salvation through what happens to us we can take heart that it is worthwhile.

3. How did God create the world?

The Bible tells us that God created the world by the word of his power. He spoke the world into being. The Scripture is more concerned for the “who” not the “how” of creation. There should be no conflict between science and faith on this issue. It is when theologians make scientific statements, and scientists make faith statements, that we get into conflict. Both science and theology are forms of truth, but they speak to different sets of questions. It is when we get involved in questions of human origins, that we can get into conflict.

Kenneth Miller, Professor of Biology of Brown University, writes, “True knowledge comes only from a combination of faith and reason… What science cannot do is assign either meaning or purpose to the world it explores…. I believe that much of the problem is the fault of those in the scientific community who routinely enlist the findings of evolutionary biology in support of their own philosophical pronouncements. Sometimes these take the form of stern, dispassionate pronouncements about the meaninglessness of life. Other times we are lectured that the contingency of our presence on this planet invalidates any sense of human purpose. And very often we are told that the raw reality of nature strips the authority from any human system of morality.” (Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God And Evolution)

The debate about the beginnings of life is colored by the conclusions people on both sides have reached independently of the evidence they cite. The age of the universe, and the process by which life was made, is an open question, which is not, I believe, addressed in the Bible. The seven “days” of creation may be thousands or millions of years as far as God is concerned.

The difficulty we have today is that an artificial separation has been made between science and faith so that the impression given is that science has reduced life to nothing but material components. Naturalistic science, taught in schools to avoid religious entanglement, contributes to the creation of a society in which life has no meaning and purpose, the physical is not seen to be sacred, and behavior is a matter of individual preference without any ethical base. This is why we are perceived by the Muslim world to be a promiscuous civilization, where every sexual urge is acceptable. Life is considered cheap, and many live like alley cats, by the survival of the fittest, the law of the jungle. Such behavior is certainly not “consecrated by the word of God and prayer.”

How we view our creation determines how we live. If we believe that we are made by God for the purpose of living to his glory, in a drama that fashions our salvation, we will live very differently from those who believe that they are only biological mechanisms, the product of chance encounters.

The view that God is the maker of heaven and earth has consequences for our lives. The Bible teaches that we are stewards, not the owners of creation. We hold it in trust. We are responsible for how we treat the world, and all the people in it. The first role given Adam and Eve was to work in the garden and take care of it. That is still our task today. We are to take care of the world in which we live. We are to treat it and all who live in it reverently, and use its resources rightly in the service of others and to God’s honor and glory.

“Realizing that God is the maker of heaven and earth is important in another respect. Many people feel frightened and lonely in the world. They are overwhelmed by the thought of the immensity of space. The stars in the night sky seem to emphasize the brevity and unimportance of human life. The stars are billions of miles away, and move farther away from us with each moment that passes. The light from them now reaching us may have begun its journey centuries ago, long before we were born.

The doctrine of creation allows us to feel home in the world. It reminds us that we, like the rest of creation, were fashioned by God. We are here because God wants us to be here. We are not alone but in the very presence of the God who made and owns everything. We are in the presence of a friend who knows us and cares for us. Behind the apparently faceless universe lies a person. The stars in the night sky are then no longer symbols of despair but joy – the same God who made them also made me and cares for me! They are even reminders of God’s of God’s promises – and their fulfillment. (Genesis 15:1-6)” (Alister McGrath, The Apostles’ Creed, p.41,42)

We are not just children of the universe, but through creation the offspring of God the Father, “in whom we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28) But even more, we can become children of God, “for if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation, the old has gone, the new has come.” (2 Corinthians 5:17)