PCEA

God is Creator

It is common knowledge that Commander Frank Borman, the best known of the famous American astronauts, as his spacecraft Apollo 8 circled the moon, read aloud these words from Genesis l: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said: Let there be light, and there was light.” These words alone seemed to him to fit the mystery and grandeur of what he was then beholding.

In these opening words of Genesis we have the only record of Creation that exists. There is no alternative in the field. Others have attempted to investigate how the event occurred, but the Bible is mainly concerned with why it took place. It is not too much to say that the creation of the world is revealed in the Bible to indicate the relation of the creation to God and, very specially, the relation of man to his God. There is also this difference that the Bible makes no attempt to give a scientific explanation of creation. Had it done so, it would have been of little use to all the generations that read the Bible for these thousands of years. What the Bible does is to tell us how the events would appear if a spectator was present to witness them. Of course there was no spectator present in this instance, but the narrative is couched in terms of observation that would be used by a spectator, and that are therefore intelligible to the ordinary mind, and are not offensive to the mind of the most scholarly reader.

Principles

What does the Bible say here about the creation, and especially about its Creator? It teaches us at once that God was the creator of all there is. God is brought into the scene without introduction or explanation. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” brings in the whole of the solar system, and indeed the whole physical universe. Then it concentrates on the creation of the earth, and it gives us three principles underlying the earth’s creation.

The first is that it all took place by the exercise of God’s Will. “In the beginning God …” is, in its majesty and simplicity, the greatest utterance in the literature of mankind. It introduces a will that is being asserted to fulfil a purpose of infinite wisdom and goodness latent in God’s mind from all eternity. And that will recognises no obstacles to thwart or delay its operation. We assert, therefore, that creation is a free and intelligent act of the divine will. The second statement is that God’s will found realisation in a word: “Let there be …” The word of the sovereign Creator caused His will to become operative, and from it creation took its being. His word was the putting forth of His power. The Writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews recalls this when he says: “the universe was created by the word of God” (Heb. 11:3). Let us not forget that the Son of God is recognised in Scripture as the Word of God (John l), the perfect expression of His mind and purpose.

The third statement made is that the word and purpose became operative through a Spirit. At the divine bidding, “the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters”. The word “moved” introduces the figure of a bird hatching her eggs from the warmth of her own body. And it was the Holy Spirit of God, with infinite intelligence and quickening power, that brought order out of chaos and life out of death.

Progression

The next thing we note about the narrative is that the creation was progressive. It moved from the earth as an inorganic body to the separation of light from darkness, and of sea from land, from the earth made habitable for organic life to the advent of life itself. In this we see that the work of each day was leading to and preparing for the next. The arrangement of the entire passage clearly implies process, orderly progressive movement in distinct stages. The four great kingdoms thus emerge in progression, the mineral kingdom, the vegetable kingdom, the animal kingdom, and the human kingdom. Man can be seen as the crown and copestone of creation as made in the image of God and after His likeness, and so fitted for the intelligent and responsive fellowship of his Maker. The note of deliberation introduced: “Let us make man ...”, suggests a new departure in the order of creation, the creation of a spiritual being in the likeness of God. As we are left face to face with the majesty, the power and the wisdom of the Creator God, we can the more profitably ask: what is the purpose of creation? Since God is the Creator, and God is a moral and spiritual being, we believe that God produced the material world for the sake of the moral and spiritual and that He is therefore guiding the universe to a moral and spiritual goal. We can understand it better when, by the grace of God, we experience what Paul says, as he links together the physical and spiritual creations: “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6). This is God’s new creation: a new light, a new knowledge, and a new glory, all radiated from a new firmament, the face of Jesus Christ. And in that light and knowledge we worship God “in spirit and in truth”.