Creation

In the beginning

Where did everything come from? The Bible answers in its first sentence.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

Genesis 1:1

"The heavens and the earth" is a Hebrew way of saying everything. The verb bara (בָּרָא), ‘created’, takes only God as its subject in its basic stem: people make and build, but only God creates.

God did not work on material that was already there, like a potter with clay.

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

Paul calls God the one who "calls into being what does not yet exist" (Romans 4:17). The church has named this creation out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo). Nothing stood beside God from eternity, neither raw material nor a rival power. God alone is eternal, and everything else exists because he willed it. The Westminster Shorter Catechism says: "The work of creation is God's making all things of nothing, by the word of his power" Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q9.

And he made the world by speaking.

By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, and all the stars by the breath of His mouth.

Psalm 33:6

"For He spoke, and it came to be; He commanded, and it stood firm" (Psalm 33:9). There is no struggle here: God willed, spoke, and it was so. That is why the elders around the throne sing, "for You created all things; by Your will they exist and were created" (Revelation 4:11).

The work of Father, Son and Spirit

Creation is the work of the whole Trinity. John says of the eternal Word:

Through Him all things were made, and without Him nothing was made that has been made.

John 1:3

Paul adds, "All things were created through Him and for Him" (Colossians 1:16). The Spirit is present in the first scene: when the earth was formless and void, "the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters" (Genesis 1:2).

The Apostles' Creed begins, "I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth" The Apostles' Creed. The Nicene Creed widens the phrase to "Maker of heaven and earth, And of all things visible and invisible", and says of the Son, "By whom all things were made" The Nicene Creed.

Against Gnostic teachers who said that a lesser god or angels had made the material world, Irenaeus of Lyons insisted in the second century that the one God made all things freely, needing no one's help, with his Word and his Wisdom, the Son and the Spirit, as his own hands Irenaeus, Against Heresies. Augustine, commenting on John 1:3, draws the line between Creator and creature: "For every substance which is not God is a creature; and what is not a creature is God" Augustine.

Good, distinct and dependent

At the close of the sixth day God looked over all he had made.

And God looked upon all that He had made, and indeed, it was very good.

Genesis 1:31

Matter is not a mistake, and the body is not a prison. When some teachers forbade marriage and certain foods, Paul answered, "For every creation of God is good, and nothing that is received with thanksgiving should be rejected" (1 Timothy 4:4). Bread, bodies, rivers and mountains are gifts.

Yet the world is not God. It is not a piece of him that flowed out, and it is not a second eternal principle locked in a struggle with him. So Christians neither worship nature nor fear it as though it held divine powers. And the world depends on God at every moment. He is not "served by human hands, as if He needed anything, because He Himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else" (Acts 17:25). How he goes on upholding it is the subject of the lesson on providence.

Why, then, did God create, if he needed nothing? Not from lack but from overflowing goodness: "For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things" (Romans 11:36). John Calvin called the world a most beautiful theatre of God's glory, in which believers may take a holy delight Calvin, Institutes 1.14.20. It is also the stage of his love. Here he made creatures to know him, bound himself to them by covenant, and at last sent his Son to share our flesh. The story that opens in Genesis 1 closes with a new heaven and a new earth.

The creation account itself ends not with work but with rest.

Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because on that day He rested from all the work of creation that He had accomplished.

Genesis 2:3

Matthew Henry comments: "God did not rest as one weary, but as one well pleased" Matthew Henry. The world was made for a rest shared with its Maker. See Why should we rest?, and for the Sabbath and the Lord's Day, the lesson on worship and prayer.

Reading the six days

All this Christians confess together. They differ over how to read the days of Genesis 1 and how the account relates to what the sciences say about the age of the universe and the history of life. These differences run through most churches rather than between them.

Young-earth creation reads the days as ordinary days and the world as some thousands of years old. Its holders point to the numbered days and the refrain "And there was evening, and there was morning", and to the fourth commandment, which grounds the Sabbath in the fact that "in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth and the sea and all that is in them" (Exodus 20:11). Basil, Luther and Calvin read them so, as do many evangelicals today.

Old-earth creation, often in the form of the day-age view, reads the days as long ages. The Hebrew yom can mean a period as well as a day; Genesis 2:4 speaks of the whole work of creation as "the day that the LORD God made them" (Genesis 2:4); and the seventh day has no closing evening and morning. God, on this view, worked in stages over a long history, and many believe he made humankind by a special act.

The framework view reads the week as a literary frame rather than a timetable. Days one to three form realms (light; sky and sea; dry land), and days four to six fill them (sun, moon and stars; birds and fish; animals and humankind). The pattern shows that Genesis teaches who made the world and why, not how long it took. Augustine already held that God made all things at once, the days giving an order rather than a timetable; Reformed scholars developed the view in the twentieth century.

Evolutionary creation holds that God brought forth life through a long evolutionary process, working through the natural order, as when he bids the earth "bring forth living creatures" (Genesis 1:24). Since Pope Pius XII's encyclical of 1950 the Catholic Church has allowed inquiry into the evolutionary origin of the human body, while teaching that each human soul is created directly by God Pius XII, Humani Generis; many Protestants, including some evangelicals, hold it too. Questions about Adam are taken up in the lesson on the fall.

The four views differ, but all confess that God is the Creator of all things, that the world is good, that human beings bear his image, and that Genesis is God's word. Augustine warned that when Christians talk nonsense about the natural world while claiming the authority of Scripture, unbelievers laugh, and Scripture itself is brought into contempt Augustine, Literal Meaning of Genesis 1.19. He also taught that what is truly demonstrated about nature should be shown not to contradict Scripture, and that whatever contradicts Scripture should be held false. For more, see Is Genesis history? and Do science and faith conflict?

To believe in creation is to receive the world as a gift: to thank God for morning light and daily bread, to care for what he called good, and to rest before the one who made it all.

Practice