Creation

Made by the word of God

The Bible's first sentence answers the question of where everything came from:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

Genesis 1:1

The verb bara (בָּרָא), ‘created’, takes only God as its subject in its basic stem: people make and shape things, but only God creates. He did not work up a material that was already there, like a craftsman; he called into being what was not (creation out of nothing). "By the word of the LORD the heavens were made" (Psalm 33:6): he spoke, and it was so. Nor did he create out of need. The elders around the throne sing, "You created all things; by Your will they exist and were created" (Revelation 4:11).

Creation is the work of the Trinity. Of the eternal Word, John says, "Through Him all things were made" (John 1:3), and in the first scene of Genesis "the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters" (Genesis 1:2). God made human beings in his own image (the image of God), and when he had finished he "looked upon all that He had made, and indeed, it was very good" (Genesis 1:31). So Christians do not despise the body or the material world; they receive it with thanks. Yet the world is not God, nor a part of God that has flowed out from him. It depends on him at every moment, and he goes on upholding and governing what he made: this is providence.

The church's confession

The church put the Creator at the head of its creed:

We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.

The Nicene Creed

In the second century Irenaeus answered the Gnostic teachers, who said the material world was the work of a lesser god or of angels. He taught that the one God made all things freely, needing no one's help, with his Word and Wisdom ever beside him Irenaeus, Against Heresies. Augustine drew the line between Creator and creature sharply: "For every substance which is not God is a creature; and what is not a creature is God" Augustine. And creation has a purpose: "For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever!" (Romans 11:36).

Reading the days of Genesis

Christians confess all of this together. They differ, however, over how to read the six days of Genesis 1 and how to relate them to the great age of the universe that the sciences describe, and the differences run through most denominations. Young-earth creationists read the days as ordinary days and the world's history as some thousands of years. The day-age view reads each day as a long era. The framework view takes the six days as a literary pattern that teaches who made what and why, not a timetable. Evolutionary creationists hold that God also created life through a long process of evolution. The Catholic Church teaches that God creates each human soul directly, and has allowed inquiry into evolution as an account of the origin of the human body Pius XII, Humani Generis.

All these views confess that God is the maker of all things, that the world is good, that human beings bear God's image, and that Genesis is the word of God. The reasons for each are set out in the lesson Creation, and the question is taken further in Is Genesis history?