We Need a Theology of Creation

Every single question I have about the world, about myself, about almost everything, is rooted in this beautiful book of beginnings. That is why I felt compelled to follow up The Characters of Christmas and The Characters of Easter with a new project on the people who were there when it all began.

But before we can understand the characters of creation, we must first bow before the Author of Creation. God is not just another actor in this drama, a figure we mold and massage into a deity of our liking. Instead, the Bible opens by describing the formation of the world as an act that begins with the One who had no beginning, who is always there. Jesus would later testify to the religious leaders that “before Abraham was, I am.” Theologians call this God’s “pre-existence.”

In the Beginning…

I’ve been reading Genesis 1 for four decades, and yet every time my eyes fall on those words, I can’t help but be met by awe and wonder. In the beginning . . . God. I love what British Old Testament scholar Derek Kidner writes: “It’s no accident that God is the subject of the first sentence of the Bible, for this word dominates the whole chapter and catches the eye at every point of the page.”[1] Physicist Arthur Compton once remarked that “in the beginning God” is a phrase that is “the most tremendous ever penned.”[2]

The Christian story gives us an intensely personal God.

Why are these four simple words at the beginning of our Bibles “the most tremendous ever penned”? The Bible is making the claim that the entire cosmos and everything in it had a purposeful and orderly origin—and that God was there. In other words, there was no violent clash of equal deities vying for supremacy. There was no random eruption of atoms that resulted in the order and design of the universe. The Bible asserts that a loving Father formed the universe and carefully crafted the human beings who bear His image.

“I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come” (Isa. 46:10 NIV); “I am the first and I am the last,” God whispers to the prophet Isaiah (Isa. 44:6). John reminds us that God was “in the beginning” (John 1). The psalmist declares, “Before the mountains were born, before you gave birth to the earth and the world, from eternity to eternity, you are God” (Ps. 90:2).

From eternity to eternity, you are God. For finite creatures, this is hard to wrap our minds around. Everything in our lives had a beginning and has a fixed endpoint, but God is eternal and transcendent. He is outside of time. Theologian John Frame writes that “it is significant that the world has a beginning, and that God exists before that beginning . . . the Creator precedes the creation.”[3]

God Is Incomprehensible

We cannot possibly comprehend the fullness of who God is. Throughout the ages our most brilliant minds have merely scratched the surface. And yet as we begin a book about the characters of creation it is important for us to pause and dwell on God for a moment. We must understand that God is no mere character, but He is the story, the author, the beginning of creation. He’s not one in a pantheon of feuding gods as the first readers of Moses’s words in Genesis may have imagined. He’s not “one with the universe” as many religions today might muse. He is not a figment of our imagination, a kind of shape-shifting deity who conforms around our preferences.

God stands outside of His creation; He is other than His creation; He is above His creation.

This short phrase also tells us how God created. In the beginning, God created implies that God began His creative acts with . . . nothing.

Stay with me here for a moment. In one sense, the act of creating is something shared by both creator and creation, especially humans (more on that in a future chapter). Right now, I’m creating this chapter. I’m making something new that didn’t exist before. You create in your daily life, whether building furniture or launching new projects or filling out spreadsheets or baking a cake.

There is a vast difference, though, between our creation and God’s. When we create, we start with raw materials. I start every book with knowledge gained by other books, with a MacBook and software, with a mind crafted by God in my mother’s womb. When a carpenter crafts furniture, he starts with raw or repurposed wood. When a baker makes a cake, she begins with sugar and flour and yeast and a thousand other ingredients.

God’s creative acts at the beginning of the world were different. Theologians have a term for this: creation ex nihilo, a Latin word that simply means “out of nothing, something.” In other words, God didn’t start with raw materials. God didn’t start with a lump of clay. God started with nothing.

The rest of the Scriptures illuminate this. “For he spoke, and it came into being; he commanded, and it came into existence,” we read in Psalm 33:9; while Psalm 90:2 declares, “Before the mountains were born, before you gave birth to the earth and the world, from eternity to eternity, you are God.” In response to Job’s questions, God answered him by reminding him of His creative acts:

Who fixed its dimensions? Certainly you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?
What supports its foundations?
Or who laid its cornerstone
while the morning stars sang together
and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

Who enclosed the sea behind doors
when it burst from the womb,
when I made the clouds its garment
and total darkness its blanket,
when I determined its boundaries
and put its bars and doors in place,
when I declared, “You may come this far, but no farther; your proud waves stop here”? (Job 38:5–11)

The New Testament also illuminates creation ex nihilo. John asserts that “all things were created through him, and apart from him not one thing was created that has been created” (John 1:3). Paul tells us that “everything was created by him, in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through him and for him” (Col. 1:16) and that “For from him and through him and to him are all things” (Rom. 11:36). God “calls things into existence that do not exist” (Rom. 4:17). The writer of Hebrews says, “by faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible” (Heb.11:3).

We cannot possibly comprehend the fullness of who God is.

Kidner describes God’s creation in this way: “Our commands, even at their most precise, are mere outlines: they rely on existing materials and agencies to embody them, and the craftsman himself works with what he finds, to produce what he only knows in part. The Creator, on the other hand, in willing an end willed every smallest means to it, his thought shaping itself exactly to the least cell and atom, and his creative word wholly meaningful.”[4] Another theologian, John Frame, writes: “Creation is an act of God alone, by which for his own glory, he brings into existence everything in the universe, things that had no existence prior to his creative word.”[5]

Even the original Hebrew word used for God’s creative acts, bara, gives these acts distinction from the way humans make things. This word is only ever used in Scripture in relation to God’s creation. This means God is, as one theologian says, the “creative and binding force of life.”[6]

The Personal God of Genesis

If this is true, if God is the “creative and binding force of life,” then the only right response is to lean in and learn more about our Maker. Too often our approach to Genesis, our approach to creation, bogs down in either shrugging dismissal of or intramural debates about the exact age of the earth or other tiresome debates. But I believe the first objective, when the Spirit inspired Moses to pen the words of Genesis, was to make a statement that there is a God who is always there, who breathed out creation with His words, who fashioned human beings with care and concern, who was at the beginning with an end in mind, who is Lord of history, Lord of creation. Creation matters because it helps correct ideas about God, about humanity, and about the cosmos. The words of this ancient text came to an ancient Near East shaped by mystical and supernatural ideas, a framework that involved jealous and capricious deities and to the people of God who had spent centuries embedded in an Egyptian culture filled with false notions of the supernatural. Having seen God demonstrate His superiority over the gods of Egypt, Moses now intended for His people to learn the truth about who God is and who they were created to be.

David Atkinson explains how Genesis contrasts with the origin stories told in ancient Mesopotamia:

Whereas the Enuma Elish talks about many gods, Genesis proclaims a majestic monotheism: there is one God. Whereas in the Babylonian stories the divine spirit and cosmic matter exist side by side from eternity, Genesis proclaims God’s majestic distinction from everything else which in sovereign power he creates, and which depends on him for existence. Whereas in the Near Eastern mythology the sun, moon, stars and sea monsters are seen as powerful gods, Genesis tells us that they are merely creatures. . . . Whereas in the Mesopotamian myths, light emanates from the gods, in the Genesis narrative, God creates light by the power of his word . . . Genesis 1 sings the praise of the majestic Creator of all. It speaks of his life-giving power. It also gives a profound significance to human life . . . One can imagine what a rock of stability this chapter would have provided for the people of God when faced with the lure of pagan myths around them.[7]

We are so many centuries removed from the time when Moses, inspired by the Holy Spirit, wrote about how the world began—and yet we are no less lured by our own pagan myths. The biblical story of creation is as relevant today as it was then and is a welcome antidote to the false ideas that pervade our world, ideas that afflict people with confusion and despair. The God of creation is not the God of materialism, that endless treadmill that sees this physical world and the acquiring of riches as the only end in life. The God of creation is not the God of pantheism and Eastern religions that diminishes human uniqueness and sees God and the universe as one united whole. If you’ve ever heard someone say, “The universe is telling me something,” you’ve arrived at a soft (and quite impersonal) pantheism. The God of creation is also not the God of dualism, which has God and the cosmos running on parallel tracks, nor is the God of creation the God of deism, a kind of absent deity who constructed a world over which he has no power.[8]

Genesis gives us something so unique for its time and so unique for our modern world: a God both transcendent and near, both powerful and personal. Genesis gives us a God who has chosen to speak. “God speaks. He is a talking God. The first thing he does is speak and by his powerful word calls the universe into existence,” says theologian D. A. Carson. Creation is a powerful way in which God communicates. The writer of Psalm 19 says, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the expanse proclaims the work of his hands.” It’s a powerful testimony, but it’s far from the only way God speaks. The writer of Hebrews says that God also speaks through His written Word and in the person of Jesus Christ:

Long ago God spoke to our ancestors by the prophets at different times and in different ways. In these last days, he has spoken to us by his Son. God has appointed him heir of all things and made the universe through him. The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact expression of his nature, sustaining all things by his powerful word. (Heb. 1:1–3)

The Christian story gives us an intensely personal God, the three-in-one triune Godhead, who not only created this world but intervenes in this world and sustains the world and is leading the world toward glory. The Father, Son, and Spirit were all active in creation. Genesis 1 tells us the Spirit hovered over the waters. And later passages in Scripture assert that Jesus Christ was the active agent in creation.

This is the meaning of John’s opening words in his gospel, when he points to Jesus of Nazareth, the God-man born of Mary, and says of Him that He was “with God in the beginning” and that “all things were created through him, and apart from him not one thing was created that has been created.” This is the meaning of Paul’s words, “For everything was created by him, in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through him and for him” (Col. 1:16).

[1] Derek Kidner, Genesis: An Introduction and Commentary (London:Tyndale,1967), 47.

[2] James Montgomery Boice, Genesis: An Expositional Commentary, Vol. 1: Genesis 1–11 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1998).

[3] John M. Frame, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Christian Belief (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing, 2013), 363.

[4] Kidner, Genesis, 51.

[5] Frame, Systematic Theology, 185.

[6] Bruce K. Waltke, Genesis: A Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Academic, 2016), 69.

[7] David J. Atkinson, The Message of Genesis 1–11 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2017), 16.

[8] Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1994), 268–70.