Maker/Creator of heaven and earth

The creeds are often part of congregational worship (See here for a discussion of the creeds). One of the Sunday services we watch on-line recently included recitation of a creed. My wife and I were glad to say the words together, although not together in time and space, with the congregation.

One part struck me: "I believe in God the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth ..." (Some churches say "maker of heaven and earth.")

Was the Father maker of heaven and earth?

The Old Testament does not say much about the Trinity. Judaism was a monotheistic religion. One God. That God, of course, was Creator and Maker. So over half of the Bible does indicate that God the Father was creator. The New Testament doesn't present a clear picture of the Trinity, and perhaps a picture of the Trinity can't be clear enough for our limited minds to grasp. But Christ and the Holy Spirit are certainly persons of importance in the New Testament.

There are passages in the New Testament that indicate that God the Son was the main creative agent in making and creating heaven and earth:

John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 The same was in the beginning with God. 3 All things were made through him. Without him, nothing was made that has been made. (Scripture quotations from the World English Bible, public domain.)

The Word was the Son.

Colossians 1:15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. 16 For by him all things were created in the heavens and on the earth, visible things and invisible things, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things have been created through him and for him. 17 He is before all things, and in him all things are held together.

Again, the context makes clear that "He" is God the Son, Christ. And Christ was not only Creator, but is Sustainer of creation.

and Hebrews 1:1 God, having in the past spoken to the fathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, 2 has at the end of these days spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom also he made the worlds. 3 His Son is the radiance of his glory, the very image of his substance, and upholding all things by the word of his power, who, when he had by himself purified us of our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high,

Again, God the Son is creator and is sustainer.

I'm not suggesting that the Creeds be re-written. They won't be. But, like other parts of the Creeds, there's more that Christians should know and act upon than can be expressed in a sentence or phrase. God the Son, Christ our Savior, was deeply involved in creating, and is now deeply involved in sustaining that creation.

Thank you for reading.

Does the Bible really say that? Excerpt from my book, 1

What the Bible says.

This book discusses some popular, but wrong, beliefs among Christians who take the Bible seriously, and some areas where there is disagreement among Christians. My goal is to examine what the Bible does say about these matters. It is more important to examine and know what the Bible really says, than to point out things that it doesn’t say, or that many Christians misunderstand. What does the Bible really say? Much of it has been summarized in the historic creeds of the church.

The most important content of the Bible is that Christ’s perfect life, as God in the flesh, and His death and resurrection, have paid the price for human sin:

1 Corinthians 15:1 Now I declare to you, brothers, the Good News which I preached to you, which also you received, in which you also stand, 2 by which also you are saved, if you hold firmly the word which I preached to you—unless you believed in vain. 3 For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures . . .*

That truth is tremendous. But we shouldn’t stop there, but try to learn as much of what God has told us as we can. We should study the Bible, and read and listen to what godly people have said about it.

Much of this book is quotations from the Bible. Why? Because what the Bible says is much more important than anything you, or I, can write about what it says.

*(Unless otherwise specified, all scripture quotations in the book are from the World English Bible, which is in the public domain.)

 

The above is an excerpt from my recently published e-book, Does the Bible Really Say That?, which may be obtained free of charge, or purchased from Amazon for $0.99, which is the lowest price Amazon lets an author set.

If you obtained the book previously, I discovered a dozen or so errors, but have corrected them, I hope. Sorry about that! Amazon has a Manage Your Kindle page for anyone who has a Kindle or Kindle App. I recommend that you go to that page, and turn on Automatic Book Update, which is supposed to send you, free, any updated versions of a Kindle book.

Thanks for reading!

What Christians Believe

What do Christians believe? That's a good question, and the answer, whatever it may be, will certainly not please everyone. However, let me have a stab at it.

C. S. Lewis wrote Mere Christianity, a twentieth-century attempt to explain what Christians believe. He attempted, I believe successfully, to consider the beliefs that are common among Christians.

The Wikipedia tells us that a creed is "a statement or confession of belief," and that such creeds are often part of a religious service.

Two of the most important creeds in the history of Christianity are The Apostles' Creed, and, later in history, The Nicene Creed, which was developed from the earlier one. Many Christian denominations use one or the other of these creeds in their services, and one or the other (or both) of them are often used as a distillation of the beliefs common to Christians.

Here is the 1975 Ecumenical version of the Nicene Creed:

We believe in one God,

the Father, the Almighty

maker of heaven and earth,

of all that is, seen and unseen.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,

the only Son of God,

eternally begotten of the Father,

God from God, Light from Light,

true God from true God,

begotten, not made,

of one Being with the Father.

Through him all things were made.

For us men and for our salvation

he came down from heaven:

by the power of the Holy Spirit

he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man.

For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;

he suffered death and was buried.

On the third day he rose again

in accordance with the Scriptures;

he ascended into heaven

and is seated at the right hand of the Father.

He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,

and his kingdom will have no end

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of Life,

who proceeds from the Father and the Son.

With the Father and the Son he is worshipped and glorified.

He has spoken through the Prophets.

We believe in one holy catholic* and apostolic Church.

We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.

We look for the resurrection of the dead,

and the life of the world to come. Amen.

*Protestants take this word as meaning "universal," in other words the church world-wide, all the people who worship Christ as savior and Lord.

These 30 or so lines do, indeed, cover what strikes me as essential Christian beliefs, and I would say that if a person does not believe these things, such a person should not be called a Christian.

There are some problems, however.

One of those problems has to do with the acceptance, or use, of one or the other of the two most important creeds by evangelical churches. There is little such use. Why? Not, I think, because evangelicals don't agree with the creeds. But evangelicals emphasize the Bible as the source of God's revelation, and these two creeds are not biblical. They were written after the last book of the Bible was written. It is also true that the creeds only speak of what Christians believe about God. They don't speak of how we know about God -- the means of revelation -- very much. True, the Nicene Creed does mention the scriptures, and could be taken as implying that its entirety comes from the Bible, but it doesn't say that.

It is also true that evangelicals largely have distanced themselves from formal rituals in worship, except, of course, that we have our own rituals. There is, I think, a fear that reciting the same thing, however good it may be, over and over, tends to turn it into a meaningless ritual. That danger is real. However, my personal view is that there is an even larger danger in not reminding ourselves of our core beliefs, perhaps not at every service, but often.

In evangelical services, the sermon is usually the high point. In other churches, the recitation of one of the two great creeds often is the high point.

Another problem with the Nicene Creed above is that it says nothing about Christian behavior. To state the obvious, it says nothing at all about sex, power, or money (and a lot of other things).

(Paragraph Added March 24, 2015) N. T. Wright, in his How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels, points out that the creeds leave out the entire history of Israel, and say nothing about the Kingdom that Christ established, while He was here in His human incarnation. He says that the main purpose of the creeds was to establish orthodoxy -- to settle controversial points, not to set forth a summary of Christian truth.

In subsequent posts, I hope to consider the issue raised in the previous paragraph. I also hope to consider the question of Christian tolerance, or intolerance -- must Christians believe that those from other faiths cannot be saved from eternal death? (The next post, on the matter of behavior, is here.)

I have also posted on "Evidence of God's Reality."

Thanks for reading.

Added January 10, 2018: In relation to the paragraph added in March, 2015, see this post, from the He Lives blog, which goes into detail on how various statements in the creeds were meant to combat heresies.