« We Believe in the One God, Creator of Heaven and Earth | Main | We Believe In One Lord, Jesus Christ »
October 17, 2004
We Believe in one God the Creator of All Things, Seen and Unseen
We Believe in one God the Creator of All Things, Seen and Unseen
Genesis 7: 11-17 / Acts 17: 22-28
October 17th, 2004
There is a passage of Scripture we often remember at funerals. The Apostle Paul wrote, “We look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.” This is a comfort at death.
But we seldom think of unseen things as actual things God created. The Nicene Creed says, “We believe in one God, the Father almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible.” My unchallenged assumption when I thought of God as the creator of things seen and unseen was that He created things big enough to see and things too small to see. He created large dinosaurs and tiny atoms. The Creed was saying, as the lovely hymns puts it, “All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small, all things wise and wonderful, the Lord God made them all.” But it was material things, none the less.
But the Creed describes God as the Creator of things not just large and small but visible and invisible.
But when the 318 early Church leaders got together in AD 325 to think about God, other things than size were on their mind in describing God this way. They faced the challenge of influential people who had a low view of the material world. They believed that spirit was good and matter was evil. They believed the God of the Old Testament, the one who created the earth, was not the good God. The good God was the Father of the Lord Jesus. He was the God who would rescue them from the evil world of matter, and deliver them to the good spiritual realm.
In answer to these anti-materialists, the Nicene Creed affirmed that the one God, the only God there is, created everything, both the material world that we can see and the spiritual world that we can’t see. It was a way of affirming that the material world as well as the unseen spiritual world was good. After finishing creating the heavens and the earth, Genesis tells us that God saw that it was very good.
Nowadays there are not too many people who think of material things as evil. In fact, we find an opposite challenge. Nowadays material things are the whole picture. We hear the joke, “The one who ends up with the most toys wins.” It’s a self-conscious taunt at ourselves, at the materialism that holds nearly everyone in its grasp. What’s really important? It’s how much you’ve got. It’s material security. We worry about Social Security being around still by AD 2030. Who worries about the future of unseen things like goodness and love?
In Fosdick’s hymn that for some reason is very popular we sing, “Shame our wanton selfish gladness, rich in things and poor in soul. Grant us wisdom, grant us courage lest we miss thy kingdom’s goal.” Rich in things and poor in soul. We believe in the material things God has made. Our problem is in taking seriously the spiritual realm.
What we think of as the spiritual realm we may think of as the domain of competing religions. I had two good-looking young Mormon fellows come by our house last week. They looked at me with what seemed an element of pity when I told them I was Presbyterian. I didn’t tell them I am pastor of the white church up on the hill over yonder. They were confident they had a better take than Presbyterians do on the unseen things.
Islam is the fastest growing religion of all. You and I may think of the radicals, the terrorists like Osama ben Laden when we think of Islam, but a fast-growing multitude of people have a finer view of Islam and are converting from Christianity and other religions to it.
On the Purdue campus I’ve seen two Hare Krishna folk handing out literature by Stanley Coulter Hall. These are Hindu evangelists. The spiritual realm, the unseen arena has a lot of competitors. In fact, there are so many of them that religion nowadays can seem an entirely made up kind of thing, a cultural thing.
It wasn’t quite this way in Paul’s day. Then religions mostly didn’t compete for converts. The Jews tried to make converts because they believe in one God, the Creator of all people. Jesus told His followers to proclaim the good news everywhere that this God loved them. But back then most religions were territorial. To convert someone to your religion was like a Boilermaker driving down to Bloomington trying to make converts of Indiana Hoosiers.
The Apostle Paul referred to the unseen realm when he wrote of Jesus, “He is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation; for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities—all things were created through him and for him.”
Elsewhere he referred to the “principalities and powers,” as having gone disastrously wrong. “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.”
Something went disastrously wrong in the unseen realm. The prophet Isaiah wrote of the King of Babylon words that earlier Christians believed described the fall of part of the invisible part of God’s creation. “How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, son of Dawn! How you are cut down to the ground, you who laid the nations low! You said in your heart, ‘I will ascend to heaven; above the stars of God I will set my throne on high; I will sit on the mount of assembly in the far north; I will ascend above the heights of the clouds, I will make myself like the Most High.”
What is this realm of principalities and powers, of the world rulers of this present darkness? Who was this Day Star, son of Dawn? The old King James Version translated the Hebrew word helel in Isaiah 14: 12, “Lucifer,” which it got from the old Latin Vulgate translation. Lucifer comes from the word “light,” lux.
Isaiah described the fall of the highest angel that God created. And when he fell, he brought into God’s creation a wickedness that was almost as strong as the goodness God created. Pride made Lucifer fall. He preferred to reign in hell rather than to serve in heaven, as Milton put it. “To wage by force or guile eternal war, Irreconcilable to our grand Foe, Who now triumphs, and in the excess of joy sole reigning holds the tyranny of heaven.”
And so we have cruelty, and the abuse of women and children, and genocide, and war, and every evil. But we soon lose sight of the fact that every evil is the twisting of something good. God created the unseen hosts, the realm of angels, as ministering spirits. They were entirely good. But they fell through pride, and thus turned what was good on its head, and evil entered our world. Many of us moderns are too sophisticated to believe this kind of thing. As C.S. Lewis noted in The Screwtape Letters, the enemy has won a great battle with us when we do not even think he exists. He can wreck his havoc unseen, unrecognized. Who can doubt that something has gone terribly wrong in our world?
But I believe that when we say we believe in God, the Creator of all things unseen, there is yet a region of this part of His creation that is unsullied. The Gospel of John begins, “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word was God.” The word for “word,” logos, really needs several words to get at what it means. Logos doesn’t just mean “word,” as we commonly use this term. God, as it were, brimmed with thought, energy, and power. The creation of everything was God’s deliberate unleashing of His logos, energy, and power.
People were made in the image of God. And we reflect this creative impulse of God. Everything we “create” begins with an idea, with something reflecting the logos. Leonardo da Vinci thought about flying machines and boats that could travel beneath the water. He imagined what later technicians achieved as the Wright brothers got flying machines off the ground. He imagined the submarines that have become so much a part of oceanographic research and one of the most frightening instruments of modern warfare. Ideas precede the development of industry. Ideas in the minds of artists find form in great statues, paintings, and music. We know a little bit about how “idea” comes before creation.
But we have thought of this primarily in terms of the material effects produced by ideas. But isn’t it so that it is ideas that are the behind-the-scenes movers and shakers in our world? When you are gripped by an idea, your life finds a focus, and you can do wonderful things. Without ideas, material things lie unused. Without ideas, great purposes are left unachieved. Iron ore rests peacefully in the rocks until someone gets the idea of smelting iron ore. Steam blows happily through a hole in a teakettle until someone gets the idea of harnessing that steam as a source of energy. But it’s not only in manufacturing things that the ideas work.
Think of how your spirits rise when you are encouraged, and then how different is the texture of your life. Hope is a powerful unseen part of creation. God created hope. God is the God of all hope, Paul writes. People who are discouraged may live wasted lives, all their gifts and talents unused. But when a discouraged person hears a word that lifts her spirits, how different her life becomes! God created encouragement. It’s part of the logos, the Word that was in the beginning with God. God created love. Love makes a mother care for her baby, sacrificing her sleep, sacrificing energy that might be put into moneymaking work. What a creative force love is!
When Paul wrote of the “fruit of the Spirit,” –love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, and self control, he referred to unseen things God created. Perhaps you have not thought of the fruit of the spirit in this way. But God created these unseen things that we think of as “qualities.” There would be no love if God did not overflow love from His logos.
And so there is this unseen realm very different from the “principalities and powers, the spirituals hosts of wickedness” that wage war against the soul. And this unseen realm moves in the world with a resistless force. Because in every war, heroic acts of goodness spring up all over as well as desperate acts of wickedness. The ones who abused Iraqi prisoners make the headlines first. But we also learn of soldiers who befriend, and help, and even sacrifice their lives for the sake of Iraqi people. These stories come out much later. What is the source of this good? Who is the source of this good? It is God, the Creator of all things, the seen and the unseen.
The reason why Jesus left us the example of submitting His will to the will of the Father, was so that we could let the God who created us direct the workings of that inner part of us that move us to every action. When we intentionally submit our wills to the will of God, God shapes the ideas that make us act. We become, then, part of God’s on-going creative energy, rendering good out of evil, light out of darkness.
When the will of God directs medical research, unborn children are never at risk. When the will of God directs our community development, the poor never suffer. When God’s ideas shape our ideas, we move on the “formless void” and become agents of God’s bringing joy out of sorrow, healing out of suffering, blessing out of cursing. All of this is part of God’s unseen work of creation.
We believe in one God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen. “We look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.” In what things do you and I place most value? For what do we strive? If we believe the unseen things are eternal, and the things we can see are passing, how should we then live? Think on these things, and let them guide us to live with eyes set on what is enduring, rather than on what will pass away.
O Lord God, creator of all things, things we can see and things we cannot see, of things that pass away and of things that endure, help us to fix our minds on things that endure, and so to live. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at October 17, 2004 09:30 AM