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October 10, 2004
We Believe in the One God, Creator of Heaven and Earth
We Believe in the One God, Creator of Heaven and Earth
Genesis 1: 1-5 / Revelation 4: 1-11
October 10th, 2004
I wonder what the folk who composed the Nicene Creed would have thought if they knew how a cell breaks down proteins that are damaged or have outlived their usefulness. Two Israelis and an American won the Nobel Prize in chemistry this past week because they discovered what God did when He said, “let there be cells,” and complicated organisms composed of cells and the world within each one came into existence. Whenever I pick up tidbits of insight about how nature works, I have a sense not only of looking back down the tunnel of time to a distant moment of creation, but of how God is still involved in the workings of this world.
Is it any wonder that Paul wrote, “ever since the creation of the world God’s invisible nature has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.” Since the beginning of time people looked at nature, at the wonders of conception and birth, of planting and harvest, of the cycle of the year, of the interacting parts of the body and found their minds drawn beyond what they could see. They not only looked up, but they looked around and felt God’s invisible presence. This presence radiated uncanny power holding things together. It bespoke Deity, a Being altogether other than humanity.
Paul could not see into the intricacies of a cell, but he could see enough. He saw what most of us who are not scientists can see, that the world is a very amazing organism. The world swirls with life. Within the world we now know are billions of tiny worlds teeming with life—indeed, of life within life. In an atom is a universe.
The world has wonders that defy the microscope to see, intricacies revealing an imagination that not only plans tiny intricacies, but sustains their role in the whole. When I catch word of bits and pieces of the intricacies of creation I ponder the interconnectedness of all this.
I think of the words of Scripture, speaking of the Son of God, “God has made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of his will . . . to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.” The mystery of God’s wisdom and insight holds things together, not as a kind of glue, but somehow personally in the One we call the Second Person of the Trinity. Folks, this is mystery. We’re out of our league here.
This holding things together has to do with more than the pieces of created matter. “Though the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the ruler yet” in the affairs of this world. The chaos you and I now see, of terrorism, of rampaging diseases destroying millions of people, of genocides, of injustices, of the out-of-control whirl of sex and violence that dominates in our country are like spasms that God permits a momentary fling. But as He holds together what seems to us the delicate balance of nature, He is holding together as well the delicate balance of humanity, that special part of creation made in His image.
I chose Revelation 4 for our New Testament reading this morning because here we see something of the grandeur of the One who holds all things together whom we so easily call the Lord Jesus. We think of the Incarnate Son who was born to Mary, a tiny baby, who lived as we do. John describes this same one in another way. He was given a rare glimpse into what to us seems the future, but in truth it is a description of the eternal governing center of the universe. This passage ends by exclaiming, “Thou didst create all things, and by thy will they existed and were created.” From the end, so to speak, he looks to the beginning, and all time flashes in between.
He saw a throne with Someone sitting on it he couldn’t find words to describe. He gives the names of precious stones that radiate light. This one was altogether Light. The light this one gives off is like an over-arching rainbow made of emerald. Round the throne are these twenty-four elders, which may refer to “lieutenants” of God, angels we would say, that superintend His work. From the throne there come flashes of lightning, voices and peals of thunder, and before the throne are seven torches of fire. In front of it is a sea of glass, like crystal. What’s going on? Something defying description is going on.
Here the Scriptures reach into the meager fund of human words to describe something beyond words. It seems to me that the opening lines of Genesis are in the same category.
They are full of wonder. It is not clear exactly how to translate the first verse. Is it as our translation has it, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” even though there is no word “the” before the word “beginning” in the Hebrew text? Or is it, “When God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was without form and void.” We get the sense in of staring into mystery. To read, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” supports the idea of creation out of nothing.” And I believe with wiser people than myself that God did create everything out of nothing. But the opening lines of Genesis don’t say this explicitly.
Then, on the first day God said, “Let there be light,” and there was evening and there was morning, one day. But there was yet no sun. That would come on the fourth day, after there were plants and trees. What was the light of the first day? It wasn’t the light you and I know. And to whom did God say, “Let there be light?”
I wondered if God’s speech here was a deep sound that brought order to the formless void. It was the kind of sound described in Revelation 4. The voice was like a trumpet blast, peals of thunder. What is described in Revelation 4 was already there in Genesis 1. And I wonder if the light that God said should come into being was the beginning of order overtaking the formless void. You and I can’t imagine this formless void because everything we have seen has form. Even mud we know is a mix of dirt and water.
Do you not sense as I do that we have been shown mystery here? We are beyond where words can go. Before God brought order to this something it was tohuvevohu, formless, shapeless, undefined. A brooding darkness with no contrasting light anywhere was on the surface of the abyss.
It is language that suggests the very opposite of the intricate world you and I know a tiny bit about. There was nothing intricate then. There was a formless something that words cannot describe. Words describe things that we can identify—clouds, water, dirt, rock, animals. But how do you describe what was before there were words, or anything identifiable with words?
Since the middle of the 19th century, when Charles Darwin published his book, The Origin of Species, the question of how God created the earth has generated much discussion among Christians. Charles Hodge of Princeton Seminary disagreed with Darwin on all counts. But his son, Archibald Alexander Hodge, and B.B. Warfield had no difficulty accommodating Darwin’s “facts” to the “facts” of Scripture. Most Christians in our country who thought about these things hovered between the opinions on this matter that their cherished teachers taught. All wanted to be faithful to scripture, and all recognized that they had to accommodate details unraveling in science that went far beyond the summary statements of the Bible.
A famous trial that took place in Dayton, Tennessee in 1925, has set the pace for much discussion about creation vs evolution ever since. A young physics teacher, John Scopes, assigned reading from a textbook, A Civic Biology that taught evolution. This violated a Tennessee law against teaching evolution. The trial that followed caught the public imagination thanks to the help of plays like “Inherit the Wind,” performed by some of America’s greatest actors, and two movies that first featured Spencer Tracy as Clarence Darrow, and then Kirk Douglas in the same role.
People who believe that God created everything precisely as Genesis 1 and 2 describe were caricatured as dim-wits, and all who thought that God may have unfolded the world as we now see it gradually were type-cast by their opponents as atheists.
Today thoughtful and devout Christians stand on both sides of this divide. They concur actually on more than one thing, that God is the Author of creation. Even those who hold to literally twenty-four hour days of creation believe that the signs of development within species are the result of valid science. And those who believe more generally in development are no less sure that God has moved it along.
I am not equipped to argue the intricacies of this debate. But I get the impression that behind the discussion is the concern that the idea of natural selection ultimately means denying God as the Creator. Some Christians eminent in biological science do not see it this way. Kenneth Miller of Brown University has written a thoughtful book arguing just the opposite.
My own experience has been that people I have prayed with and worshiped with, who have witnessed of their faith in Jesus Christ so that others came to believe in Him, believe that God has gradually unfolded the world as we now see it. And other people I have prayed with and worshipped with, and who have witnessed to their faith in Jesus Christ so that others have come to believe in Him believe in a young earth, and that God created things specifically as they are.
I think of the words in the Epistle to the Hebrews, written long before any of this discussion took place between thoughtful Christians, “By faith we understand that the world was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was made out of things which do not appear.”
To be faithful can often seem to be a matter of taking sides on issues that none of us knows about in detail. And thus we may dim the fact that all we can affirm for sure, and that by faith, is that “we believe in one God, the Father almighty, the creator of heaven and earth.” When we say “heaven” we know we mean far more than we can see through telescopes, of what is beyond the galaxies, of the place where God uniquely dwells. And when we say earth we know that we understand only fragments of its complexity. And God does not hold us accountable to be certain of things that are beyond us. All He holds us accountable for is to believe that He exists and that He faithfully rewards those who seek Him.
Back in 1909, the Dutch pastor, politician, and scholar, Abraham Kuyper delivered six lectures at Princeton University that explained the Reformed outlook on life as applied to several important categories. The fourth of these had to do with Calvinism and Science.
And the fourth point of this lecture stressed that there is no conflict between faith and science. “Every science in a certain degree starts from faith, and, on the contrary, faith, which does not lead to science, is mistaken faith or superstition, but real, genuine faith it is not.”
Kuyper argued that the real collision is between “normalists” and “abnormalists.” The normalists believe in untethered evolution, leading anywhere it goes, with moral views, and ideas about Deity that go along with it. Process theology is a development of what Kuyper called "normalism." God is developing as things develop. The present degradation in morals that is justified as “the community standard,” is all right because change is inevitable and where it goes we’re bound to accept because there is nothing else than what happens.
Abnormalists believe something has gone wrong, and that God has intervened. Sin entered the story of the world, but it did not and does not have the last word. Kuyper accepted the science of his day that argued that the world has developed since God began the process, but it is all still governed by God’s inscrutable decrees. God is still in control. God’s special acts of intervention are seen in the “miracle of regeneration” that can change the human heart, in the miracle of Scripture, by which He teaches us His will, by the miracle of the Incarnation, when God took on our flesh in the greatest interruption of the result of sin. The Son of God violated nature, as people thought, in coming alive after being brutally killed.
The resurrection really happened. And it was abnormal as we think of what is normal.
Trusting in God’s hand on every aspect of life, we dare to unloose every fetter and explore God’s creation for all we’re worth. The only bias we have is something inescapable, that it all didn't just happen at random. God created everything that we can explore. So that good, hard science is a great act of faith itself. You who explore the mysteries of life honor God as much as any of us who study the Scriptures. Because in each, God has shown us something of Himself.
As Calvin put it, the Scriptures give us in a nutshell what God wrote in creation. The big topic of the Bible and of all creation is God.
I told our son as I saw his mind developing with great questions in college that if we love God, we honor Him by exploring every avenue of creation. Because we believe God created all things, it is a great joy to discover what He made. It is an act of faith, in fact, that I believe God appreciates. Because, after all, we believe God is our Father, a personal God, and not a distant Creator. We believe in one God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth. Love Him with all of your mind, all of your heart, all of your soul, and all of your strength. And do not fear that in loving Him with all your mind that you can go wrong, if in all your ways you acknowledge Him.
Let us pray: O Lord God, creator of heaven and earth, we trust in you. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at October 10, 2004 09:30 AM