God who is “all over” or “everywhere” does not wish to fill all the space in our universe. In order to make room for creation, God withdraws or limits himself. Then, having limited himself, God creates something “over against himself.” Only after the creation of the heavens and the earth can it be said, “There is something which exists which is not God.”
I Believe in God the Father Almighty Maker of Heaven and Earth
There is an often told story about a young boy and a model boat.
First, the boy builds the boat. Not from a kit, from scratch. He selects just the right materials for the hull, the deck, the masts and the sails. Then, over a period of weeks and months, he builds the boat that his heart longs to build. When it is completed he runs down to a lake, sets the sails, and puts his boat into the water.
The boy steps back to admire what he has made. He enjoys a moment of justifiable pride, then a strong wind begins to blow. Before the boy can retrieve his boat, it is out of reach. The wind continues to blow, and the boat runs before the wind out into the open water. In hopes that the wind may change direction, the boy watches as long as he can, but it avails him nothing. Eventually the boat disappears from his sight.
The story of the boy and his boat is not over. Weeks later the boy travels to a city not far from his own. There, while walking down a street, he spies a boat in the window of a toy shop. It has a familiar outline. Drawing closer he recognizes the very boat that he built with his own hands. Rushing into the store he makes his claim.
The toy shop owner listens with apparent interest, but then he says, “I am sorry, son. You are not the first to lay claim to that boat. Unless you can furnish proof of your ownership, it will remain in my window.”
The boy has no proof; but he does have money, so, reaching deep into his pockets, he comes up with the price of the boat. As the owner of the shop places the boat into his hands, he hears the boy say:
“Now you are twice mine. First I made you. Then I lost you. Then I bought you back!”
There are three possible conclusions to this story. You may choose your own.
In the first, the love which the boy lavishes upon his creation, and the sincerity of his words and sacrifice mean nothing to the owner of the shop; and, with scarcely a thought to the boy or the boat, he rings up another sale.
In the second, the owner is touched by the boy’s confession, and wishes he knew a little more about the boy, thinking that, if he did, he might give him back his money.
In the third, upon hearing the boy’s exclamation, the owner of the shop suddenly knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that the boy is truly its maker, and he refunds the boys money.
In the Bible, God says to all humankind, including you and me, what the boy in the story said to his boat.
“First, I made you. Then I lost you. Then I bought you back!”
How do we respond to this Word of God? Hopefully, if we are among those who confess our faith by means of the Apostles Creed, then we are like the shop keeper in the third ending of the story. We believe in God the Maker precisely because have known him first as our Redeemer.
This is the order of confession in the Apostles Creed.
The Creed begins, “I believe in God the Father Almighty…” Since there can be no revelation of “God as the Father” without a simultaneous revelation of “God as the Son;” and, since we know that God the Son is the price which God the Father paid to redeem us from sin and death, it follows that our first confession of God is the confession of the God who “bought us back.”
The Apostles Creed may not be explicit on this point, but I hope you will agree with me that it is heavily implied. If you do agree with me, then it is easy to see that it is only after we have confessed God as Redeemer, that we confess God as”Maker of Heaven and Earth.”
This order of confession is important. Those who attempt to confess God first as Maker have a poor record of getting to really know God.
At best, God becomes “the Uncaused First Cause….” which scientists posit as the beginning of creation.
At worst, God becomes a perverted product of the human imagination.
This was Paul’s point in Romans 1. There we read that, though humankind possessed the knowledge of our maker because God himself had given it to us, we still:
… exchanged the glory of God for the image of mortal man, or birds, or animals or reptiles…and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator.
Usually, human error falls somewhere between these two extremes. People make God over into the kind of God they prefer.
They make God a benign old man who sits up in heaven and winks at sin.
Or, they make God a tribal diety who blesses them, and their family, their clan, their tribe, their nation.
There are four things I think must be said of this confession.
I
First, it means that God who is “all over” or “everywhere” does not wish to fill all the space in our universe. In order to make room for creation, God withdraws or limits himself. Then, having limited himself, God creates something “over against himself.” Only after the creation of the heavens and the earth can it be said, “There is something which exists which is not God.”
Let me make that point again. Since creation there has been a very basic division in the universe: God and everything else!
This is an important point. Today, thanks (or no thanks) to the New Age Movement, it is very popular to say that God is in everything, and therefore, everything that exist is a part of God.
This allows New Age philosophers to make two very dangerous assertions.
First, it allows them to advocate the divinity of all human beings. “God is in you,” they say, “and in you, and in you, and in you. God is in everyone.”
Now on the surface this sounds very spiritual, but in saying, “God is in everyone,” they also say that God is uniquely in no one.
Christians ask, “What about Jesus—is he the Son of God?”
“Of course,” they say, “Jesus was divine…but no more divine than you, or you, or you, or me….”
In this way New Age teachers make human beings the measure of all things, effectively putting human beings in the place of God. Sound familiar? It should, it is precisely what Paul described in Romans 1 when he said that, “they exchanged the glory of God for the image of (human beings)…” Idols are carved not just in wood or stone, but also in words and ideas.
Of course, the confusion of the creation with the Creator does not end with putting human beings in the place of God. As strange as it sounds, immediately after New Age teachers make human beings the measure of all things, they start to lower the place of human beings in the scheme of creation.
“If all things are a part of God,” some of them say, “[1] then the beasts of the field, and the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea are just as important in the scheme of things as human beings.”
This kind of thinking doesn’t just lift animals up to the level of human beings, it also serves to bring human beings down to the level of the animals.
UP? DOWN? Which is it to be? What then is the place of the human being in the world?
The late Reinhold Niebhur taught that we human beings live “in a half-way house” between God and the rest of creation. On the one hand, like the animals, we all share a physical body that is part and parcel of our finitude. On the other hand, we are made in the image of God, and we posses a limited freedom that allows us to live by choice rather than by instinct, and to respond to God’s offer of love.
Of course, we human beings cannot stand the tension of living in the “halfway house.” We try to escape it either by claiming a freedom that is not ours to claim, or by denying the responsibility of choice that is not ours to deny.
When we claim a divinity that is not our own, we are like Raskolnikov, the ax murderer in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment who kills the old pawn broker for her gold because he considers himself above her.
When we seek to deny our freedom and its attendant responsibility, to sink back into an animal world of unbridled instinct and passion without the virtue of responsibility, we are like the hero of On the Road who’s life goal was to bed 1,000 women for the sake of the pleasure alone.
New Age teaching allows human beings to leave the half-way house of humanity in which God has placed us by both doors at once.
But the Bible, and the Creed say that God is not a part of the world, and the world not a part of God. God is the “Maker of heaven and earth.” God withdraws himself to make room for creation. Then God creates. We are not “gods,” or even “a part of God,” but we can be the children of God. In John 1, the scripture is speaking of the Eternal Son incarnate in Jesus when it says: “To all who received him, who believed on his name, he gave the power to become the children of God.”
II
There is a second point to be made.
The Apostle’s Creed declares that God is “the Maker of Heaven and the Earth.”
Heaven and earth do not stand just for two stories of a three storied universe, nor for the the cosmos, but for the heaven which is God’s throne and for the earth which is God’s footstool, and the world of human beings.
The Nicene Creed interprets this phrase for us when it adds, “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, and of all things Visible and Invisible.”
We see the earthly, the heavenly is invisible to us. But is that all that can be said?
A friend of mine suggested that we might also think in terms of all that the visible, physical world contains, and of all which the invisible, spiritual world contains. He was particularly concerned that we give a thought to the principalities and powers, the angels and archangels, and, of course, the demonic and the satanic inhabitants of the invisible, spiritual world.
He has a point, but Karl Barth had an even better suggestion. Barth suggested that, “visible” and “invisible” might be better understood as the “conceivable” and the “inconceivable.”
Yes! For there are things about this visible, physical world of which we can conceive, and things about this visible, physical world of which we are yet to gain knowledge, and of which we can scarcely imagine or conceive. There is the conceivable and the inconceivable.
If this is true of the visible world, how much more is it true of the invisible world which belongs only to God and to God’s person and to God’s majesty?
The confession of God the maker of heaven and earth, the visible and the invisible, the conceivable and the inconceivable is very important because our view of creation is constantly changing. When the Apostle’s Creed was written its authors still believed in a three storied universe: God was “up there,” hell was “down there,” and earth was “in between.”
The authors of the Creed thought that heaven was just a bowl no bigger than the earth it covered. That was the limit of their space. Their conception of time was no larger. They thought the earth was a little over 4,000 years old. Anything else was “inconceivable.”
Today, we know that the cosmos is ancient and space without bounds, and for us, anything else is “inconceivable.” Yet, we with our modern worldview, and they with their ancient worldview, worship the same God. This worship requires the same thing from each of us. It requires our confession of and consecration to a God without limits.
In the Apostle’s Creed we make the confession. What about the consecration?
H.C. Morrison, the founder of Asbury College said that, for the Christian, “consecration” always comes in two bundles, and both must be placed upon the altar of God. The two bundles are the “known” and “the unknown.”
“I believe in the God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, and of all things Visible and Invisible, Comprehensible and Incomprehensible!”
III
There is a third point to be made.
The fact that God is the “Maker” of Heaven and Earth, implies a divine pride in the divine craftsmanship. This is verified in Genesis 1:31: “And God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.” NEB
According to Greek thought, particularly Plato, matter is evil.
Some Christian mystics would have us to believe the same of the world that God has created.
Not so! Dietrich Bonhoffer was right when he warned that “to despise the creation is to despise God the Creator.”
One of my prize possessions is a rifle that started life in 1924. It was manufactured by Brno, the Czech National Arms Factory and initially saw life as a military rifle, indeed, might have been used by the Czechs in 1938/9 when they opposed the Nazi’s. Of course, it is just as likely that it was used by the Nazi’s when they took it from the Czechs. Like most material “things” a rifle is without a conscience. It can be turned first this way, then that.
At any rate, at some point in its existence, it came into the possession of an American, who kept it for years, then, perhaps because it was handy, used it as a tomato stake in his garden. It was being used as a tomato stake when it was spotted by a friend of mine. Today my friend is an exceedingly fine gunsmith. He helps to build fine double-barreled shotguns, literally carving them from a solid block of steel. They sell in excess of $10,000 dollars, and are more objects of art than instruments for hunting.
When my friend saw this rifle, he was just a student. Still, he bought it from the owner for three or four dollars “and a new tomato stake,” then he stripped it down to the action, added a new barrel, trigger, and sights. Then he polished it, and he blued it, and carved, checkered, and finished its stock. On the barrel he engraved, “K____ S_____, Maker!”
My friend will tell you that it is the worst rifle he even made, but still, each time he sees me, we end up talking about it. It is his creation and he has pride in it. He always wants to know if I am giving it the kind of care it deserves.
If my friend is so concerned with a rifle that can be held in two hands, how much more is God concerned with the world he has made?
Surely, God has pride in the creation, justifiable pride. There are times when the beauty of this world absolutely sends me to my knees in awe. This beauty is not confined to the beauty of the earth, or sky, or sea. It is there, in every detail. I remember a day that I stood on a North Carolina beach and considered a handful of sea shells. The thought occurred to me that even God’s throwaways are beautiful. Then I turned around to walk back to my car, and I was greeted by the flotsam and jetsam that we human beings leave everywhere we go.
What a contrast! In Genesis 1, God charges humankind to tend the earth. We have spent more time rending than tending! It must give God cause to shudder.
And what we have done to our bodies, and minds, and souls is equally horrific! We eat, drink, and smoke ourselves to death. We pollute our minds with the flotsam of television, and the jetsam of a constant stream of advertising. And our souls? We have lost them in the rush and bother, and business of life. We can scarcely hold ourselves together.
III
The fact that God is maker of heaven and earth implies ownership. God created from nothing. This means that God is free to do as he wills with all of creation.
We know from the scientific record that not everything that he created was meant to last forever. One can find dinosaur bones, but one will look in vain for dinosaurs. One can read about “passenger pigeon,” but the last of them are long gone. The dinosaur, the passenger pigeon, the dodo bird, and thousands of other species are gone forever.
Some of those species are gone because we human beings were careless of their existence. That is bad. One hesitates to think what we may have lost without knowing it. Some of them are gone because God willed it so. One cannot imagine a good reason for the survival of T-Rex!
Who would keep God from doing such a thing? Human beings alone posses the reason, self-awareness, imagination and freedom! Only the human being is conscious enough to object.
Notes:
1. New Age teachers and teaching is diverse. It follows a flow; and, perhaps, a pattern, but teachers differ among themselves.
2. Jer 18:1 The word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD: 2 “Arise, and go down to the potter’s house, and there I will let you hear my words.” :3 So I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was working at his wheel. 4 And the vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to do. 5 Then the word of the LORD came to me: 6 “O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter has done? says the LORD. Behold, like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel. 7 If at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, 8 and if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will repent of the evil that I intended to do to it. 9 And if at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will build and plant it, 10 and if it does evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will repent of the good which I had intended to do to it. 11 Now, therefore, say to the men of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem: ‘Thus says the LORD, Behold, I am shaping evil against you and devising a plan against you. Return, every one from his evil way, and amend your ways and your doings.’ ”
Finis
Worth Green, Th.M., D.Min.
EverydayCounselor©
New Philadelphia Moravian Church
4440 Country Club Road
Winston-Salem, N.C. 27104