Redeemer Catechism Series, Question 11
JORDAN QUINLEY
As we continue working our way through the Redeemer Catechism, we come to question 11. In our previous article we addressed the question of God’s decrees: what are they? How does He carry them out? In this article we look at one of God’s first decrees: His creation.
Q11: What is God’s work of creation?
A11: Creation is God’s work of making and ordering all things from nothing by his powerful word, and all very good.
Divine creation is a fundamental aspect of almost any religious system—and there is good reason for this belief. Nature declares to us the reality of a supernatural creator. In fact, we can hardly look around at the immensity, beauty, and apparent design in the natural world without being compelled to believe that a powerful and transcendent Being must be behind it all. Unlike many creation myths, however, the Bible describes a single, all-powerful Deity who imagined and then produced the whole cosmos and the whole spiritual realm from nothing. Therefore, He is the supreme authority over all lands, all people groups, and indeed, all that exists.
The Bible references God’s work of creation often, not only in the first two chapters of Genesis. Certainly, though, Genesis 1 and 2, as the opening scene of the whole canon of Scripture, set the stage, declaring that God is the maker, the owner, and the sovereign over all, and differentiating the God of the Hebrews from the capricious pantheon of the pagan nations.
Seventh-day Adventism lays a great deal of importance upon the idea of a literal six-day (144 hour) period of creation.
Seventh-day Adventism lays a great deal of importance upon the idea of a literal six-day (144 hour) period of creation. This belief is due to the foundational role it plays in their Sabbath doctrine, including the belief that Sabbath observance was instituted at creation and is a fixed moral law that transcends the Sinai covenant. This connection is seen in Adventist belief #6, which states that “in a recent six-day creation the Lord made ‘the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them’ and rested on the seventh day. Thus He established the Sabbath as a perpetual memorial of the work He performed and completed during six literal days that together with the Sabbath constituted the same unit of time that we call a week today.”
For Bible-believing Christians, however, there has always been much more room for different ideas about how rightly to interpret the opening passages of Genesis. There are surviving works from as early as the third century in which Christian scholars were expressing various ideas as to the meaning of the Days of Genesis 1. More famously, in the fourth century, Augustine wrote about them, “As for these ‘days,’ it is difficult, perhaps impossible to think—let alone explain in words—what they mean,” commenting elsewhere that the creation day of Genesis 1 “is different from the ordinary day with which we are familiar.” Sincere students of the Word have raised honest questions about the interpretation of Genesis 1 ever since. The layered literary qualities and historical and canonical contexts of the Genesis 1 and 2 accounts belie any notion that there is some “plain” or “obvious” meaning that modern readers should easily grasp and of which lack of acceptance is a clear rejection of scriptural authority. For this reason, varying interpretations among godly scholars should be met with charity and humble consideration.
The point emphasized in the Redeemer Catechism is that upon which all Christians must agree: namely, that God supernaturally spoke into existence all things out of nothing.
The point emphasized in the Redeemer Catechism is that upon which all Christians must agree: namely, that God supernaturally spoke into existence all things out of nothing. He spoke into the void, and the power of His words filled the nothingness with time, space, matter and energy. He created both the unseen, spiritual dimension inhabited by angels (perhaps indicated by the word “heavens” in Genesis 1:1, as Meredith Kline suggests) and the physical realm of all that composes the cosmos and which we can see and inhabit (perhaps indicated by the word “earth”).
“For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him” (Col 1:16). He did this creating by fiat, by His word—or rather, by His Word, as John 1:3 indicates that it was through the Word, the Lord Jesus who was in the beginning with God the Father, that “all things were made.” It is by this same powerful word that Christ is now “sustaining all things” (Heb 1:3).
Having filled the void with substance, God speaks into the chaos of Genesis 1:2 and, in verses 3 and following, brings order to the universe and to the earth, making and naming spaces and their inhabitants and assigning to created things their function in his grand scheme. It is by doing just what God intended it to do that creation is deemed “very good.”
The world is not the result of random chance or blind natural processes. It is the deliberate work of a master builder, and as such is embedded with purpose and value. We are to observe the world with a sense of wonder that leads to praise and indeed, to worship. One of the worst things that can be said of people is that, having experienced the profound testimony of the natural creation as to the divine nature and eternal power of the God who made it all, they then fail to glorify him as God and to give thanks (Rom. 1:21). Let us be among those who recognize the Creator behind the creation and, through Jesus, “continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise—the fruit of lips that openly profess his name” (Heb 13:15). †
- How Did God Create Humankind? - February 29, 2024
- What is God’s Work of Creation? - August 24, 2023
- What Are God’s Decrees and How Does He Carry Them Out? - June 22, 2023