Devotional 22: Of Creation: On a clear night, far from the lamps of any city, a man lifts his eyes to the sk

The Confession Read

It pleased God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, for the manifestation of the glory of his eternal power, wisdom, and goodness, in the beginning, to create, or make of nothing, the world, and all things therein whether visible or invisible, in the space of six days; and all very good.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 4, Section 1

Introduction

On a clear night, far from the lamps of any city, a man lifts his eyes to the sky and finds himself undone. The stars are not scattered like salt across a table. They are massed in rivers of light, veiled in clouds of dust that are themselves galaxies beyond counting, each one a furnace of ten billion suns. The man is not merely impressed. He is silenced. Something in the sheer scale of what he sees presses upon him a question he did not know he was carrying: why is there anything at all? Why not nothing? The Westminster Divines answer that question with a single sentence, a sentence so compact that a child can memorise it and so freighted with meaning that theologians have spent lifetimes plumbing its depths. We have arrived at Chapter 4 of the Confession, and with it we step from the eternal decree of God, which occupied us through Chapter 3, into the execution of that decree. Chapter 3 taught us that God, from all eternity, freely and unchangeably ordained whatsoever comes to pass. Chapter 4 now shows us the first great act by which that counsel began to be realised in time: the creation of the world. The decree is the blueprint; creation is the first stone laid. The decree is the purpose; creation is the first breath of its fulfilment. The doctrine of creation, rightly understood, does not merely satisfy intellectual curiosity about origins. It establishes the fundamental relationship between God and everything that is not God. It tells us who we are by telling us whose we are. The Divines open the chapter with a sentence in which every clause has been weighed on the scales of Scripture. Consider first what they do not say. They do not say, "In the beginning, God created." That would be true, but incomplete. They say, "It pleased God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost." Creation is a Trinitarian work, and the Divines name each Person deliberately. The Father willed it; the Son, through whom all things were made, was the agent of it; the Spirit, who hovered over the face of the deep, brought order and life from the formless void. Creation is not the work of a solitary monarch but the overflow of the eternal communion of love that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have enjoyed from all eternity. It "pleased" God to create. The act of creation was not forced upon God by some necessity of His nature, as though He would have been incomplete without a world to govern and creatures to love. The triune God possesses all life, glory, goodness, and blessedness in and of Himself, as we learned in Chapter 2. He did not create because He was lonely. He did not create because He needed something from what He made. He created because it pleased Him to do so — a sovereign, free, joyful act of the divine will. The world exists not because it had to but because God wanted it to, and that wanting is the most secure foundation any created thing could have. The purpose of creation, the Divines tell us, is "the manifestation of the glory of his eternal power, wisdom, and goodness." God did not create to acquire glory He lacked but to display glory He already possessed. The creation is a theatre — not in the sense that it is unreal, but in the sense that it is the stage on which the attributes of God are performed before an audience of angels and men. The eternal power of God, which could have remained forever hidden in the depths of the divine being, is set forth in the immensity of the cosmos, in the violence of the quasar and the stillness of the mountain. The wisdom of God, by which He orders all things to their proper ends, is displayed in the intricate fitness of every creature for its environment, in the mathematical elegance of physical law, in the delicate balance that sustains life upon this planet. The goodness of God, which moved Him to create at all and to create beings capable of enjoying His gifts, is reflected in the beauty that meets the eye at every scale of creation, from the curve of a nautilus shell to the sweep of a spiral galaxy. Creation is not silent about its Maker. Every atom shouts His praise.

Scripture Foundation

The Confession does not spin its doctrine of creation from philosophical first principles or the speculations of natural reason. It draws its language, clause by clause, from the fountain of Holy Scripture. We trace the biblical foundations before building upon them. The opening verse of the Bible is the charter of the doctrine of creation: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" (Genesis 1:1). Every word in this verse repays careful attention. "In the beginning" — the Hebrew bereshith — marks the commencement of time itself. Before this beginning, there was no "before" because time is a feature of the created order, not a container into which creation was placed. Augustine, reflecting on the question of what God was doing before He created the world, famously answered that He was preparing hell for those who ask such questions. But beneath the wit lies a serious theological point: there is no "before creation" in any temporal sense because time itself is a creature. God dwells in eternity, and His act of creation is the act by which time, along with space and matter, came into being. The verb "created" translates the Hebrew bara, a word used in the Old Testament exclusively of divine activity. Human beings can make (asah), form (yatsar), build (banah), but only God can bara. The word carries the sense of bringing into existence something radically new, something that did not exist before and that no rearrangement of pre-existing materials could produce. Theologians speak of creation ex nihilo, out of nothing. This is the unambiguous testimony of Scripture. God did not fashion the world from eternal matter, as the Greek philosophers taught. He spoke, and what He spoke came to be. The author of Hebrews captures this truth with precision: "Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear" (Hebrews 11:3). The visible order is not a rearrangement of the invisible. It is a creation out of nothing, summoned into being by the sheer power of the divine word. The comprehensive scope of creation, "the world, and all things therein whether visible or invisible," is attested throughout Scripture, with particular clarity in the apostle Paul's confession of Christ's supremacy. Writing to the Colossians, Paul declares: "For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him" (Colossians 1:16). The Greek words Paul uses are horata and aorata, the visible and the invisible. The visible creation encompasses everything accessible to the senses: the stars and planets, the mountains and seas, the flora and fauna of earth, the human body in its intricacy. The invisible creation encompasses the angelic orders — thrones, dominions, principalities, powers — beings of pure spirit who, though hidden from our sight, are as truly created as the dust beneath our feet. Nothing in all the vast hierarchy of being, from the highest seraph to the smallest particle of dust, exists by its own power or owes its origin to any source other than the creative will of God. The apostle John, in the prologue to his Gospel, identifies the Son as the divine Agent through whom creation was accomplished: "All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made" (John 1:3). The double negative in the Greek is emphatic. John could have written simply, "All things were made by him." He adds, "without him was not any thing made that was made," to close every conceivable loophole. There is no created reality, however small, however distant, however strange, that owes its existence to any power other than the Word who was in the beginning with God and who was God. The same Word who became flesh and dwelt among us is the Word by whom the galaxies were flung into space and the angels were called into being. Creation and redemption are not two unrelated works of two different gods, as the Gnostics of the second century taught and as the spiritualising tendencies of every age have been tempted to imagine. The same Lord who hung upon the cross is the Lord who spoke the light into existence, and the hands pierced by Roman nails are the hands that shaped the stars. The psalmist, caught up in wonder at the sheer majesty of what God has made, cries out: "By the word of the LORD were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth. For he spake, and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast" (Psalm 33:6, Psalm 33:9). The creation is not the product of divine labour, as though God had to exert effort to bring it into being. It is the product of divine speech. God speaks, and reality obeys. There is no resistance to overcome, no material to shape, no interval between command and fulfilment. The word of God is not merely descriptive; it is creative. When God says "Let there be light," light does not deliberate whether to appear. It appears, because the voice of the Creator carries within itself the power to bring into being whatever it commands. The temporal framework of creation, "in the space of six days," is drawn directly from the narrative of Genesis 1 and confirmed by the Decalogue itself. When God inscribed the Fourth Commandment upon tablets of stone, He grounded the Sabbath ordinance in the pattern of His own creative work: "For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day" (Exodus 20:11). The same God who spoke from Sinai with thunder and lightning, and whose finger engraved the law upon stone, chose to embed the six-day creation week into the moral foundation of His covenant with Israel. The creation days are not a poetic framework designed to accommodate any theory of origins that may gain currency in a given century. They are the pattern after which human labour and rest were modelled, and the God who cannot lie presents them as history, not as allegory. Finally, the divine assessment of the finished creation, "and all very good," echoes the repeated refrain of Genesis 1, which climaxes with the comprehensive verdict: "And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good" (Genesis 1:31). The Hebrew phrase is tov me'od, and the addition of me'od — exceedingly, abundantly — intensifies the goodness beyond the level of the individual days. Each day's work was good (tov). The whole, taken together, was very good. There was no flaw, no defect, no trace of decay or death, nothing that a perfectly holy God could look upon with anything other than unalloyed delight. The creation as it left the hand of God was a flawless reflection of His character, a work of art in which the Artist could take perfect pleasure. That this goodness has been marred by sin is the tragedy of the fall, which we shall consider in due course. But the original goodness of creation is the baseline against which the fall is measured, and it is the guarantee that redemption aims at restoration, not destruction. God does not discard His spoiled creation. He redeems it.

What the Divines Meant

The Westminster Divines composed this section in a theological context where the doctrine of creation was under assault from several directions. The precision of their language is not the pedantry of men who enjoyed splitting theological hairs. It is the vigilance of shepherds who knew that errors about origins inevitably produce errors about everything else. On one front stood the ancient heresy of Gnostic dualism, which had resurfaced in various forms throughout church history and was alive in the seventeenth century. The Gnostics taught that the material world was not created by the supreme God but by a lesser, ignorant, or even malevolent deity. Matter was inherently evil; spirit was inherently good. Salvation consisted in escaping the prison of the body and the corruption of the material order. Against this, the Divines affirmed that the one true God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, created all things — visible and invisible — and that all of it, matter no less than spirit, was very good. The body is not a tomb from which the soul must be liberated. It is a creation of God, originally good, and destined for resurrection. The material world is not an illusion or a mistake. It is the handiwork of God, and it pleases Him. On another front stood the rationalism of the Socinians, who subjected every doctrine to the bar of fallen human reason. The Socinians denied the Trinity on the grounds that it was logically incomprehensible, and they threatened, by extension, to reduce the doctrine of creation to what could be deduced from unaided philosophy. Against this, the Divines affirmed that the triune God — Father, Son, and Holy Ghost — created the world, not from any necessity accessible to reason, but according to His own good pleasure. Creation is an act of sovereign freedom, not a deduction from first principles. The God who creates is the God who has revealed Himself in Scripture as one God in three Persons. The Divines' insistence on naming each Person of the Trinity in the opening clause of the doctrine of creation is a deliberate confessional act: the God of creation is the God of the gospel, and the God of the gospel is triune. On yet another front stood the ancient error, inherited from Greek philosophy, that matter is eternal. Plato's Timaeus taught that the world was formed by a divine craftsman who imposed order upon pre-existing chaos. The raw material was always there; the deity merely shaped it. Aristotle went further, holding that the world itself was eternal, without beginning or end. This pagan notion had infiltrated Christian theology at various points, and the Divines were determined to exclude it absolutely. They wrote "create, or make of nothing" — the "or make of nothing" being a deliberate gloss on "create" to ensure that the doctrine of creation ex nihilo could not be evaded. God did not find a heap of raw material and fashion it into a world. He brought the raw material itself into existence. Before creation, there was nothing except God. After creation, there was something, and that something owed its entire existence, in every aspect and at every moment, to the sustaining power of the Creator. The affirmation of a six-day creation was directed against those who, even in the seventeenth century, sought to allegorise the creation account into a poetic myth. The Divines were not naive men. They were among the most learned scholars of their age, well versed in the natural philosophy of their day. They knew that some of the Church Fathers had interpreted the days figuratively. They chose, nevertheless, to confess "in the space of six days" — language that leaves no room for a non-literal construal. They did so because they believed that when God, in the Fourth Commandment, grounded the weekly pattern of labour and rest in the pattern of His own creative work, He was treating the creation week as history, not as metaphor. One cannot rest on the seventh day in commemoration of a divine act that never happened in time. The Sabbath rest of the creature is an imitation of the Creator's rest, and the Creator's rest presupposes the Creator's actual, temporal, completed work. The purpose clause, "for the manifestation of the glory," is the theological centre of the section. Everything else orbits around it. Creation exists not for its own sake but for God's. This is the great divide between a Christian doctrine of creation and every secular alternative. The secular account, whether ancient or modern, treats the world as a brute fact, a given that requires no further explanation, or as the product of impersonal forces indifferent to questions of meaning and purpose. The Christian account insists that the world has a purpose, and that purpose is to display the glory of God. The eternal power of God is manifested in the sheer magnitude and energy of the cosmos. The wisdom of God is manifested in the order, complexity, and fitness of every part for its function. The goodness of God is manifested in the beauty, the abundance, the sheer generosity of a world made not merely to function but to delight. The creation is doxological. It exists for praise. Robert Shaw, in his Exposition of the Westminster Confession, draws the implication: "If the great end of creation was the manifestation of God's glory, then it follows that the chief end of man, as the principal creature in this lower world, must be to contemplate and celebrate that glory. God made the world that He might be glorified; He made man that man might be the priest of creation, gathering up the silent praise of all things and offering it back to the Creator in conscious, intelligent worship." The Shorter Catechism's first question — "What is the chief end of man?" — is not an arbitrary starting point. It flows directly from the doctrine of creation confessed in this section.

Theological Depth

John Calvin, in his treatment of creation in the Institutes, draws attention to a feature of the Genesis account that is easily overlooked. God created the world in six days, Calvin observes, not because He needed the time but because He intended to teach. "For God could have finished the whole work of creation in a single moment," Calvin writes. "Why, then, did He take six days? So that we might learn to contemplate His works with greater attention, and so that we might understand that the creation was ordered with a view to man's instruction." The six days are a pedagogue, leading us by the hand through the divine workshop so that we might pause and marvel at each successive gift: light on the first day, the firmament on the second, dry land and vegetation on the third, sun and moon on the fourth, fish and birds on the fifth, land animals and man on the sixth. God did not rush through creation. He unfolded it like a scroll, and He invites us to read it slowly. Turretin, in his Institutes of Elenctic Theology, addresses the philosophical challenges to creation ex nihilo with characteristic rigour. The axiom ex nihilo nihil fit was treated by ancient philosophy as self-evident. Turretin responds that the axiom is true of secondary causes only. A human artisan cannot create out of nothing; he must work with existing materials. But the axiom has no purchase on the First Cause. "The power of God," Turretin writes, "is not to be measured by the standard of created power. He who gave being to all things cannot Himself be bound by the limitations of the things He has made. To deny that God can create out of nothing is to deny that God is God." The doctrine of creation ex nihilo is not a philosophical speculation. It is a corollary of the doctrine of God. If God is the absolute, self-existent source of all being, then creation must be the product of His will alone, with no material presupposed and no limitation imposed from without. Herman Bavinck, whose Reformed Dogmatics remains a landmark treatment of the doctrine of creation, emphasises the goodness of the created order against every form of world-denying spirituality. "The creation," Bavinck writes, "is not a necessary evil, a prison from which the soul must escape, or a shadowy copy of a higher, spiritual realm. It is a revelation of God's perfections, a work of art that the divine Artist beholds with delight, a manifestation of the riches of His wisdom and goodness." Bavinck traces the tragic consequences that flow when the goodness of creation is denied. If matter is evil, then the incarnation becomes impossible — for how could the holy God unite Himself with something intrinsically corrupt? If the body is a prison, then the resurrection becomes pointless — for why would God restore what should be discarded? The whole structure of Christian doctrine, Bavinck argues, depends upon the premise that what God made was very good. Sin entered the world, not as the inevitable outworking of its material nature, but as the alien intrusion of a moral rebellion that God never willed and never authorised. Thomas Watson, in his Body of Divinity, draws out the practical consequences of Trinitarian creation with the warmth that characterises all his work. "See here," Watson writes, "the dignity of the creation. It is the work of the blessed Trinity. The Father created, the Son created, the Holy Ghost created. Shall we despise what all three Persons of the Godhead have made? Shall we use our bodies, which the Trinity fashioned, as instruments of sin? Shall we deface the image of God in the creation when the whole Trinity has set His signature upon it?" For Watson, the doctrine of creation is never merely theoretical. It is the ground of every duty the creature owes to the Creator. The body you inhabit was made by God. The world you live in was made by God. The neighbour you are tempted to despise was made by God. Every relationship, every responsibility, every moral claim upon your conscience traces back to the fact that you are a creature, and your Creator has rights over you that no other being can claim. A. A. Hodge, in his commentary on the Confession, identifies the link between the doctrine of creation and the doctrine of providence that follows in Chapter 5. "God did not create the world and then abandon it," Hodge writes. "He did not wind it up like a clock and leave it to run down on its own. The same power that called the world into being sustains it in being. The same wisdom that ordered its parts orders their continued relations. The same goodness that pronounced it very good governs it for the good of His creatures and the glory of His name." Creation and providence are not two doctrines but one doctrine viewed from two angles. Creation is God's bringing the world into existence. Providence is God's continuing to uphold and govern what He has made. The moment God ceased to sustain the creation, it would cease to exist, not with a bang but with an absence — as a reflection vanishes when the mirror is removed. "In Him we live, and move, and have our being," Paul told the Athenians (Acts 17:28), and the present tense of the Greek verbs indicates not a past event but a continuing dependence. Creation is not merely how things began. It is how things continue to be.

Puritan Application

First, stand in awe before the sheer gratuity of your existence. You did not have to be. Before God created the world, there was no world. Before God created you, there was no you. Your existence, and the existence of everything you have ever loved, everything you have ever feared, everything you have ever taken for granted, is not a necessity. It is a gift. The universe does not exist because it had to. The universe exists because God was pleased to create it, and His pleasure is the only reason anything stands between you and the abyss of non-being from which you were summoned. Let this truth humble the pride that struts through life as though the world owed you something. The world owes you nothing. You owe the world nothing. Everything — your next breath, your next heartbeat, the ground beneath your feet, the sky above your head — is grace upon grace, gift upon gift, from the hand of a God who needed nothing from you and yet chose to make you. Spend a moment today in silence before this truth. You are not self-made. You are God-made, and the breath in your lungs is on loan from the One who breathes out galaxies. Second, honour the body as the creation of God. The Gnostic temptation has never fully left the church. It creeps in whenever we speak of the soul as though it were the real person and the body as though it were an inconvenient housing that the real person must someday escape. It creeps in whenever we treat the physical world as a second-class reality, less spiritual and therefore less important than the invisible realm. The Confession will have none of this. The triune God created the visible world, and when He finished He pronounced it very good. Your body, with all its frailty and all its glory, was made by God and will be raised by God on the last day. Treat it, therefore, with the reverence due to a divine creation. Do not defile it with impurity. Do not despise it for its weaknesses. Do not neglect its care. And do not imagine that holiness consists in escaping from physical existence. Holiness consists in offering your body — your eyes, your hands, your tongue, your whole embodied self — as a living sacrifice to the God who made you. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us not to abolish the physical but to redeem it. Third, look at the creation and learn to see the Creator. Paul tells us that the invisible things of God — His eternal power and Godhead — are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made (Romans 1:20). But the clarity of the revelation does not guarantee that fallen human eyes will perceive it. Sin has a way of turning the creation into a curtain rather than a window. We see the mountains and think of geology. We see the stars and think of astronomy. We see the beauty of a flower and think of botany. All of these are legitimate and good in their proper place. But none of them should obscure the deeper truth: these things exist to display the glory of God, and the person who sees only the secondary cause without the First Cause has missed the point of what he is looking at. Train yourself to trace the effect back to its source. When you eat, taste the goodness of God in the flavours He designed. When you walk outdoors, see the power of God in the stability of the earth beneath your feet. When you gaze at the night sky, feel the wisdom of God in the mathematical precision of the orbits. Learn the art of seeing through the creation to the Creator, until every created thing becomes a sacrament of His presence and a summons to His praise. Fourth, rest in the temporal pattern God has embedded in creation itself. The six-days-and-a-Sabbath rhythm is not an arbitrary imposition upon human life. It is woven into the fabric of what it means to be a creature, and modern attempts to erase it have not made us freer. They have made us exhausted. God gave us six days for labour and one day for rest because He knows what we are made of, and He knows that a life without Sabbath is a life headed for burnout, idolatry, or both. The Fourth Commandment, as the Divines will unfold later in the Confession, has a moral substance that predates the ceremonial law of Israel. It goes back to creation itself. Before there was a nation of Israel, before there was a tabernacle or a temple, before there were sacrifices and priests, there was the pattern of six days of work and one day of rest, and God hallowed the seventh day because on it He rested from all His work. Honour the Lord's Day, not as a grudging duty but as a gift from the Creator who knows what His creatures need. Let it be a day when you stop proving your worth by your productivity and rest in the finished work of the God who made you and the Saviour who redeemed you. Fifth, let the doctrine of creation out of nothing shape your expectations of what God can do. If God could summon the entire cosmos into being by the word of His power, without tools or materials, then He can certainly handle the difficulties that loom so large in your life. He can create faith in an unbelieving heart. He can create hope in a despairing soul. He can create a way through a situation that, from every human angle, has no way through. "Is any thing too hard for the LORD?" the angel asked Sarah when she laughed at the promise of a son in her old age (Genesis 18:14). The answer, for anyone who believes in creation ex nihilo, is transparently, obviously no. The God who made the heavens and the earth does not run out of options. He does not encounter problems He cannot solve. He does not face situations that exceed His power or baffle His wisdom. The same voice that said "Let there be light" and dispelled the primeval darkness can speak into the darkness of your present trial and command the light of His deliverance to shine. Pray, therefore, with the confidence of those who know what their God can do. The God who creates out of nothing is the God who gives life to the dead and calls those things which be not as though they were (Romans 4:17).

Prayer

Almighty and everlasting God, who in the beginning didst create the heavens and the earth out of nothing by the word of Thy power, and who dost uphold all things by the same word: we bow before Thee as creatures before their Creator, as dust before the Potter, as those who have nothing that they have not received. Thou didst not need us, yet Thou hast made us. Thou didst not require our worship, yet Thou hast made us to worship Thee. We confess that we have too often lived as though we were the centre of the universe, as though the world existed for our pleasure and Thy glory were an afterthought. Forgive us, O Lord, for the smallness of our vision and the arrogance of our hearts. We praise Thee, Father Almighty, that creation is Thy work and not ours, that the world rests upon a foundation more secure than human effort or cosmic chance. We praise Thee, Lord Jesus Christ, eternal Word through whom all things were made, that the hands which shaped the stars were stretched out upon the cross for our redemption, and that the Creator became a creature to rescue His fallen creation. We praise Thee, O Holy Spirit, who didst brood over the waters of the deep and bring order from the void, that Thou dost still move upon the chaos of our hearts to bring the new creation to birth. Grant us, we beseech Thee, eyes to see Thy glory in all that Thou hast made. Let the mountains speak to us of Thy majesty and the flowers of Thy tenderness. Let the vastness of the heavens humble us and the intimacy of Thy providence comfort us. And when we are tempted to take Thy gifts for granted, remind us that every good thing we enjoy — the air we breathe, the food we eat, the love we share — is a gift from the hand that was pierced for us. Teach us to number our days, to rest upon Thy finished work, and to live as those who know that their times are in Thy hands. We ask all this in the name of Jesus Christ, our Creator and Redeemer. Amen.