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Thursday, October 4, 2012

God and Creation

1 Corinthians 8:6 yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom are all things and we exist for Him; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we exist through Him.

If we were to summarize all that there is to be known or can be known, it would be this: God and creation.  The three major headings under which all of God's activites fit are these: Creation, Redemption and Completion.  The Baptist Faith and Message 2000 states under its article entitled "God" - "There is one and only one living and true God. He is an intelligent, spiritual, and personal Being, the Creator, Redeemer, Preserver, and Ruler of the universe." Today I want us to consider the significance of the Biblical teaching of creation, and how it is the Bible unfolds it under the following three headings 

1. God Planned Creation
2. God made Creation
3. God Preserves Creation

God Planned Creation.
Before Genesis 1:1, what was God doing? As we have seen in other blogs, we know God is revealed in scripture as the Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  As the Trinity, redemption or salvation was planned before the creation of the world by them entering into what the Bible describes as "the counsel of God". (Ephesians 1:11)  With the Bible revealing that truth, we understand that creation and history were also pre-planned by God.  Jeremiah 33:20-21 states - “Thus says the LORD, ‘If you can break My covenant for the day and My covenant for the night, so that day and night will not be at their appointed time, 21 then My covenant may also be broken with David My servant so that he will not have a son to reign on his throne, and with the Levitical priests, My ministers."  Similarly Jeremiah writes a few verses later: “Thus says the LORD, ‘If My covenant for day and night stand not, and the fixed patterns of heaven and earth I have not established".Creation and all of history were planned by the Triune God. 

God made Creation.
We would run out of space in today's blog if we were to list every passage that speaks on this subject of creation.  Some sixty passages exist that speak on the subject of creation.  Genesis 1:1 and Job 38 are but a few of the major passages that tells us that God made all things.  As the Triune Creator, we see the Biblical testimony telling us about how the Triune God went about creating all things:

God the Father Sanctioned creation.  Genesis 1:1; Psalm 33:6.
That is He had creation on His mind and with the Son spoke everything into being.

God the Son structures creation.  John 1:1; Colossians 1:16-17
"By Him and through Him all things consist" is the language of scripture pertaining to the creative activity of the Son.  He with the Father brought into reality what had been on the Father's mind.  Without the Son, nothing would be made that had been made. (John 1:3).

God the Holy Spirit sustains creation.  After the creation week, the creative activity of God ceased. (Genesis 2:1-3).  From thereon God interjected the Laws that He uses to regulate and maintain the created order.  Through the four fundamental forces of gravity; the strong force (holding together the nuclei of atoms); the weak force (what brings about radioactive decay) and electromagnetism (spectrum that includes radio waves, visible light and other forms of radiation, as well as what binds together elements into molecules) the Spirit of God sustains and gives life to all things. (Psalm 104).   

God Preserves Creation
It is the Holy Spirit who is sustaining and directing all of history and the universe to its intended end as the Son holds together the structure of all things with the Father's continuing sanction.  Romans 8:19-21 tells us - "19For the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God. 20For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope 21that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God."

This is but a quick thumbnail sketch of the Biblical doctrine of God and creation.  As we can see in many of these passages, creation functions as both an environment and illustration of God's purposes for redemption.  Furthermore, the Trinity's involvement with the created order is set to bring to completion the Father's will at Christ's return as revealed by the Spirit in the scriptures.  May our thoughts be made more Christ-centered as we think on God and creation.