Creation

Hello and welcome to the first session of Bishop Joe's course on the Apostles' Creed. Press play above to watch and listen and/or you can read the script below...

Hello, I’m Bishop Joe and welcome to this four-part series, looking at the Apostles’ Creed – one of the great proclamations of the Christian faith, and an overview of the Biblical story of our creation and salvation.

We’re looking at the Creed in four videos – and we’re calling them, Creation, Christmas, Cross, and Comforter.

Today, Creation.

Here’s how the Creed begins. What’s called the First Article of the Creed.

I believe in God, the Father Almighty,

creator of heaven and earth.

The Creed begins this way because the Bible begins this way.

Genesis chapter 1, verse 1: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

God says, Let there be… light, or sea, or land, or plants, animals – and there they are, because he called them into being. And each time God saw that what he had made was good.

As we look around at the beautiful scene here at Ribble Valley, everything we see is here because God speaks it into being. God chooses to create it and to hold it, to sustain it. And with God we see that his creation is good.

Genesis tells us that God also says, Let there be humankind in our image, in our likeness… and here we are, too, because God calls us into being. And because we are made in God’s own image, when God made humanity, Genesis tells us that he saw that what he had made was very good.

With the psalmist, then, we can sing to God our creator

… you formed my inward parts;

you knitted me together in my mother's womb.

I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

Wonderful are your works;

my soul knows it well.

Or think of the Psalmist’s song about the night sky:

By the word of the Lord the heavens were made,

and by the breath of his mouth all their host.

Modern street lighting hides from us so much of the night sky, the sweep of the Milky Way, which was so familiar to our forebears. Though out here in the countryside, on a clear night, you can see many more stars. And modern astronomy is revealing to us much much more of the scale of God’s creation.

Sunlight takes around eight minutes to travel from the sun to the earth. Which means that the sun is eight light minutes from the earth. But the observable universe is 93 billion light years across – and who knows what lies beyond that? Unimaginable vastness.

Julian of Norwich was an English Christian woman who lived a life of intense prayer in the 14th century. In her prayers, she pictured the whole universe as being from God’s perspective so small and fragile that it is like a single hazelnut held in his hand. So, she tells us, God creates the universe, he loves it into being, and he keeps it in being from moment to moment.  

The delicate beauty of the flower, the rush of the river, the grandeur of the mountain, the gift of human life, the unimaginable vastness of the universe – all created by God, all held by him, so that if he let it go it would disappear and be no more. But God’s creation does not disappear - because God holds it up and cradles it in his hand.

But there is, crucially, more for us to say. For every Christian reflection on creation needs to open the Scriptures again at the beginning of St John’s Gospel. Like Genesis, John begins with these words: In the beginning. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it”.  

So far, John is echoing Genesis, isn’t he? God spoke the universe into creation. It is created simply on the basis of God’s Word, God’s wisdom. It is held in being by his Word. But then John writes something new:

“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

What John is telling us now is that the Word by which God creates all things – that Word was made flesh in Jesus Christ, and made his home among us.

As St Paul writes in his Letter to the Colossians:

“… in him [In Jesus, that is] 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. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”

Or, as the Nicene Creed simply puts it, ‘through him all things were made’.

In Jesus, in other words, we meet the one who stands before creation, who is prior to creation. The person who walked the streets of the Holy Land 2,000 years ago is the one through whom all creation has its existence and order and shape.

As St John says, “He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him.”

To speak about creation is to hold that there is an answer to the question, Why is there something rather than nothing? How come the universe exists? Now, of course, we could refuse to ask that question. We could insist that the universe just exists and there’s no more to say. The atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell famously took that approach.

But the Biblical authors insist that that question – How come the universe exists? – it does have an answer. The world is here because it is created and held in existence by God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth.