ALMIGHTY
And God the Father is “almighty”—which means that he can and will do all that he intends. What does he intend for his sons? Answer: that they should share all that their elder Brother enjoys now. Believers are “heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him” (Romans 8:17). Suffer we shall, but we shall not miss the glory: the Father almighty will see to that. Praise his name.
FURTHER BIBLE STUDY
On our adoption in Christ:
Ephesians 1:3-14
Galatians 4:1-7
QUESTIONS FOR THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION
What does the statement “we are indeed his offspring” say about God’s fatherhood? What does it leave out?
How is God’s fatherhood seen within the Trinity?
Why can Jesus call Christians his “brothers”?
Whatever the Lord pleases,
he does, in heaven and on earth,
in the seas and all deeps.
PSALM 1 3 5: 6
CHAPTTER 4
Almighty
The Creed declares faith in “God the Father almighty .” Does the adjective matter? Yes, a great deal. It points to the basic Bible fact that God is the Lord, the King, the omnipotent one who reigns over his world. Note the ecstatic joy with which God’s sovereign rule is proclaimed and praised in (for instance) Psalms 93, 96, 97, 99:1-5, and 103. Men treat God’s sovereignty as a theme for controversy, but in Scripture it is matter for worship.
We need to realize that you cannot rightly understand God’s ways at any point until you see them in the light of his sovereignty. That, no doubt, is why the Creed takes the first opportunity of announcing it. But though the believing heart warms to it, it is not an easy truth for our minds to grasp, and a number of questions arise.
WHAT GOD CANNOT DO
First, does omnipotence mean that God can do literally anything? No, that is not the meaning. There are many things God cannot do. He cannot do what is self-contradictory or nonsensical, like squaring the circle. Nor (and this is vital) can he act out of character. God has a perfect moral character, and it is not in him to deny it. He cannot be capricious, unloving, random, unjust, or inconsistent. Just as he cannot pardon sin without atonement, because that would not be right, so he cannot fail to be “faithful and just” in forgiving sins that are confessed in faith and in keeping all the other promises he has made, for failure here would not be right either. Moral instability, vacillation, and unreliability are marks of weakness, not of strength: but God’s omnipotence is supreme strength, making it impossible that he should lapse into imperfections of this sort.
The positive way to say this is that though there are things that a holy, rational God is incapable of intending, all that he intends to do he actually does. “Whatever the Lord pleases, he does” (Psalm 135:6). As, when he planned to make the world, “he spoke, and it came to be” (Psalm 33:9; see Genesis 1), so it is with each other thing that he wills. With men, “there’s many a slip ’twixt cup and lip,” but not with him.
HUMAN FREE WILL
Second, is not God’s power to fulfill his purposes limited by the free will of man? No. Man’s power of spontaneous and responsible choice is a created thing, an aspect of the mystery of created human nature, and God’s power to fulfill his purposes is not limited by anything that he has made. Just as he works out his will through the functioning of the physical order, so he works out his will through the functioning of our psychological makeup. In no case is the integrity of the created thing affected, and it is always possible (apart from some miracles) to “explain” what has happened without reference to the rule of God. But in every case God orders the things that come to pass.
So, therefore, without violating the nature of created realities, or reducing man’s activity to robot level, God still “works all things according to the counsel of his will” (Ephesians 1:11).
But surely in that case what we think of as our free will is illusory and unreal? That depends on what you mean. It is certainly illusory to think that our wills are only free if they operate apart from God. But free will in the sense of “free agency,” as theologians have defined it—that is, the power of spontaneous, self-determining choice referred to above—is real. As a fact of creation, an aspect of our humanness, it exists, as all created things do, in God. How God sustains it and overrules it without overriding it is his secret; but that he does so is certain, both from our conscious experience of making decisions and acting “of our own free will,” and also from Scripture’s sobering insistence that we are answerable to God for our actions, just because in the moral sense they really are ours.
EVIL IS MASTERED
Third, does not the existence of evil—moral badness, useless pain, and waste of good—suggest that God the Father is not almighty after all, for surely he would remove these things if he could? Yes, he would, and he is doing so! Through Christ, bad folk like you and me are already being made good; new pain-and disease-free bodies are on the way, and a reconstructed cosmos with them; and Paul assures us that “the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Romans 8:18; cf. verses 19-;23). If God moves more slowly than we wish in clearing evil out of his world and introducing the new order, that, we may be sure, is in order to widen his gracious purpose and include in it more victims of the world’s evil than otherwise he could have done. (Study 2 Peter 3:3-;10, especially verse 8ff.)
The truth of God’s almightiness in creation, providence,
and grace is the basis of all our trust, peace, and
joy in God, and the safeguard of all our hopes
of answered prayer, present protection,
and final salvation.
GOOD NEWS
The truth of God’s almightiness in creation, providence, and grace is the basis of all our trust, peace, and joy in God, and the safeguard of all our hopes of answered prayer, present protection, and final salvation. It means that neither fate, nor the stars, nor blind chance, nor man’s folly, nor Satan’s malice controls this world; instead, a morally perfect God runs it, and none can dethrone him or thwart his purposes of love. And if I am Christ’s, then—
A sovereign protector I have,
Unseen, yet forever at hand,
Unchangeably faithful to save,
Almighty to rule and command....
If thou art my Shield and my Sun
The night is no darkness to me,
And, fast as my moments roll on,
They bring me but nearer to thee.
Good news? Yes, the best ever.
FURTHER BIBLE STUDY
God the overruler:
Genesis 50:15-;26
Psalm 93
Acts 4:23-;31
QUESTIONS FOR THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION
What does “almighty” mean? Why is it important to believe that God is almighty?
In what sense, if any, is it true to say there are some things that even omnipotence cannot do?
Is God’s power limited by man’s free will? Why or why not?
For everything created by God is good,
and nothing is to be rejected if it is received
with thanksgiving.
1 TIMOTHY 4: 4
CHAPTER 5
Maker of Heaven
and Earth
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth”; so begins the Bible. (“The heavens and the earth” is Bible language for “everything that is.”)
It is arguable how much (or how little) Genesis 1 and 2 tell us about the method of creation—whether, for instance, they do or do not rule out the idea of physical organisms evolving through epochs of thousands of years. What is clear, however, is that their main aim is to tell us not how the world was made but who made it.
INTRODUCING THE ARTIST
The solution-chapter in one of Dorothy Sayers’s detective stories is called “When You Know How You Know Who.” Ge
nesis 1 and 2, however, tell us who without giving many answers about how . Some today may think this a defect; but in the long perspective of history our present-day “scientific” preoccupation with how rather than who looks very odd in itself. Rather than criticize these chapters for not feeding our secular interest, we should take from them needed rebuke of our perverse passion for knowing Nature without regard for what matters most—namely, knowing Nature’s Creator.
The message of these two chapters is this: “You have seen the sea? The sky? The sun, moon, and stars? You have watched the birds and the fish? You have observed the landscape, the vegetation, the animals, the insects, all the big things and little things together? You have marveled at the wonderful complexity of human beings, with all their powers and skills, and the deep feelings of fascination, attraction, and affection that men and women arouse in each other? Fantastic, isn’t it? Well now, meet the one who is behind it all!” As if to say: now that you have enjoyed these works of art, you must shake hands with the artist; since you were thrilled by the music, we will introduce you to the composer. It was to show us the Creator rather than the creation, and to teach us knowledge of God rather than physical science, that Genesis 1 and 2, along with such celebrations of creation as Psalm 104 and Job 38-41, were written.
In creating, God was craftsman and more. Craftsmen shape existing material and are limited by it, but no material existed at all until God said, “Let there be...” To make this point theologians speak of creation “out of nothing,” meaning not that nothing was a sort of a something(!) but that God in creating was absolutely free and unrestricted, and that nothing determined or shaped what he brought into being save his own idea of what it would be like.
CREATOR AND CREATURE
The Creator-creature distinction is basic to the Bible’s view of God’s lordship in providence and grace, and indeed to all true thought about God and man. That is why it is in the Creed. Its importance is at least threefold.
First, it stops misunderstanding of God. God made us in his image, but we tend to think of him in ours! (“Man made God in his own image” was a crack by Voltaire, rather too true to be good.) But the Creator-creature distinction reminds us that God does not depend on us as we depend on him, nor does he exist by our will and for our pleasure, nor may we think of his personal life as being just like ours. As creatures we are limited; we cannot know everything at once, nor be present everywhere, nor do all we would like to do, nor continue unchanged through the years. But the Creator is not limited in these ways. Therefore we find him incomprehensible—by which I mean, not making no sense, but exceeding our grasp. We can no more take his measure than our dogs and cats can take our measure. When Luther told Erasmus that his thoughts of God were too human, he was uprooting in principle all the rationalistic religion that has ever infected the church—and rightly too! We must learn to be self-critical in our thinking about God.
The world exists in its present stable state by the will and
power of its Maker. Since it is his world, we are not its
owners, free to do as we like with it, but its stewards,
answerable to him for the way we handle its resources.
Second, this distinction stops misunderstanding of the world . The world exists in its present stable state by the will and power of its Maker. Since it is his world, we are not its owners, free to do as we like with it, but its stewards, answerable to him for the way we handle its resources. And since it is his world, we must not depreciate it. Much religion has built on the idea that the material order—reality as experienced through the body, along with the body that experiences it—is evil and therefore to be refused and ignored as far as possible. This view, which dehumanizes its devotees, has sometimes called itself Christian, but it is really as un-Christian as can be. For matter, being made by God, was and is good in his eyes (Genesis 1:31) and so should be so in ours (1 Timothy 4:4). We serve God by using and enjoying temporal things gratefully, with a sense of their value to him, their Maker, and of his generosity in giving them to us. It is an ungodly and, indeed, inhuman super-spirituality that seeks to serve the Creator by depreciating any part of his creation.
Third, this distinction stops misunderstanding of ourselves. As man is not his own maker, so he may not think of himself as his own master. “God made me for himself, to serve him here.” God’s claim upon us is the first fact of life that we must face, and we need a healthy sense of our creaturehood to keep us facing it.
FURTHER BIBLE STUDY
God the Creator:
Genesis 1-;2
Isaiah 45:9-;25
QUESTIONS FOR THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION
What is the significance of God’s words “Let there be...”?
What does the Creator-creature distinction have to do with God making man in his own image?
Why can we say with confidence that the material order is not evil?
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.
JOHN 1: 14
CHAPTER 6
And in Jesus Christ
I believe in God the Father... and in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord.” So the Creed declares. When it called God “maker of heaven and earth,” it parted company with Hinduism and Eastern faiths generally; now, by calling Jesus Christ God’s only Son, it parts company with Judaism and Islam and stands quite alone. This claim for Jesus is both the touchstone of Christianity and the ingredient that makes it unique. As the whole New Testament was written to make and justify the claim, we should not be surprised when we find the Creed stating it with fuller detail than it states anything else.
CHRIST AND THE CENTER
This claim is central to the layout of the Creed, for the long section on Jesus Christ stands between the two shorter sec tions on the Father and the Spirit. And it is central to the faith of the Creed, for we could not know about the Trinity or salvation or resurrection and life everlasting apart from Jesus Christ. It was Jesus Christ, in his redemption of all God’s people, who was the revealer of all these truths.
See how the Creed presents him.
Jesus (Greek for Joshua, meaning “God is Savior”) is his proper name. It identifies him as a historical person, Mary’s son from Nazareth in Galilee, a Jewish ex-carpenter who worked for three years as a rural rabbi and was put to death by the Roman authorities about a.d. 30. The four Gospels describe his ministry in some detail.
Christ (literally, “the anointed one”) is not a surname, except in the old sense in which surnames like Smith, Taylor, Packer, or Clark declared a man’s trade or profession. “Christ” is what Presbyterians would call an “office-title,” identifying Jesus as God’s appointed savior-king for whom the Jews had long been waiting. Since the Christ was expected to set up God’s reign and to be hailed as overlord throughout the world, to call Jesus Christ was to claim for him a decisive place in history and a universal dominion that all men everywhere must acknowledge. The first Christians did this quite self-consciously; one sees them doing it in the speeches recorded in Acts (see 2:22-36; 3:12-26; 5:29-32; 10:34-43;. “To this end Christ died and lived again, that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living” (Romans 14:9). “... so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow” (Philippians 2:10).
Also, the title Christ expresses the claim that Jesus fulfilled all three ministries for which men were anointed in Old Testament times, being prophet (a messenger from God) and priest (one who mediates with God for us by sacrifice) as well as being king.
The glory of this conjunction of roles is only seen when we relate it to our actual needs. What do we sinners need for a right and good relationship with God? First, we are ignorant of him and need instruction, for no satisfying relationship is possible with a person about whom you know little or nothing. Second, we are estranged from him and need reconciliation—otherwise we shall end up unaccepted,
unforgiven, and unblessed, strangers to his fatherly love and exiles from the inheritance that is in store for those who are his children. Third, we are weak, blind, and foolish when it comes to the business of living for God, and we need someone to guide, protect, and strengthen us, which is how the regal role was understood in Old Testament Israel. Now in the person and ministry of the one man, Jesus Christ, this threefold need is completely and perfectly met! Hallelujah!
Great Prophet of my God!
My tongue would bless thy name;
By thee the joyful news
Of our salvation came;
The joyful news of sins forgiven,
Of hell subdued, and peace with heaven.
Jesus, my great High Priest,
Offered his blood and died;
My guilty conscience seeks
No sacrifice beside;
His powerful blood did once atone,
And now it pleads before the throne.
My dear Almighty Lord,
My conqueror and my King,
Thy sceptre, and thy sword,
Thy reigning grace I sing.
Affirming the Apostles ’ Creed Page 3
