Creator of Heaven and Earth – What Does This Mean?

“In the Beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” are the first words in the Bible. “I believe in God the Father almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth …” we confess in our creeds. At the heart and center of all we believe is the fact that God made the universe — including us. This teaching is the foundation of everything else that we believe. The whole structure of Christian faith depends upon it, from the authority of God’s word to the doctrine of salvation by grace. Because God is the Creator and he loves us, we can live at peace. Nothing can harm us eternally because He protects us. If he is not the Creator, than we are on our own in the face of evil.

Like much of the Christian Faith, the conviction that God is the Creator of all things is a axiom — an idea that is assumed to be true. Strictly speaking, we do not try to prove that the God of Holy Scripture is the Creator. We take God’s word for it. We might argue from the evidence of the orderliness of the universe that a Creator exists, but we cannot use the evidence in the material world to identify his as the God we trust.

Some non-Christians will argue that this faith is a weakness. It is not based upon observation of the physical world and logical explanations of the data found there. (In other words, we do not use science to prove it) Yet everyone who tries to explain how the world came to be also use axioms. For example, those who trust scientific theories assume: that the world is an orderly place, that experiments repeated in precisely the same way over and over again will respond with more or less the same results. It assumes that nothing that cannot be seen, touched, tasted, smelled or heard is real.

Everyone, then, relies on beliefs that they conclude explain the world. While we may disagree with each other, discussion requires a certain amount of respect for those with very different faiths,