God, Maker of Heaven and Earth

Our considerations of the first two characteristics of God established by the Apostles’ Creed, namely His Fatherhood and almighty sovereignty, leads
us naturally to the next statement, that God is Maker
of heaven and earth. It should be noted
that there is hardly a more presuppositional statement, as I am using the term,
than Genesis 1:1. God the Creator is
assumed from the start and not subjected to a series of rational or scientific
proofs. It is in the question of God’s
being Creator that we find one of the starkest contrasts between modern and
postmodern thought as it relates both to believers and non-believers.

Throughout
most of the past century, if one were to listen to teaching on Genesis chapters
1-3, the most referenced topic would be the debate between evolution and
creation. This aspect of the culture war
was set up in the early 20^th century by the advent of
fundamentalism, as well as the publicity of the Scopes’ trial, and it remained
a point of conflict for the decades that ensued.

While it may very well be true that
many believers in atheistic evolution have found no significant meaning in
life, we believers in Christ have forgotten our own answer to the question of
meaning. To treat Genesis 1 as a
proof-text against evolution is to miss the entire point of the passage and to
submit our biblical exegesis to the agenda of modernism. Genesis 1 was not written in response to
questions about evolution, the age of the earth, or any other such modern-day
inquiry. Rather, it was written to
establish a monotheistic origin of the world, in which “no other deity
challenges God’s right to create; no other deity helps God create; no other
deity opposes God’s creative activity.”[1] It directly confronted the polytheistic
Mesopotamian accounts of gods who “lie, steal, fornicate, and kill.”[2]

In the climax of the one God’s
creative activity, as indicated by a threefold use of the word “create,” human
beings are formed “in His image.”[3] Here we find the Christian faith’s answer to
the postmodern idolatry of marketing identities expounded by Middleton and
Walsh. Who are we? We are human beings, created in the image of
God. None of the Mesopotamian creation
accounts included an exalted view of human beings.[4]

This notion [of humans as imago Dei]…presents us with an important
alternative both to the modern imperial self of yesteryear with its grandiose
pretensions to autonomy and to the postmodern self – decentered, disoriented,
fragmented, and tossed by the wind of every impinging image and context.[5]

Redeemed
from sin by Christ, the church, consisting of “God’s renewed image bearers,” is
“empowered” to once again be what God intended us to be in the earth.[6] Understanding the significance of God as
Creator gives more meaning to humanity than any modern or postmodern attempt to
give or sell us an identity. It is time
for the church to put down the weapons of its fight against “secular evolution”
and take up the truth of the meaning of humanity, rooted in God’s being “Maker
of Heaven and Earth.” Only in doing so
will the church be able to offer genuine hope in the midst of postmodern
confusion.