By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.
It’s hard for us to imagine a time when everything we see was not. And what we see is only an impossibly tiny fraction of what is. To short-lived people, the universe feels eternal. And if it isn’t, what can explain its beginning?
The answer is a matter of faith for everyone: None of us witnessed creation’s birth (Job 38:4), and the experiment isn’t repeatable. But God tells us what happened. The Bible’s first words are, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). Creation is his first example of what it means to live by faith as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1). The early church put creation first on the list of what Christians must believe: “God the Father Almighty” is the “Maker of heaven and earth.”
Creation is an all-or-nothing doctrine. Either God is the creator of all things or there’s no God, at least not one who deserves full allegiance from every creature. If we doubt that God created the visible world, how can we know that he’s making a new heaven and earth that can’t yet be seen? If we don’t believe in the first creation, what hope can we have of becoming new creations ourselves (Gal. 6:15)? But people of faith confidently press on, desiring a better, heavenly country prepared by the God who made this one (Heb. 11:16), eagerly anticipating their own re-creation (2 Cor. 5:4).
It’s hard not to sense the truth of divine creation (Rom. 1:19–20). But our sensory experience can only be transformed into trust, thanks, and praise when the Holy Spirit leads us to believe. Here’s what we believe: Merely by words spoken into nothingness, God made a universe that bends our minds both by its massiveness and its minute detail. And if he is “my God and Father for the sake of Christ his Son,” I can trust that he will “provide whatever I need for body and soul and will turn to my good whatever adversity he sends upon me in this vale of tears.”1
“The great significance of the opening statements of the Bible lies in its teaching that the world had a beginning.”2 God alone is eternal (1 Tim. 1:17). And the world will have an end (2 Peter 3:10). “The origin unfolds into consummation, and the end is already in the beginning.”3 In the end, each of us will stand before God to be judged by how we have used the light he gave us. Creation teaches us to prepare for that day by trusting in God through Christ, enjoying him and his countless gifts, and behaving wisely in his world.
