God gives us the answer to one of the most enduring questions: Where did the cosmos come from? Is the universe the result of some free personal agent, or did the universe somehow create itself? The biblical account teaches that creation is distinct from God (the two are not the same being) and at the same time that creation is entirely dependent on God. He is before all things and on him all things depend. As we’ve seen before, there never was when God was not, but there was when matter was not. As the psalmist exclaims, “Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God” (Ps. 90:1–2).

Our Creator God

When considering the creation of the universe, there are three principal questions we can ask: Who? How? and Why? Of those three questions, the first question is the most foundational. It also is the most obvious. According to the Bible, God is Creator of all things visible and invisible.

We cannot overstate the importance the Bible gives to the revelation of God as Creator. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). Reading in English, we could say aseity is the first thing we encounter about God. In the beginning—before all and independent of all—there was God. In the original Hebrew, however, the verb bara (“to create”) comes prior to the word Elohim (“God”). This is not an unusual grammatical construction for Hebrew, but it does mean that even before we are introduced to the word for God, we know that he is a creator.

Our God is the one through whom all things came into being. He is the maker of heaven and earth. Over and over the Bible reminds us that the God of Israel is no territorial deity. As the people confessed in Nehemiah’s day, “You are the Lord, you alone. You have made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them; and you preserve all of them; and the host of heaven worships you” (Neh. 9:6). There is only one Creator, and therefore there is only one God. “For thus says the Lord, who created the heavens (he is God!), who formed the earth and made it (he established it; he did not create it empty, he formed it to be inhabited!): ‘I am the Lord, and there is no other’ ” (Isa. 45:18).

When Paul preached to the Gentiles, he emphasized that they should put away their idols and turn to “a living God, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them” (Acts 14:15). As the Creator of all things, God needs nothing from his creatures. Famously, Paul explained to the Athenians that “the God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything” (Acts 17:24–25).

God gives us the answer to one of the most enduring questions: Where did the cosmos come from? Is the universe the result of some free personal agent, or did the universe somehow create itself? The biblical account teaches that creation is distinct from God (the two are not the same being) and at the same time that creation is entirely dependent on God. He is before all things and on him all things depend. As we’ve seen before, there never was when God was not, but there was when matter was not. As the psalmist exclaims, “Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God” (Ps. 90:1–2).

Creation Days

Of the three questions—Who? How? and Why?—the how question is the one where the most controversy has arisen. At the heart of the how question is the debate surrounding the creation days. Among evangelicals, there are four typical approaches.

(1) The six days of creation are normal twenty-four-hour days. This view usually means (but doesn’t have to equal) a belief in a young earth (e.g., thousands of years old instead of billions of years). (2) The Day-Age view argues that the creation days represent an unspecified length of time and that a “day” in God’s reckoning can refer to a long period of time (Isa. 11:10–11; 2 Pet. 3:8). (3)

Read More