Believing in God the Maker means living for what lasts. It means refusing to center our lives around a world that’s passing away. This is not all there is. We were made for more—for a world where sin and death are no more, where love and righteousness dwell forever.

Every year on her birthday, the princess Rapunzel looks out from her tower and sees floating lanterns filling the night sky. She doesn’t yet know they’re sent, year by year, by her parents—the king and queen—to draw her back home. But one day, a prince leads her out of the tower to discover that she has been a princess all along—and to meet the ones who brought her into the world.

That story, told in the animated film Tangled, echoes the Christian story. In the Bible, we are locked away in a tower of sin, but God shines the light of his Word into the darkness (John 1:5). He has left evidence of himself all over the sky (Ps. 19:1) and sent his Son to lead us back to himself (1 Pet. 3:18).

And it’s remarkable how far some people will go to find their birth parents. They’ll hire private investigators, search church records, and pay for DNA testing. Beneath it all is a deep desire to know who and where we came from—to meet the ones who brought us into the world—the ones who gave us life.

But what about our Maker? What if you could know the one who knitted you together in your mother’s womb (Ps. 139:13)? The one who slung the stars into place, who designed a butterfly’s wings, who made honey sweet and sends forth lightnings (Job 38:35)? What if you could know the one responsible for keeping your heart beating, who knows the very moment it will stop (Ps. 139:16)?

The Apostles’ Creed introduces him to us: “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.” The Creed helps us meet our Maker before we die.

The Meaning of “Maker of Heaven and Earth”

When the Creed calls God the “Maker of heaven and earth,” it acknowledges him as the Creator. It declares that God made everything other than himself. It insists that he is the potter and the universe is his clay (Isa. 64:8). He is the artist and the universe his canvas. He is the singer and the universe his song (Heb. 1:3).

Entirely unlike his creation, God is uncreated. He is eternal and unique—the unmade Maker. Scripture begins with the same truth: “In the beginning, God” (Gen. 1:1a). That means there was never a time when he wasn’t. He always is. The first thing the Bible wants us to know is that the eternal God created the heavens and the earth (Gen. 1:1b).

So however old the universe may be, it is a mere infant in the tender yet almighty hands of its eternal Maker. We are the new kids on the block. But as Jesus prayed in John 17, the Son shared glory with the Father “before the world existed.” This means that before time began, God existed in eternal love—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Creation itself, we might say, is an explosion out of that divine love. It’s a result of God’s desire to share his love beyond himself (Eph. 1:4).

The Maker of Everything

“Maker of heaven and earth” is a literary device writers call a merism—a phrase that uses two extremes to capture the whole. When a student says, “I studied day and night,” they mean they studied all the time—they studied comprehensively. When someone loses their phone and subsequently finds it, they might say, “I searched high and low for it,” which means they looked everywhere. So when the Creed says that God is “the Maker of heaven and earth,” it means he made everything. “From the furthest galaxy to the smallest molecule,” as one hip-hop artist put it, God created it all. From things you need a telescope for to things you need a microscope for. He made everything from the heights of Mount Everest to the depths of the Mariana Trench. He made light and meteorites, water and otters, planets and granite. Heaven and earth means all of creation. And God, the Father, is the Maker.

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