The eternal gospel proclaimed by the angel of Revelation 14:6 calls for the worship of ''him who and made heaven earth'' (verse 7).* As a pastor committed to the proclamation of this gospel, I find this call more than a reminder of our origin: it is a call to confess that God is the Creator.
Can one be truly Christian without such a confession? An agnostic could dismiss the Genesis account as a fable that requires no particular response. A scientist could look to "an accidental collocation of atoms" 1 for the origin of life. A philosopher might turn to a first cause. And a poet could talk of life as a "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."2 But the Christian cannot but begin with a faith affirmation in a Person: "In the beginning God created ..."
Why is the continual affirmation of Genesis 1 so important to Christian faith and ministry?
The Christian apex
First, to affirm God's creatorship is to acknowledge that the sovereign Lord is at the apex of the Christian's worldview. Because God is, a Christian can say, "I am. Without Him, I am not." "By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all their host by the breath of his mouth. . . . Let all the earth fear the Lord, let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him! For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood forth." 3
The Christian perspective of history, time, and space finds its origin and meaning within the contours of Genesis. To Christians God constitutes the ultimate reality. He is the cause and designer of life. His personhood guarantees life's structure, purpose, and order: "In him we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28). As Schaeffer points out: "The strength of the Christian system the acid test of it is that everything fits under the apex of the existent, infinite personal God, and it is the only system in the world where this is true. No other system has an apex under which everything fits. . . . Without losing his own integrity, the Christian can see everything fitting into place beneath the Christian apex of the existence of the infinite-personal God." 4
The Genesis proclamation "Let us make man" and the attendant details of the Creator's involvement in the shaping of human life make it clear that the Creator of the cosmos is not a distant, impersonal, absolute force or idea or mind, but a person.
In saying that the Creator is personal, we are not ranking God's nature relative to our own. At the least we are saying that God cannot be less than the human person, and this at once destroys human pretension to create its own god. At the most we are saying that the incomprehensible and infinite God has revealed Himself in a kind of relationship that could only be described in terms of personhood. What is not personal is obviously less than personal, and this is not the biblical concept of God.
The personhood of God, however, is not to be understood in terms of the limitations inherent in human personality, but rather in possibilities of relationships that involve love, fellowship, communication, and historical and existential purposes. Hence we could talk of God as entirely the other and at the same time approach Him as immediately near. He is both the transcendent and the immanent one.
The other and near
The second reason why Christian proclamation must remain committed to the Genesis account is that only that account maintains the Creator's distinction from creation while yet relating Him to it. The point is crucial in facing the twin temptations constant in human history: that of identifying the Creator with creation (common to pantheism and most Eastern mysticism) and that of isolating the Creator from creation (such as the attempt of platonic metaphysics or secular human ism to explain nature and human potential without a personal God).
So the biblical insistence on a creation ex nihilo shows that the God of the Bible is transcendent over and in dependent of creation and is truly free. At the same time, this God is personal in that He is capable of relating to His creatures. In other words, God creates, but He is not dependent for His creation on any pre-existent substance. He relates, but for His relation He is not reliant on any external motivating force. Both the will to create and the will to relate are internal to Him. He is entirely the other, absolutely Himself. It is this exclusivity of God that leads the Christian proclamation to deny any potentiality within the creature to be come God. Any pretension to such potential is foreign to a Christian perspective of life, and hence Christians are always called upon to reflect upon their limitations. Yet the power of grace allows them to accept their finitude courageously.
Authentic living
A third area in which the doctrine of creation becomes crucial to Christian proclamation is in the authentic under standing of ecology and history it affords. Because God is the Creator, the biblical revelation consistently maintains that matter is not intrinsically evil, and that nature contains nothing "self-originating, self-operating, self-sustaining, or self-explanatory." 5 This world belongs to God; it is not ours, to treat as we wish without any regard to a norm higher than our self-will and self-interest.
The essential goodness of creation thus lays the foundation against dualism of nature, on the one hand, and meaninglessness of history, on the other. As Niebuhr points out, the confession of God's creatorship carries the implication that "the world in its totality" is "a revelation of His majesty and self-sufficient power." "The doctrine of creation escapes the error of the naturalists who, by regarding causality as the principle of meaning, can find no place for human freedom and are forced to reduce man to the level of nature. It escapes the error of the rationalists who make nous into the ultimate principle of meaning, and are thereby tempted to divide man into an essentially good reason, which participates in or is identified with the divine, and an essentially evil physical life." 6
The prophet Isaiah forcefully directed a people in despair to look to God's creative activity and to discover therein meaning for their own history, however twisted and meaningless it may have seemed: "Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth? It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to dwell in; who brings princes to nought, and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing." 7
The gospel proclamation today could do no less. Genesis inevitably points to Revelation. The beginnings move toward new beginnings; the creation toward con summation. With all its chaos and disorder, with all its confusion and hopelessness, this cosmos is not without hope: it is moving toward its inevitable climax. To this climax the angel of Revelation 14:6, 7 draws our attention, and part of our responsibility is the proclamation of that eternal gospel that insists: "Fear God and give him glory, for the hour of his judgment has come; and worship him who made heaven and earth, the sea and the fountains of water."
