3 Questions about Creation: Who, How, and Why?

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) The Framework Interpretation popularized by Meredith Kline maintains that the first three days represent creation kingdoms, ruled over by the creation kings of days four through six. The days, therefore, should be read topically, not sequentially. Based on Genesis 2:5 (“the Lord God had not caused it to rain”), Kline argues that God oversaw creation by means of ordinary providence. (4) The Analogical approach understands the days more generally as divine work days.

While the events recorded may be broadly consecutive, the length of the time is irrelevant to the purpose of the Genesis account. The days are God-divided days or extraordinary cosmic days. Our human week is copied from this creation week, but “copy” is to be considered analogically not literally. While there are plausible reasons for each view, and orthodox Reformed representatives can be listed for each of them, I find the twenty-four-hour view most convincing.

First, there are several indications that the Hebrew word yom is used in Genesis 1 in the normal sense of a twenty-four-hour day: the references to morning and evening, the cycles of darkness and light, the fact that we still have seven days in our week. Most crucially, the refrain of “days, years, signs, and seasons” suggests we are dealing with normal calendar demarcations.

Second, there are good explanations for the appearance of the sun on day four. For example, the universe might have been illuminated by the special, supernatural presence of God. Alternately, one can argue that the sun was already made (Gen. 1:1), but not separated until the fourth day. Light wasn’t created on the fourth day; rather, the greater light and lesser light were separated (Gen. 1:14).

Third, normal days allow for the world to be relatively young, which means that death in the animal world need not have existed before the fall.

Fourth, God could have created the world with the appearance of age. Just as Adam on his first day did not look like an infant, so the universe, though created in six normal days, may look much older.

Fifth, this view of the creation days was affirmed by early commentators (Basil, Ambrose), by medieval scholastics (Lombard, Aquinas), by the magisterial Reformers (Luther, Calvin, Beza), by the Puritans (Perkins, Owen, Edwards), and was the only known view of the Westminster divines.

Sixth, God did not merely accommodate himself in how he explained the work but in how he actually accomplished the work. As Calvin put it, Moses didn’t speak of six days “for the mere purpose of conveying instruction. Let us rather conclude that God himself took the space of six days, for the purpose of accommodating his works to the capacity of men.”¹

We do not look at the universe rightly unless we see in creation a glorious reason to praise the living God.

The End for Which God Created the World

We do not look at the universe rightly unless we see in creation a glorious reason to praise the living God.

“Let all the earth fear the Lord,” the psalmist tells us, “let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him!” And why? “For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm” (Ps. 33:8–9). Similarly, Psalm 148 calls on the heavens and the heights, the Lord’s angels and his hosts, the sun and moon and shining stars, the highest heavens and the waters above the heavens to praise the name of the Lord. The reason? “For he commanded and they were created. And he established them forever and ever; he gave a decree, and it shall not pass away” (Ps. 148:5–6). In short, God formed us and made us; he created us for his glory (Isa. 43:7).

To use the language of Jonathan Edwards’s famous treatise, divine glory is “the end for which God created the world.” We must never suppose that God created the cosmos out of lack—because he wanted a relationship, or he wanted someone to love. God did not create the world because he was thirsty. Rather, God created the world because it is the nature of a fountain to overflow. Creation is the superabundance of divine goodness, beauty, mercy, love, wisdom, power, sovereignty, self-sufficiency, self-existence, justice, holiness, faithfulness, and freedom.

Edwards puts the matter wonderfully. We should slow down and read him carefully:

As there is an infinite fullness of all possible good in God—a fullness of every perfection, of all excellency and beauty, and of infinite happiness—and as this fullness is capable of communication, or emanation ad extra, so it seems a thing amiable and valuable in itself that this infinite fountain of good should send forth abundant streams. . . . Thus it appears reasonable to suppose that it was God’s last end that there might be a glorious and abundant emanation of his infinite fulness of good ad extra; and that the disposition to communicate himself, or diffuse his own fulness, was what moved him to create the world.²

To put the matter much less elegantly, we can say the creation was God’s decision to go public with his glory. From the microscopic level to the cosmic level, we have reason to give God praise. Just consider that by some scientific estimates there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on earth. The Milky Way has 150 billion to 200 billion stars, and our galaxy is only one of hundreds of billions of galaxies. Depending on which estimate you follow, there are more than 100 billion trillion stars. Think of the number one followed by twenty-three zeroes. That’s about how many stars there are in the universe. The number defies human comprehension. And Psalm 147:4 says, “He determines the number of the stars; he gives to all of them their names.”

All good theology begins with the beginning. There is no Christianity without the doctrine of creation. “Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created” (Rev. 4:11).

This article is adapted from Daily Doctrine: A One-Year Guide to Systematic Theology by Kevin DeYoung.