The Apostles’ Creed: I Believe in God the Father Almighty…
January 7, 2020
“I believe.” Simple as it sounds, those two words of proclamation are inherent to Christianity. Our faith itself—that in which we rest all of our hope—must be rooted in something substantial.
By nature, we are all religious beings. And we all convey religious affections toward someone or something. We were made to worship and we were made, worshipping. Our lives are designed to bring the utmost glory to God who made us. Every breath we take, our rising up in the morning, our going about our work, the exercise of our intellect and emotions—all these things and more are purposed to glorify the Maker.
We know this Maker through what is called natural revelation. What can be known of God is plain to each one of us, because he has shown it to us (Romans 1:19). Additionally, “his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made” (Romans 1:20).
But even in the midst of God’s revelation to us of himself in the light of nature—all that he has created from the tangible things surrounding us to the laws that govern the universe, to our very own souls—we suppress the truth of God in our unrighteousness. We would rather, sinfully, be our own gods and run our lives according to our own understanding.
But life doesn’t work that way. If God is the Maker of heaven and earth, if he is indeed Almighty, then we, at best, operate disjointly when we live for our own names, rather than for his. We need something to break through that unbelief, shatter our pride, human autonomy, and intellectual hubris. We need Truth.
And God has given us Truth, namely in his Word, the very revelation of who he is, in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. As the Westminster Shorter Catechism puts it, the Scriptures principally teach what we are to believe concerning God and what duty God requires of us.
But here is the question I want each of us to consider: What is our response to God’s Truth?
When we read the Scriptures ourselves, when we listen to the Word of God preached, when we dwell upon the gospel of Jesus, do we respond in belief or unbelief? There are only two responses after all.
And so this is the beauty of the historic creeds of the Christian Faith: they put the truth of God’s Word before us for the edification of our faith. When we recite the Apostle’s Creed, we affirm as a church the bedrock of our faith. We worship a God who is triune—three Persons, one God. And when we proclaim in the first attestation that we believe in God the Father Almighty, the Maker of heaven and earth, our hearts as believers are nourished. For we are not just declaring truth, we are declaring trust.
So where is your faith?
