Before the argument about how long it took, there is a claim about Who did it. Start there.
Christians can spend so much energy fighting about the age of the earth that we skip the doctrine underneath the fight. Before “how” and before “how long,” the Bible makes a claim so large that if it is true, nothing else in your life is untouched by it. Ten words in English, and they hold up the whole building.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
Genesis 1:1, NASB1995
The sentence does not argue for God. It assumes Him — and then puts everything else on the other side of the verb. Before the beginning, God. Not matter. Not energy. Not a law of physics idling in the dark. God, alone, self-existent, needing nothing, and then a universe that did not have to be. That is the doctrine of creation, and it is the first doctrine because it settles the first question: whose world is this?
Out of nothing
The historic Christian confession is creatio ex nihilo — creation out of nothing. God did not shape pre-existing stuff the way a potter needs clay or a builder needs lumber. There was no eternal raw material lying around beside Him. He spoke, and what was not, was.
By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible.
Hebrews 11:3, NASB1995
This is not a minor technicality for theologians. It is the difference between a God who is genuinely God and a God who is merely the strongest thing in a universe He did not make. If matter is eternal and God only rearranged it, then God is a craftsman inside the room. If God spoke the room itself into being, then He stands outside it, over it, unrivaled. Only the second God can be worshiped without embarrassment. Only the second God actually owns what He made.
The Word who made everything
And the New Testament will not let creation stay abstract. It puts a face on it. The One through whom the universe came into being is named.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being.
John 1:1–3, NASB1995
For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible … all things have been created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.
Colossians 1:16–17, NASB1995
Read those two lines and let them land. The universe was not only made through Christ; it was made for Him. And it is not coasting on its own momentum — it is being held, this second, by the same Word that spoke it. The atoms in your hand are not self-sustaining. They are upheld. Take Christ out of the picture and the picture does not fade slowly; it ceases. Creation is not a clock He wound and walked away from. It is a song He is still singing, and if He stopped, the music would not just end. It would never have been.
What creation settles about you
Doctrine is never just information. Get creation right and four things fall into place that a godless universe can never give you.
- Ownership. You are not your own. The Maker has rights the made thing does not (Romans 9:20–21). That is not tyranny; it is reality. The clay does not get a vote on whether it was made.
- Meaning. If you were made “for Him,” you have a purpose you did not assign yourself and cannot be talked out of. A universe of accidents can hand you no such thing.
- Dignity. The same account that makes you a creature makes you an image-bearer (Genesis 1:27). Every person you will ever meet is a deliberate work of God, not a cosmic leftover.
- Accountability and hope. A world with a Maker is a world that means something and answers to Someone — which is terrifying until you learn who that Someone turned out to be.
This is also why unbelief is never merely intellectual. Paul says the creation itself preaches, loudly enough that no one gets to plead ignorance.
For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.
Romans 1:20, NASB1995
The Creator who stepped inside
Here is where the doctrine of creation stops being a debate and becomes good news. The God who spoke the galaxies did not stay outside the world looking in. The Word who made all things came into the things He had made.
And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.
John 1:14, NASB1995
The hands that flung the stars into place were nailed to a beam He had grown from a seed He had designed. The Author walked onto the stage and let the characters kill Him, so that the very creatures who spend His gifts denying Him could be made new. And that is the last word creation speaks: the God who once said “Let there be light” is in the business of saying it again over dead hearts.
Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.
2 Corinthians 5:17, NASB1995
So before you ever get to the age of the rocks, settle the doctrine under the debate. This is His world. You are His workmanship. You are not an accident, and you are not your own. And the same voice that called everything out of nothing is willing, right now, to call you out of the grave you were living in. Start there. Everything else is downstream.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist