As I have been preparing the messages for our evening services, working through the creation narrative in Genesis, I learned something I had not known before. The word, “created,” in Genesis 1:1 (In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth) is used only of God in the Bible. Not once does any biblical author apply the Hebrew word which is translated as “create” to human beings or any other living thing. Only God creates. There are other words that are ascribed to both God and people (words that can also be translated as “made,” for example), but the act of creating is ascribed to God alone.
Scholars who have studied this word have come to the conclusion that the Hebrew word is as much a theological word as it is a description of an action. Yes, creating is an act of God, but the word also says something about the nature and mind of God. The act of creating shows us God’s intentionality as he brings about something entirely new, something that has not existed before. The universe did not exist, but God began to create, intentionally providing an environment of space and time and filling that space and time with an inhabitable world which he then filled with all sorts of living things, including humanity. By searching on the Hebrew word in the Old Testament, every time God creates, a new situation is brought into being, one that had not been in existence before.
We, as human beings, do not do that. Our creative acts are not original, for we only have the ability to take what already is and form it into something else. An artist, with great skill, can make a painting of a river, but all she is doing is rearranging some coloured chemicals on a canvas. A builder can construct a house, and it can be entirely original in design, but that house is made of things that have already existed. He is simply rearranging part of creation to make them into something else. We do not create, at least not in the sense that God creates. When God creates, something new is made, something that did not exist before.
In the second part of Isaiah’s prophecy (beginning at chapter 40), God’s creative act moves beyond the mere physical world to the creation of a new nation from among the nations. In Isaiah 43:1, we read that God created the nation of Israel, and although Israel appeared to be one nation among many, she was, in fact, a new creation by God as God called Abraham from among the nations and made his descendants, the sons of Jacob, into a nation. God chose Abraham, and biblical scholars see a strong parallel between this creative act of God in forming Israel into a nation and the teaching on election. As we know from passages like Deuteronomy 26:5ff. and others, that as God chose Abraham from among all the peoples of the world, he entered into covenant with him and made him into a nation, beginning with the first miraculous act of giving Abraham and Sarah a son in their old age. God elected Abraham to eventually become a nation, and God’s election is akin to his act of creation.
Election refers to God’s intentional decision to create a people belonging to himself out of all the people of this world. While there are many communities of people in our world, communities created because of commonalities (family, classmates, work buddies, soccer moms, neighbourhoods, etc.), the community that have in common faith in Jesus Christ is unique because it is created by God. Election, thus, is God’s creative act in which he makes something entirely new, not reconfiguring or reshaping something that already exists.
When Paul says, “If anyone is in Christ, new creation!” (2 Corinthians 5:17), he uses this language specifically to show that a Christian is not merely a reshaped person but an entirely new person, created by God through Jesus Christ. We become new persons, not merely reworked old persons, indicating that the salvation we have in Jesus is more far-reaching and deeper than might appear on the outside. In fact, we can say that we become entirely different persons when, by God’s grace and the powerful working of the Holy Spirit, we come to faith. It would be wrong, therefore, to assume that those who believe in Jesus and those who do not are somewhat the same kind of people with just a bit different perspective on life. We become new people, created by God as he chooses us to become his children. The radical nature of our salvation should never be understated, for the act of salvation is as significant as the act of creation. God does something new when he creates a people for himself out of all the peoples of the world.
We look forward to the goal and purpose of our salvation, the new creation which will be fully established when Jesus returns. In order for that new creation to be designated as “very good,” like the first creation was before sin twisted and marred it, everything in the new creation must also be of “new creation” quality, so in order to participate in that new creation, all that enters into it must have been created by God first. Thankfully, his work of salvation does exactly that, and we can be assured that when we are in Christ, we will fit well into that new creation.
God’s act of creation, then, is not merely an activity of God by which he makes the world. It is God doing something entirely new, something that was not done before, and something that cannot be done by human hands. This is also true of our salvation, and, by God’s grace in Jesus Christ and by the working of the Holy Spirit in us, we are made into something new, something that we cannot accomplish by ourselves.