Our Father of Infinite Power, Wisdom, and Goodness

Article 1 of the Apostles’ Creed

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” This is, of course the first verse of the first book of the Bible: Genesis. The Scriptures don’t begin by explaining God or making a case to prove his existence. They don’t begin with describing his attributes or his character. No, the Scriptures simply begin with the premise that God’s existence is a given truth. He simply is. We initially know God because of his work in creation. To build upon that simple, yet foundational, truth, “in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” simply makes sense on a very instinctive, very human level.

The Apostles’ Creed similarly begins with the simple, yet foundational, statement, “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.” Last week we looked at the Apostles’ Creed as a whole. This week we continue our series on the Foundations of our Faith by digging a bit deeper into this first article of the Apostles’ Creed.

As mentioned last time, a significant function of the Creed is to give us a summary of our faith that is both Trinitarian and Christocentric. This opening statement of the Creed is all it says about the first Person of the Trinity: God the Father. So, what does it mean that we call him “Father”? What does it mean when we say that he is “Almighty”? And what is the significance of his role as “Maker of heaven and earth”?

Perhaps a bit counterintuitively, I want to start with the second of those questions. What does it mean to call God the Father “Almighty”? In the words of our Provincial Catechism, this means that God “has power over everything and accomplishes everything he wills.”^[1] There is nothing he can’t do. Everything he wills, he accomplishes. Article 1 of our Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion says that he is “of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness.” That is, when we speak of God as Almighty, we are not only speaking of his power and will, but also that his wisdom and goodness are without limits.

With that infinite wisdom comes infinite knowledge. In explaining what it means for God to be Almighty, the Provincial Catechism goes on to say, “Together with his Son and the Holy Spirit, the Father is all-knowing and ever present in every place.”^[2] He knows all and is everywhere. Furthermore, these attributes of being “Almighty” are not unique to the Father; they are part of the unity of the Godhead and thus are true of all three Persons of the Trinity.

We know of God’s infinite power and infinite goodness because he is the “Maker of heaven and earth.” As “Maker of heaven and earth,” God made both the physical and the spiritual, the visible, and the invisible. He did so out of nothing; God pre-exists all matter, all energy, all space, and all time. Indeed, he made them all.

This means that God oversees and is sovereign over all creation. The bible often uses the analogy of God as the potter with us as the clay that he shapes. The Scriptures especially remind us of this when we are inclined to rebellion or pride. For example, in Isaiah 45:9, God rhetorically says, “Woe unto him that striveth with his maker!… Shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it, What makest thou?” Or in Jeremiah 18:6, God says to his people, “O house of Israel, cannot I do with you as this potter? Saith the Lord. Behold, as the clay is in the potter’s hand, so are ye in mine hand, O house of Israel.” Even in the New Testament St. Paul reminds us, “Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus? Hath not the potter power over the clay?” (Rom. 9:20-21). When we start to think of ourselves as in control, when we start to think that God should bow to our will, Scripture reminds us that he is the potter, and we are merely clay.

Yet, God’s infinite power and sovereignty also comes with his infinite goodness and love. This is also demonstrated when he is called “Maker of heaven and earth.” As we continue reading the description of Creation Week in Genesis 1, we see that God declares his work to be “very good” at each stage of creation. This goodness of creation is an outflowing of God’s own goodness. Because of his power and his goodness, creation naturally praises him. Our Morning canticle, Benedicite Omnia Opera, from the Song of the Three Children in the Greek additions to Daniel, demonstrates this praise in beautifully poetic terms moving from the sky and weather to the physical world to God’s people. Similarly, in Psalm 145:8-9, we sing:

The LORD is good to all; and his tender mercies are over all his works.
All thy works shall praise thee, O LORD; and thy saints shall bless thee.

Yet, in light of natural disasters, sickness, famine, and man’s own inhumanity to man, it can be hard, at times, to see that goodness in Creation. And this can make us question the goodness of God. The way this is often phrased is, “If God is of both all-powerful and all-loving, why is there evil in the world?” The implied accusation is that the existence of evil means that God is either not perfectly good or not perfectly powerful.

The Scriptures, of course, do not shy away from the truth of evil’s existence. The Scriptures do not see the existence of evil as contradicting God’s power and goodness. Indeed, as we move forward in Genesis, we see that man’s own rebellion is the cause of the world’s corruption. Man’s rebellion against God brought sin, evil, and death into the world. Not only did sin corrupt humanity, but it also corrupted the world that man was supposed to steward.

Furthermore, the Scriptures hint at a similar rebellion among the unseen spiritual beings that God created, which also impacted the rebellion of our first parents. We, then, continue in that rebellion. We continue to sin against God, alienating ourselves from him and from each other, perpetuating evil and falling short of God’s glory.

But that’s not the end of the story. You see, evil is not a thing in and of itself. Evil was not itself created. Rather, evil is a corruption and perversion of what God made good. And God has promised not to leave evil unchecked. He does indeed deal with evil and has dealt with it already. Though we are not yet at the end of the story, we have God’s promises of redemption, the first of which is given at the in Genesis 3, right after man’s fall. Romans 8:22-23, from the traditional Epistle reading on the 4^th Sunday after Trinity, speaks of how the hope of all creation coincides with our own redemption:

For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.

In describing God’s goodness with respect to his creation, our Provincial Catechism says, “God is both loving and holy. God mercifully redeems fallen creation, while righteously opposing all sin and evil. The Lord Jesus Christ is the fullest revelation of God’s holy love.”^[3] The Father’s answer to the problem of evil was to send his Son to redeem humanity and all of creation. While the full effects of redemption have not yet been realized, we have the down payment, the guarantee, in our Lord’s own resurrection. In our next installment, we’ll look at that a bit more as we get into the second part of the Creed.

God’s creation of heaven and earth is one part of why we call him Father. After all, we are among those things that he created. In Acts 17, as St. Paul is preaching to the philosophers in Athens, we see that even the pagans recognized this universal aspect of God’s fatherhood. “In him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring.”

Yet there is a deeper fatherhood to God, one that goes to his very essence as God. I needed to have children to become a father. But God the Father was always Father. He did not need to make us to become the Father. Our Provincial catechism puts it this way: “God the Father is the First Person of the Holy Trinity, from whom the Son is eternally begotten and the Holy Spirit eternally proceeds.”^[4] The relationship between the First and Second Person of the Trinity was always that of Father and Son. St. John describes our Lord Jesus as the “only begotten” Son of the Father.^[5] This speaks of our Lord’s unique and eternal Sonship.

Nevertheless, Jesus taught his disciples to also call God “Father.” Throughout the Gospels Jesus refers to God as “my heavenly Father” as well as “your heavenly Father.” Earlier in Romans 8, St. Paul tells us that when we are united to Christ, we receive the “Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God” (Rom 8:15-16). He then goes on to say that by this adoption as sons of God, we become co-heirs with Christ, heirs of God’s promises. And indeed, our adoption leads to the redemption of the rest of creation.

J.I. Packer, the great Evangelical theologian, co-editor of our Provincial Catechism, and sometime mentor to my own Bishop, wrote that the doctrine of adoption is the “highest privilege that the gospel offers: higher even than justification.”^[6] It is the “nucleus and focal point” of the New Testament’s teaching on the Christian Life. He writes that our adoption demonstrates the greatness of God’s grace. It demonstrates the glory of Christian hope. Our adoption is the key to understanding the ministry of the Holy Spirit. Our adoption is the basis for understanding the call to holiness. And our adoption is the key to assurance of our salvation. ^[7] In fact, Dr. Packer writes that he would summarize the Gospel in three words: “Adoption through Propitiation.”^[8]

Our adoption by the Father fulfills our expectations from the idea of God’s universal fatherhood the Athenian philosophers and poets spoke of. Because we have been adopted as sons, we can now fully appreciate what it means to be his “offspring” by virtue of him making us. Our Provincial Catechism puts it this way: “When I call God ‘Father,’ I declare that I was created for relationship with him, that I trust in God as my Protector and Provider, and that I put my hope in God as his child and heir in Christ.”^[9] And, as Jesus tells us in Luke 6, when we are made children of God, we are then empowered to imitate him in our own lives. “Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful…”

Some of you may have had wonderful earthly fathers who provided a good, if imperfect, picture of our heavenly Father. Some of you may have had terrible earthly fathers or perhaps never knew your earthly fathers. For some of you, calling God “Father” may be a very difficult thing indeed because of those experiences. For others, your father was somewhere in between, neither especially good nor especially bad, just a regular guy with all the ups and downs that implies. For all of us, we can see true Fatherhood in the love and holiness of God. The Scriptures tell us of his infinite power, wisdom, and love.

Through Christ’s sonship, we are made sons of our heavenly Father and given the Spirit of adoption. Despite God’s vastness, despite being above and beyond his creation, he condescends to meet us. He involves himself in our little lives, for they are anything but little to him. We may be clay, but our Father is a master artist. He made us. He loves us. He calls us to follow his Son Jesus Christ, to be united to Christ, and to walk in the power of the Spirit as his own adopted children. God Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, is indeed our Heavenly Father.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

1. The Anglican Church in North America. To Be a Christian: An Anglican Catechism. Edited by J.I. Packer and Joel Scandrett. Wheaton: Crossway (2020), 36. ↑
2. Ibid. ↑
3. Ibid., 35. ↑
4. Ibid. ↑
5. Cf., John 1:18, 3:16. While the proper translation of μονογενής is highly debated among Greek scholars, “only begotten” is used in the Nicene Creed and represents standard theological language within Christian orthodoxy. ↑
6. J.I. Packer. Knowing God. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press (1973), 186. Emphasis in the original.
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7. Ibid., 194-206.
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8. Ibid., 194.
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9. The Anglican Church in North America, 36. ↑