The Grace Of Creation

By T. Robert Ingram

Houston, Texas.

The thesis of this article is that all of the doctrines of grace are dependent upon and derived from the historical fact of Creation, and silence about the biblical record, or modification of it to allow for aeons of time and historical error, leaves the very concept of grace without foundation and subject to grave distortion.

I am indebted to the Swedish theologian, Gustaf Wingren, for putting his finger on what may well be the fatal flaw in the neo-orthodoxy of Karl Barth, Oscar Cullman, and others, who have attempted to erect a system of theology based solely on the biblical message of the Lordship of Christ with little reference to the biblical doctrine of God’s work as Creator and Preserver of the world.[1]

It would be unfair, however, to point only to neo-orthodoxy in this connection. It seems to me that even among those who seek to be most consistently orthodox in their theology, including those like ourselves who would raise once again what we call the doctrines of sovereign grace, there is a preponderance of interest in grace as manifested in redemption to the point even of silence about grace as seen in creation.

Yet when the two great works of God, Creation and Redemption, are allowed to become separated, if only by silence about the former, the way is wide open to the worst of errors—antinomianism, dualism and humanism, the last considered as a refined form of dualism.

Wingren points out that the two credal formulae which have predominated throughout the whole history of the Christian Church, the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed, are both quite markedly Trinitarian in form. “Despite their internal variations,” he writes, “we note that faith in God the Creator, in Jesus Christ crucified and risen, and in the Spirit in His work of edifying the Church, was a regulative principle in the formulation of both these Creeds.”[2]

The point is that those most universally accepted minimal statements of what is required to be believed both specifically include the doctrine of Creation, as well as the doctrine of the Church. It is not enough to believe simply in the Lordship or Sovereignty of Jesus Christ. It is necessary to believe that Lordship extends to the eternal sovereignty inherent in Him by whom all things were made. The very meaning of sovereignty, or lordship as used of the Risen, Ascended and Living Lord Jesus Christ, is discovered in the historical fact of Creation as recorded in the Genesis account, and as affirmed repeatedly throughout both Old and New Testaments.

Yet in even such a sound and important work as Louis Berkhof’s “Manual of Christian Doctrine,” grace is defined strictly in terms of redemption: “In the specific language of Scripture,” he writes, “the grace of God is the unmerited love of God toward those who have forfeited it, and are by nature under a judgment of condemnation. It is the source of all the spiritual blessings that are bestowed upon unworthy sinners.”[3] Are we then at liberty to conclude that grace was not the source of all the spiritual blessings bestowed upon Adam in Paradise, before the Fall when he was not a sinner?

Another modern writer, Thomas F. Torrance, says the New Testament speaks of grace as “the divine love in redemptive action.”[4] Is it not even more pointedly the divine love in creative action ?

When “God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good,” (Gen. 1, 31) was it not of grace that it was good? to say nothing of the fact that it existed at all? Was there some merit in the things God had made that made them good, apart from his grace ? Was it not the unmerited love of God which gave existence to all things?

True enough, Berkof’s definition implies that before the Fall man enjoyed the unmerited love of God, else he could not have forfeited it. But is there no need to state clearly and to understand how nothing merits existence? Nothing deserves to be? God owes it to nothing to bring it into being, even when he pronounces that being good. God has no need of His creatures, neither has he any need for their goodness.

I wonder if Gospel preachers would not be relieved of some tortuous and grossly strained efforts to describe man’s depravity if only they would be at pains to show even man’s goodness is a gift of grace. “For who maketh thee to differ from another? and what has thou that thou didst not receive? now if thou didst receive it, why dost thou glory, as if thou hadst not received it?” (I Cor. 4:7.)

I find something almost ominous in the idea that it is only human depravity that is dependent upon grace. One writer has said, “Grace is love in its princely and sovereign form, love to the indifferent and the disloyal, whose one claim is their need.”5 But there is no preacher and never will be who can convince one who is not indifferent and disloyal that he is. That’s exactly what job’s friends tried to do, who for their pains heard God say, “My wrath is kindled against thee, … for ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right.” (Job. 42:7)

When this message of grace to the sinner is left unsupported by the grace that gave him being and preserves him alive, it is inescapable that it leave many with the idea that man before the Fall had no need of grace. This opens pandora’s box of humanistic cults and doctrines, leaving man, even if something of a failure because of sin, nevertheless somebody in his own right who has no need of God, or of righteousness, or of law, or of sanctification, if only he can slip out from the consequences of that sin.

Someone might enter a plea in behalf of this overriding emphasis on grace in redemption to the exclusion of the grace of creation on the ground that redemption is a greater work even than creation. That redemption is a greater work might well be allowed: but it can never be allowed, even by the sin of silence, that redemption can be separated from creation. If fact, the very nature of the case demands that the grace of redemption had to be the grace of the Creator.

Athanasius says of man’s case after the Fall, “What—or rather Who was it that was needed for such grace and such recall as we required? Who, save the Word of God Himself, Who also in the beginning had made all things out of nothing? His part it was, and His alone, both to bring again the corruptible to incorruption and to maintain for the Father His consistency of character with all.”[6]

If another redeemed what God had made, that other would be greater than He who made all things: and that is absurd. In fact, it is directly because God made all things that Redemption was either necessary or desirable.

Let me quote at length from Athanasius: “It would, of course, have been unthinkable that God should go back upon His word and that man, having transgressed, should not die; But it was equally monstrous that beings which once had shared the nature of the Word should perish and turn back again into nonexistence through corruption. It was unworthy of the goodness of God that creatures made by Him should be brought to nothing through the deceit wrought upon man by the devil; and it was supremely unfitting that the work of God in mankind should disappear, either through their own negligence or through the deceit of evil spirits. As, then, the creatures whom He had created reasonable, like the Word, were in fact perishing, and such noble works were on the road to ruin, what then was God, being good, to do? Was He to let corruption and death have their way with them? In that case, what was the use of having made them in the beginning? Surely it would have been better never to have been created at all than, having been created, to be neglected and perish; and, besides that, such indifference to the ruin of His own work before His very eyes would argue not goodness in God but limitation, and that far more than if He had never created men at all. It was impossible, therefore, that God should leave man to be carried off by corruption, because it would be unfitting and unworthy of Himself.”[7]

It would be foolish ever to argue that there is no need to dwell on the grace of Creation, or on Creation at all for that matter, since it is assumed. For reasonable as the truth of creation is, it can never be assumed that any men have the faith to “understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.” (Heb. 11:3)

Were this so, there would have been no need for Athanasius to wage his heroic lifetime struggle for the biblical doctrine of the Trinity, or to write the treatise from which I have quoted. It seems that the Church in every age has to contend mightily for the doctrine of God, and specifically God the Maker of all things, visible and invisible. But certainly in our day not even the giddiest pollyana could for a moment persuade himself that the Genesis account of Creation is commonly assumed to be true. I say the Genesis account, for if this is not true, there is no knowledge available to man about Creation.

I think it would be safe to say that even an overwhelming majority of Christians who are committed to some concept of the Lordship of Jesus Christ are embarrassed by the Creation narrative and would rather not talk about it. You all know of those who have resorted to such strange notions as the gap theory, or theistic evolution. And think of those in the liberal camp who don’t even bother with this. These seemingly disparate groups all have one thing in common: they reject the historical truth of the Genesis record.

And I think it is impossible to accept a historical record that is either undated or is wrongly dated. One may certainly correct Ussher’s dating: but to laugh at it is to mock the Scriptures as containing no reliable dating at all. And the very silence about the grace of Creation is eloquent testimony to the fact that it may by no means be taken as a common assumption with no need for the kind of searching and study and preaching that is required for the grace of redemption.

Before we can hope to recover the full doctrines of grace so as to include the grace of Creation, it will be necessary to deal publicly and openly with what is certainly a common assumption: That assumption is that evolution is true, and that somehow the facts which prove evolution to be true are to be found in observable data recorded in so-called science. Just plain honest reason demands that if evolution is true: if it be established even that the earth is millions of years old — let alone billions—then the Genesis narrative is not true. If it is not true, it is false. And if it is false, the whole foundation of Christian doctrine, of biblical doctrine, is destroyed.

If there is anything certain about the doctrines of grace, it is that they rule out any hint of worthiness, or deserving, on the part of the recipients. “If it be of works, then it is no more grace.” (Romans 11:6).

But the basic principle underlying evolutionary thought has to be that “It is not He that hath made us, but we have made ourselves.” This applies not only to man, but to the whole created order. What is it when the creature adapts itself to certain conditions but that it is improved by its own works? Most evolutionary dreamers don’t hesitate to attribute to the little water creature the power to have grown its own wings. The term “natural selection,” if it means instinctive selection, is self-contradictory for to be selective implies conscious and deliberate work. And “survival of the fittest” is a raw, savage attribution of fitness and excellence to tooth and claw war to the death as the path to perfection and goodness.

Whether one think of adaptation of the species to new environments, or of natural selection, or of elimination of the weaker in a vast cosmic struggle, it is impossible to escape from merit on the part of the creature. I cannot see how it helps one whit to try to rescue some semblance of piety by saying, “Well, God is the author of evolution.” Besides speaking a logical absurdity, such a notion still, it seems to me, assumes merit on the part of the creature. There has to have been some merit on the part of each creature whom God selected to survive at the cost of its rivals: for its very survival is said to be its testimony of merit. Even if it be said that it is God who imparted the superior quality to that creature which he ordained to survive, still it follows that God chose that creature because it had an intrinsic worth over and above that which did not survive.

For while in Romans St. Paul opposes grace with works, the Pauline doctrine as a whole opposes grace with merit of any kind—either earned or imparted. There is a smouldering, twisted passion for reliance upon worth and merit in any concept of evolution, be it theistic or clear-sightedly atheistic.

If God’s choice is sovereign and arbitrary and governed by no value or consideration outside Himself, then it cannot be that he conducted billions of years of progressive creation by which he slowly selected those creatures that were fittest to survive. “The Lord did not set his love upon you, nor choose you, because ye were more in number than any other people; for ye were the fewest of all people: But because the Lord loved you, and because he would keep the oath which he had sworn unto your fathers.” Deut. 7:7.

The Lord did not choose you because you walk on two feet. He did not choose you because you learned to think and to speak. He did not choose you because you were fairer, or stronger, or more ferocious than other species that you wiped out. The Lord made you what you are. And this making, this act of special creation, is the Supreme Act of Sovereignty which exhibits God as he may be known to man in all his dazzling attributes and marvelous glory. It is the very source of justice. It is the ground of Providence and, as I have shown, of Redemption.

Job never knew God until he was confronted with Him as Creator of all things. “Then the Lord answered job out of the whirlwind, and said, ‘Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me. Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare if thou hast understanding.”‘ (Job 38:1–4). With these words, says Dhorme, “Yahve reduces the problem to a question of origins.”[8]

And job, when he was made to look square into the face of the marvels of God’s creative work and his governance of all that He had made, cried, “I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee. Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” (Job 42:5, 6).

Here, we might say, is a sermon from on high which brought a man to repentance, not by berating him for his sins, but by unfolding the marvel of God’s Creative and Providential work. Creation is Paul’s final answer to the vexing grace of election: “Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?” (Rom 9:21).

Creation is the premise of all sovereignty, all grace, the grace of law, the grace of order, the grace of election, the grace of justification, sanctification and eternal life. “Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own?” (Matt. 20:15). These words of the parable are put in the mouth of the owner of the vineyard, but they clearly instruct us about God.

It is the power of dominion, or ownership, which God gave to man that most closely describes the image of God in which man was made. All the other human qualities, such as reason, contribute to man’s overall capacity to have dominion. “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion.” (Gen. 1:26) .

Just as marriage shows us the relationship that is betwixt Christ and His Church, so man’s power to own (a power which belongs only to a man) shows us the relationship between God and the whole of Creation. What a man owns he may use or dispose of in any manner it pleases him without accounting to any other human being: it is lawful for him to do what he will with his own. This reflects God by whom and in whom and through whom all things exist and have their being.

Man has a delegated power of ownership. So we may say without irreverence it is by His grace that what he owns is well taken care of—or not, for that matter. But God, who delegated this power of dominion, has by virtue of having created all things out of nothing, unmitigated sovereignty over all things in heaven and in earth.

Anything else is unthinkable. Granted, this startling truth poses many difficulties for the human mind that is impious or uninstructed or both. Nevertheless, the God of the Bible is this Creator: nothing higher can be imagined, and that is God. “Hearken unto me, O Jacob and Israel, my called; I am he; I am the first, I also am the last. Mine hand also bath laid the foundation of the earth, and my right hand bath spanned the heavens: when I call unto them, they stand up together.” (Isa 48:12, 13).

The Maker is greater than all the he makes. God has made all things. Here is seated sovereignty, authority, power, justice, mercy, grace. The very word “authority” derives from authorship which bestows ownership and dominion. God is not Sovereign because He Redeemed. God Redeemed because He is Sovereign.

Ernest F. Kevan tells us that “The Puritans emphasized the God relatedness of human life and the moral obligations resulting from man’s creation by God. They held that the obligation to obey derived from the creature-Creator relation, and that the right to command arose from the Creator-creature relation. On this ground, therefore, they maintained that the obligation to obedience and the right to command remained undiminished either by the Fall or through the intervention of grace.”[9] The right to command is certainly a facet of sovereignty and the doctrines of grace.

There is another consideration in regard to God as Creator without which I think the whole notion of grace is impaired, if not lost: and that is that there is no reason why God created, no motive, no incentive, no need, other than sheer love which is received as grace. I have heard it often said, especially in this day of careless and uninstructed preaching about love, that God created the universe, and especially man, because he needed an object for his love. I have even heard it said God needed to be loved by man in return. But such a thing cannot be said of the Creator of all things, and is not in accord with true love. It may seem to accord very well with attempts to persuade that love is important, and that God values grace very highly. But it cannot be attributed to Him who is eternal, and therefore self-existing, complete in himself and lacking in no way.

Charnock, writing of the goodness of God, says, “God is good in himself, and to himself, i.e. highly amiable to himself; and therefore some define it a perfection of God, whereby he loves himself and his own excellency; but as it stands in relation to his creatures, it is that perfection of God whereby he delights in his works, and is beneficial to them. God is the highest goodness because he doth not act for his own profit but for his creatures’ welfare, and the manifestation of his own goodness. He sends out his beams, without receiving any addition to himself, or substantial advantage from his creatures.”[10]

What better portrayal of grace can there be? And this had to do not only with a grace and goodness that extends towards sinners, but toward all that He has made.

Those attributes of God which cannot be separated from Him as Creator—His eternity, His goodness, His power, His wisdom, and whatever else may be seen—show us that this grace, this unmerited favor, is inherent in His being. It is impossible that any creature could deserve to be created: or that one could deserve to be selected for competitive advancement over other creatures.

During roughly the last 15 or 20 years, there has been in this country what must be seen as a Providential appearance of strong support from men of science for the historical truth of Creation as in the Genesis narrative. Their support is based upon the evidences of observable data, commonly called scientific data, and upon right reason. The effort is not to prove or demonstrate the truth of Creation scientifically, but to show that sound scientific analysis accords far better with Genesis than with any of the countless theories of evolution that have been advanced. More to the point here is that, by approaching the question from scientific observations and analysis, these men have thrown much light on the meaning of Creation and have opened the understanding to its implications.

For example, Dr. Henry Morris has made much of the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics, not only in support of the fact of special creation but also to illustrate the vast difference between presently observable processes in nature and the unique work of creation ex nihilo.[11] One of the most certainly established laws of science, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, is a scientific way of saying what always has been commonly known—that time and change cause decay. Reason alone shows that no one could observe special creation ex nihilo taking place: it is not subject to proof by this means. But it helps me greatly to understand what this means when a man of science explains that there is no process in nature that is not one of corruption: therefore natural processes cannot reveal how things were created. The door is closed even to imagining what happened in those first six days by comparison with what is going on now: for what is going on now is change and decay, as the hymn writer saw. Perhaps this, too, opens a better understanding of the total dependence of all things upon God’s sovereign grace, not only for redemption but for our very being.

I must mention one other phase of these scientific creationists, even though it is not directly connected with the manifestation of God’s grace. That is the question of the probable age of the natural or created order as may be estimated by observable data. Perhaps no single question is more important to the acceptance or rejection of the truth of the grace of Creation. Many have demonstrated how untenable are the schemes by which estimates of billions of years have been advanced. But it seems to me those who have produced many lines of evidential speculation to show a very young age of the universe are far more important.

There is not time here even to list the various evidences that have been worked out by men like Drs. Harold Slusher and Tom. Barnes of the University of Texas at El Paso. But it should be much more widely known that one line of reasoning after another has led to the conclusion that the universe cannot be more than 10, 000 years old, and that it most probably is precisely as old as the chronology of the Bible would have it. Dr. Slusher has even shown that if light moves in what we call Riemanian space rather than Euclidian—and this seems very likely—then light from a star measured at mathematical infinity would reach the earth in 15.7 years![12] This material is available in books and publications, especially the Creation Research Quarterly, and provides a vast resource for illustration and exposition for teaching the grace of God as manifested in Creation, and the utter dependence of all creatures upon our Maker for all that we have.

The grace of redemption cannot rightly be separated from the grace of Creation; and if Creation is not a historical fact, neither is the doctrine of grace which it reveals.

Notes

1. Gustaf Wingren, Creation and Law (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, Ltd., 1961)
2. Ibid., p. 3.
3. Louis Berkhof, Manual of Christian Doctrine, (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1933), p. 67.
4. Thomas F. Torrance, The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers, (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, Ltd., 1948), p. 21.
5. H. R. Mackintosh, The Christian Apprehension of God, (1934), quoted in Torrance, above, p. 12, n. 3.
6. Athanasius, The Incarnation of the Word of God, trans. by A Religious of C.S.M.V., (New York: MacMillan Co., 1946), p. 33.
7. Ibid., p. 32.
8. E. Dhome, A Commentary on the Book of Job, trans. by Harold Knight, (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd., 1967), p. 576.
9. Ernest F. Kevan, The Grace of Law, (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1965) p. 262.
10. Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, (Reissue Photolithoprinted at Ann Arbor: Cushing-Malloy, Inc. 1969), p. 542.
11. Henry M. Morris and John C. Whitcomb, Jr., The Genesis Flood, (Philadelphia: The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1961), see esp. pp. 222-227.
12. See article in Science and Scripture, March-April 1971, Beaumont, Texas, entitled A Scientist Explains. Dr. Slusher has since joined the staff of the Institute for Creation Research, San Diego, California.