Quotes about Creation

Oh, God, You have given me a vacant soul, an untaught conscience, a life of clay. Put Your big hands around mine and guide my hands as a teacher guides the childish fingers that hold their first crayon, so that everytime I make a mark on this life, it will be Your mark. When my hands mold this clay, may the impressions be, in reality, made by the movement of Your hands and directed by Your perfect thoughts.

Destruction is a form of creation.

The main characters in a novel must necessarily have some kinship to the author, they come out of his body as a child comes from the womb, then the umbilical cord is cut, and they grow into independence. The more the author knows of his own character the more he can distance himself from his invented characters and the more room they have to grow in.

A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious.

As the New Testament and the church tradition teach, the life of God is nothing other than the perfect love that eternally unites the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and this Triune God spoke creation into being with the ultimate goal of inviting humans to share in this life. This is what God created us to long for!

In a creation populated with free agents, God doesn't always get what he wants. Augustine and the church tradition that followed him were simply mistaken when they insisted that the will of the omnipotent is always undefeated. Because God desires a creation in which love is a reality, he allows his will to be defeated to some extent.

We miss the full force of the imago Dei concept if we simply identify it with various ways humans are distinct from animals (e.g., reason, morality, love). The biblical concept instructs us as to how we are like God, not just how we are different from animals. To discover the meaning of the imago Dei, we must pay close attention to the way Scripture speaks about it.

This understanding of God provides the key to understanding what the Bible means when it declares that humans are made "in the image of God." The imago Dei means that humans, like God, are essentially beings who exist in relationship. We are created to exist in relationship with God and with each other. To the extent that we live in isolation from God and from each other, we are not fully human.

This view is not traditional. Opponents of the restoration view of creation often object that this view has few representatives in the church tradition. This is true, but two observations qualify its force as an objection. First, evangelicals, and Protestants in general, look to Scripture as their sole authority in matters of doctrine. Therefore, while the absence of precedent for a view should make us cautious, it cannot itself constitute a decisive objection.

The "days" of Genesis 1 are part of a literary structure that serves to support the theological claim that Yahweh-God alone is Creator-King! They are not meant to satisfy modern curiosity as to how long it took God to create the world.

The literary framework view not only avoids this problem but actually explains it. The order of the days is not meant to reflect the chronology of creation. It is rather meant to express thematically the problems of darkness, watery abyss, formlessness, and void expressed in Genesis 1:2. 4.

Disagreements over the interpretation of Genesis 1 are not new. Early church fathers such as Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Augustine wrestled with this issue hundreds of years ago. However, the debate within Christian circles over the age of creation has intensified during the last 150 years, largely in response to the Darwinian theory of evolution.