Apostles' Creed: God, Father, Creator

I believe in God, the Father Almighty,

      maker of heaven and earth,

      and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord:

Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,

      born of the Virgin Mary,

      suffered under Pontius Pilate,

      was crucified, died, and was buried: He descended into hell.

The third day He arose again from the dead.

He ascended into heaven,

      and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty.

From there He will come to judge the living and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit,

      the holy catholic* church,

      the communion of saints,

      the forgiveness of sins,

      the resurrection of the body,

      and the life everlasting.

Amen

Faith and Belief are interesting words. We say that we have belief in a certain thing, and yet too often our actions belie a very different belief. Faith and belief are often dictated to be only about God or some other religion. The truth is that both are connected much closer to what is deep within us, what or who we trust. You can have faith and not believe in a God. Faith is simply a trusting in a person or thing. I have faith that the skyscraper that I work in will not fall. I wasn’t here when it was built, but I have faith that the architects and builders did a good job. I put my faith in the fact that it looks stable and it’s been standing for several years. This faith comes easily. It makes sense. Similarly belief is to trust in something, but something that is much harder to prove. I know very little about micro chemistry and a little more about physics. However I have no way of disproving the god partial or dark matter. Before these things where proven by science, the general public had to believe that science was telling them the truth: that the theories were true.

However, faith and belief are not built in a void. When I say that I believe God exists, I’m not saying that I’m sticking my head in the sand. Science has yet to prove that God doesn’t exist. And the fact that many prominent scientists today are Christian or follow some other religion, gives credence to the fact that Science might be closer to proving God then disproving him. (see this wiki article for a list of past and present Christian thinkers in science). Not that it matters whether we can prove God’s existence or not. We all believe in something: whether it is God or the fact that there is no God.

I would argue that belief is not the problem. The problem is what we believe. Many people believe in a god of some sort: whether he is a ‘nice’ entity who answers our prayers and gives off a warm fuzzy feeling, or an ‘evil’ being having fun playing with the little human below. When I say ‘I believe in God’, I am saying the kind of God that I believe in. God (with an uppercase), is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He is the God that brought the Israelites out of Egypt.

But the Apostles’ Creed doesn’t stop with ‘I believe in God’; rather it continues to speak to God’s character. ‘The Father Almighty’: God is not just the God of Israel, he is our Father. When Christ taught his disciples to pray, He opened the prayer with ‘Our Father’. God as a father reminds us that God is good and he cares for his children. Almighty means that he is enough above all others; he is to be first in our lives. But greater then father or might is the fact that God is ‘the creator of heaven and earth’. This act of creation, gives God authority. If God is the author of creation, of our lives, then he is capable of amazing and wonderful things. God’s power in creation reminds us of the image we bear. We are made in his image. We can call him father. He is the Almighty God, maker of heaven and earth, of the seen and unseen.

So when I say: ‘I believe in God, the Father almighty, Creator of heaven and earth’, I am saying that that belief is evident in my life. Terrifyingly I state this every week in church, out loud among my community. I often wonder if my faith, my belief in God and his character is evident in my life. If what I state every week, has indeed permeated the whole of me. Sometimes, I look back at my week and see time and time again when I didn’t really act out of belief, but rather out of fear. Times when I gave God less of a position in my life then my own creations and earthly hopes. I need the reminder that God is the Almighty one, my Father, my creator, and my God.