What is Biblical Creation?
Dr. Donald Chittick

Biblical Creation is supernatural, which means the Creator spoke things into existence as opposed to some naturalistic process (evolution). Creation is the idea that the world is dependent moment by moment on the Creator. Biblical Creation is also ex nihilo; this means ‘creation out of nothing but pure spiritual power’. (Psalm 33:6, 9). The Creator did not need matter, energy, time or anything else. God is the Creator of the entire material universe. He is the self-existent Being, already existing at the moment the universe began.

Why Is Biblical Creation Important?
When I lecture on university and high school campuses, I seldom use the word ‘God’; instead, I use the word ‘Creator’. Creation identifies God as Creator. God is not an idea, a moral standard, or the universe itself. All of scripture supports that point.

Creation identifies man. Man was made in the image of the Creator. Man can communicate, has a mind, spirit, emotions, exercises free will, is creative, etc. God created man’s body and breathed life into it. It is not merely a stack of chemicals that arrived by natural processes.

Creation is the basis of the Gospel. Man was created perfect, but in Genesis 3 we have the account of the Fall where man used his will in an attempt to become autonomous and independent of the Creator. The total man fell.

Up until the Fall, the Creator’s word was man’s test and standard for truth. All ideas were compared to what the Creator said. Any idea that did not agree was wrong because the Creator would not lie. After the fall, man was no longer in tune with the Creator and became emotionally estranged from God and angry with Him. Man fell ‘intellectually’ when he was tempted to use his own standards of truth, and substitute his own opinions for the Creator’s absolute truth standard.

Originally, man was not created to die. Death is abnormal. Death entered the world when man sinned and the consequences of that sin affected the entire creation (Rom. 8:22). Because of sin, the total man has to be converted spiritually, emotionally, morally (repentance) and intellectually. He has to again move back to the Creator’s word as his test for truth (Romans 12:2). Conversion, which involves a renewed mind, may include all four steps at once - spiritual, emotional, moral and intellectual. Often it does, but many times, it does not. I was spiritually converted, emotionally converted and morally converted before I was intellectually converted. It took a long time for me to sort out all the issues.

Before conversion, man tries to cover his moral guilt by intellectualizing God out of the picture. One way he did this was to invent a naturalistic belief system such as evolution. Evolutionism is man’s way of interpreting all of his experience and all factual reality into a worldview independent of God.

One basic assumption everyone must make concerns the nature of the material universe. Instead of referring to the universe as the ‘creation’, the man who seeks to remain autonomous calls it ‘nature’. Nature is considered to be autonomous, like a self-running machine is to be independent of outside influences. One who believes in naturalism (evolutionism) has redefined ‘science’ to mean an autonomous approach to nature. So it is clear that creationism and evolutionism are differing worldviews. As different faiths, they are philosophically in conflict. To try to harmonize the two is logically impossible.

Scripture makes some interesting predictions about attitudes and conditions in the last days just before the return of Messiah. One prediction is that scoffers will arise and their scoffing will be aimed at the idea of Creation. The idea that the heavens resulted from God’s command will not be tolerated. Second, men will deny the worldwide flood of the days of Noah. And third, this denial will be in spite of vast amounts of evidence. We should not be surprised when people fail to believe, no matter how good our evidence.

In the final analysis, Biblical creation not only serves as a good basis for science, but for all of life. Best of all, creation brings ‘meaning’ to the totality of man’s existence.