St. Andrew's Episcopal Church
Ayer, Massachusetts
Faith, Community, and Love
We Believe: A Simple Exposition of the Creeds
CHAPTER III. WE BELIEVE IN GOD THE FATHER
What We Mean by God
"I BELIEVE IN GOD." "I BELIEVE IN ONE GOD."
The word "God" is one of the hardest words in our language to explain or define. It is short and easy to use, but the wisest are perplexed when they try to say what it means. That is not because it means so little, but because it means so much. It is always easier to define small things than great things; much simpler to tell someone what we mean by a rose than what we mean by beauty.
One line we can follow to discover what men have in mind when they use the word "God" is to gather together some of the other words they use in place of it. In the Bible, in prayers and hymns, God is often spoken of as "the Most High," "the Lord," "the Lord of all power and might," "the Rock of Ages." He is sometimes spoken of as "the Everlasting Arms" and as One "who was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be."
From words and sayings like these we can see certain things that are at the heart of what men mean by "God." He is the rock-bottom fact about our universe, the power that is back of it or over it, the one that can be depended upon and does not change. He is also the best we can know or imagine. To love God is to love the Best, not second-best. To trust God is to trust the most dependable. St. Paul wrote of certain people "whose god is their belly." It is commonly said of some men that money is their god. When we say that some people make money their god we mean that they care more about money than anything else and trust the power of money more than anything else. In doing that they make an idol, for an idol is a false god, a god not worthy of all our trust and all our love.
Another way to discover what men mean by "God" is to observe how they act and feel in His presence. Wherever we find men conscious of God we find certain acts and feelings.
We find worship, adoration, sacrifice, prayer. We find reverence, humility, a feeling of mystery and dependence, trust and devotion. When they are aware of God, men feel their own littleness and uncleanness; they feel moved to kneel or stand; they want to give Him the best they have and praise His greatness. We can say then that God is the One whom men worship, on whom men feel that they depend, to whom they owe everything. The real atheist or man-without-a-God is he who has found nothing or no one whom he worships and trusts and knows himself called to serve with full devotion.
Belief in God is not just one more belief added to our other beliefs, as though we added a belief that there is a race of yellow men to our belief in a white or black race, or as though we accepted the idea that we have an uncle in Chicago about whom we had not previously heard. Belief in God must become our ruling belief or it is not really what it claims to be. What we think about God has to do with what we think about everything, about our neighbors, who also belong to God; our possessions, for they come from God; about our work, which is only good if it is done for God. What we believe about God is very close to what we believe about all of life, where it comes from, where it is headed, what we are to live for.
Christians are those who love and trust God as they have come to know Him through Jesus and in Jesus. They trust the Living Power whom He trusted and see that Living Power at work most clearly in His life. They love and serve the Living Goodness whom He served and find that Living Goodness embodied in His Life.
If we could read the life of Christ freshly, without ever having heard of God or religion, the fact that would stand out most would be that He lived constantly with Someone Else. In addition to the mind within His own life and all the human minds about Him, He was sure of Another Mind. That Other Mind really understood things and Christ knew that the way to understand things is to get in touch with the thoughts of God. Christ had a will of His own and knew that there were wills in the human lives of His neighbors. But He was conscious of Another Will who had the right purpose for Him and His neighbors. He called that Other Will the Will of God. The things worth caring for were the things God cared for. The things worth doing were the things that God willed. The first commandment or rule of life for Him was to love the perfect Will of God, or to seek first His rule or kingdom in our lives. He found this Someone Else making His Will known in the moral law, through the minds of the prophets, in the needs of men, in the opportunities and demands which life brings to us.
When we join in the opening words of the creeds we declare our faith in the Living Will whom Jesus served and in calling Him "God" we confess that this Living Will is for us the rock-bottom fact on which our lives depend and the Perfect Goodness who claims our loyal service.
"The Father"
We have already noticed some of the many names men have used for God. Jesus used most often the name "Father." When He prayed He always began, "Father." The prayer He taught His disciples begins, "Our Father." In speaking of the relation between God and man He often used parables of fatherhood, such as that of the father who had two sons or that of the father who knew how to give good gifts unto his children. To understand His words we must remember that the Jewish father of His time was not a playmate or easy companion to his children as modern fathers often are. The father in a fine Jewish family was a wise and loving ruler, whose commands called for absolute obedience. He had authority in his household and the children felt respect for him as well as love. Though Jesus did not address God as a king, He often spoke of Him as a king. His God was a royal Father, with all the majesty of a great ruler. He spoke of God as a great Lord, who put His servants in charge of His possessions and expected them to manage His possessions faithfully. His God was the world's King and the rightful Master of men's lives. But His favorite name for God was "Father."
When we try to find a name that will help us to think of God truly, we have to take a word which we have learned in our every-day doings. Since we are human beings, we can only think of God with our human thoughts. We look at the earth and the stars, the workings of heat and electricity and chemicals, and we see that they are orderly. We see law in the way they act. Some have thought that "Law" would be the best name for God. It is Law, they say, that rules all things. Law is what we must obey and depend upon. But a law, in the sense that science uses the word, does not make anything happen. It is just the order men find when they observe carefully the happenings in nature. We cannot worship a law. It does not care. It has no purpose and no power of itself.
We watch the living things about us, plants and animals, and give the name "Life" to that which is in all that grows. There is Life in us and all about us. There are those who think that "Life" is the best word for God. God is the Life in everything. But life is not the highest and deepest thing we know until it becomes the Spirit. Only then does it think and have purposes and care for what is good. The highest kind of life on earth is the personal life we find in men. And the highest kind of human life is found in the great thinkers, artists, rulers, saints. In them we see spirit mastering things and shaping them into beauty and goodness. What we find in them is the best clue we have as to the nature of God. Jesus thought of God as the Wise One, the Great Ruler, the Maker of Beauty, the Holy One, but even more He thought of Him as the Loving Will who cares most for the spirits of men because they belong to Him, who desires to share His best gifts with His children, and stands ready to forgive all the wrongdoings of men if only they will return to Him. Jesus chose the simple, human word "Father" as the name for God because it expressed what was uppermost in His thoughts of God.
Following Him, we believe in God "the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ." We are not cogs in a vast machine or animals in a huge park, but children in a home. The people around us are not cogs in a machine and we disagree with God when we use them simply as tools to gain our own ends. The things we own and use and enjoy are not just "luck." They are what the Father has given us in accordance with His will for the common good. Our attitude to life is only true to this faith in "the Father" when it is humble, trusting, grateful, brotherly. We "hallow" His name of "Father," exalt it and make much of it only by living as sons and brothers.
"Almighty"
Men have always admired strength. Their heroes have been strong men, like Hercules and Samson, who could lift great weights. They have admired the strength of a horse or an ox and the strength of the "strong mountains." We still admire strength. We are thrilled by the strength of those who can drive a ball further than the rest of us or endure the strain of a long climb or swim many miles through cross currents.
As men grow wiser they come to see that there are many kinds of strength. There is the strength of Goliath that came from mere height and weight and largeness of muscle and bone. There is also the strength of David that came from skill and swiftness and the will to win. And David defeated Goliath. We see the strength of mind outwitting the strength of muscle. We see the strength of goodness outlasting the strength of money. Thousands remember and honor the name of St. Francis, but who knows the richest man who lived in the days of St. Francis? Pontius Pilate was a strong man in his day. He ruled over a province and could decide whether men could live or die. But we remember him only because he had something to do with the life of Jesus.
Jesus had a great deal to say about real power and greatness. He was constantly upsetting people's ideas on that subject. "You think," He said, "that the great men are those who lord it over their fellows. The truly great are those who serve their fellows." They are the people who in the long run get the most done and persuade the most people to follow them. "You think the best way to deal with an ememy is to do him one worse. If he hits you, hit him harder. I say that the greatest achievement is to make a friend of him. That is harder to do and can only be done by the strength of love." There is an old Christian hymn which we constantly use in our services that carries out the idea. "He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek." The idea is that the power of God may not be on the side of those whom men commonly call strong.
Men have always admired the strength of God. For "power," the power in which we shall finally put our trust, is an essential part of what men mean by God. They have wondered at the strength of Zeus, who could "hurl thunderbolts." They have marveled at the power which could keep "the stars in their courses." To begin with, men admired the brute strength of God. He was "the Lord mighty in battle." As they grew wiser they came to admire even more the wisdom of God, His patience, His self-restraint, the strength of His character. The Almightiness in which Christians trust is not the strength of brute force or possessions or the power to command; it is the Almightiness of the Father. The highest power that God has is the power of love to overcome evil and create an answering love. It is not so much the power to compel as the power to attract; more like the power of beauty to win our admiration or truth to gain our free assent or love to gain our affection and trust than the power of a heavy machine to hammer things into shape. That was the kind of power that Jesus trusted even when He saw the strength of the Roman Empire and and His enemies united to kill Him. And the power He gained from communion with the Father was of this same sort. He did not compel things to happen as He wished, but when they happened He was ready to use them for His own good purposes. He did not compel men to follow Him. He drew them into His service. He was sure that this kind of power rules in heaven and will remain when the powers of this world have passed away. He believed in a "Father Almighty."
"Maker of heaven and earth, And of all things visible and invisible"
One of the oldest questions with which men have wrestled is the question as to how the world as we know it came into being. It is still one of the questions that interests us most. But though this question is one, there are two different ways in which men come to it. We may wonder what the world was like at the beginning, by what stages things came to be as we now see them, how old the world is. That is the concern of science. Or we may wonder what kind of power lies back of everything, whether the world came into being because some great Purpose was at work and what that Purpose was. That is the interest of religion.
The Bible opens with a story of Creation. Plainly those who wrote that story were not writing as historians, who base their work on carefully tested records of the past, or as scientists, who seek to put many pieces of evidence together to make a reasonable picture of how things happen. The great concern of the men who wrote the Bible was to declare their faith that the power back of all things is the Purpose or Will of God. Believing that, they used their imagination freely to picture God at work in the beginnings of things. They did not care so much how long Creation took or in just what order things were created. They cared greatly whether or not God was back of it all.
For thousands of years that was the only story of Creation which men possessed. But in the last two hundred years scientists have been giving us a new story of Creation. They have had to use their imaginations also, but their imaginations have had more accurate materials on which to work. They have had the records given us in the rocks, the remains of prehistoric animals in the earth, the clues to be found in the family relationship between the many forms of life. As a result we know that the heavens and the earth are many times older than the people of the Old Testament ever dreamed. We know that the world we see and the innumerable forms of life about us did not all begin to be at one time. We imagine the earth being drawn off the whirling gasses of the sun and started on its endless journeying in space and then cooling and hardening and being shaped into the globe upon which we live. We picture life beginning, perhaps by some mingling of the materials of the earth, and then evolving into the great family of life leading up to Man.
Careful students of the Bible have discovered that two ancient stories of Creation have been joined together in the early chapters of Genesis. The earlier and more childlike form of the story is found in the second chapter. There God is pictured as making things somewhat as a man fashions a piece of pottery with his hands. He "formed Man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life." In the first chapter of the same book we find the later and more majestic story in which God's thought and will bring things into being by their own mysterious power. "God said, Let their be light: and there was light." Our own thought of Creation develops somewhat as did that of those ancient writers. At first we think of God in a childlike way, making things as a man makes them with his hands. As we grow we come to see that this is an unworthy and childish picture and think of God's thought and will shaping and moving all things more as our thought utters itself in our action or as an artist clothes his dreams in a great picture or a great book. God's creative power is the power of Reason and Spirit indwelling and shaping the materials of the universe so that they fulfill His purpose.
Creation is not something that happened long ago and was then ended. It is going on all the time. God is constantly creating new things, changing the "scene," creating new "characters," like a writer working on a very long story. He creates tomorrow out of today, plants out of soil and air and light, men out of animals, saints out of common human nature. His Spirit is forever moving "on the face of the waters." This constant work of creation He shares in a measure with us. That is part of our sonship. We have the power to make ourselves and the people and things about us. We can dream and plan and shape. We do a good work and play a good part when we work with the purpose of God by letting the Spirit and Will of God work in and through us.
Continue to Chapter IV. We Believe in the Son--Who is He?