Creation: It’s All Music — Creatio ex Nihilo, Gift, and Covenant
Creation: It’s All Music
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” The Bible’s opening line presents a bold assertion about God’s creative reach: he made everything. The idea that God created all things has been a foundational doctrine of the church from its earliest days. Scripture never tries to defend this claim with arguments; it simply declares God’s magnificent work in passages like Genesis 1:1.
The church has depended on its theologians to uphold this grand declaration. While the Bible offers no defense of creation out of nothing, this teaching was remarkably radical for its time.
Creatio ex Nihilo
Ancient creation myths nearly always followed a familiar pattern. They featured an eternal, always-existing substance or material, paired with an eternal mind that could shape that material into the world we know. Whether the stories described the mind and material forming the world violently or cooperatively, the core components stayed the same.
The most refined version of this creation narrative comes from Plato. He taught that, first, there was an eternal substance called matter, the building block of all created things. Second, there existed forms—think of them as eternal blueprints of the world, but the blueprint itself is considered more real than the thing constructed. A form existed for everything from stars to doorknobs to cats. Third, there was the demiurge, something like a creator god who, upon closer inspection, resembled a mindless robot. The demiurge shaped matter into the forms it observed, thereby creating the world.
This story and similar ones dominated ancient understanding of the world’s origins. Against this backdrop, the church proclaimed its own doctrine. The church teaches that God conceived the entire world through his own wisdom. Every creature—from flaming cherubim to the Milky Way to aardvarks—was thought up by God. The Lord creatively made everything through his wisdom. And not only that, but he then brought everything he conceived into existence without using any preexisting material, solely by his power. This is what the church calls the doctrine of creation out of nothing, or creatio ex nihilo, as medieval theologians termed it.
God, without any preexisting substance or matter, called everything into being. This is exactly what creation out of nothing means: God made everything simply from his wisdom and power.
But this is not the whole picture of creatio ex nihilo. The church also teaches that God creates out of no necessity. Another ancient view held that creation happened as an overflow of God’s life and being. Under this idea, creation is not an act undertaken by God but something that necessarily follows from what he is—much like how the sun, by nature a dense ball of energy, simply radiates light. The star shines because of what it is, not because it chooses to. Some ancients, and contemporary thinkers too, pictured God this way: he could not help but create, because creation naturally overflowed from him. This leads to two implications: first, creation is not willed by God but merely happens; second, creation and God are no longer distinct. If creation is an overflow of God, it means creation is simply more of God in another form.
The church’s teaching on creation rejects this narrative. God creates freely. We see this in the creation account when God says, “Let there be…” This statement reveals the nature of God’s creative act—it is free. God decided to create, and he did so entirely by his own will. This also establishes a firm distinction between God and his creation. God did not have to create, but he chose to, making something distinct and other than himself. God freely chose to create the world.
There is another aspect of creation out of nothing to understand: God created out of no need. What this means is that God had no need for creation when he made it. Some misguided people teach that God created because he needed his creation, whether for companionship, an object to love, or even something to love him back.
The church rejects this narrative as well. The God of the Bible is the triune God, perfectly content in himself. God cannot be lonely because he is Father, Son, and Spirit, providing perfect company within himself. He has always possessed a perfect object of love in himself, as the Father loves the Son and vice versa. He has always been perfectly loved by himself, again within the Father-Son relationship. The only reason for creation we can offer is the mystery of God’s love.
When the church says God created out of nothing, it means God made the world without any material substance, without necessity, and without need.
Gift
The doctrine of creation out of nothing reveals the giftedness of creation. Since creation is a completely free act of love from God, we can call the act of creation an act of grace. God gives existence to creation as a gift to that creation. In other words, God graciously bestows existence and life. To explore this giftedness, we can return to the three aspects of creation out of nothing, but this time in reverse order.
First, God creates out of no need. This is the most critical aspect of creation’s giftedness. It is what makes creation a real gift. If God had made creation out of some need for himself, it could not be a true gift, because a gift must be for the sake of another. Only when God creates as an act of love for his creation can creation actually be a gift.
Second, creation could not be a necessary overflow of God. This would create two problems. For one, if creation flowed out of God, there would be no act of giving. Giving requires intentionality, and if creation necessarily emerged from God, there could never be intentional giving from God. Additionally, if creation were merely an overflow of God taking a new form, then God would not actually be giving to another entity. As long as creation is simply God, there is only God and no recipient of the gift. It is only when God freely creates that he is first able to give with intentionality and second to have a recipient to give to.
Third, creation had to be wholly made by God so that the gift could be wholly from God. If God had used some preexistent substance, the gift would not entirely come from him. There would always be that substance that could receive praise or gratitude apart from God. Since God created everything according to his wisdom and power, he is the sole giver of the gift of creation.
Creation is a gift of love to creation, wholly from God. This gift of existence and life is given to all of God’s creatures, but especially to humanity. In Genesis 1, creation leads up to humanity. The first six days prepare a space for humans to live, and we see hints that creation exists for human use. God does give the aardvark existence as a gift to the aardvark itself, but ultimately the aardvark exists for the sake of humanity. The gift of creation is ultimately given to humanity to open up the possibility of knowing the gift giver.
God does not give creation its existence in an uninterested way. Rather, he gives this gift so that it may be used in a very specific way: for knowing the triune God. Humanity has an obligation to respond properly to God. He has given us existence and life so that we might know Existence himself, Life himself. What then should we do in response? Give praise, of course.
Covenant
God did not make humanity as an addendum to creation but as its climax. He made creation as a means for us to covenantally know him—in other words, creation is the basis for covenant. This may seem obvious, but humanity needed a created order to know God. We, as finite, physical beings, need a way to encounter God. This is the purpose of creation. God created us and the world as a gift, but the gift was intended to lead us to an even better gift: the giver himself. God made creation so that we may know him.
God created the cosmos so that we would have a place to know him. Space and time, the world, exist as a place for worship. In other words, the world is a temple. Genesis 1 teaches us to understand the world as a temple. This point becomes clear through three observations about the chapter. First, the creation account describes the making of the world in language that presents it like a building: a three-tiered structure with the sky as the top floor, the earth as the ground floor, and the waters as a sort of basement. This depiction evokes the image of a house or building. Second, in the center of a temple there is usually an idol of that god, and in the center of the creation story there is also an idol of God. That idol is humanity, made in the image of God. Humanity receives unique attention and is established as creation’s image of God. Third, on the seventh day God rests. In ancient Near Eastern myths, the gods of Israel’s neighbors always rest in their temples. In Genesis 2, we see God resting. Some have said he rested because he was tired from creating, others that he rested as an example for humanity. Both explanations are unsatisfactory. In light of the ancient world, God’s rest indicates that his creation is now ready for him to dwell in it. God rests in his creation because his creation is his temple.
What does this say about creation’s role in facilitating a covenantal relationship between God and humanity? If creation is God’s cosmic temple, it means the whole world exists for the sake of worshipping and knowing God. Creation as a whole is the place where humanity encounters God. God made the world to be the space where he and humanity would know one another.
Creation is not only the place where humanity covenantally knows God but also the means by which humanity knows him. Creation is God’s communicative gift to us. This does not mean we can only know God through creation, but rather that whenever God speaks to us, he uses his created order to do so. Even in the most extreme circumstances, such as God speaking audibly and directly to a person, that person is receiving a message through human words—words that are part of the created order. God’s creation is the means by which we communicate with God.
God can use creation to communicate because his creation is spoken. The world is made from God’s words. In Genesis 1, when God creates, he says, “Let there be light,” “Let there be waters,” “Let there be…” God created through his wisdom and power, but the actual act of creation is his speaking. Everything God created is fundamentally words: cherubim, galaxies, squirrels—all are created words.
The first aspect of this spoken reality is God’s act of speaking itself. By speaking the world into existence, God began a conversation with his creation, and in that conversation, a relationship. When someone calls out to you, there are three possible responses: respond positively by calling back, respond negatively by scorning the call, or ignore the call entirely. In our case, we cannot ignore God’s call. When God calls us into existence, we cannot resist our creation. We can only respond to his creating word either positively or negatively. How we live our lives is how we respond to God’s creating word. A life pursuing God and responding with gratitude is a good response; a life rejecting God and hating him is a poor one. Since God’s creation of us happens through his spoken word, our lived lives are always a response to that word, for good or ill. Because we are created in conversation with God, we are always in relationship with him. The question is whether that relationship is healthy or self-destructive.
The second aspect is that everything from mountains to stars to zebras is inherently words and therefore acts of communication. Since creation is made of God’s words, he can use it to communicate with humanity. The church has long taught that humanity can learn about God through the created order, though the method has been debated. Too often, the church thought that learning about God in creation required special intelligence. But the spoken reality of creation suggests what is necessary is not intelligence but being a good listener. As Jesus said, “Those who have ears to hear, let him hear.” Creation shows us who God is not because of our ability to study, but because God is speaking to us through it. It does not matter how well one can observe the cosmos; if a person is closed to God, they will not see him. But the one with an open ear, willing to hear what God might say, will hear and learn of the God of the universe.
God does not arbitrarily use creation to communicate. He expresses aspects of himself appropriate to the creature he uses. For example, God would not use a rabbit to show his power. Instead, as in scripture, he often uses thunderstorms to convey his might; the thunderstorm gives only a glimpse of God’s power but points us in the right direction. The vastness of the sky gives us a sliver of an idea of God’s infinite vastness. This connection between a thing and what it signifies is called sacramental. When something is sacramental, it points beyond itself because it shares in the qualities it points to. The thunderstorm is powerful and can point to God’s power because God shared a little of his power with the storm. He spoke it into being in a way that resembles, though only slightly, what he is like.
Therefore, God can communicate with us through his creation because creatures are, by nature, God’s own words. As the psalmist says, “The heavens declare the glory of God” even though they have no speech. Why do the heavens have no speech? Because they themselves are speech. We can know about who and what God is through his creation not because we are so capable of understanding, but because God is so capable of communicating.
The third and final aspect is that the goal of all creatures is to be in harmony with God and, consequently, with one another. As Jesus taught, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’” When creation makes God its goal, it falls into harmony. We move towards God across his hummed melody of space, the heavens, and the earth. We find our tempo in the cycles of his time. And we sing our song of praise and thanksgiving as his words come together in unity. If God’s creation is a collection of words, then when they come into harmony, they become music. Creation in its glorified state will not only sing the song of the Lamb but will be the song.