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The First Article In the Large Catechism where he discusses the first article of the Creed, Luther asks the following question, “What kind of God do you have? What do you know about Him?” And his answer is this, “First, my God is the Father who made heaven and earth. I take nothing and no one else as God except Him alone, for there simply is no one else who could have made heaven and earth.” A bit later Luther zeros in on the phrase “Maker of heaven and earth” and explains it this way: “What I mean to say and what I believe is that I am a creation of God, that is, He gave me and continuously preserves for me my body, soul, and life, my bodily members great and small, all my senses, my reason and intellect, and so on, also food and drink, clothing, livelihood, wife and child, servants, house and home, etc.; besides this He causes the necessities and comforts of life to be provided for me by everything in creation--the sun, the moon, the stars in the sky, day and night, air, fire, water, the earth and all that it can produce, birds, fish, animals, grains and all manner of produce. He also gives whatever other physical and temporal blessings there may be, such as good government, peace, security.” There are, of course, many people today who no longer believe this. They think the world both came into being and runs on its own. Others say God gave things a little push in the beginning, but now everything works without Him. This belief comes from picturing the creation as a big machine. We have discovered more and more about how this machine works, and many have concluded that God is nowhere to be found. The machine works just find without Him. There are many problems with this belief. What do we know about complex machines? Take your car as an example. Do cars come into existence on their own, without a designer and skilled labor? And what would happen if no one worked on it to maintain it? You may know much about how a car works. But surely you would not propose that the forces involved in the operation of the car created it in the first place. Nor do these forces maintain the car. In a similar way, should we not conclude that an intelligent Designer is needed to create and maintain the universe? Although we cannot see God at work maintaining the creation, we should realize that His sustaining hand is needed. Tools do nothing on their own. They do useful work only when they are in the hands of an intelligent being. We know much more about the creation than the people of Luther’s day. But what we know does not overthrow what we confess in the Creed. We should remember that we cannot produce or preserve even the smallest blessing on our own. Everything we have comes directly or indirectly from the hand of our heavenly Father. As Luther points out, the sun, rain, animals, plants, government, etc. are all tools God uses to give us what we need in this life. The problem we have is that we often forget that God is behind these tools. We become proud and imagine that we have produced the good things we have on our own. We think, for example, that modern farming techniques will produce the food we need. Or we trust modern medicine to maintain our health. None of the advances that have been made since Luther’s day have changed the reality of our situation. Without God’s blessing, the seeds we plant and the medicine we take would be useless. Thus we should thank God for the many blessings that He has placed all around us. We should not forget His great generosity. He richly provides the things we need in this life. Not only has God given us eternal blessings in Christ, He also is concerned about our physical needs. As Jesus assures us in Matthew 7: “Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? ... If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!” |
