The Apostles' Creed: God the Father Almighty

The Apostles’ Creed is a confession of faith. As such it not only speaks about the act of faith (i.e. “I believe”) but also its object. In what do Christians believe? Answer: God, but not just the concept of god. We believe in the one true and living God, the God who is and who has revealed himself generally in his works of creation and providence and specially in the the Holy Scriptures and the incarnation. As J.I. Packer notes on pp. 31-32 of Affirming the Apostles’ Creed, “Today’s idea is that the great divide is between those who say, ‘I believe in God’ in some sense and those who cannot say it in any sense. Atheism is seen as an enemy, paganism is not, and it is assumed that the difference between one faith and another is quite secondary. But in the Bible the great divide is between those who believe in the Christian God and those who serve idols—“gods,” that is, whose images, whether metal or mental, do not square with the self disclosure of the Creator. One wishes that some who recite ‘I believe in God’ in church each Sunday would see that what they actually mean is ‘I do not believe in God—not this God, anyhow!’”

A.W. Tozer famously said, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” The Creed begins by identifying God as “the Father.” What is meant by this designation? According to Scripture God is Father in at least two ways. First, God is a Father in relation to his Son. He eternally begets his Son. The Son is eternally begotten of him. Thus we confess in WCF 2.3: “In the unity of the Godhead there be three persons, of one substance, power, and eternity: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost: the Father is of none, neither begotten, nor proceeding; the Son is eternally begotten of the Father; the Holy Ghost eternally proceeding from the Father and the Son.” Though the Son and the Holy Spirit are also fully God, the Creed begins with the Father because he is first in order of origin in the trinitarian relations. This order of origin is not chronological. God did not become a Father when he begot his Son. There was no such when. He is always the Father who begets his Son. The Father begets; the Son is begotten. This is why the Apostles often refer to the Father as God in relation to the Son whom they typically designate as Lord (cf. John 3:16; 1 Cor. 12:6; 2 Cor. 13:14; Heb. 1:5; 1 Pet. 3:3; Jude 1). It is also why The Apostles’ Creed begins with God the Father.

But there is another sense in which God is designated Father. He is also, eternally, the heavenly Father of all his adopted children within the creation. Thus Jesus taught his disciples to pray, saying, “Our Father in heaven…” And the Apostle encourages the Romans, writing, “For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs-heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him” (Romans 8:14-17). We also confess in WCF 12.1: “All those that are justified, God vouchsafes, in and for his only Son Jesus Christ, to make partakers of the grace of adoption, by which they are taken into the number, and enjoy the liberties and privileges of the children of God, have his name put upon them, receive the Spirit of adoption, have access to the throne of grace with boldness, are enabled to cry, Abba, Father, are pitied, protected, provided for, and chastened by him, as by a father: yet never cast off, but sealed to the day of redemption; and inherit the promises, as heirs of everlasting salvation.” To confess faith in God the Father is to confess that we belong to him as his beloved children. Our fundamental identities are not found in the various human relationships that bind us—whether earthly families, marriages, national citizenship, etc.—but in the heavenly family, marriage, and citizenship into which we have been adopted. To be an adopted child of God is to participate, albeit in a creaturely way, in the eternally blessed relationships of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Our God is personal. He does not become personal when he creates. He is eternally personal in himself personally invested in the history of his creation. This personal investment is revealed to us by way of a covenant. Thus Caspar Oliveanus teaches on pp. 9-15 of his An Exposition of the Apostles' Creed that the Creed is at bottom a covenantal affirmation. Our God is not only over and apart from us. He is also for and with us.

The Creed continues by describing God the Father as “almighty.” Besides the fact that he is good, we confess that he is unlimitedly powerful. But this raises a question. Does the Creed’s attribution of almightiness to the Father mean that the Son and Spirit are less mighty? No. The power of the Father is an attribute of the deity he shares with the Son and the Spirit. Just as each person of the trinity is equally God, so each is equally almighty. But what does God’s almightiness entail?

I remember a moment in fourth grade when one of my teachers asked if anyone in the class could draw a two-dimensional shape with just two straight lines? Believing I could do anything, I raised my hand. She handed me the chalk. I walked to the board. After several failed attempts, I sat down. The lesson was clear. Some things are impossible by definition (i.e. a two-dimensional shape, by definition, cannot be drawn with only two straight lines). Does God’s unlimited power mean that he can draw a two-dimensional shape with two straight lines? No, that’s nonsensical. God’s almightiness does not mean he has the ability to be nonsensical. It also doesn’t mean he has the ability to act contrary to his own nature. God cannot sin, which is another way of saying he cannot cease to be God. God’s almightiness means that he is able to do whatever he pleases, as Ps. 115:3 says, “Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases.” And he is only pleased to do that which is consistent with his nature.

God’s almightiness is evident in his works of creation and providence. God spoke forth the creation from nothing by the word of his power. Moreover, as we confess in SC 11, “God's works of providence are, his most holy, wise, and powerful preserving and governing all his creatures, and all their actions.” Both these works are the execution of God’s eternal decree, of which we confess in WCF 3.1: “God, from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass: yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures; nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established.” Included in this decree is the predestination of some (i.e. the elect) to everlasting life and the foreordination of others to eternal destruction.

To confess that God is almighty is to confess that he controls all that comes to pass in such a way that it cannot be otherwise. His plan cannot be thwarted. But if that is true, what about evil? And what about human free will? While God’s almightiness is not limited by his creation in any way, he has created human beings with moral agency. That means we have the freedom to act according to our nature. Like him we are able to do whatever we please, but we are not able to please whatever we please. We are not able to get behind our nature to change it at any point. We are secondary agents with the power of secondary causation. God is therefore able to be in control of all we do without that control being active at every point. We only do what God has decreed we will do AND we always ultimately do what we please. Both are true. We alone are culpable for the evil we do, because we are the only active causal agents in it and we always intend evil by it. God’s agency in evil's occurence is permissive, and he has ordained it for good reasons, reasons that he has not fully disclosed to us. He is not the author of evil, but neither is evil something that is outside his power at any point.

But if God has the power to rid the world of evil, why doesn’t he? This is sometimes called the problem of evil. The argument goes as follows. (1) Evil exists in God’s creation. (2) An all-good God would eliminate evil if he could. (3) An all-powerful God could eliminate evil if he would. (4) Therefore, God cannot be both all-good and all-powerful. The problem with this problem is that it doesn’t simply make the elimination of evil an entailment of God’s goodness. We would agree with that. It makes the immediate elimination of evil an entailment of God’s goodness. We disagree with that. As Packer says on p. 48 of Affirming the Apostles’ Creed, “If God moves more slowly than we wish in clearing evil out of the world and introducing the new order, that, we may be sure, is in order to widen his gracious purpose and include in it more victims of the world’s evil than otherwise he could have done.” Further, he has already begun this good process within all his adopted children, and because he is almighty we can be assured that he will finish what he has begun. There is therefore much comfort in the doctrine of God’s almightiness. As Oliveanus writes on p. 41 of An Exposition of the Apostles’ Creed, “I believe that I have a covenant with God almighty, who by His omnipotence both brings to pass whatever He wills in all the world and prevents, confuses, and drives back whatever He does not will or has not decreed, so that it is impossible for these things to happen.”

Christians believe in the one true and living God who has revealed himself as both an eternal Father to his only begotten Son and a temporal Father to his adopted children. He is personal, good, and powerful. Working out his holy and wise decree for his own glory and the good of his adopted children.

Review Questions

1. What is the significance of the designation “Father” being applied to God? In what two ways is he a Father?
2. What is the significance of the Creed’s description of God the Father as “almighty”? Why is this attribute ascribed to the Father? Are the Son and Spirit less mighty?
3. Does God’s almightiness mean that he can do anything? If not, in what does it mean?
4. How does God’s almightiness relate to human free will and the existence of evil?

Does Your God Hate Me?

Thus far in our series Engaging the Homosexual Movement we have looked at arguments/objections from nature, morality, and authority that might be raised in favor of the normalization of the practice of homosexuality. And we have offered Christian answers to each objection. In this lesson we will address another argument/objection that touches on each of the previous three. It is not so much an argument for the normalization of the practice of homosexuality as it is an argument against the God who condemns it. While the previous three arguments touch upon theology in general, this argument concerns theology proper. Given the truthfulness of the previous three answers, one might ask, “Does your God hate me?” After all, as we have already seen, homosexuality deserves the wrath and curse of God.

“God hates the sin and loves the sinner,” has become an axiom within broad evangelicalism. But is it true? Is it biblically defensible? Oftentimes those who hold this view do not realize that it is, at best, a second-class deduction based on the theory that God’s love is chiefly expressed in providing the possibility of salvation for each individual sinner, which is a tenet of classical Arminianism. In this view God hasn’t acted to actually save anyone. He has only acted to secure its possibility. Changing the possibility into an actuality is a function of the human will to determine its own destiny. This view of salvation only works if sin is depersonalized, i.e. separated from the sinner himself. Just as God hates the sin and loves the sinner, so also Christ died for a depersonalzed concept called sin but not for the actual persons who sin. So the question becomes: is the depersonalization of sin biblically defensible? (By the way, this is one of the strengths of the Calvinistic understanding of sin and grace. But if you go this direction, you must arrive at the doctrine of definite atonement because if Christ died to actually secure salvation and not all are saved, then he must have only died for some.)

The Bible does not depersonalize sin. It teaches that sin is a personal offense against a personal God. It is either our sin or my sin but never simply sin. We see this most clearly when we consider the definition of sin in 1 John 3:4. The text says, “Sin is lawlessness.” Thus we teach our children from SC Q. 14: “What is sin? Sin is any want of conformity unto, or transgression of, the law of God.” Sin is the violation of an established requirement/duty (i.e. a law) between two or more parties. In other words, it is covenantal and, therefore, personal by nature. There is no such thing as sin separated from the persons who commit it. So we read in Ps. 11:5, “The LORD tests the righteous, but his soul hates the wicked and the one who loves violence.” And again in Rom. 9:13, the Apostle Paul, quoting Malachi, reminds us saying, “As it is written, ‘Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.’” According to Scripture, God hates sinners because of their sin against him. And who are these sinners? They are those born by ordinary generation from the time of Adam's fall forward. Paul is crystal clear about this in Rom. 3:10-20. “None is righteous, no, not one,” he says. The Apostle John teaches the same in 1 John 1:8, saying, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”

Therefore, we conclude that one answer to the question “Does your God hate me?” is “Yes. God hates all those who practice sin. As Paul says in 1 Cor. 6:9-10, ‘Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.' God’s wrath and curse justly fall upon such people. That includes everyone born in the world except Jesus. I deserve God’s wrath and curse because of my sin just as much as anyone else." But there is more to our answer than that. There is more to the Bible than the law and sin. There is also the gospel and grace.

“Does your God hate me?” is essentially a question about the love of God. We could rephrase it negatively, asking, “Does your God not love me?” The answer to this question is complex. The Bible speaks of the love of God in several ways. One way it speaks of God's love is as a divine attribute. We see this, for instance, in 1 John 4:7, which says, "God is love," meaning God's very essence is love. The Bible never speaks of divine wrath in the same way. Wrath is not a divine attribute. God's essence is not wrath. Therefore, when the Bible speaks of the wrath of God, as it does so often, we must understand it to be referring to a way in which God reveals himself through his works of providence. Such works are truly revelatory of the divine essence but do not necessarily constitute the essence. Theologians in the catholic and reformed tradition have historically understood God's wrath to be a revelation of the divine attribute of justice relative to creaturely sin. So when we speak of God hating the sinner, we do not conceive of that hatred as the divine essence. Another way in which the Bible speaks of divine love is with respect to his general providence over all that he has created. We read about this kind of love in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus teaches that Christians should love their enemies. His reason? “For he (the Father) makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matthew 5:45). In other words, God loves his enemies in a general providential sense, and, therefore, we should do the same. So in this sense God loves the one who approves the practice of homosexuality. God provides for his temporal needs despite his rebellion against him. This is what makes the continued practice of sin so heinous. The practice of sin is the rejection of the love that God expresses to the sinner each and every moment. As God loves his enemies, being patient with them, giving them ample opportunity to repent, they continually reject him by suppressing the truth he has clearly revealed to them (cf. Rom. 1:18ff). This expression of God’s love only condemns sinners. It cannot save.

What about God’s love in a salvific sense? Is there any sense in which God salvifically loves those who practice sin? There is. God expresses his love to all sinners by inviting them to believe the gospel and be saved. This is where the Reformed distinction between the general and effectual calls becomes so important. God only extends his effectual call to his elect. But he extends his general call to all people without discrimination. All those who hear the proclamation of the gospel and receive the invitation to believe it are in fact receiving an expression of God’s love to them in a salvific sense. The offer of salvation in Jesus Christ is freely given and freely taken by any who would believe. As John 3:16 says, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” Whoever hears that message is only a breath away from receiving eternal life in him (cf. Rom. 10:8). This is a genuine offer of salvation. Any who will believe will be saved. I can think of no better summary of this doctrine than WCF 15.1 and 4: “Repentance unto life is an evangelical grace, the doctrine whereof is to be preached by every minister of the gospel, as well as that of faith in Christ….As there is no sin so small, but it deserves damnation; so there is no sin so great, that it can bring damnation upon those who truly repent.” LC Q. 32 also asks, "How is the grace of God manifested in the second covenant?" And it answers in part: "The grace of God is manifested in the second covenant, in that he freely provides and offers to sinners a mediator, and life and salvation by him."

So a further answer we might give to the question “Does your God hate me?” (after we have explained the condemnation of the law) is to say “God also loves you. He expresses his love to you by providing for all your temporal needs each day. Moreover, he is loving you right now by offering you life and salvation if you would only repent and believe in Jesus Christ. 1 Cor. 6:11 goes on to say, ‘And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.’ This offer of cleansing is a free gift. Will you receive it?”

Does God hate those who approve of the practice of homosexuality? Yes and no. He hates them because of their sin against him, which ironically is a rejection of the love he freely gives. It is a personal offense against his greatness and goodness. But he also loves them in the sense that he provides for their temporal needs. And, when the gospel is proclaimed in their presence, he loves them by inviting them to receive the free gift of life and salvation through repentance and faith in Jesus Christ.

Now there is another, deeper, sense in which the Bible speaks of the love of God. We touched on this earlier when we distinguished God's effectual and general calls. God’s love is also expressed in his unconditionally choosing to save some out of the estate of sin and misery. This is what the Apostle teaches in Rom. 9:13 when he writes, “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.” We cannot know whether God has loved anyone in this sense until he has made a credible profession of faith. Thus a WRONG answer to the question, “Does your God hate me?” would be to say: “No. God loves you and he has a wonderful plan for your life. He sent his Son to live and die for you to provide a way for you to be saved.” We search the Scriptures in vain to find a single instance of the Apostles or their associates sharing the gospel in this way—and for good reason! It presumes a knowledge of that which is unknowable at the time (cf. Deut. 29:29). It may be true that God has a wonderful plan for that person’s life. It may be true that he sent his Son to live and die for that person, but we cannot know either of these things until the person has made a credible profession of faith. All we can know prior to such a profession is that salvation is freely offered to them in Christ if they will believe, and that free offer is an expression of God’s love for them. If they respond by truly repenting and believing in Jesus, then we will know that God has loved them in the sense that he has unconditionally elected them to be saved by the work of his Son. If he hasn’t loved them in THAT way, then they will persist in their rejection of the gospel, refusing to repent and believe in Jesus.