Monday, May 2, 2016

Creator and Maker


Psalm 95:6 “Oh come, let us worship and bow down; Let us kneel before the Lord our Maker.”

Always looking to learn more about the Word of God, I read that Psalms 95–100 are all involving "praise to the Lord". One of these major themes is recognition of the Lord as "Maker of heaven and Earth". For example, consider Psalm 95:5 “The sea is His, for He made it; and His hands formed the dry land.” Thus, God made the earth, including both land and sea. But He also made the heavens! “ Higher and far more complex than any planet of the solar system, or any star in the heavens, are the living organisms found only on planet Earth—especially human beings—and He made these too.

Psalm 100:3 “Know that the Lord, He is God; It is He who has made us, and not we ourselves; We are His people.”

The article points out that it is significant that these verses all emphasize the activities of God as “Maker”, rather than as “Creator”. In the first chapter of Genesis, both types of activity are stressed, the account finally concluding with the summary: “Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made” - Genesis 2:3.



What I didn’t know was that the two types of work are almost synonymous when referring to the divine activity, but not quite (otherwise “created and made” would be redundant). Specifically, the three acts of true creation in Genesis are the creation of the physical elements of the cosmos, the entity of biological life, and the spiritual image of God in man. These entities God simply called into being, “ex nihilo”, to produce; to bring into being from nothing; to cause to exist by His omnipotent Word. Everything else He made, or formed or let be, out of the three basic entities that were specially created. He is both Creator and Maker of all things, and we should worship Him as such.

In Christ, Brian

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