Our Maker & Creator

Psalm 95:6 “O come, let us worship and bow down: let us kneel before the LORD our maker.”

As finite creatures, we tend to take for granted the infinite Creator God. Maybe that is because we cannot “create” something from nothing, but can only “make” something from existing material. I read an interesting article on Creator God; our maker, that pointed out that in the first chapter of Genesis we are told that God was to “make man in our (the Godhead’s) image.” Similarly, on the seventh day God “rested from all his work which God created and made”. God is, therefore, both Creator and Maker of all things, including the image of God in mankind. These two terms are not synonymous, though they sometimes seem to be used interchangeably. To “create” is the calling into existence entities that previously had no existence. No one except God is ever the subject of the verb “create”, because only God can create something from nothing. The work of making, on the other hand, is that of organizing created entities into complex systems.

It is interesting that God is called “Creator” five times in the Bible, whereas He is called “Maker” 16 times. God ‘created” His image in men and women, but He also “made” them in that image. That is, He called into existence the spiritual component of man’s nature, not shared in any degree by the animals. The article explains that He also organized the basic material elements into complex human bodies, the most highly organized systems in the universe, and these were made in that image that God Himself would one day assume when He became an incarnate human being (Jesus Christ). In this way, He is both Creator and Maker of His image in each person.

That image has been marred because of sin, but through the work of Christ we have been “renewed in knowledge after the image of Him that created us.  Created and newly created, made and remade, let us humbly kneel before the Lord, our Maker and Creator.