Apostles' Creed: First Article

Apostles’ Creed: The First Article

What has God given to you?  Perhaps that is an easy question for you to answer.  But then again, maybe not.  Maybe it is a question whose answer you have been discerning for many years.  The First Article of the Apostles’ Creed may be of some help in this regard, especially Martin Luther’s explanation of it in the Small and Large Catechisms.  As you read it, notice that it is nothing less than a confession of faith.  

I believe in God, the Father almighty, CREATOR of heaven and earth.  

What is this?  Answer:

I believe that God has created me together with all that exists.  God has given me and still preserves my body and    soul: eyes, ears, and all limbs and senses; reason and all mental faculties.  In addition, God daily and abundantly provides shoes and clothing, food and drink, house and farm, spouse and children, fields, livestock, and all property--along with all the necessities and nourishment for this body and life. . . 

Why would God do such a thing for you and me?  Simple, he loves us and wants to provide for our every need!  What is our response to such generosity?  According to Luther the proper response to our indebtedness toward God for all he has done for us and given us is “to thank and praise, serve and obey him.”

Back to that word “obey,” again?  Maybe you are saying to yourself, “Thanks and praise I can manage . . . but obey?  What am I, a little child?”  Yes.  And yes.  Yes we are back to that word that calls us to obedience.  Even though we are not too keen on it in our day and age when individualism reigns, and autonomy is coveted, we are called as followers of Christ to a radical obedience to the will of God.  And yes on the second question, you are like a little child.  You are God’s child!  God, your holy and heavenly Father knows what is best for you because he sees a bigger picture than you could ever see.  For those of us who are parents, remember when you were a teenager and you thought you knew everything?  I sure do!  I could not figure out where my parents were coming from or how my mother seemed to have premonitory abilities.  It was like she could see the consequences of what my stupid and shortsighted actions would bring.  It was not until I was an adult and a parent myself that I finally realized that experience had a lot to do with it.  Mother could see what was going to happen because she had lived a lot longer than I had; she had seen people make poor decisions that would cause pain and heartache.  She knew the signs to look for and she knew which way would lead to life.  God, our divine parent, has an even bigger picture of life than my mother and the call to obedience is not about oppression, it is about true freedom!  

I believe that as human beings who are desperately searching for meaning in our lives, if we are totally honest with ourselves, we want to know God.  I mean really KNOW God.  Not just information about God, as if we could even pin down any pertinent information anyway.  (Where were you born God?  What is your occupation, sir?  Where did you study and what degree was conferred upon you?)  We cannot ask the usual questions that we ask one another upon introduction.  But “knowing” God is a life long journey.  As we continue on that journey of faith, as we worship and praise, pray to and are obedient to God, we grow in our maturity and “knowing” God.  But that knowing is always incomplete.  It is always insufficient.  Partly because knowing the fullness of God will not happen in this life but only in eternity; the human mind and heart cannot handle the full knowing of God and his magnificence.  But also, because of human sin, we are unable to fully know God as our ability to obey is sorely lacking; our ability to give everything over to the One who created us is faulty.  And yet, there is still a deep yearning to be closer to God, to know him in the fullest sense of the word, whatever we can know about the Creator of heaven and earth.  

If we could know God perfectly, Luther asserts that the Creed is the way we would be taught to do that.

  The First Article of the creed is the “shortest possible way of describing and illustrating the nature, will, acts, and work of God the Father.”  It gives us answers to the questions we have about who God is, what God is like, and what God does.  It points believers to a deeper life in God by encouraging us to see more clearly that all we have comes from God’s gracious hands, including and beginning with our very existence.  

The First Article of the Creed calls us back to obeying the most important commandment-- the First Commandment: You shall have no other gods.  This is our root problem as human beings; we tend to worship the wrong things.  We put our faith in the wrong people and the wrong possessions and the wrong dreams for our future.  We like to do it our way!  It takes us a long time to recognize that “our way” will only lead us to heartache, pain, loss, shame, guilt- you name it!  But God has a better way!  He urges us to put our complete trust in Him alone because He is faithful and true; God is responsible for the fact that we have our body and mind, our family and friends, our jobs and our savings accounts, and even our churches.  

What would the church, and the world for that matter, look like if humanity understood a little better that it is God alone who creates and sustains life?  What would it be like on earth if we took to heart that everything we order online, everything we accomplish in life, everyone we call friend or loved one or neighbor, is a blessed gift from God?  I am convinced that things would be different, radically different!  It can be and is different for each believer who embraces the fullness of this article.  Devotion to God becomes a way of life, not just something we do for an hour or two on Sunday mornings.  Obedience to God becomes an imperative in the believer’s life, not looking to the culture for our cue, but the Creator of all that is and ever shall be.  

In Luther’s day people were reading this article, and perhaps like the 21st century church, they were reciting it in worship with little thought to what they were actually saying.  “We all pass over it; we hear it and recite it, but we neither see nor think about what the words command us to do.”

  His point is that if we really thought about this article, if we really dug deeper into it, we would put credit where credit is due: not with ourselves and our own brute strength, but with the One who is worthy of our praise and devotion.  “This is the way the wretched, perverse world acts, drowned in its blindness, misusing all the blessings and gifts of God solely for its own pride, greed, pleasure, and enjoyment, and never once turning to God to thank him or acknowledge him as Lord or Creator.”

This article works like the law but acts as gospel in our lives.  It convicts us of our selfish arrogance and pride, but frees us to see what God is really up to for our sake. “Therefore, if we believed it, this article should humble and terrify all of us.” 

 We are sinners indeed.  We should be scared out of our minds, that is IF we believed this article had any merit for us as human beings.  Knowing God and confessing and believing this article of faith urges us to submit to God’s will and rejoice in the blessed gifts that create and sustain our existence.  Without God we have no life whatsoever which is a very humbling confession to make if we are mired in self sufficiency and arrogance.  For this reason we “owe it to God to serve and obey him for all these things.”

Thanks be to God that he loves so much that he withholds nothing from us.  Let us be truly grateful for life, faith, the whole creation, our children, our communities, and for every wonderful thing that we have been given to enjoy.

Photo: Chapel Altar at Camp Mowana, Mansfield, Ohio by Amy Little