Meditation: Our Father Created All Things in Six Days!

The following meditation is taken from the “daily meditations on the Heidelberg Catechism” feature found on the PRC website. The author is Rev.G.Van Baren (emeritus PRC pastor), who originally wrote this section of meditations for our sister church in Singapore, the Covenant Evangelical Reformed Church.

This series of meditations covering the doctrine of creation begins the month of March and explains that part of the “HC” which treats the Apostles’ Creed, specifically its opening article on the sovereign Fatherhood of our God: “I believe in God the Father, Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.”

Following my post from yesterday and in light of the current church (and world) attacks on God’s Fatherhood and His work of creating in the beginning, I believe this meditation and the rest in the series (which you may find at the link above) will guide you truthfully in your faith concerning the Almighty Maker. And may such truth lead us to fall down before Him in humble worship and adoration on this Lord’s Day (for this, you may also read Rev.4).

Read: Hebrews 11

Genesis 1 and 2 present the simple, clear, testimony of the great work of creation by our Almighty Father. In six literal days (each identified as beginning and ending with evening and morning) He fashioned all things within His great universe. It did not take our Father millions or billions of years to finish the work. It was finished in six days. The word “day” almost always refers to a literal day in Scripture. The few exceptions are clearly identified (as in Gen. 2:4). God speaks also of the days of creation in His great law: the Ten Commandments. God said that we are to rest on the seventh day, for “in six days God created the heavens and the earth and rested the seventh day.”

This is an essential truth which can be contradicted only with severe consequences for the interpretation of all of Holy Scripture. Scripture is completely infallible or it is fallible in some or many of its passages. Presbyterian and Reformed Churches which began with a denial of the literal creation days, soon were led into a pattern of denying or “reinterpreting” many other passages of Scripture. Many heresies have been introduced in this way.

The creation account has in it a simple beauty in describing the great work of creation. The beautiful statement is included with the days of creation: “And God saw every thing that He had made, and, behold, it was (very) good.” There was no sin, no evidence of the curse or of death in all of that which God had made.

There is clearly presented also an order in that creation: God creates a “stage” for his work—especially on the earth. He forms the plants needed to sustain life. Then He created animal life from lower to higher forms. Within each “kind” there could be and would be changes seen over a period of time. But one “kind” did not evolve into other “kinds”.

The climax of this creation was the formation of Adam (means “dust”) from the dust of the earth—and Eve (the first woman) from Adam’s rib. Adam was made the head of creation and all mankind. Gen. 2 points out also that the creation was at the same time the establishment of the marriage relationship. From the beginning, God made one man for one woman as long as they both would live. When questioned about divorce, Jesus insisted, “From the beginning it was not so.”

It is humbling to realize that the Almighty God who did all this, is my Father for Jesus’ sake.

*Note: It may be added here that the PRC website has plenty of other reading material on the creation-evolution debate taking place in the church. Consult, for example, our pamphlet section, or specifically, this pamphlet.