The opening line of the Apostles’ Creed, a single sentence, holds a great deal of theology. It breaks naturally into three affirmations about God: he is Father, he is almighty, and he is creator. Each shapes how we worship, how we pray, and how we live in the world.
God the Father
The language of “Father” necessarily implies relationship, but often we hear “Father” and immediately think of God’s relationship to us. But before he created anything, he was already a Father—to the second person of the Godhead: his Son. When we confess that God is “Father,” we first mean that he is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
The distinction is between what is necessary and what is contingent. God is Father necessarily, as a matter of who he is in eternity. We are his children only contingently, because of what he has done for us. Gregory of Nazianzus put it well: “Father” is the name of the relation between the Father and the Son, and it expresses a oneness of nature between the one who begets and the one begotten.
Paul makes the same point in Ephesians 1:3: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.” Before the foundation of the world, he chose us in Christ and predestined us for adoption “through Jesus Christ.” We relate to God as Father only in and through the Son.
This order guards against the error of taking our definition of fatherhood from our own earthly fathers, or even from our experience of God’s care, and then read it back into God. The direction runs the other way: Every human father is accountable to the standard set by the heavenly Father.
The truth is both humbling and comforting. It humbles us because we did not have to exist and we have no claim on him. It comforts us because the intimacy the Father has with the Son is the intimacy into which he brings us. It is not up to us to find the right words or the right moment. The almighty God, whose majesty we could never approach on our own, invites us to call him Father.
This also shows why the Christian God is distinct. A God who is a solitary unit had nothing to love before creation. The triune God has eternally shared love between the Father and the Son, so when he creates and when he saves, he acts out of his own loving nature rather than out of need. And because the Father and the Son are in eternal relationship, we cannot be lone-ranger Christians. Later in the Confession, we confess “our Lord,” not “my Lord.”
Is God, then, the Father of all people? In a general sense, as creator, he is the source of everything, and Luke can call Adam the “son of God” (see also Acts 17:28–29). Sin is therefore a rebellion against that relationship. But we must take care, for “the universal fatherhood of God” is often used to mean that everyone is a child of God and all is well. Fatherhood in the full, personal sense, belongs first to Christ and to those who are in him.
God Almighty
Having established the relationship between Father and Son, the Creed identifies God as “Almighty.” It might have led with any number of attributes, but the formulators intentionally chose this one. Why “almighty”? Perhaps because the Father’s work of making us his children required all power. Perhaps because it sets the God who creates apart from every false god and ruler. Perhaps because it marks the line between creator and creation, since everything created is limited and he is not.
Scripture gives “almighty” rich witness. “None can stay his hand” (Daniel 4:35). “Nothing is too hard for you” (Jeremiah 32:17). “Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases” (Psalm 115:3). His purposes are never frustrated by inability execute them.
That matters for the gospel. If God knew everything and loved us, but lacked the power to act, his love would be ineffective. But if he has set his love on us, nothing can stop it. This is the confidence of Romans 8, where nothing in all creation can separate us from his love in Christ Jesus.
God’s almightiness implies absolute lordship. This opening part of the Creed describes who he is objectively, whether or not anyone submits to him. Later, the Creed will speak of “our Lord,” expressing our submission within his kingdom, but his lordship does not depend on our acknowledging it.
Creator of Heaven and Earth
“Heaven and earth” is a merism—a way of naming two extremes to include everything between them. As in Genesis 1:1, it means all that is created: the whole universe.
Does calling the Father “creator” exclude the Son and the Spirit from this role? It does not. Scripture attributes creation to all three: the Spirit hovered over the waters, the world was made through the Son (John 1; Colossians 1), and Psalm 33:6 speaks of the word and breath of the Lord’s mouth. The Creed singles out the Father, but not exclusively. The persons of the Trinity are distinguished by their relationship to one another, not by dividing up the works of God. When God acts, the whole God acts.
The doctrine of creation grounds two relationships.
First, it grounds our relationship to God. He is creator and we are creatures. We are not his peers. We are not self-made. We are not self-owned. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof” (Psalm 24:1). This cuts against a culture that prizes autonomy above all, and it offers something better: a settled sense of who God is and who we are. Humanity needs something other than humanity to save it. It also rules out pantheism, which says that creation is God, and deism, which pictures a God who winds up the universe and steps away. Christians confess that he upholds all things by the word of his power. Every breath we take is a gift from the creator.
It also gives us a framework for the story of the Bible. Sin is a kind of de-creation, a kicking against the creator. Salvation is re-creation, restoring the world not merely to its original design but to its intended glory.
Second, it grounds our relationship to creation. If the world is God’s, then we are stewards and not owners. Creation declares that he made it, and it bears something of his fingerprint. How we treat it says something about what we believe of him. Christians should think more carefully about a theology of ecology, resisting both the old suspicion that the material world is evil and the opposite error of treating the land as divine. Adam and Eve saw and took, and the pattern of grasping and exploiting has been repeated since. Stewardship is the better way.
The doctrine also affirms the goodness of the arts, work, and our bodies. These were made good, and although each can be corrupted or idolised, each can also be received and offered back to him. The question for the believer is how to do art, work, and bodily life to the glory of the creator.
Worship
All of this flows from one short phrase. God is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and in him our Father. He is almighty, so his purposes cannot fail. He is creator, so we, and everything else, belong to him. We did not deserve to be created, and when we fell he did not abandon us but made us new. That is reason enough to worship him.