He Made All Things | Sunday, June 29, 2025

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it... And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. (John 1)

Six small words from the Nicene Creed—"through Him all things were made"—answer the deepest crisis of our age.

The Council of Nicaea and the Question It Answered

This summer marks the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea and the creed that came from it. In 325 AD, the bishops of the church—then concentrated around the Mediterranean—gathered in the ancient Greek city of Nicaea, in what is now northern Turkey, to deal with a false teaching spread by a pastor from North Africa named Arius. Arius taught that Jesus was a created being, not divine. But the early church had believed and taught for two centuries that Jesus is divine—God incarnate, God in the flesh.

The leaders gathered to affirm and formalize their faith in the statement we know as the Nicene Creed. It is relatively short—only 227 words—and was never intended to be a comprehensive statement of everything Christians believe. It addresses a very specific issue: the nature of God, and more specifically the nature of Christ.

The creed speaks of the triune nature of God—a difficult theology to comprehend, because our brains are finite and God is infinite. God, as revealed in Scripture, exists as one God ("Hear, O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is one," Deuteronomy 6), yet He has revealed Himself in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is the doctrine of the Trinity.

The Creed's Focus Is Jesus

Notice how the creed is weighted. Of the 227 words, only 21 deal with the Father, 37 deal with the Holy Spirit, and 34 deal with the Son. The whole focus is really on Jesus, because of Arius's teaching that Jesus was created. The creed clearly articulates, from the Bible, who Jesus is.

In doing so, it answers the question Jesus put to His disciples in Matthew 16:15: "Who do you say that I am?" When He asked what people generally thought, most recognized Him as a very spiritual man, a prophet. But the important question—the one that mattered 2,000 years ago, at Nicaea in 325, and still today—is "Who do you say that I am?"

A Statement Christians Agree On

What is fascinating about these 227 words is that Christians have read and affirmed them together for 1700 years, in all places and times. There are significant divisions in the church—three major flavors. Orthodox Christians are generally in the East; moving west you reach Roman Catholicism, and further west the Protestant churches, of which we are a part. The Great Schism divided Orthodox and Roman Catholics in 1054. The Reformation, usually dated to 1517 when the monk Martin Luther posted his 95 Theses hoping to reform the Roman church (which instead excommunicated him), brought about the Protestant churches.

Yet if you gathered a Roman Catholic priest, an Orthodox priest, and a Protestant pastor, we would largely agree on everything in these 227 words. That doesn't mean nothing distinguishes us—important things do—but on these core truths we are agreed.

This is point one: the Nicene Creed is a simple statement about God upon which Christians are agreed. The creed is not comprehensive. It says nothing about how salvation is imparted and received, nothing about communion or baptism's modes, nothing about how or when Jesus will return, nothing about church government, Bible translations, spiritual gifts, or God's sovereignty and man's free will. It addresses the core things we hold about who God is—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

In over twenty years of traveling with the church to Central America, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and Asia, I've discovered we have a really big family—diverse, dressing and worshiping differently, but agreed on these core issues. Many in non-denominational churches like ours never encounter this creed, but those who grew up in Catholic, Orthodox, Presbyterian, or Lutheran settings recognize it instantly. My hope is to show that this is in the Bible, and these are things we hold and believe.

Six Words That Mean More Than You Think

I want to focus on just six words from the creed: "Through Him all things were made." In context, these words refer to Jesus Christ, the Son. Just before them we affirm, "We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God."

But notice an apparent duplication. The creed opens, "We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth." Then, of the Son, it says "through Him all things were made." Why say the same thing twice? It's important.

It is easy for any Christian to say, "I believe God created everything," because that's the first thing you learn when you open the Bible. People who never grew up with Scripture—who found a Gideon Bible in a hotel—open to page one and read, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." That is the most basic, fundamental article of Christian belief: God exists, and He made everything else that exists.

Is Belief in God Anti-Science?

In our post-scientific-revolution, post-Enlightenment Western culture, "In the beginning God created" is a dividing line. There are essentially two worldviews. Either you believe in science—that everything came to be by scientific naturalism, through random processes over billions of years of evolution—or you're one of those weird people who believes God created everything. These two are pitted against each other as if at war.

But when you look at the last 600 years, they generally were not in conflict. The great names of the scientific revolution—the fathers of science—were theists and Christians. Through observation they discovered that everything fits together orderly, and they investigated creation as an act of worship, amazed at God's power and grandeur. Copernicus, Kepler, Bacon, Newton, Boyle, Pascal—these were Christians who believed an awesome God made an ordered, orderly cosmos.

This is point two: belief in God as Creator is not anti-science; it is the worldview that explains why science works. God ordered the cosmos, and that orderliness makes science possible. Science depends on a consistent universe. Those in STEM fields know you can form a hypothesis—combine this chemical with that chemical and predict the result—because the cosmos is ordered and repeatable. We should be thankful that tomorrow, when you do what you did yesterday, something new doesn't suddenly happen.

Science assumes the world operates by consistent laws and that our rational minds can understand them. Those assumptions do not naturally arise from naturalism. The Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga makes this point in his 1993 book Warrant and Proper Function. If your mind is just the byproduct of unguided evolution aimed solely at survival rather than truth, then you have no good reason to trust your beliefs—including your belief in science itself. This is his evolutionary argument against naturalism. Belief in a Creator is not an obstacle to reason; it is the foundation of reason. A rational mind in an orderly cosmos comes from an orderly God who made you in His image.

The Problem of Genesis 1

But there's a challenge in the creed's opening words. The God of Genesis 1, in whom we affirm belief, is independent of His creation. He must be, because He made it. He doesn't rely on it, has no necessity for it, precedes it, and stands outside and separate from it. And because He is independent of and separate from creation, He seems distant. We are inside the box—the cosmos—and He is outside. How can we connect with Him? That is the problem of Genesis 1.

This became an even greater issue in the 17th and 18th centuries. The scientific revolution of Kepler, Newton, and others inspired a philosophical revolution—the Enlightenment. Thinkers like René Descartes, John Locke, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant reasoned: if God is outside this box, and all we know is inside it—including our own minds—then though we may believe God exists, we have no way to know Him.

Descartes' rationalism believed in God but said, "I can never connect with Him." Then John Locke's British empiricism held that we can study all the tangible things in the box but cannot know God beyond it. David Hume's skepticism said, "I know I exist and this exists, but since I can't know God, I don't think He exists." Then Kant's idealism. At each stage God is pushed further away.

The Clockmaker God

The scientific revolution showed the magnificent order of the universe. As philosophers reflected on that order, they reasoned God further off. The universe came to be seen as a wonderfully designed mechanical clock—so orderly we can predict eclipses centuries out. And if it's a clock, the maker is a clockmaker who is independent and removed. Theism shifted into deism: a transcendent God who is the first cause, who made the clock, wound it up, and left. He is not immanent, not present, not personal, not in relationship with us.

This is point three: the rationality God designed into creation became the very tool humans used to reason God away. James Sire charts this in his book The Universe Next Door, now in its sixth edition. He traces the move from theism—dominant in the West from the first century until the fourteenth—to deism (God is far away), then to naturalism (maybe there is no God, only what exists here), then to existentialism (if naturalism is true, why are we here? "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die," as Solomon said in Ecclesiastes).

French existentialism influenced everyone who went to university in the last fifty years. It moved toward nihilism—there's no point to anything; "Vanity, vanity, all is vanity." Thinkers like Albert Camus concluded you might as well kill yourself; that is essentially the argument of The Myth of Sisyphus (don't read it if you're depressed). From deism to naturalism to existentialism to nihilism to postmodernism, where we live today—where you can't know anything and everything is subjective.

So where are we in 2025? Pretty lost. For centuries scientific naturalism assumed we'd figured it all out and would build utopia. Those hopes were shattered by two world wars in the first half of the 20th century. The scientific utopia never came. Our culture now wrestles with a crisis of meaning, identity, morality, purpose, and destiny.

Jesus Immanentizes the Transcendent

To those lost and wandering, who've forgotten who made them and what they were made for, I bring you back to these six words: "Through Him all things were made." They say nothing different at their core from "We believe in one God, the Father, the maker of heaven and earth"—and yet they say something uniquely important.

Here is point four, and it will sound like gibberish until I explain it: Jesus immanentizes the transcendent.

The Bible begins, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." That God is far away, and I can't connect with Him; the inevitable result is deism. Then we reach John 1, which echoes Genesis: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God... All things were made through Him." There are those words again. "And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it." We don't understand Him, because He is off in the distance.

We have a deep problem. There is a transcendent God who transcends us, time, and space, beyond our comprehension. Yet we are conscious of ourselves and this world, aware of morality—what is true, good, just, right, and beautiful—and that awareness implies someone over it all. Psalm 19 says, "The heavens declare the glory of God"; day to day they utter speech, and there is no language where their voice is not heard. We recognize that existence requires a cause—so I, who exist, must have a cause.

Paul says the same in Romans 1: "Since the creation of the world, God's invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that we are without excuse." And beyond creation, there is conscience. Have you ever thought, "That person should not have said that"? The moment you say someone "should not" have done something, you affirm an objective standard of right and wrong. To say someone lied affirms truth; to call something gross affirms objective beauty. Your conscience indicates a moral lawgiver who sets the standards of truth, goodness, and beauty—what Aquinas, and before him Aristotle, called the unmoved mover.

But thinking deeply on these things, the inevitable outcome is still deism. I can't connect with Him. I'm in the dark and cannot comprehend the light—until John 1:14: "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth."

God With Us

To immanentize is to bring something from the realm of the abstract, distant, and transcendent into the realm of the here and now—the tangible and present. Notice the connection to Emmanuel, which means "God with us." Jesus brings the infinite, transcendent God into direct connection with the world that could not comprehend the light. Now we behold His glory, full of grace and truth.

God created you and me to live in connection with Him—life in connection with God, one another, and the world through Jesus. But we've been separated from Him since Genesis 3 through rebellion and sin. Jesus brings God's presence near. He is "God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one being with the Father." He can bring the transcendent God near because He is fully God clothed in human flesh.

John 1 establishes that the Word was active in creation—the same God who said, "Let there be light." And in Genesis 1:26, God says, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness." Who is the "us"? The triune God in community—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That same "us" became flesh and dwelt among us.

Paul says it in Colossians 1: "He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by Him all things were created... All things were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist." He is the Creator and sustainer of everything. So fully has He come near that Jesus could say, "If you have seen Me, you have seen the Father."

The Answer to a Crisis of Meaning

This means the nihilistic, existential dread of a postmodern, naturalistic culture finds its solution in Christ Jesus. Point five: as Jesus brings transcendence near, He brings meaning, purpose, and hope to everything.

The meaninglessness people feel in a culture that has put all its faith in naturalism and scientism should not surprise us. It would be more surprising if someone who fully bought into the modern Western narrative were not depressed. Consider how our culture answers life's great questions.

On identity and origin: you are nothing more than an animal, produced by billions of years of random chance and unguided processes, and someday outdone by a greater species while yours goes extinct. On purpose: your only ultimate purpose is to survive—survival of the fittest—and to pass along your genetic material. On destiny: when you die, you merely cease to exist, your body reabsorbed into the matter of the earth. On morality: there is no objective measure of truth, goodness, or beauty beyond what you make for yourself. And then we're told that, despite everything, global warming or a cosmic asteroid may end it all anyway.

Is it any wonder we live through a crisis of meaning? I'd be surprised if you weren't depressed, having been told this since youth. Why do so many young people struggle with self-harm, with pain seeming the only proof that they're real? It is the least surprising outcome that late-stage modernity is experiencing a collapse of all structures of meaning and purpose.

I recently heard the cognitive scientist and philosopher John Vervaeke interview a woman named Britt Hartley, described as "a certified spiritual director, meditation teacher, and leading voice in secular spirituality specializing in religious trauma deconstruction and nihilism recovery." That's a job in 2025—you can make good money helping people process their nihilism. Is it possible that our modern Western worldview is pathological? It makes you sick.

Christianity Is a Relationship

Through Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, all things hold together. "Through Him all things were made" means more than you think. It means God is not distant, detached, disengaged, dispassionate, or disinterested. It means He is interested—He made you for a purpose, He is personal, and in Christ Jesus He is engaged with your life, near and compassionate. He is the Creator who came down to reveal the light, love, grace, truth, joy, peace, and hope of God to you. In Him we find the meaning, purpose, and hope this world desperately needs.

This is why He says, "Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." This is why He says, "I stand at the door and knock; and if anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with him, and he with Me." God wants relationship with you. This is why it's been said that Christianity is not a religion but a relationship. Yes, it is also a statement of things we believe—one God the Father, the maker of all things seen and unseen; the Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten of God, fully God, through whom all things were made. But we believe these things because He came to us to deal with what separates us—sin and death—so that we might have relationship with Him. He says, "I want to know you, and you to know Me, and in Christ you can." He is not distant. He is here. He immanentizes the transcendent.

Closing Prayer

God, I thank You for these things that seem so simple on the surface but are profound. You desire to have a relationship with us. You want us to know You as we are known. You made us for this purpose, and You invite us to come in—or perhaps You invite us to let You come in. God, I pray that as we open our hearts to You, we would introduce You to others, because You have set us to be ambassadors of Your good word and of Your gospel. Help us to do that today and this week. Help us to connect with You and to bring others into connection with You as well. For we ask this in Jesus' name. And all those who agreed said, "Amen."