BeReshith bara Elohim eth haShamaim waeth haAretz - our Bible starts with an affirmation that God first made both "the heavens" and "the earth". The Creeds single out this creative activity as one of the most important things that we believe about God the Father. And the Nicene Creed goes further, echoing Colossians 1:16, and adds that God made "everything, whether visible or invisible".
In this scientific age, we run the danger of looking too closely at how exactly this "making" took place. The verb bara used here is relatively neutral: in Chapter 2, the writer uses a different verb, one that implies moulding, just as a potter moulds clay into a pot. But the writer is not interested in the method. The point is that it was God who did it.
To understand this, we need to go back to the time when the accounts in Genesis were written. God's people were surrounded by nations with whole pantheons of gods - moon gods, sun gods, fertility gods, rain gods. The message of Genesis is that these were no gods at all - it was the one true God who had made everything - even the sun, the moon and the rain. The opening verse of our Bible does not tell us how, but who!
It does tell us, though, that God is at the beginning of all things - before time began, which means that the children's question "Who made God?" is meaningless, for creation and any other kind of cause and effect can only take place where time exists. Being there "in the beginning" does not mean, either, that the expression "God rested" in Gen. 2:2, means that God was like a Divine watchmaker, making the world and then letting it run by itself. God's connection with the world is not at all mechanical. It is continuing and personal.
God made both heaven and earth. In the first chapter of Genesis, we see the sun and the moon created on the fourth day and placed "in the heavens", and the animals, along with humankind, created on the sixth day and placed "on the earth." But the New Testament sees heaven in a different light. Heaven is not "the sky", heaven is another dimension to our existence.
This is what our Gospel faith is all about. In John's Gospel, Pilate declares: "Behold the man" (or better, "the one who is truly human"), and on the same day, the sixth of the week, Jesus declares "It is finished!" Easter is, as it were, an eighth day, a day of new creation (2 Cor 5:17), preparing us for a new heaven and a new earth (Rev 21:1). The first man, says Paul, was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man, Jesus, is from heaven (1 Cor 15:47).
Adding "all things, seen and unseen" not only dots the i's and crosses the t's. It also draws our attention to God in action, sustaining everything. And this does not mean all things bright and beautiful. We have to accept the world around us, without judgement, without prejudice, without the idea that it was made solely to give us pleasure, in the sense that we can do what we like in it. The world where "all things" are "bright and beautiful" is not the world God made - it is the kind of world we would make if we could, but it is an impossible world.
And it also reminds us that the world is more than a collection of visible and physical objects. Feelings, emotions, experiences all take us outside a physical realm into a spiritual (even an angelic!) order. Here too God is the source and the sustainer. And it is our belief that God is in charge of everything - not in everything, but over and underlying everything - that we must accept before we move on to the next section of the Creed - the section that deals with the work and the nature of Jesus Christ, our Lord.
HD