A Creationist Confesses

By Rebecca Barnes

I think I’m a closet Creationist. I live in a place where the majority of people worship nature. They extol her virtues. They admit to spending time with her to feed their soul. They go to the mountains for church. They show nature reverence by recycling. They talk about the planet as though it’s the biggest thing going. And they talk as though we all agree on this.

So I’m embarrassed to come out and say I worship the Creator of nature. 

I believe God is all-powerful and the originator of everything. He’s bigger than the planet. 

But the culture around me makes me feel ignorant for believing that, and this view is so passé that I just avoid talking about it.

But I have started to realize what I’m missing by not thinking about this more. My faith is weaker. Just like my body atrophies over the long winter of sloth, my faith needs to get out in the spring air and walk around to see what the big fuss is all about. What if I do believe that God made the world?

If I believe that God made the world, I believe the history in the first book of the Bible. I believe Genesis 1:1:

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

I have to believe it, rather than know it because no one was there but God. But it isn’t ignorant to start with a hypothesis. In reality, it takes the same amount of faith to believe that life began any other way.

However, at the end of the idea of life as God’s design, I find meaning and purpose. God as Creator means that I have a father of life who made everything personally—even me.

Psalm 139:13 says it poetically:

“For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.”

This reassures me that the Creator is not only powerful and awesome but personal, too. What a difference this makes in who I think I am. What a difference it makes in who I think God is, too. If I believe that God made the world, then I can see who he is by what he made.

Romans 1:20 says this:

“For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.”

In other words, when I look at a lilac bud, or mountain range, I can see eternal power and the divine. 

Instead of worshipping nature, I can worship the Creator of nature. It’s so obvious that I am without excuse for not finding God all over it.

And if I believe that God made the world, I cannot doubt his power to do anything else or to ever lose his strength. The books of the prophets remind me of that.

“Ah, Sovereign Lord, you have made the heavens and the earth by your great power and outstretched arm. Nothing is too hard for you,” Jeremiah 32:17.

The faith it takes to believe in God as Creator is not different than the faith I must have to believe God can re-create. He can forgive me. He can have a grand plan to restore my life and to bring me back to him through Jesus.

For some reason, this always seems harder to do than to speak the universe into existence. But why would it be? If God can make all of creation, why can’t he make me, or anyone, a new creation?

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!”  - 2 Corinthians 5:17.

Rebecca Barnes is the curriculum director for Summit Kids Ministry at Flatirons. She is married to an amazing man, who encourages her faith and listens to her typing a lot. She has three daughters and a son-in-law who she likes to cook for. She lives in Old Town Lafayette because it’s a little eclectic, like her.