Matthew Coleman
May 23, 2021
Question #
12

Has the creation narrative ended?

Question:

You say that God has created us to be like him, and that he’s still making us, but what about God resting on the seventh day? Isn’t creation already complete?

Answer:

“For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well.”
‭‭Psalms‬ ‭139:13-14‬ ‭


It is true that we are still awaiting our glorification in new birth, when we put off the corruptible and clothe ourselves with incorruptibility, as Paul speaks of in 1 Cor 15, man--by the will of the Father, is still being actively created and formed by the work of the spirit—into the image of Christ. Just as Christ was brought into flesh within the womb of the Virgin Mary, our inward parts are being knit together and formed in our mother’s womb—our mother being the Church. Our sustenance  being the Scriptures. We are actively being brought from death to life, our physical death, being nothing more than a birth into true life. This is yet another example of Christ’s conquering the curse that was laid out in Genesis 3:16. Every nook and every cranny of our being, is being shaped and formed by the hands of the Potter. Like clay we are being fashioned and created into the image of our Savior. The creation narrative is an image of mankind’s ongoing creation in Christ. In his book Transfiguring Time Olivier Clement puts it this way;

“All the mystery of time and eternity is summed up in the meaning of the first day, the Lord's Day, as St. Basil showed. Sunday is at one and the same time the first day and the eighth day, the beginning and the end, the moment at which eternity gives birth to time and the moment at which eternity welcomes in time. If the unfolding of the week symbolizes the unfolding of the whole universe, Sunday reveals God's design, conceived from the beginning of the world, "to unite all things in Christ." Sunday is Paradise regained and the inauguration of life in the Resurrection, the miraculous suddenness of dawn, and the light without end of the eighth day, when God is finally all in all. Sunday draws together all the mystery of our salvation—it is the time created by Christ, recaptured by him and unfolding in him, in the Alpha and the Omega, the first, the last, the Living One.

Christ has not only recapitulated all of human history, he has fulfilled it.”

Matthew Coleman

Matthew Coleman is co-founder of Mercy On All. He lives in Western Kentucky with his wife and two children. He loves reading science fiction, fantasy, and anything written by George MacDonald, J.R.R. Tolkien, G.K. Chesterton, or C.S. Lewis. By the way, Christianity is True.