Creational Purpose

God is the Creator—and Lord—of all things. He is the Lord prior to, in, and over his creation. To know God as Creator is to know him as the Lord who claims us in the totality of our existence. The world is God’s world and it testifies to him who made it.

The world is the house of the Great King and the Great Artist. He does not permit Himself to be seen; for man cannot see God, only the world. But this world is His creation, and whether conscious of it or not, it speaks of Him who made it. Yet in spite of this testimony man does not know Him, or at least not rightly. … We behave ourselves in this God-created world (if one may use the clumsy simile) like dogs in a great art gallery. We see the pictures and yet fail to see them. … Our madness, haughtiness, irreverence—in short, our sin, is the reason for our failure to see the Creator in His creation (24-25).

Humanity in all ages has had ‘presentiments’ of God though not true or full knowledge. This natural awareness of God’s existence is the basis of human religion: “the gods of the heathen are partly constructions of human fantasy, partly surmise of the true God, a wild combination of both” (26). This is true also of the philosophers.

Brunner distinguishes between belief that a divine being created the world (which is merely a theory of origins) and faith in the creator. The latter is, as already mentioned, to know God as Lord and to obey him as such.

The world is not an arbitrary occurrence, rather God’s creation is purposeful. What appears to us as perhaps random chance or fate finds its place in God’s overarching plan.

There is One who knows the destiny of the world, He who first made the sketch, He who created and rules the world according to this plan. What is confusion for us is order for Him, what we call chance is designed by Him, thought out from eternity and executed with omnipotence (28).

This purpose, however, is not immediately evident to those who live in the world and its historical unfolding but is a matter of revelation, a matter of Jesus Christ. Here Brunner announces the divine purpose: “reconciliation, salvation, forgiveness of sins, promise of eternal life, fulfilment of all things in God’s own life. That is God’s plan for the world” (29). The world that originated in God is to find its fulfilment and destiny in God: to this we are called and invited, and to this we must respond. “To hear this call, and in this call to hear where God will lead us, to have insight into God’s plan for the world—that is faith” (30).