Advent Midweek I: The Nicene
Creed
“One God, The Father Almighty”[1]
December 3, 2025
Text:
First Article of the Nicene Creed
For 1700 years now, the one, holy,
Christian, and apostolic Church has been confessing some form of the Nicene
Creed. Forged in the heat of controversy
at the Council of Nicaea in AD 325; namely to deal with the Arian heresy: The
false teaching that the Son was created in time, and that our Lord Jesus
Christ is not fully God with the Father; the Nicene Creed is THE
statement of orthodox Christianity. If
you are looking for some criteria to measure whether a church body belongs to
the One Holy Church of God, this is it.
Now, I covered the history of this
earlier this year on Trinity Sunday.
(That Sunday, incidentally, falls when it does every year because the
Nicene Creed was written in late May/early June.) The newsletter article this month also gives
a little more background on the Creed, and, if you want to take a deep dive,
you can purchase the book, Worshiped and Glorified, by my dear friend
and Matthew’s Godfather, Pastor Timothy Winterstein. So we won’t spend a lot of time on background
in these midweek meditations. Instead,
we’ll let the theology of the Creed permeate our hearts and minds, one article
each week.
What is a Creed? And why confess it? The word, creed, comes from the Latin
word, credo, and simply means, “I believe.” So, at the most basic level, a Creed is
simply a statement of what you believe.
Whenever you confess the faith, you are speaking a Creed. That’s one reason Christians who say “No
Creed but the Bible,” or “Deeds, not Creeds,” are being ridiculous. First of all, both those statements are
Creeds! Secondly, the historic Creeds of
the Church (the Apostles’, Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds, known collectively as
the Three Ecumenical Creeds), are simply a summary of the teaching of the
Bible: Who God is, what He does for us, and who we are in God. So let’s not make a false distinction between
the Bible and the Creed. The Creed just
gives us what the Bible teaches. And
third, you know, if you have no authoritative standard, like the Creed by which
to measure your theology, you can believe and teach anything you want, and
claim the Bible as evidence. Take Arius
as an example. He used Bible passages to
prove his heresy, that the Christ is not God.
But the fact is, he was misusing those passages, and, in fact,
denying the fundamental assertion of Holy Scripture: God made flesh for the
salvation of the world. The Creed
keeps us honest. It keeps us in
bounds. It keeps us in the faith of the
Bible, which is to say, in the Christian faith, the faith of Jesus, the faith
of our Triune God.
But it’s not just this theoretical,
abstract theological statement, this Creed.
The Creed is the story of God in relation to man. It is the story of God as our Creator,
Redeemer, and Sanctifier. And so, it
is our story. When we confess the
Creed, we’re telling our story, who we are in God. When we mediate on the Creed… when we pray
it… we’re immersing ourselves in that story. And then we live in it. It’s who we are. It’s our identity. And see, this is a concrete reality for
us. Because we are baptized into
it, born anew into this story, and into this God Whom we here confess:
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Tonight, the First Article: “I
believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth and of all
things visible and invisible.”
He is one God, as emphasized
in our Old Testament reading, the Shema, the Creed of the Hebrews: “Hear,
O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.” (We’ll hear this Oneness echoed in the
Second Article, when we confess “one Lord Jesus Christ.”) This is a confession over against paganism’s many
gods, as well as the many gods of our own idolatry. It is not the case that there are
different gods presiding over different places and peoples. There is no Greek or Roman pantheon. Nor are the idols beguiling our hearts true
gods. There is one God… not many
gods, and not no God… One God, the One we confess in this Creed,
the One Who reveals Himself in Sacred Scripture. We who know the Holy Trinity may also hear in
this confession the mystery of God’s unity, His Oneness, even as He is
Three Persons.
But, specifically, we are speaking
here of the First Person of the Trinity, the Father. And this hits on the central concern of the
Nicene Creed. That God is Father, necessarily
means He has a Child… His Son. God
is the Father eternal. And that
means He has a Son from all eternity.
The Son is eternally begotten.
That is to say, Arius is wrong to teach there was a time when the Son
was not. Eternity doesn’t just mean without
end. It also means without
beginning. The Son was with the
Father in the beginning. He is before
the beginning. Always. He was not created. He is eternally begotten of the Father. That is something our finite minds cannot
comprehend. We can only wonder,
and worship, believe, and confess. It is this eternal Father who sent His
eternally begotten Son to be conceived by the Holy Spirit (also God), born of
the Virgin Mary, in time, to be our flesh, and be our Savior. The Human Nature of the Son has
a beginning: The Incarnation. We
celebrate that at Christmas. The Divine
Nature of the Son does not have a beginning. He, rather, has that Nature with the Father
from all eternity. More on that next
week.
But there is something else about
this confession of God as Father. In
Jesus, His only-begotten Son, He is also now our Father. He is not just our Father because He created
us (although He certainly did). He is
our Father because, in Christ, He has redeemed us, and adopted us
to be His own children by our Baptism into Christ. He loves us.
Enough to purchase us with His Son’s blood and death. He cares for us. He provides for us and protects us. And He can, because He is Almighty,
Omnipotent (this, by the way, also being a confession over against the
pagan gods, most of whom were not worshiped as almighty, as omnipotent). Now, our God could use His omnipotence
to enslave us, rule over us in tyranny, or destroy us. But that is not who He is. The word Almighty here is joined to Father
in such a way that we may know our God uses all His omnipotence in love for us,
and for our good. Remember, God is the
true and perfect Father. Don’t
measure Him by human fathers.
Even the best of human fathers fall far short of God’s
Fatherhood. Our heavenly Father
never fails us.
He is the Maker of heaven and
earth. Creation. Genesis 1 and 2. You’ll be reading those passages this week if
you’re joining us in our Advent devotions, and I pray you are. Creatio ex nihilo, creation out of
nothing. God speaks all things
into existence, by His Son, the Word, Who would become
incarnate. “By faith we understand
that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not
made out of things that are visible,” says the writer to the Hebrews (Heb.
11:3; ESV). Now, heaven, here
refers to the stuff that is not the earth (that is, the heavens, the stuff up
there), and earth to this world and everything in it. But then we go on to confess that our Father
created all things visible and invisible. The visible part is easy to
understand. That’s all the stuff we see:
Creatures, objects, the material universe (sun, moon, and stars, etc.), flesh
and blood (the stuff that makes up our fellow human beings). But then also the things that are invisible. That is this whole invisible realm of angels
and demons (demons, having originally been created as good angels, who then
rebelled), of what we think of as heaven, God’s throne, the spirits of the
saints, hell, the spirits of the damned, our own spirits, and the eternal God
Himself. It is invisible to our
fallen eyes. But it will be
visible to us when our sight is healed, when we cast aside forever this
fallen flesh, to be raised anew, and whole, in Jesus Christ, who
is risen from the dead. Don’t think of
this invisible realm as somehow less real than the material of this
world. That is the deception with which
the devil has beguiled this generation.
It is real. In fact, in
the resurrection of Jesus Christ, it is even tangible. And if that is true now, just wait until we
are raised from the dead, and given to inhabit the New Creation. New Creation, healed of the corruption
resulting from our sin, restored as our Father always intended it for us, and
exalted even beyond the Paradise of Eden.
This is our story… the story
of God for us. The story of God with
us. The story of us in God. Beloved, the words of the Nicene Creed are precious
words. Treasure them. Believe them. Pray them. Live in them. And then speak them with all the
saints of the last 1700 years. Speak
them to yourself, for your own edification, to sustain you in the holy
faith. Speak them to one another,
to strengthen and embolden the Church. Speak
them to the world. This is your
witness, your testimony of the one true God.
The day may come when you have to die for this, as so many before
us have. But this I can guarantee… If
this is your confession, you will live in it. Not just now, but forever after. Unto the Day you see with your own eyes this
one God, our Father Almighty, with Jesus Christ His Son, and the Holy Spirit,
world without end. God grant it, and
that, soon. In the Name of the Father,
and of the Son X,
and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
[1] Advent Series loosely
based on Timothy J. Winterstein, Worshiped and Glorified: A Study of the
Nicene Creed (St. Louis: Concordia, 2025).
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