The Apostles' Creed

I Believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth

The creed opens by confessing the one God as Father and as Almighty Maker of everything seen and unseen. It means that behind all things is not chance, or many warring gods, or a distant force, but a personal God who is both a loving Father and the sovereign Creator. To say these words is to place your whole life in the hands of the one who made you and calls you his own.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.Genesis 1:1 (KJV)

What this line confesses

The first article gathers several truths into a few words. God is one, not many. God is personal, and the name given first is Father, the most tender of all names, the one Jesus himself used. God is Almighty, holding all power, so that nothing can finally thwart his will. And God is the Maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible, so that everything that exists depends on him and belongs to him.

Holding Father and Almighty together is the heart of it. A father without power could not keep his children safe. Almighty power without fatherhood would be cold and frightening. The creed says the one who holds all power is a Father, and the Father who loves you holds all power. That is the ground on which a Christian stands.

Its biblical basis

Scripture opens with this confession. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. The Bible never argues for God's existence; it simply announces the Maker, and everything follows from him. The Psalms sing that the heavens declare the glory of God, and Paul tells the Athenians that in him we live, and move, and have our being.

That this Maker is a Father is the constant witness of Jesus. He taught his disciples to pray, Our Father which art in heaven. He called God my Father and your Father. Paul writes that we have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The creed is not inventing a comforting idea; it is confessing what the Bible reveals from its first verse to its last, that the Almighty Creator has drawn near as a Father.

Why it mattered: against dividing the Maker from the Father

This line was written against a real and dangerous error. In the second century, teachers such as Marcion and various Gnostic groups taught that the God who made the physical world was a lesser, ignorant, or even evil deity, quite separate from the good and distant Father of Jesus. On that view the material world was a mistake or a prison, and salvation meant escaping it.

The creed answers with one breath: the Father Almighty is himself the Maker of heaven and earth. There are not two gods, a bad creator and a good redeemer. The God who formed the world and called it good is the very same God who sent his Son to save it. This is why the Christian faith honors the body, the earth, and the whole created order, and looks not for escape from creation but for its renewal. Matter is not evil; it is made, and its Maker loves it.

Almighty: the Father who holds all things

The word Almighty is worth pausing over. In the Greek of the creed it is pantokrator, which means the ruler of all, the one who holds all things in his hand. It is not raw, impersonal force but sovereign care. The same God whose power flung the stars into place numbers the hairs of your head and marks the fall of a single sparrow. His might and his tenderness are not in tension; they are one.

This is a great comfort in a world of trouble. Because the Father is Almighty, no evil, no accident, and no power on earth can finally snatch his children from his hand. Job, stripped of everything, still worshiped the God who gives and takes away. Jesus, facing the cross, prayed to a Father for whom all things are possible. To trust an Almighty Father is to know that nothing reaches you that has not first passed through hands that love you.

A gentle word is worth adding about the name Father. It does not mean that God is male, for God is spirit, and Scripture can even picture his care with the tenderness of a mother comforting her child. Father names a relationship of love, faithfulness, and covenant, the name Jesus himself used and taught us to use. To call God Father is not to shrink him to our size but to be lifted up into the family of the One who made all things and calls us his own.

How Jesus reveals the Father

We could not know the Father as Father on our own. The creed places him first, but it is only through the Son that we truly come to see him. When Philip asked, show us the Father, Jesus answered, he that hath seen me hath seen the Father. To watch Jesus welcome the outcast, still the storm, weep at a grave, and forgive his enemies is to watch the very heart of God the Father made visible.

This is why the first line of the creed is not a cold statement about a distant deity. The Almighty Maker has a face, and it is the face of Jesus. Everything the second article will say about the Son is, at the same time, the Father drawing near, for Jesus said, I and my Father are one, and no one comes to the Father except through him.

So to confess God the Father Almighty is already to be led toward Jesus. The creed opens a door and then, in its longest section, shows us the Son who walks us through it into the arms of the Father. The Maker of heaven and earth is not looking for servants who fear him from afar but for children who will come home, and he sent his Son to bring them.

What it means for us

To confess God as Father and Almighty Maker changes how you meet each day. It means you are not an accident. You were made on purpose by one who knows your name. It means the world, for all its pain, is not without a ruler; the power behind it is fatherly, and moving toward good. And it means you can bring every fear to one who is strong enough to help and tender enough to care.

Jesus made this personal. He did not only teach that God is a Father in general; he came to bring you to that Father as his own child. To begin the creed with these words is to begin your whole life in the right place, resting in the hands that made heaven and earth and now hold you.

Whatever you have believed about God until now, the creed invites you to begin here, with the good news that the power behind all things wears the face of a Father. You are not adrift in an indifferent universe. You were made by One who knows your name, and the same hands that flung the stars into place are open to receive you. To say, I believe in God the Father Almighty, is to come out of the cold and into the warmth of a home, and the door stands open for you to enter. Come in, and be at home with the God who made you and calls you his own.

A note for all traditions: the creeds are not a fourth authority above Scripture but a faithful summary of it. Christians hold them in different ways, some reciting them weekly in worship and others rarely, yet the faith they confess is broadly shared across the church. Where believers differ on secondary matters, the creeds mark the ancient center that unites us: one God, and one Lord Jesus Christ, crucified and risen.

Related: The Apostles' Creed explained · And in Jesus Christ, his only Son · Who is God the Father? · The Christian creeds