Before God Said Anything, He Did This…

What the creation story suggests about God that many Christians have never considered

Image by HiddenCatch on iStock

If you asked a hundred believers to describe God, I reckon you’d hear the same handful of words repeated over and over again.

God is righteous.

God is loving.

God is just.

You’d probably hear words like holy, merciful, powerful, sovereign and faithful as well.

None of those answers are wrong. In fact, they’re deeply rooted in Scripture. But lately I’ve been wondering whether we’ve overlooked something important. Not because it’s hidden away in an obscure passage or buried in the original Greek, but because it’s so obvious that we tend to look straight past it.

This thought first occurred to me while I was writing.

That probably sounds strange. After all, writing doesn’t feel particularly spiritual. Most of the time it feels like staring at a blinking cursor, deleting half your sentences, and wondering whether you’ve got anything worthwhile to say. Yet there is something deeply satisfying about creating something that didn’t exist before.

I see it at home all the time. My daughter is forever carrying around little sketchbooks. Half the time I don’t even know what she’s drawing. I’ll glance over her shoulder and there’ll be dragons, strange creatures, made up characters, or some world that exists only in her imagination.

My son is different. He gets absorbed in video editing. He’ll spend ages moving clips around, changing music, adjusting transitions, and making tiny tweaks that I can barely notice.

Adults aren’t much different. We write books, start businesses, build furniture, renovate houses, plant gardens, record podcasts, and spend far too much money on projects that seemed like a good idea at the time.

For some reason, we don’t seem content just to live in the world. We have this urge to leave our fingerprints on it.

The more I thought about it, the more curious I became.

Where does that impulse come from?

Why do we find so much meaning in creating things?

As a Christian, my thoughts eventually drifted back to the opening pages of Genesis. Not to the endless debates about the age of the earth or the mechanics of creation. I’ve heard those conversations my entire life.

Instead, I found myself noticing something embarrassingly simple.

The first thing God does.

Before there are commandments, covenants, prophets, miracles, temples, churches, sins, sacrifices, or even people, God creates. That is how the biblical story introduces him to us.

Not first as a judge.

Not first as a king.

Not first as a saviour.

But as a creator.

In fact, the very first verb in the Bible is the word “created.”

Let me ask you, if the first thing God reveals about himself is his creativity, what does that tell us about who God is?

Why Would God Create Anything?

Why would God create anything at all?

Most of us never ask that question because we’ve grown up with the creation story. God creates the universe. That’s simply part of the furniture of Christian belief. We accept it so readily that we rarely stop to consider how remarkable it actually is.

After all, a perfect God shouldn’t need anything. If God is somehow incomplete without creation, then he isn’t really perfect. A God who needs companionship, validation, entertainment, or purpose from something outside himself is dependent on that thing.

Which raises a fascinating problem.

If God lacked nothing, what motivated him to create a universe?

The question becomes even more interesting when viewed through the lens of the Trinity. Christians have traditionally understood God as Father, Son, and Spirit existing eternally in relationship with one another. Long before there were galaxies, planets, or people, God was already experiencing perfect communion and perfect love.

That means creation cannot be explained by divine loneliness. God wasn’t wandering around an empty universe wishing he had someone to talk to. Nor was he searching for worshippers to boost his self esteem. If God is who Christians claim he is, then he was already complete before a single atom came into existence.

Yet he created anyway.

He filled the cosmos with stars. He filled the oceans with life. He created music, colour, imagination, beauty, humour, curiosity, and all the countless things that make existence richer than it strictly needs to be.

For years I was taught to see creation primarily as a display of God’s power. There is certainly truth in that. Creating a universe is an impressive way to demonstrate power. But power only explains how God created. It doesn’t explain why.

Creativity Is What Love Does

The more I thought about it, the more I realised that power is only part of the story.

Power can explain how something gets made, but it doesn’t explain why someone chooses to make it.

A billionaire has the power to buy a yacht. That doesn’t tell us why he wants one. An author has the power to write a novel. That doesn’t tell us why she spends years doing it. The ability to create and the motivation to create are not the same thing.

So what motivated God?

For me, the answer lies in the Trinity.

If God exists eternally as Father, Son, and Spirit, then relationship is not something God invented after creation. Relationship is part of God’s very nature. Before there were human beings to love, God was already love. Before there were neighbours to serve, God was already self giving. Before there was a world to redeem, God was already existing in perfect communion.

That changes how I read Genesis.

Creation begins to look less like an act of power and more like an act of generosity.

God is not creating because he lacks something. He is creating because he has something to give.

The more I thought about it, the more I started noticing how often creativity and love seem to travel together.

When people fall in love, they don’t just sit around admiring each other. They start building a life together. They buy furniture. They make plans. They have children. They create traditions. Twenty years later there are family jokes, holiday rituals, and entire histories that didn’t exist before they met.

The same thing happens on a smaller scale all the time. Someone loves their neighbourhood, so they start a community garden. Someone loves music, so they start a band. Someone loves a problem enough to solve it and ends up starting a business.

Maybe that’s why I’ve never been able to separate love from creativity.

The opposite of love isn’t just hate. Sometimes it’s indifference. It’s the shrug of the shoulders. It’s looking at something and deciding not to invest yourself in it.

Love, on the other hand, gets involved.

It rolls up its sleeves.

It imagines a different future and starts moving in that direction.

Which is why I’ve started to wonder whether creation tells us something deeper about God than we often realise.

If God is already complete within himself, then creation cannot be about filling a hole. It cannot be about meeting a need. It has to be about expression.

It has to be about giving rather than getting.

And maybe that’s exactly what creativity is.

But What If You Don’t Believe in the Trinity?

You don’t have to accept the doctrine of the Trinity for the basic observation to remain interesting. Even if you understand God as a single divine being rather than Father, Son, and Spirit, the question still stands.

Why create anything at all?

Why would a perfect being, lacking nothing, choose to bring a universe into existence?

The Trinity sharpens the question for me because it places love and relationship at the centre of God’s nature. But even without it, creation remains a profoundly generous act. The universe didn’t have to exist. Neither did sunsets, music, humour, imagination, or any of the countless things that make life more than mere survival.

However you understand God, creation seems to tell us something important.

Why We Can’t Stop Making Things

If there is any truth to this idea, it changes the way I think about human creativity.

For years I assumed creativity was a specialised gift. Some people have it and others don’t. The creative people are the artists, musicians, novelists, filmmakers, and designers. The rest of us just get on with ordinary life.

The older I get, the less convincing that distinction seems.

Human beings are constantly making things. Sometimes we make art. Sometimes we make businesses. Sometimes we make traditions, communities, technologies, movements, or families. Sometimes we make a cake. It’s all creation. We take what exists and reshape it into something new. The scale varies, but the impulse remains remarkably consistent.

Perhaps that is why creativity feels so natural to us. We don’t experience it as an alien activity imposed from the outside. It feels like something we were born to do.

That doesn’t prove anything, of course. But if Genesis is right, it does offer an interesting explanation.

The first thing God does is create. A few verses later, human beings appear bearing the image of that Creator. Maybe those two ideas belong together.

Maybe our urge to create is not simply a useful evolutionary adaptation. Maybe it tells us something about the kind of universe we inhabit.

A universe that begins with creativity at its source would naturally produce creatures who create. A universe that begins with love would naturally produce creatures who long to make, build, shape, imagine, and bring new things into existence.

Seen that way, creativity stops looking like a hobby enjoyed by a talented minority. It starts looking like a clue.

A clue about ourselves.

And perhaps a clue about God.

The God We Start With Matters

The more I’ve reflected on all this, the more I’ve come to suspect that the way we imagine God matters more than we realise.

Most Christians are introduced to God through ideas like holiness, authority, judgement, power, or sovereignty. Again, none of those ideas are wrong. They’re all present in Scripture. But they aren’t where the story begins.

The story begins with creation.

That may seem like a small observation, but I’m no longer convinced it is.

The first image the Bible gives us is not of God ruling a kingdom, enforcing laws, judging sin, or demanding worship. The first image is of God bringing something new into existence. The opening pages of Scripture are filled with movement, imagination, possibility, beauty, and delight. Again and again, God creates something and declares that it is good.

I sometimes wonder how differently we might think about God if we started there. After all, the universe we inhabit is wildly, extravagantly creative. There is no obvious reason for there to be millions of species, countless colours, breathtaking landscapes, music, humour, imagination, or the endless variety we find in nature. A functional universe could have been far simpler. Yet creation overflows with diversity, beauty, and surprise.

That doesn’t strike me as the work of a reluctant creator ticking boxes.

It feels more like the work of someone who delights in creating.

Perhaps that’s why this idea has lodged itself in my mind.

When Christians say that God is love, I agree. Wholeheartedly. But maybe creativity is one of the clearest ways that love expresses itself. Maybe creativity is what love looks like when it takes shape. Maybe the reason God’s first act is creation is because creation is what naturally flows from a God whose nature is love.

I could be wrong.

But the next time you open the Bible, pay attention to how God introduces himself.

Dan Foster is the author of “The Bible is Your Story: What the characters of Scripture reveal about the patterns shaping your life.”

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