This is the second article in a series on the The Apostles’ Creed that TGC Canada will be publishing over the following months. Each article will unpack one phrase of the creed.
The Apostles’ Creed begins with four simple yet seismic words: “I believe in God.” For centuries, Christians have confessed this as the foundation of all faith. But what does it actually mean to believe in God? And what kind of God are we talking about—the vague spiritual force of popular culture revealed in Star Wars, or the living, triune God revealed in Scripture?
The first line of the Creed, “I believe in God, the Father Almighty,” invites us to recover a vision of God that is both intimate and immense—personal yet infinite, near yet utterly holy—immanent yet totally transcendent.
What It Means to Believe
Modern culture often treats belief as a matter of private opinion—something you “feel is true” rather than something anchored in reality. Faith, in this view, is blind, emotional, and disconnected from reason. But the Bible, and the Creed that echoes it, understands belief very differently.
To believe, in the Christian sense, is never irrational. It’s simply to trust—to rely on something or someone you have good reason to think is true—to trust in the best explanation for the facts. Everyone exercises faith every day. You sit in a chair trusting it won’t collapse. You drive across a bridge believing it will hold. You follow a GPS trusting it won’t lead you to drive headlong into a lake.
Christian faith works in a similar kind of way. The theologian William Lane Craig explains that every act of belief has three parts: understanding, assent, and trust.
The first article in this series listed these three aspects of faith as follows—understanding means knowing what you’re talking about. You can’t believe in something you don’t understand at all. Assent means agreeing that it’s true—that the bridge really exists. But trust is when you actually walk across it.
Many people reach the first two steps—they have a decent understanding of who God is and even affirm his existence—but they never cross the bridge. They believe in God the way they believe in King Charles: they acknowledge his existence but live unaffected by him. They live and function in their lives as if God is a kind of constitutional monarch rather than God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth. We can tend to tolerate God as if he were a mostly harmless politician. But he is the King of kings and the Lord of lords (1 Tim. 6:15). The Lord reigns (Ps. 93:1). To merely tolerate or to ignore God is to misunderstand God.
True faith, by contrast, always leads to life change. It orbits around God the way planets revolve around the sun. It’s not content to know about him; it must know him personally.
The God We Believe In
When the Creed says, “I believe in God,” it is not speaking of a generic deity. As Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 8:5–6, “Although there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth—as indeed there are many ‘gods’ and many ‘lords’—yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist.”
There are countless conceptions of “god” in the world—Allah, Vishnu, Zeus, the “universe”. But the Creed points to one: the God revealed in Scripture, who eternally exists in three persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
This is not a cold abstraction but a living relationship. The Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Spirit, and the Spirit is not the Father—yet each is fully and truly God. He is not a divine force or cosmic energy, but a personal being who loves, speaks, and acts.
Why “Father”?
Calling God “Father” is one of Christianity’s most distinctive claims. Many religions say “I believe in God,” but to say “I believe in God the Father” is uniquely Christian and deeply Trinitarian. That is one of the reasons why it is inevitably irreverent to replace “Father” with mother. We need to respect the way God reveals himself in his Word.
God is Father in relation to his Son and Spirit. Existing in the one divine essence, there is eternal relationship—three equally divine and glorious persons—different yet inseparable, unified yet diverse. Despite attempts to find a suitable illustration, God is not like an egg, or the states of water, or a three-leaf clover. Those illustrations confuse rather than clarify God’s nature. He is unlike anyone or anything. He is God. The Creed, then, affirms the God who is love—not merely in sentiment but in being—a God who has always existed in relationship with himself.
But can everyone call God “Father”? In a culture quick to say, “We’re all God’s children”, the Creed emphatically corrects us. It’s important to notice that it refers to God as “the Father”, not “our Father”. While Scripture teaches that we are all God’s masterpiece by way of creation, we must become his children only through adoption—by believing in his only Son Jesus Christ.
John writes, “To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God” (John 1:12). We are not born with God as our Father; we must be born again (John 3:3). Adoption into God’s family comes at a cost—an infinite one paid by Christ himself. God forsook his Son in order to adopt his enemies (Rom. 5:6-10).
As John also says, “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him” (1 John 4:9). Jesus was condemned by us so that we might be blessed by God. The Son was forsaken so that sinners might be embraced. Christ was alienated by God that we might be adopted by God.
The Cost of Adoption
Adoption always carries a price. An international adoption might cost tens of thousands of dollars. But the divine adoption cost infinitely more.
On the cross, Jesus bore our sin, our shame, and the Father’s wrath so that we might be called sons and daughters of God. The eternal Son became what he was not—human—that we might become what we were not—children of God (John 1:12-14).
When believers recite, “I believe in God the Father,” they are confessing that their relationship with God was purchased at immeasurable cost. They are no longer spiritual orphans trying to earn acceptance. They are now beloved sons and daughters welcomed home through Christ.
The Almighty
The Creed doesn’t end the first line with “Father.” It adds one more crucial word: Almighty.
God reveals himself to Abraham saying, “I am God Almighty; walk before me and be blameless” (Gen. 17:1). The word almighty expresses absolute power and sovereignty—but also calls for obedience and awe. The Almighty’s strength isn’t abstract; it’s moral and personal. It inspires holiness.
In Revelation 1:8, the Lord declares, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.”
Why this title? Why choose this attribute of God to include in the Creed? Perhaps because “Almighty” encompasses all of God’s other attributes—his omniscience, omnipresence, mercy, and grace—into one glorious name. In any case, it highlights his power. It reminds us that every heartbeat, every breath, every moment of history depends entirely on him.
Believing in God Almighty melts pride like wax near a flame. It’s a wrecking ball to the fragile drywall of self-sufficiency. Because if there’s one thing fallen humans are not, it’s almighty.
