Christ the Creator as Seen in the Book of Proverbs
By Dr. Rafat Amari
Christ, as seen in the book of proverbs, is the eternal Wisdom and power of all creation
The Bible declares Christ as the creator. This is seen throughout all of the books of the prophets of the Old Testament and the writings of the New Testament, all of which are inspired by God. Regarding the deity of Christ in the Old Testament, I will limit myself, for the lack of space, to discuss a few verses from the book of Proverbs (written in the 10th century B.C.) and another few verses from the book of Isaiah, ( written in the 8th century B.C.).
The book of Proverbs, chapter 8 portrays Christ as the "Wisdom of the Trinity,” whose power created all things.
Regarding the concept of the Cosmos, the Bible differs, from all other religions in that it does not consider the Cosmos as consisting of different layers of a building; rather the Bible speaks of "The great deep" to mean "the vast space of the Cosmos." The Persians imagined the Cosmos as being formed of 7 layers bound together by a mountain, rising up from the celestial sea beneath them. This mythological Persian concept so strongly influenced all the sects, who were born in contact with the Persian Empire: Mandaeans, Manicheans and Gnostics, that they all incorporated this map of heaven into their faiths. Every one of these sects and religions has their own modified version of the Persian Map of the Cosmos. The Qur’an, as a book that was born under such Middle Eastern sects, presented a similar idea about the Cosmos.
The book of Proverbs mentions the pre- existence of the Son of God, sitting with the Father, as the process of creating the universe unfolded. In chapter 8, verse 27 we read:
"When He prepared the heavens, I was there; when He set a compass or (circle) upon the face of the deep."
The book of Proverbs does not state that God planned the Cosmos as a building of seven layers, instead, God drew circles on the vast space, or the deep. Before incarnation, Christ declares that He was there when the first circle was made upon the vast space planned by the Triune God, indicates that He was participating, as a person of the Trinity, in the planning of the creation of the universe.
The same chapter of the book of Proverbs, (the book of Proverbs was mostly written around 950 BC) attributes the creation to the Son of God, as we see in the 30th verse:
“Then I was beside Him as a master craftsman. And I was daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him.”
Christ as a person of the Triune God, through His creative power, is the one who brings forth the world that the Triune God had planned. This fact is indisputably established in many books of the Old and New Testament.
From verse 27, which I quoted above, we see that God planned the universe as a vast, deep expanse with circles drawn upon its surface, which represent the orbits. God, in the planning process, fixed these orbits in order to regulate the movements of the stars and the Galaxies. This is a scientific concept, since we know today that the universe is built on a great order of orbits of the stars and the galaxies. For example, the earth orbits the sun, and the sun orbits the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. Our sun is located in one of the spiral arms of the galaxy. The diameter of our galaxy is about 100,000 light years across, and the sun is about 25,000 light years away from the center of the galaxy. The Milky Way galaxy continuously circles clockwise around its own axis. Therefore, even the sun itself moves as a part of this larger galactic movement at a speed of 170 miles per second – around 270 Kilometers per second. It is estimated that the sun would require 200 million years in order to circle one time around the center of the galaxy.
As we have seen from the verses that I quoted from the book of Proverbs, Christ planned the planetary orbits with the Father, and He brought them into existence in this universe according to His marvelous plan. Christ is the creative person in the Trinity, who executes the creation of everything that the triune God plans.
Copyright 2006 by Dr. Rafat Amari. All rights reserved.