The Mustard Seed
The Story Behind the Apostles' Creed
The Christian Church is not a social club that people join so they can attend meetings, pay membership dues, promote a cause, or have a good time. The Church is the fellowship of people who share a common faith in Jesus Christ, united together to worship Him and to live in service to Him.
Since the earliest days of the Christian Church, when new believers wanted to receive baptism and join the fellowship, their pastors would meet with them for several weeks, teaching them God's Word. They learned basic information about who God is and what He has done to save us. Then, when the new Christians were ready to receive baptism, they stood in front of the fellowship and told what they believed about God, using the words of the Apostles' Creed. The word "creed" comes from the Latin word "credo," which means, "I believe."
We have no evidence that any of Jesus' original Apostles actually wrote this creed. We call it "the Apostles' Creed" because it summarizes the Apostles teaching which we find in the Bible.
The Bible describes God as three Persons in One God -- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit -- the Trinity. And so the Apostles' Creed has three sections or "articles;" each article describes one of the three Persons of the Holy Trinity.
In one short sentence, the First Article describes God the Father, who He is ("the Almighty") and what He does ("He made heaven and earth").
The longest part of the Apostles' Creed is the Second Article. It describes the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, Jesus Christ, the Son of God. The Second Article tells a story. It tells THE STORY of all that Christ did for us to win our salvation -- becoming human, suffering and dying on the cross, rising again, ascending into heaven, and one day He will return to judge all people, living and dead.
The Third Article begins, "I believe in the Holy Spirit." Then the creed goes on to name some things that are the effect of the Holy Spirit's work:
(1a) "the Holy Christian Church..." or as older translations of the Latin creed say, "the holy catholic Church." The word "catholic" is a Latin word which means "universal." We print it with a lower case "c" so we don't confuse it with the organization known as the Roman Catholic Church. The universal Holy Christian Church is not any earthly organization. It is not a denomination. It is the invisible Body of Christ, with Christ alone as our head.
(1b) "the communion of saints," or as we like to Sign, "the fellowship of God's holy people," meaning all true Christians whom Christ has made holy by His blood, His sacrifice on the cross for us. The "communion of saints" is simply another name for the universal Holy Christian Church of all true believers.
(2) "the forgiveness of sins..." The Second Article describes what Jesus did to earn our forgiveness, and the Third Article assures us that God truly does forgive us. The Holy Spirit gives each of us faith to know that "God forgives me!" The Holy Spirit makes this truth personal for every one of us.
The final lines of the Third Article describe our future hope, our faith in God's promises for those things which we have not yet received -- "the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting."
Throughout history, one of the purposes of the creeds is to announce our faith in the face of false teaching about God, or heresy. The Apostles' Creed answers one the first anti-Christian heresies -- Gnosticism. Gnostics taught that spirit is good and physical material is bad. Gnostics believed that Satan, not God, created the physical world, and they could not accept that Christ became human. The First Article of the Apostles' Creed says that God the Father created both "heaven and earth." The Second Article says that God became fully human by a human birth. He physically died and physically rose again. And the Third Article affirms "the resurrection of the body" for all who die in Christ.
This we believe!