THE PURIFICATION OF THE HEATHEN DOCTRINE: obviating the eternity of matter.
II. THE DEEPENING OF THE JEWISH DOCTRINE of the Shekinah: clearly pronouncing the personal life of love in God as it enters into the world.
III. THE GLORIFICATION OF THE SOUND DOCTRINE of scientific investigation: man the final cause of things; the God Man the final cause of man.
IV. THE VERDICT OF THE SPIRIT respecting the derivation of the world from a non-spiritual source: materialism. (Lange.)
The Christian features in all things
I. The CREATURELY instinct of dependence, as an impulse towards the upholding Word.
II. The NATURAL, SELF-UNFOLDING instinct, as the impulse towards freedom (Rom_8:1-39.).
III. The COSMICAL, WORLD-FORMING instinct, as an impulse towards unity.
IV. The SPIRITUAL instinct, as the impulse to rise in the service of the Spirit. (Lange.)
Christ the Creator
I. As He is the efficient cause of all.
II. As He is the pattern by which all were made.
III. As all things are created by the Godhead, and the Word was God. (Cornelius a Lapide.)
The universal creatorship of Christ
I. ASSOCIATES HIS NAME WITH ALL EXISTENCE, PAST AND PRESENT.
1. It furnishes the key to the dark problems of nature and providence.
2. It gives to science and Christianity a common foundation.
(1) Science reveals the eternal power and Godhead of the Word.
(2) Christianity the means of mercy to fallen man through the Word.
(3) Each a compartment of one great fabric reared to the glory of God. Science the outer court: admire and adore. Christianity the holy place: kneel, pray, praise (Heb_4:16).
II. AFFORDS TO FAITH THE GREATEST ASSURANCE AND ENCOURAGEMENT. “His every word of grace is strong,” etc.
III. INSPIRES THE HUMBLEST WITH CONFIDENCE. Christ cares for the humblest of His creatures (Psa_104:27; Mat_7:11).
IV. IRRADIATES THE FUTURE WITH A GLORIOUS HOPE (Rev_21:1; Rev_21:5). (Van Doren.)
The relation of Christ to the created universe
All things are
I. IN Him. All archetypal forms and sources of creative life eternally reside in Him.
II. BY Him. He is the one Producer and Sustainer of all created existence.
III. FOR Him. He is the end of created things. Living for Him the explanation and law of every creature. (Van Doren.)
The creative power of the Word
See 1Co_8:6; Col_1:16; Heb_1:2. Observe
1. God revealed Himself through His Son before the Incarnation.
2. To be a Creator the Word had to be God.
3. Matter is not eternal: the universe has an intelligent personality back of it, as architect, builder, and sustainer.
4. The stars are a manifestation of Christ, as well as the Bible: we see Him in natural as in revealed religion.
5. The Being who made all things is worthy of being trusted with the absolute work of making and sustaining our characters. (A. H. Moment.)
The universe a revelation of Christ
The creation of a single atom would have been a revelation of Him: how much more is this great universe! A man is always greater than his work; no architect, for example, ever put his whole self into the noblest building he designed; even so the Word is greater than the universe which He has called into being. Still, so far as it goes, it reveals Him to us. To the eye of childhood this world into which we are born is beautiful and strange, and marvellous past expression. Not less so to the intelligent and thoughtful manhood. If the romance is gone, as the summer dew from the grass at noon, the real wonder only becomes more overwhelming. (J. Culross, D. D.)
God in nature
To the infidel, Nature’s voices are but a Babel din. Trees rustle, and brooks babble, and winds blow; but there is no meaning in their sound. To the Christian, all speak of God; and if it were not for the dimness of the natural eye, he might see His host of angels at their ministry. The tree stretches out its arm, laden with fruit, like the arm of God. The morning sprinkles him with dew, as with holy water; and he is sung to sleep at evening with songs like the lullaby of earthly parents to their children. (H. W. Beecher.)
Divine designs open to us in creation
When I was in the galleries of Oxford, I saw many of the designs of Raphael and Michael Angelo. I looked upon them with reverence, and took up such of them as I was permitted to touch as one would take up a love token. It seemed to me these sketches brought me nearer the great masters than their finished pictures could have done, because therein I saw the minds’ processes as they were first born. They were the first salient points of the inspiration. Could I have brought them home with me, how rich I should have been! how envied for their possession! Now, there are open and free to us, every day of our lives, the designs of a greater than Raphael or Michael Angelo. God, of whom the noblest master is but a feeble imitator, is sketching and painting every hour the most wondrous pictures--not hoarded in any gallery, but spread in light and shadow round the whole earth, and glowing for us in the overhanging skies. (H. W. Beecher.)
The Creator must be Divine
To create, to call something out of nothing--be it a dying spark or a blazing sun, a dewdrop cradled in a lily’s bosom, or the vast ocean in the hollow of God’s hand, mole-hill or mountain, the dancing motes of a sunbeam or the rolling planets of a system, a burning seraph or a feeble glow-worm, one of the ephemera that takes wing in the morning and is dead at night, or one of the angels that sang when our Lord was born; whatever be the thing created, the power to create is God’s, the act of creation His; and therefore, since Paul says that Jesus Christ created all things, he cannot mean to depose our Lord from the throne of Divinity, and lower God’s only begotten Son to the level of a created being. (T. Guthrie, D. D.)
Creation the work of God
Creation is the work of God: “without Him was not anything made that was made.” He only can create. The architect can rear a cathedral, the sculptor can cut forms of symmetry and grace from marble, the painter can depict life on his canvas, the machinist can construct engines that shall serve the nations; but not one of them can create. They work with materials already in existence. They bring existing things into new combinations; this is all. God alone can create. (D. Thomas, D. D.)
The greatness of the universe a testimony to the greatness of Christ
1. We look around us upon the infinite variety of productions which the earth brings forth--their use, their goodness, their beauty; we sweep the eye of imagination over ocean and continent, hill and plain, lake and stream, corn-land and forest, sahara and paradise; we mark the changes produced by day and night, and the succession of the seasons; we listen to the music of nature--the boom of ocean dashing on the shore, the wind in the forest, the tinkling of the hidden moorland rill; we think of the countless tribes of living and sentient beings that inhabit earth along with us; we think of man with his marvellous endowments; we think of the treasures of darkness and hidden riches of secret places; we listen to all that science can tell us of the subtle agencies that pervade creation and the laws which bind all beings together.
2. Then, standing on earth as on a promontory, we look upwards and outwards. Beneath the nether sky, with its cloud and scenery, and its sunrise and sunset hues of beauty, there are illimitable realms of space, studded with worlds moving harmoniously in close ravelled maze. These heavens were vast and glorious to the eye of the Chaldean gazer thousands of years ago; how have their vastness and glory grown to us since then! The globe which is our dwelling-place is one of the smallest planets wheeling round one of the lesser suns. It is conceivable that only our own little world might have hung solitary in immensity; but the space swept by the telescope teems with solar systems compared with which ours is insignificant. In the Milky Way alone are millions of suns, the nearest of which requires years to dart its light to us, though light travels two hundred thousand miles during the single vibration of a pendulum. In the presence of that immensity, our globe is but as a grain of sand on the seashore.
3. Leaving the realms of space, with the help of geology, let us look back on the realms of time. Since our world became the theatre of life, ages on ages have run their course, for the duration of which we have absolutely no measure. The universe in its vastness, wonder, and divine beauty, and in all the evolutions through which it has passed during countless ages, lay first of all in His mind--if one may say so--as the grand cathedral was in the brain of the architect ere its foundation-stone was laid; it took all that we see, and all that science discloses, and all that mystery still hides, to express
His creative idea. How great, then, must the Maker be! How wise, good, glorious! (J. Culross, D. D.)
Christ’s creative knowledge
A quaint countryman, telling of his thorough knowledge of the people of his vicinity, said boastfully, “I know all these people as well as if I’d made ‘em.” That statement of his covered a great deal of ground, whether it were true or were only a suggestion of a truth. No man can understand a complicated piece of mechanism like the man who made it. And there was never so complicated a piece of mechanism on earth as the average man or woman. At the best, every man or woman is a bundle of contradictions; and the closest human friend is puzzled at times over some new phase of those contradictions in his friend. Only He who made that puzzle can know its parts in all their relations and in all their workings. What a comfort in the thought that our Friend of friends knows us as well as if He made us; knows us because He did make us--for “all things were made by Him.” (H. C. Trumbull, D. D.)
Christ’s presence in His creation
He is not a Master who, like a carpenter or builder, when he has prepared a house or ship, leaves the house for its owner to dwell in, or commits the ship to the mariners that they may traverse the sea in it, and he himself goes whither he may. No; God the Father has begun and finished all things by His Word, and preserves it also continually by the same, and remains with His work until He wills that it shall no longer exist (Joh_5:13). As we were made by Him without our assistance, so also we cannot be preserved of ourselves. Thus here, were all to understand that all things created are preserved, in being otherwise they would not long remain created. (Luther.)
The confidence inspired by Christ’s creatorship
If without Christ nothing was made, then nothing made by Him can do any injury to His kingdom. Fear loves to make exceptions; it allows all else to be innocuous; only that one thing which is directly in view appears to threaten danger. This is met with the assurance that all things, without exception, were made by the Word; therefore every fear is unreasonable to Him who has the Word on His side. If to be made, and to be made by Him, are the same thing, there can be no enemy that is to be feared, either in heaven or in earth. (Hengstenberg.)
What was not, and what was made by Christ
Many, wrongly understanding “without Him was nothing made,” are wont to fancy that “nothing” is something. Sin, indeed, was not made by Him; and it is plain that sin is nothing, and men become nothing when they sin. An idol also was not made by the Word, and an idol is nothing. Therefore these things were not made by the Word; but whatever was made in a natural manner, whatever belongs to the creature, from an angel even unto a worm. What more excellent than an angel among created things? What lower than a worm? But an angel is fit for heaven, the worm for earth. He who created also arranged. If He had placed the worm in heaven, thou mightest have found fault; and if He had willed that angels should spring from decaying flesh, thou mightest have found fault. And yet God almost does this, and He is not to be found fault with. For all men born of the flesh, what are they but worms? And of these worms God makes angels. (Augustine.)
