Copyright © 2002 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
I hated driving in England. The problem was that I’ve been driving the American way too long. My habits are too deeply ingrained. Yes, I got used to driving on the left. I even got used to passing through roundabouts at high speed. But the whole experience was one of constant tension. While our daughters calmly read and slept and squabbled in the back seat, I felt like we were always on the brink of disaster. If I relaxed for even a moment behind the wheel, old habits would take over, I would veer to the right and the four of us would be snuffed out in a head-on collision.
So imagine now that the world we live in is a vehicle being driven by God through His providence. The only thing which keeps it all going, allowing you and I to blithely ride along in the back seat of the universe, is our Creator’s constant attention. He made us from nothing and the only thing which keeps us from falling back into nothing, which keeps us in being, is that He continually steers us safely toward existence. As Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and many other great theologians have said, if God withdrew His power even for a moment, we, the universe and everything would collapse back into the nothing from which we all came.
The second part of God’s ordinary providence, then, is conservation. We exist only because God constantly, at every second, conserves our being. He not only creates, but for eternity holds together what He has created. In our text today, Paul slips this thought into verse 17, in the middle of a hymn of praise to Jesus Christ.
Just as in our reading last week for John 1, verses 15 and 16 of Colossians 1 teach us that God’s Son Jesus Christ is the beginning and purpose of creation. John says that He is the Word by which God the Father created. Paul says here that He is “the firstborn over all creation.” This does not mean He is the first creation, but that Christ is before and over anything that was made. Verse 16 leaves no doubt about this, giving a comprehensive litany of creation: “things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him.”
Verse 17, then, sums up the thought of Jesus’ relationship to creation with the words, “He is before all things.” But Paul doesn’t leave it at that. Creation is a past event. Back in the depths of time, God made the universe by and for Jesus. Creation is over and done with, will never happen again. But the work of God is not finished. He hasn’t been resting ever since the sixth day. So Paul adds, “and in him all things hold together.” God in Christ didn’t just create once and then relax. As Hebrews 1:3 also shows, He is forever at work, “sustaining all things by his powerful word.”
You might suppose that God isn’t a very good creator if He can’t ever relax. After all, you and I can make things, walk away from them with no further attention, and then come back to find them in pretty good shape.
While I was in seminary we were caretakers for three years on a beautiful rustic estate in the country northwest of Chicago, near Mundelein. The last summer we were there, the owner asked if I could construct an attractive, lighted entry at the driveway. So I spent a few weeks running electric wire underground, shopping for light fixtures, pouring concrete and setting posts. Then I miter cut and nailed strips of cedar over plywood to create two pillars topped with wrought iron lamps. The finishing touch was to hang on one of the pillars a sign which welcomed visitors to “Oak Hollow Farm,” the owner’s name for his place.
When we visited Chicago in July, Beth and I took our daughters up to Mundelein to see that place where we had lived eighteen years ago. Some of you who are much better builders than I probably know the sort of pleasure I felt when we drove up that road and saw that entryway still standing and looking pretty good. It had lasted all those years and the new owner had kept it just like I built it.
So why can’t God do at least as well as you or I? If a bozo carpenter like me can make something that has lasted nearly two decades, why can’t the creator of the universe make it last without His constant attention? Why is conservation a necessary addition to creation?
As we discovered last week, it all has to do with materials. When you or I make something, whether it’s constructing a deck or painting a picture, we must use whatever materials we can find. The fact that our project lasts awhile is not merely a matter of our good work, it’s a product of the materials. The wood and nails, the canvas and the paint existed without our help and before we started. So those materials and our creations keep on existing without us when our work is finished.
However, God works without any materials to begin with. All the materials He uses are His own creation. He reached into the abyss of nothing and lifted every single atom into being. Each particle of the universe depends absolutely on God for its existence and that dependence continues forever. He must not only create it by His Word, but sustain and conserve it by that same Word, moment by moment, day by day, week by week and from age to age through eternity. This utter dependence of the universe on God is part of what we celebrate when we sing “as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end.”
God’s conservation is, in fact, like you or I singing a song. When you open your mouth to make a sound, say that high E flat on the word “end” at the end of “Glory Be to the Father,” the note lasts only as long as you work at it. If you are a trained singer, like the opera stars my wife admires, then you might hold it quite awhile. But eventually your strength gives out, the flow of air through your vocal cords ceases, and the existence of that particular note is over. But, as Christian fantasy writers J. R. R. Tolkien and Calvin Miller suggest, God never stops singing His creation into existence.[1] His breath is endless. The voice of the Lord holds the crystal clear note of our world in existence without ever faltering.
Recognizing the fact that our existence depends moment by moment on God’s conservation ought to sober us a little. Ecology activists continually try to call our attention to how fragile our planet is, how near we are to the edge of ecological disaster. The President is trying to alert us to an imminent danger of mass destruction by terrorists. But the thinnest line we walk is always with us. But for God’s conserving power, we are always on the brink of non-being, always liable to wink out of existence like the light you turn off before going to bed.
Job felt this sense of utter and absolute dependence on God. Job got very near the brink. He lost his home and livestock. He lost his children. Most of what he held dear quit existing for him. He experienced his own life on the line. So in the passage we read from chapter 9 of the book of Job, he asked how one can dispute with God, with that kind of power? He overturns mountains if He wants to. He can speak to the sun and tell it not to shine. Who are we to suppose that He may not simply turn out our lights as well?
Acknowledging our constant and complete dependence on God’s good pleasure to keep the lights of our beings glowing is what you might call “serious religion.” This is different from all those warm fuzzies for your buddy Jesus who rides along as your co-pilot through life. This is belief that Christ the Lord is in the existential driver’s seat. We rely totally on His ability to steer us safely away from destruction. By ourselves we stand on the brink of never-ending darkness. Our only hope is the Word which says, “Let there be light.”
Serious religion, sober faith is that which acknowledges that Jesus Christ is for us what Paul says here, the creator and sustainer of all existence, the one with the supremacy in everything. Verse 19 says that “God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell” in Jesus. It is that fullness of power on which we depend.
Babies and small children remind us of the kind of dependence we have on Christ. Ask any mother of a two-year old how much attention her child needs. With dark circles under her eyes, she’ll tell you how he’s always on the brink of killing himself. He has his finger in the light socket or his head out the second story window. He’s wandering off at the mall or rushing out into traffic. He depends completely on his parents to steer him away from disaster at any time. And it’s that dependence which caused Jesus to implore us to come like little children into His presence. He was not supposing that children are somehow pure and innocent. He was not even focusing on the fact that children can be very trusting. No, Jesus invited us to come like children just because they are so helpless, so needy, so totally incapable of sustaining themselves.
The doctrine of conservation, then, teaches us that we are forever children in relation to God. From the beginning to the end of our lives we are sustained by His constant and unfailing work to keep us in existence and save us for Himself.
One practical consequence of believing in God’s conservation ought to be a daily exercise of faith acknowledging our dependence. As God day by day conserves our lives, let us stop our own activity for just a few minutes each day and think of what God is doing. Reflect on how everything you are and have is a gift given through Christ to you. Then offer a prayer that humbly acknowledges your daily need for what He gives you. A moment like that in each day will give you an experience of providence as well as a knowledge of it.
I don’t want to leave you, however, with the impression that this serious religion of acknowledged dependence is an unhappy and fearful sort of thing. This is a not a matter of walking around constantly anxious about your relationship with God, fearful that at any moment He might decide to quit wasting time on you and let you disappear. No, accepting dependence on God’s conservation ought to be a great assurance.
After Thomas Aquinas discusses God’s conservation of all that exists, he considers the question: “Whether God can annihilate anything?” That is, can God actually do the opposite of conservation and let what He has made cease to exist? Thomas’ answer is more or less that of course God can. If He made it and upholds it by His power, then He may withdraw His power at any time He pleases. God can erase from existence any of His creatures.
But then Thomas asks another, I think more penetrating, question, a question not about what God might do but about what He actually does. He asks whether God does in fact annihilate anything? The answer may be surprising. Thomas begins by quoting Ecclesiastes 3:14, “I know that everything God has done will endure forever,” and goes on to offer philosophical reasons why God has not and will not annihilate any of His creatures. Then I found this academic-sounding but oh so rich sentence: “the annihilation of things does not pertain to the manifestation of grace.”[2]
In other words, according to His power, God can easily take out of existence anything He’s brought into existence. But, but according to His grace, God will never do it. For God, grace always trumps power. Because of grace, God does not need to annihilate. Instead, as Paul tells us here, God in Christ will reconcile.
God did not bring any of His creation into existence in order to destroy it. The gift of being is one He gives forever. And the reason is because, in one way or another, every last person and particle in all the universe will be reconciled to Him. As verse 20 tells us, through His Son Jesus God will “reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.”
Jesus dying on the cross is God’s sign that annihilation is not His plan for anyone or anything. God’s plan is filled with grace which will bring His creation back together again, into the order and harmony He made it for. God’s plan of grace has a place for everyone.
We visited cathedrals while we were in England. On our tours we were occasionally struck with the sight of empty pedestals over doorways and clear glass panes in the middle of some of the great stained class windows. Those empty places, we learned, came about during the nine years Oliver Cromwell abolished the monarchy and ruled England as “Lord Protector.” In a violent attempt to purify the Anglican church, Cromwell’s followers took sledge hammers to statues of saints and climbed tall ladders to shatter their images in the windows. Looking at the scars on the ancient buildings, Beth and I shuddered to think of all that beauty being destroyed. Cromwell went down in our book as one of the bad guys.
Near the end of our time in England, we visited Westminster Abbey. This huge church is filled with burial places and monuments of famous people. In the Poet’s corner you can find Geoffrey Chaucer and Rudyard Kipling. Isaac Newton is buried among a group of important scientists. George Frederick Handel heads the list of great musicians. We walked along the walls, pointing out on the monuments the names we recognized.
When we came to the far eastern end of the Abbey, we made a dismaying discovery. Set in the floor, right in the center of Henry VII’s chapel was a plain stone with the inscription “The Burial Place of Oliver Cromwell.” “What’s he doing here?” Beth said to me. It was a good question. If anyone was an enemy of grand church buildings like this, it was Cromwell. Why was he remembered here among all these others? Why even this simple stone for a man who caused England and her church so much pain?
Then it came to me that Westminster Abbey is a little model of God’s provident plan for our world. Whatever one might feel about him, Cromwell was part of the history of England. So there is a place for him in its most famous church. Even he fits in. And so by grace there is a place for each and every one of us in God’s great plan to reconcile all things in Jesus Christ. By grace no one is left out of that plan, no one simply ceases to be. No one is too far gone to be included. By the blood of His very own Son God has determined not to simply destroy any of His creatures, but to save them by grace if they will only accept it.
Which all means that conservation is yet another way in which God demonstrates how much He loves you. He upholds you in existence day by day because your place in creation is assured for you by the grace of Jesus. My prayer is that you will acknowledge and accept that place, that you will believe, and live like you believe, that Christ died and rose so that you might be forever reconciled with God. We are upheld forever by gracious power. May we learn to depend more upon that power, but most of all, upon that grace.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2002 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj