The Creator
For by him were all things created that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers. — COLOSSIANS i. 16.
LAST read my text, it appears to me plainly to assert, and clearly to demonstrate, the doctrine of our Lord’s divinity. Now the incarnation of God, more than any other truth in the Bible, is one of pure revelation. There are many other doctrines there, of which men, without any aid from inspiration, have arrived at a more or less clear conception; guided to the discovery of them by no other lights than those of reason and of conscience. Therefore Paul says, “When the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: which show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the meanwhile accusing or else excusing one another.”
It will make this doctrine stand out all the more prominently as that great and sacred mystery which angels desired to look into, and at the same time serve, what I think an important purpose to direct your attention —
I. To some of those cases which illustrate the harmony between Natural Religion and our Christian faith. Such, for instance, is —
1. The doctrine of the being of a God. I do not need to open the Bible to learn that. It is enough that I open my eyes, and turn them on that great book of nature, where it stands legibly written, clearly revealed in every page. God! that word may be read in the stars and on the face of the sun; it is painted on every flower, traced on every leaf, engraven on every rock; it is whispered by the winds, sounded forth by the billows of ocean, and may be heard by the dullest ear in the long rolling thunder. I believe in the existence of a God, but not in the existence of an atheist; or that any man is so, who can be considered in his sound and sober senses. What should we think of one who attempted to account for any other works of beauty and evident design, as he professes to do for those of God? Here is a classic temple; here stands a statue, designed with such taste, and executed with such skill, that one almost expects the marble to leap from its pedestal; here hangs a painting of some dead beloved one, so life-like as to move our tears; here, in Iliad, or Mneid, or Paradise Lost, is a noble poem, full of the grandest thoughts, and clothed in sublimest imagery; here is a piece of most delicate, intricate, and ingenious mechanism. Well, let a man tell me gravely, that these were the work of chance; tell me, when I ask who made them, that nobody made them; tell me, that the arrangement of the letters in this poem, and of the colours in that picture, of the features in the statue, was a matter of mere chance; how I should stare at him! and conclude, without a moment’s hesitation, that I had fallen into the company of a raving madman or of some drivelling idiot. Turning away from such atheistic ravings about the infinitely more glorious works of God, with what delight does reason listen, and with what readiness does she assent, and with what distinct and hearty voice does she echo the closing words of the seraphim’s hymn, “the whole earth is full of his glory!”
2. Such also is the doctrine that man is a sinner. Who needs to open the Bible to learn that? It is enough that I open my heart; or read in the light of conscience the blotted record of my past life. “I know and approve the better, and yet follow the worse,” was the memorable saying of one of the wisest heathens; yet it did not need any superlative wisdom to arrive at that conclusion. Dr. Livingstone tells us that he found the rudest tribes of Africa, on whose Cimmerian darkness no straggling ray of revealed truth had ever fallen, ready to admit that they were sinners. Indeed, they hold almost every thing to be sin which, as such, is forbidden in the word of God. Nor is it possible to read his clear statements on that subject, without arriving at this very interesting and important conclusion, that the ten commandments received from God’s own hand by Moses on Mount Sinai, are but the copy of a much older law — that law which the finger of his Maker wrote on Adam’s heart, and which, though sadly defaced by the fall, may still, like the inscription on a time-eaten, moss-grown stone, be traced on ours. See how guilt reddens in the blush, and consciousness of sin betrays itself in the downcast look of childhood! Even when they drink up iniquity as the ox drinketh up the water, and wallow in sin as the swine in the mire, there is a conscience within men that convicts of guilt and warns of judgment. Dethroned, but not exiled, she still asserts her claims, and fights for her kingdom in the soul; and, resuming the seat of lordly judgment, with no more respect for sovereigns than beggars, she summons them to her bar, and thunders on their heads. Felix trembles. Herod turns pale, dreading in Christ the apparition of the Baptist; while Cain, fleeing from his brother’s grave, wanders away conscience-stricken into the gloomy depths of the forest and the solitudes of an unpeopled world. Like the ghost of a murdered man, conscience haunts the house that was once her dwelling, making her ominous voice heard at times even by the most hardened in iniquity. In her the rudest savage carries a God within him, who warns the guilty, and echoes these words of Scripture, Depart from evil, and do good. Stand in awe and sin not.
3. Such also is the doctrine that sin deserves punishment. Hell is no discovery of the Bible. In vain do men flee from Christianity to escape what their uneasy conscience feels to be a painful doctrine; one which, in their anxiety to lull conscience asleep, they reject as a doctrine of incredible horrors. If that is an objection to this book, it is an equally valid objection to every religious creed which man ever held and cherished. A great poet has represented with great power the cataracts and rivers, the rocks and glaciers, the hurtling avalanche and rolling thunders of the Alps, and those lovely valleys where summer, attired in a robe of flowers, seems sleeping at the feet of winter, as forming one great choir, and with their various voices all proclaiming, “God;” but it is not less solemn than true, it is no poetic fancy, but a plain striking fact, that the voices of all nations, of all tongues, rude or polished, have proclaimed a hell. No heathen religion but had its hell, and warned its followers of a place beyond the grave where vice shall meet the doom which it escaped on earth. And in their pictures of the damned, where we see avarice forced to drink molten gold, and eternal vultures tearing at the heart of lust and cruelty, what, again, is the voice of nature but an echo of words we do well to take heed to, Be sure your sin will find you out? 4. Such also is the doctrine that man cannot save himself. In what country, or in what age of heathenism does man appear standing up erect before his God, demanding justice? In none. All her temples had vicarious sacrifices and atoning altars, at which man is on his knees, a suppliant for the mercy of the gods. The very Pagans had more sense than some of us.
Glimmering as was the light of nature, they saw things more clearly than to be satisfied with themselves. They never believed that, through their own merits, they could be their own saviours. Hence their costly offerings; their hecatombs of victims; the painful and horrid sacrifices by which they sought to propitiate an angry God. They gave the fruit of their body for the sin of their soul; and, to the shame of those of us who will take no trouble for salvation, and grudge the smallest tax for the cause of Christ, they hesitated at nothing by which they could hope to avert heaven’s wrath, and win its favour. The voice of that cromlech stone, which still stands on our moors, the centre of the Druids’ grey, lonely, mystic circle, and on whose sloping surface I have traced the channel which, when human victims lay bound on this altar, drained off the blood of beautiful maiden, or grim captive of the fight — the voice of those tears the Indian mother sheds, as she plucks the sweet babe from her throbbing bosom to fling it into the Jumna or Ganges’ sacred stream — the voice of those ruined temples which, silent now, once resounded with the groans of expiring victims, what are these, again, but an imperfect echo of the words, Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us?
5. Such also is the doctrine that the soul survives the stroke of death. Our spiritual, ethereal essence had its symbol in the heaven-ascending flame which the heathen carved upon their tombs; and their hopes of immortality were expressed, as well by the lamp they lighted amid the gloom of the sepulchre, as by the evergreen garlands that crowned the monuments of their dead. This hope has been a star that shone in every sky; a flower that bloomed in the poorest soil; a flame that burned in the coldest bosom. Immortality! that made heroes of cowards. It imparted to weakness a giant’s strength. It made the courage of the bravest warrior burn high in the day of battle. It nerves yonder unbending savage to endure, without a groan to gratify his captors or disgrace his tribe, the tortures of fire and stake. Why do these weeping Greeks approach the dead man, as he lies on his bier for burial, and open his mouth to put in an obolus f The coin is passage-money for the surly ferryman who rows the ghosts over Styx’s stream. And why, in that forest grave, around which plumed and painted warriors stand unmoved and immovable as statues, do they bury, with the body of the Indian chief, his canoe and bow and arrows? He goes to follow the chase, and hunt the deer in the spectre land where the Great Spirit lives, and the spirits of his fathers have gone before him. How easy it is to trace, in these customs and beliefs, a sort of rude copy of the words, Life and immortality, I shall not die, but live.
6. Although I cannot say that the doctrine of a resurrection is to be placed in the same class with these universal fixed beliefs that so remarkably illustrate the harmony between the sacred Scriptures and the voice of nature, yet may not the hope of a resurrection have sometimes shot, like a bright meteor, across the midnight darkness of heathen grief? That doctrine did, indeed, astonish the Athenians; and its novelty and apparent absurdity led them to pronounce Paul a babbler. And to the eye of sense, no doubt, the tomb looks dark as blackest midnight; nor can the fondest wishes detect a sign of life slumbering in the cold ashes of the grave. Yet may not the feelings which prompt to such tender care of the lifeless body, to lay it out so decently, to bury it with funereal honours, to build it a tomb, more keenly to resent dishonour done to the relics of the dead than any done to the persons of the living, have suggested the idea of a resurrection? Might not grief have thus given birth to the blissful thought, that after a long night, the sun that had set would rise again; and that the long winter would be followed by a spring, when, like the beautiful flowers that have hid their heads in the ground, the dead would leave their graves to live and bloom anew?
No such truth might be hidden, as one of the ancient mysteries in the heathen legends of the Phcenix that sprung from its ashes into new life; yet there are things in nature which suggest a resurrection of the dead. Such is the well-known analogy presented by the changes which many creatures undergo. The insect, at first a creeping worm, crawls on the earth, its home the ground, or some humble plant or decaying matter, which feeds its voracious appetite. The time of its first change arrives. It weaves itself a shroud; it makes itself a coffin; and under the soil, in some cranny of the wall, in a convenient fissure of rock or tree, as in a catacomb, it finds a quiet grave. There, shrouded, and coffined, and buried, and to all appearance dead, it lies till its appointed change. The hour arrives. It bursts these cerements; and a pure, winged, beautiful creature, it leaves them, to roam henceforth in sunny skies, and find its bed in the soft bosom, and its food in the nectar of odorous flowers. Why should not that change, or the analogy which Paul found also in following nature, have suggested to the heathen what they illustrate to us — a resurrection? He saw our grave in the furrow of the plough; our burial in the corn dropped into the soil; our decay in the change undergone by the seed; and our resurrection, when, bursting its sheath and pushing aside the clod, it rises green and beautiful, to wave its head in summer days, high above the ground that was once its grave. That which thou sowest, he says, is not quickened, except it die: and that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain. So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption: it is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory: it is sown in weakness; it is raised in power: it is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.
Different, differing much from these, the doctrine of God incarnate is one which nature nowhere teaches us; neither by analogy, nor reason, nor intuition, nor conscience. Our proofs of this doctrine, therefore, must be sought for in Scripture, and all our ideas concerning it drawn thence. This mystery, which angels desired to look into, is one to be approached with the faith of a little child whom his father has taken out beneath the starry sky, to tell the wondering boy that these little, bright, twinkling lights are suns big and blazing as our own. A mystery this, to be approached with the deepest gratitude by those, whom to save from unutterable woe, the great God veiled his glory, and became a man to die. Without controversy, great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh, justified in the spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory. Now, in illustration of this doctrine I remark —
II. That the word of God, both here and elsewhere, attributes the work of creation to Jesus Christ.
Our Lord has been sometimes connected with creation more in beautiful fancies than by plain strong facts. There is a flower, for example, one of the most complex, yet most beautiful in nature, which the piety of other days associated with the sufferings and deep love of Calvary. In the form and arrangement of its parts it presents such a remarkable resemblance to the cross and the nails of our Lord’s torture, encircled by a halo of floral glory, that, as if it had been originally made to anticipate and afterwards left to commemorate our Redeemer’s sufferings, it has received the name of the passion- flower. And I remember how, in sweet wooded dell or on the brown heather hill, we were wont to pull up one of the fern tribe, and, having cut its root across, gaze with boyish wonder on the initials of Jesus Christ printed there, black as with ink on the pale wounded stern. Nor are these the only objects in nature that have been associated in some way with our Lord. When the mariner, leaving our northern latitudes, pushes southward to plough a sunnier ocean, he sees a starry cross emerging from the deep; and as his course tends further southward, it rises and continues to rise higher in the heavens, till, when the pole-star has dipped beneath the wave, he gazes with feelings of awe and wonder on the sign of salvation blazing above his head — its body and arms formed of brilliant stars.
In these things a devout superstition, that loved perhaps more fondly than wisely, sought to gratify its affections. Nor do we despise, but rather respect the feelings which prompted ancient piety even in this way to identify our Lord with the wonderful works of God. It is not, however, in these devout and poetic fancies that we either seek or see our Lord’s connection with that kingdom. But as, with the genius that aspires to immortality, and anticipates the admiration of future ages, the painter leaves his name on a corner of the canvas, so Inspiration, dipping her pen in indelible truth, has inscribed the name of Jesus upon all we see — on sun and stars, flower and tree, rock and mountain, the unstable waters and the firm land; and also on what we do not see, nor shall till death has removed the veil, angels and spirits, the city and heavens of the eternal world. This is no matter of fancy. It is a fact. It is a blessed fact. No voice ever sounded more distinctly
Q to my ear than that of revealed truth, proclaiming Jesus, Lord of all. How plainly is that great truth written on the face of my text! He who runs may read it there. And to the same effect the Scriptures have precept upon precept, line upon line, here a little and there a little. In seeking examples of this, we are embarrassed, not by the scantiness, but by the abundance of them. And as two or three competent and in every way credible witnesses are held in a court of law to be worth as many as would crowd the court-house, let me adduce two or three passages which ascribe the work of creation to our Lord in language plain as facts, and clear as noonday.
1. In 1 Corinthians viii. 6, Paul says, “there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we in him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by him”
2. In Ephesians iii. 9, Paul also says, “to make all men see what is the fellowship of the mystery, which from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God, who created all things by Jesus Christ.”
3. When our Lord was on his trial, and stood before his judges and false accusers, as a sheep before her shearers, he was dumb, opening not his mouth. He heard them as if he heard them not. Eager, yet afraid to strike, the high-priest at length rose from his throne, and, fixing his eye on the prisoner, said, I adjure thee by the living God, that thou tell us whether thou be the Christ, the Son of God. Whereupon — the first time he broke silence — our Saviour replied, Thou hast said: nevertheless I say unto you, hereafter shall ye see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven. Then, as we are told, the high-priest rent his clothes, saying, He hath spoken blasphemy; what further need have we of witnesses? And now, in seeking to crown Christ with the honours which they there foully denied him, how may I borrow the last words from that murderer’s mouth, saying, after Paul, in these passages from Corinthians and from Ephesians, has so clearly attributed the work of creation to Jesus, What further need have we of witnesses? But call in the apostle John. Ask him what he has to say on this great subject, what evidence he has to give, what testimony he can bear? How full, distinct, and clear his answer! Speaking by inspiration, and with his finger pointed at Christ, he says, “All things were made by him / and without him was not any thing made that was made.” And thus he writes concerning the very same person of whom, in the same chapter, he says, “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.”
Did these holy men anticipate, did they foresee a day when, walking in the light of their own fire, and, in the sparks which they had kindled, presumptuous men would rise up in the church to deny the divinity of our Lord; and, with that precious doctrine, to deny, in course of time, all the doctrines to which it is the key-stone? It would seem so. Their anxious care to make plain statements still more plain, looks like it. To make assurance doubly sure, to place our faith on a foundation secure against all assaults, I pray you to observe how the evangelist is not content with simply saying that all things were made by Christ, but adds, as if to double-lock the door against the approaching heresy, “without him was not anything made that was made” Wonderful news to tell in a sinner’s ear! the stupendous fabric of creation, yon starry vault, this magnificent world, were the work of the hands by which, in love of you, he hung, a mangled form, on the cross of Calvary!
No two harps out of heaven or in it ever sounded in more perfect harmony than the words of John and the language of Paul in my text. My text is the statement of John expanded — the bud blown out into a flower — the indestructible precious gold beaten out over a broader surface. And see how the same anxiety appears here also that there shall be no mistake! What care is taken of your faith! Paul would prevent the shadow of a doubt crossing your mind about our Lord having a right to the divine honours of Creator! “By. him,” he says, “all things were created. Did an angel, standing at his side when he penned these words, stoop down, and whisper in his ear that in coming days men would rise to throw doubt over the truth, and, explaining it away, attempt to rob Jesus of his honour? I know not; but to make the truth still more plain, he adds, “that are in heaven and are in earth.” Not content with that, he uses yet more comprehensive terms, and to embrace all the regions of God’s universe above the earth, and beyond the starry bounds of heaven, he adds, “visible and invisible.” Nor leaves his noble task till he has swept the highest and the lowest things, men and worms, angels and insects, all into Christ’s hand — adding, “whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers.”
Thanks be to God that a doctrine so precious is written in language so plain. As soon may the puny arm of a mortal man pluck the sun from the heavens, as pluck our Lord’s divinity out of this text. Well might dying Stephen, gazing through the opened hea vens, behold Jesus at the right hand of God. Where else should he see him — the man of sorrows whom Paul here, to our joy, and comfort, and triumph, exalts to the throne of an adoring universe? In the person of Jesus Christ, the Lord reigneth, let the earth rejoice. Take, believers, the full comfort of a doctrine which is so fraught with honour to God and salvation to man. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad. Rejoice in the Lord alway; and again I say, rejoice. Are you afraid? Are you in trouble about anything whatever? Are you racked with cares? Do earthly or spiritual fears disturb your peace, and cast a cold dark shadow on your soul? Does your faith faint, stagger? Rise from your knees; go forth this night; leave the cross, that affecting monument of his love, to contemplate the glorious monuments of his power; stand beneath heaven’s resplendent arch; and when, led on by the pale evening star, Orion, and Arcturus, and the sweet Pleiades, and all the heavenly host in harmonious order, as to the music of higher spheres, come marching on across the field of darkness, list, to the noble utterance of the old Hebrew prophet. In what lofty strains he speaks of your Lord and Saviour! What courage his words inspire, as, raising his arm to the starry skies, he exclaims,” Behold who hath created these things, that bringeth out their host by number: he calleth them all by names by the greatness of his might, for that he is strong in power; not one faileth. Hast thou not known, hast thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither
is weary? He giveth power to the faint. They
that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.”