The Word in Creation
“The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him; and without Him was not any thing made that was made.”
John i. 2, 3.
twKj’iLT is a distinct loss to many of us, whose lives are ‘ipL spent in the heart of great towns, that we miss those
lEallfi enlarged conceptions of Nature which are suggested by the far horizon of the sea; the outlines of distant hills; the snowy summits of the Alps; or the outspread panorama of woods, rivers, and pasture lands. And the privation affects us principally in this, that contracted views of Nature sometimes carry with them more limited views of God’s being and glory than if we dwelt in habitual contemplation of the vastness and splendour of his Creation.
One of the first thoughts which occur to the devout mind, on emerging from the straitened conditions of city life into the larger world of Nature, is to reproach itself that it has entertained such dwarfed ideas of God. And whilst it does not abate one note of the tender strain. Our Father it adds to it the deep bass of the Psalmist’s awe, “Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised, and his greatness is unsearchable.”
Such thoughts open straight on the passage before us. We look, and rightly, on the Lord Jesus, as Brother, Saviour, Friend; but do we always conceive of Him as invested with the awful glory of Godhead? We cannot be too intimate and tender in our relations to Him; but we do well sometimes to go outside to see what He has done, that we may know how great He is, who is so near and dear.
“The same was in the beginning with God.” — At first this seems merely to sum up and repeat the previous “lEet ua make an.” ^3
verse. But it does more. It tells us that He who was before the beginning was also at the beginning; and that that face-toface fellowship, which had subsisted before all worlds, was in active exercise at the august moment when the ever-blessed Trinity proceeded to create. “Let us make man.”
“All things were made by Him.” — The Greek is very significant: All things became i.e., came into being, through Him. This becatne is in striking contrast to the was of the previous verse, and indicates the passage from nothingness to being. Became., i.e.., all things emerged out of nothing at the creative fiat. There is a beautiful parallel in another passage of this Gospel, in which our Lord affirms, “Before Abraham became, I am” (viii. 58).
The preposition “through” is always used of the office of our blessed Lord in the work of creation (i Cor. viii. 6; Col. i. 16; Heb. i. 2), and is full of meaning. It leaves God the Father as the origin and source of all things, so that the elders are justified in their perpetual ascription of worship before his throne (Rev. iv. 11); but God the Son, our Lord, is the organ through which the creative purpose moves. Through Him the infinite God utters Himself in his works.
In the archaic record of creation with which the Bible opens, two phrases are to be noticed — created {Ge.n. i. i, 21, 27) and God said (which occurs ten times). Into each of these we must now read the announcement of this text. Note those three acts of creation. Whatever else we may concede to men of science, we must insist on retaining these for God, and ascribing them to our Lord. And whenever God is said to speak, we must listen for the well-known accents of a voice we love.
It was the voice of Jesus that said, “Let there be light “; and the new ethereal substance spread like a haze of glory through space. It was the hand of Jesus that made the expanse between cloud and sea, in which the birds fly (Gen. i. 20). It was the bidding of Jesus that drove the turbulent waters from the land into the ocean -bed which He had scooped. It was the thought of Jesus to splinter the mountain peaks; to thrust the frozen glacier down into the valley by inches; to pour forth the rivers: and to shake down over the hills the falling foam of the cataract. It was Jesus that carpeted the earth with flowers, and devised the innumerable sorts of plants, and planted the noble forest-trees. It was Jesus that rolled the stars on their orbits, to tell forth the glory of God, and to keep time on Nature’s dial. It was Jesus that made the fish to flash in the deep; the reptile to creep in the brake; the firefly to glance through the forest; the birds to sing in the woods; flocks to browse on the hills; and herds to traverse the prairies.
It was Jesus who created the human nature which, in after years, He was to assume. He made man in the image and after the likeness of what He was Himself to be in the fulness of time. What strange emotions must have filled his heart as He built up that first man from the red earth!
“Without Him was not anything made that was MADE.” — This is added to make exceptions impossible. The Greek is very emphatic, noi one single thing. You must not except angels because too great, nor emmets because too small; not worlds because too ponderous, nor dust-atoms because too insignificant; not electricity, nor light, nor heat, because too ethereal, nor the ichthyosaurus nor the toad because too ungainly. The hand of inspiration writes the name of Jesus where artists put theirs, beneath all things in heaven and on earth, visible or invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers.
” Not a flower But shows some touch, in freckle, streak, or stain, Of his unrivalled pencil.”
“In Him was Life.” — We must light up these words by his own: “As the Father hath life in Himself,” the source and fountain of all being, “so hath He given to the Son” that is, in the subordinate position which He voluntarily assumed for the purposes of creation and redemption — “to have life in Himself.” All life is of God in its original reservoir; and all life is in the Lord Jesus, as a cistern of supply, from which all demands for life of every sort are met.
All life — natural and physical, animal and intellectual, spiritual and religious — is in Him. The whole universe. of living things was not simply brought into being by Christ; but It IS kept in existence and sustained in living beauty by the constant communications of his fulness — as a vale is kept in fertile beauty, luxuriant with vegetation, by the spray of a perennial waterfall. As the Word, He creates; as the Life He sustams. As the Word, He declares God; as the Life’ He communicates his essence. “As the Word, He is God without us; as the Life, He is God within us.”
Apart from Christ, you may exist; but you have no life in you. “He that hath not the Son of God, hath not life” You may have many attractive and amiable qualities, much that IS correct m behaviour, and beautiful in appearance but you have no /t/e. ’
But if you are in Christ, opening all your being to Him door behind door, back into the most sacred chambers of your being, so that He has free and unhindered entrance into your entire nature; then, as the Nile, descending through the channels cut by the Egyptian peasantry, bears life and fertility into their gardens and cornfields, so will He bring his own life the life of God, “life indeed,” into you, and though you were dead, yet shall you live (John xi. 25).
(I) Say “No” to your Self-li/e.-M is in proportion as we au-tail the self-hfe that we increase the Christ-life. Michael Angelo was wont to say of the chippings that fell thick on the floor of his studio, “While the marble wastes, the image grows”,- and as we chip away ourselves by daily watchfulness and self-denial, the life of Jesus becomes more manifest in our mortal body (2 Cor. iv. 10, u). A rosebud may be grafted into a briar; but the briar must never be allowed to put forth Its oun shoots beneath it, or they will drain away its strength therefore the gardener must ever mercilessly bud them off. After the same manner must we deal with every assertion of self. I have been, and am, crucified with Christ... Christ liveth
m me
(2) Yield to the Christ-life.~TV^^ is the law of all natural torces; ,f you want them to help you, you must yield them obedience In using them, you are less their master; and more 16 f;ijc McriJ in Creation.
their slave, than you suppose. They are willing to toil for you day and night; but on the one condition that you should study and obey the laws of their operation. And it is so with respect to that greatest of all forces, the life of the Son of God. It is throbbing in every behever’s heart. And the difference between Christians consists in this, that some ignore its presence, or, at least, are ver>’ careless of its promptings, whilst others are ever on the alert to translate into instant obedience, the tiniest impressions. As you yield to the Spirit of life which is in Christ Jesus, you become more conscious of his blessed strivings within, they increase in number and power, and bear you upward, as when the ocean pours its tides up an estuary or river, and reverses the direction of its flow.
(3) Replenish waste by going again to the source. — There is so much leakage in us that we speedily exhaust what we have received. The oxygen absorbed by the blood is soon exhausted by its contact with the waste of our tissues, and needs to be drawn back through the veins to be soaked again in the air of our lungs; so does the freshness of the Divine life within us need to be daily renewed, and we must go back to Him in whom it is ever brimming, that out of his fulness we may receive, and grace for grace. It is in the reading of his Word, in prayer, and in waiting upon his ordinances, especially in the Lord’s Supper, that the inner life becomes thus replenished ajid “fulfilled with his grace and heavenly benediction.”
“The Life was the Light of Men.” — All true life is luminous. The lowest forms of physical life are light; as when the keel of the vessel ploughs up the wave, and leaves long lines of phosphorescent glory in its wake. And who does not know of some community which has been lit up by the glow of some noble life! During his life in our mortal body, Jesus could not be hid; no bushel of obscurity sufficed to conceal Him. And now, when He enters into contact with any soul or life, that soul begins to glow, that life to shine.
We are like so many unlit candles, some of coarser and some of more refined material, clustered together in a darkened chamber, but not one of us able to dispel its gloom, or cope “lis iifc is fislTt.” 17
with its dense obscurity; but just so soon as we touch Jesus Christ, or are touched by Him, we begin to sparkle and shine. His Life is Light. “Arise, shine! for thy light is come.” “Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.”
These then are our closing reflections: —
(i) How great must He be, through whom this great universe was made, who was one with God the Father in its inception, and one in its execution! He could not have been less than divine, or the infinite God could not have found adequate expression through his means. Only the Infinite can be the channel for the Infinite.
(2) We may learn something of the beauty of his mind. The beauty sleeping in a seed reveals itself by the colours of the flower as they unfurl to the sun, and the fragrance that fills the air. The beauty in the unexplored heart of a friend reveals itself in the verses we suddenly light upon, or the books which bear his name. The beauty of the artist’s mind is discovered in the pictures or statues which he has produced. And what revelations are made to us of the beauty of the conceptions of our Lord, as we arm our eyes with telescope or microscope, and study the infinite above or the infinite beneath!
(3) We can trace some lingering remnants of the grandeur of our original nature, in that we ourselves, sinful and fallen though we be, are able to admire the works of his hands, and to repeat his “very good” of all that we behold of his power and skill. Devils seem devoid of this power; for they are pictured as haunting uninhabited and desolate places, roaming through desert places, and infesting the ruined heaps of the past.
(4) We can understand the miracles and parables better. In the one, our Lord was simply re-asserting his original power over nature; as when Ulysses returned after years of wandering, and bent with ease the bow which had defied the efforts of all who had essayed to use it in his absence. And in the.
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other, He simply read out the meaning which He had hidden in vines, and seeds, and natural processes; for all things around us are made after the pattern and type of spiritual realities.
(5) We may be sure that He who made can and must redeem. It is impossible to suppose that He through whom all things were made could stand by and see them vitiated and spoilt by sin, without making a single effort to arrest the progress of the devastator, and to restore the universe to its pristine beauty and order. We are not then surprised to learn that the same paragraph which tells us that all things were created by Him, also tells us that it pleased the Father by Him to reconcile all things to Himself, whether they be things in earth or things in heaven (Col. i. 16-20).
He who is the Alpha must also be the Omega; He who created by a word must redeem by his blood; He who originated must see that He is not robbed of the fruits of his toil; He who said, “Behold, I make,” must also say, “Behold,, I make all things new.”