Sustaining All Things

I taught the first three verses of Hebrews this past Sunday, where the mysterious author (my vote is for Priscilla, but that's another conversation all together) non-chalantly rattles off a laundry list of many attributes of Jesus Christ.

Because they seem so non-chalant, and it would be easy to simply nod your head in agreement and move on, it brought to mind the book I read my senior year in Honors US History with Dr. Messer, easily the most rewarding class of my college career. Richard Hughes, reflecting on the ideas of Tillich, says in How Christian Faith Can Sustain the Life of the Mind:

• “How often have we been guilty of transforming the Christian faith into a set of orthodox propositions that simply stand there in all their splendor and do nothing to connect us either to God or to the neighbor?”

• “There is nothing wrong with orthodox beliefs. But those beliefs must never become ends in themselves. We must affirm them so long as they are biblical and true, but we must at the very same time break through them to those realities to which every Christian doctrine finally points, namely, to God and to the neighbor.”

• He clarifies that the process of breaking through a particularity is not destroying that belief, but rather, “The paradox lies in the fact that when we affirm a particularity, we break through it at the very same time, only to affirm it again and break through it again, and on and on we go, simultaneously affirming and breaking through, affirming and breaking through…”

In the margin next to that last quote lies a note in my 21-year old handwriting declaring, "How beautiful!"

So I spent a lot of time in this study wondering how we could break through these little tid-bits of theology to the deeper truth of experiencing Christ. It's not an easy process.

But anyway, the attribute I found most powerful is that Christ "sustains all things by his powerful word."

He is actively and continuously sustaining, supporting, upholding, maintaining all things. As Paul says in Colossians, "In him all things hold together." It speaks of his power and sovereignty, but also of his active working.

Deists believe God created the world and set it up with natural laws, got it going, and has left it alone, untouched ever since, watching it from a distance. This passage completely opposes that idea. Now, as a friend pointed out, while few Christians claim to believe this Deist view, sometimes we slip into that mentality on a practical level. We believe God has left us to our own devices ever since the Fall of man, and we have to sit and bide our time as things grow progressively more evil, waiting for our only hope in the second coming of Christ. The author of Hebrews, in this short phrase, tells us this is not the case. Christ knows and he is working--upholding and maintaining--here and now.

And if that's not enough, realize this: The God who sustains everything by his powerful word--keeps the planets in their orbits by telling them to do so, for example--is actively sustaining you. He who began a good work in you--He who created the earth and now keeps it running--will be faithful to complete it until the day of Christ Jesus.