Jesus, the Sustainer of My Life
We often think of God as the creator and the one who keeps us alive. We look at Him as the one who blesses us by supplying all our needs and many of our wants. But how often do we really think about the extent that God is involved with us? The writer of Hebrews speaks of Jesus as the Son of God in this way, “who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power” (Heb 1:3 NKJ). When he says, ”upholding all things” he is making a very inclusive statement.
We often think in terms of God working according to some preset laws of nature but that is not so. He made all the laws whether they are physical or spiritual. Before He created anything He had to design how His universe was to work including all the relationships between things whether they be large or small. Then after creation He would conform the actions of things to the laws He had made.
That means that when He upholds something He is positioning it according to one of those laws. That holds not just for our lives either but for all the atoms that make up the universe. While the current estimate of the number of atoms in the universe is in the area of 10 to the eightieth power (a number with 80 zeroes after it) we need to realize that atoms are made up of yet smaller things so that we are probably looking at the number of things that God is upholding as perhaps hundreds or thousands times greater than 10 to the eightieth power.
I can conceive of someone or something controlling a thousand items or so, but to control more than 10^80 items is mind boggling. It is beyond my comprehension. Furthermore God is actively doing that at a rate that is far below one billionth of a second. That means that God is actively controlling all the particles in the universe (10^80) many billions of times each second.
When Jesus said, “without Me you can do nothing” (John 15:5 NKJ) He wasn’t just thinking of a little help, He was thinking about positioning all those billions of particles that make up your body and every particle that is related to it. It is to that extent that we are dependent on Him for everything.
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