What does it mean that God is our sustainer?

In fact, man's very existence is bound up with God, however little he realizes it. "In Him we live:" He is the source of our life; "and move:" He sustains all of our activities; "and have our being:" our existence is totally dependent upon Him. Paul quotes a Greek poet as saying, "For we are also His offspring."

Such is our Creator-God. What do we not owe to Him? Our very life, and the sustainment of it. Every breath we draw we owe to Him.

Men delight in the thought that they are independent of God, but it is a delusion, they are not, for in Him we live and move and have our being. He is the faithful Creator, giving to all life and breath, and all things. His mercies preserve us. Every breath of our nostrils and every throb of our feeble hearts is by God's power and ordering. He is above His creation, dwelling in light which no man can approach unto, whom no man hath seen nor can see (1 Tim. 6:16); yet He is not indifferent to the travail of His creatures, even though that travail is the result of their rebellion against Himself. He has His part in events of today and His part is that of THE LIVING GOD, THE PRESERVER OF ALL MEN (1 Tim. 4:10). And this He has been towards men from the beginning. There have been times when His sore judgments have fallen upon men, as at the flood, and on the cities of the plain, and on the seven nations of Canaan, but this was because their revolt against Him was so open and determined and their moral degradation so horrible that the race could only be preserved by the extermination of those upon whom those judgments fell. As the surgeon's knife cuts deeply into the flesh to remove the foul cancer, so cut God's judgments into these scenes of violence for the good of His creatures. Yet judgment is His strange work. He delights in mercy. We count His long-suffering salvation. He is the preserver of all men.

Then Elihu asks, "Who gave Him charge over the earth? or who appointed Him over the whole world?" (v.13). He is asking in effect, "Is God answerable to anybody?" Did Job appoint God as the authority over the whole world? If so, of course then God would be answerable to Job! Indeed the opposite is true: Job, and every individual, is answerable to God. In fact, if God so desired, He could "gather to Himself His Spirit and His breath" by which He gives life to all mankind. What would happen then? "All flesh would perish together, and man would return to dust" (vv.14-15). How withering a rebuke to the pride of man! How clearly this tells us that we are always totally dependent on the power of God, not only in creating us, but in constantly, sustaining us in life.

It is evident that no creature can subsist in truth, save in absolute dependence on God. It must be kept to be in the truth - cannot subsist without it - for, if it is not dependent, and if dependence is real, it must be kept. It has lost its place of creature, if it is not in the truth of it. The first principle of its being, as such, is that dependence; it is in virtue of creation, i.e., it subsists in relationship with the Creator, and with the Creator as such, and does not exist if the Creator has not created it - exists in virtue of His power as Creator, and of His will too; hence, the moment it has made itself, in will, independent (in fact it cannot) it has falsified its existence - its existence, morally, is a lie in opposition to the truth of its necessary condition, that by which alone it exists. Thus dependence is alone the truth of any creature.

But, if this be so, there must be an active process of sustainment by Him who creates, otherwise the dependence is in vain; hence, whenever the creature is left to its responsibility, free to the action of its own will, its first act in will is its fall - it has gone out of dependence - it has left God - and the truth of its position with God, its subsistence, if it subsists, is a lie, and will becomes, not a mere part of nature, setting the rest in activity, but a will of its own, i.e., rebellion against God.

All things serve His might. Stormy wind fulfils His word. The lightnings obey Him, and say, "Here we are." It was the marvellous truth that Jehovah "upholds all things by the word of His power" (read Job 38-41), accompanied by the sense of His grace, that broke Job down. The Jehovah of the Old Testament is the Jesus (Jehovah-Saviour) of the New, as Isaiah 50 clearly shows. The very beating of our hearts, the expansion and contraction of our lungs are problems that can only be solved by the same wonderful fact, "He upholds all things by the word of His power."

He upholds "all things by the word of His power." He is the God of providence, and has not left His creation, or retreated back into the invisible glory where He was, but presides over the whole universe. He calls the stars by name, brings them on in their courses, "for that He is strong in power; not one faileth." All the providential ordering of the world, all God's ways in government have been entrusted to His Son. "By Him all things consist."

This too is evident in the fifth glory mentioned: "upholding all things by the word of His power." If He is the original Creator, He must he also the eternal Sustainer of all things. Nothing can subsist except by the Word of His power, which maintains all things in existence. This is indicated remarkably in Isaiah 40, the first part being the witness of John the Baptist to Christ, and verses 9 to 11 declaring His coming: "Behold, the Lord God will come," and the remainder of the chapter occupied with the greatness of this One, Who measures the waters, the heavens, the dust of the earth, and maintains the order of the heavenly orbs, so that "not one faileth." Only blindness could ignore this magnificent prophetic reference to the promised Messiah.

In verse 3 we also find the wonderful fact that the Son is the Upholder of all things. The previous verse has set Him before us as the Creator of all, and as the One who shall inherit all things, now we discover that all things are upheld and hang together by the word of His power. We may talk sometimes about the laws of the universe. We may observe the working of the law of gravitation, though the real why and wherefore of it is unknown to us. We may even, before we are much older, have to listen to fickle "science" altering or overturning all that she had previously asserted as to these laws. Well, so be it! We know that THE LAW of the universe is the word of His power, and this is all that really matters. Any laws which we may observe, or think we observe, are very secondary, and should the leaders of scientific speculation suddenly reverse their pronouncements we shall not turn a hair.

The Son is also the Upholder of "all things by the word of His power." He maintains the universe which He has created. All the laws and principles of nature are maintained in action by the word of the Son's power. "All things subsist together by Him." (Col. 1:17.) Men of science can tell us something of the vastness and beauty of the principles which operate in nature, and they freely confess that they can only traverse the outer fringe of the wonders of the universe. But how little do they think, in most cases, that everything subsists together by the Son. There is not a bit of creation that is not upheld by the word of His power. God would have us to ponder this - to consider it in all its magnitude - and thus to contemplate the Greatness of the Son.