good preachin, Pat

Pat Quinn preached from Hebrews last night on Christ being both God's exalted son and our incarnate brother. One part stands out for me, not because it was new, but because it's very, very old, and because I've thought of it many times.

He talked about microscopes.

Actually, what he said was that Christ is Lord over both the macro and the micro, that the creation was spoken into existence through Jesus, and that Jesus now holds the galaxies and quasars together by his power and will. He's the designer, engineer, and maintainer of big things like planets and stars and gravitation and electromagnetism.

But he's also Lord of the small, the atomic and subatomic. He is the strength behind the forces that hold the various parts of atoms and molecules together. After the sermon, as I was talking to the kids about this, I used a spring as an analogy for God's strength in the universe. If I squeeze a spring together and hold it, it doesn't move, but it has energy behind it, energy that would be released if I let it go. In the same way, the universe--at both the micro and macro levels--is being held together by God; and behind everything we observe or theorize, there is great energy. That energy is Christ's hands holding all things together.

The unbeliever looks into a telescope and sees the size and grandeur of the universe and claims that if there is a god, we're too small to merit his attention. But have the skeptic turn the telescope around and look in at the microscopic and he'll see that things go on in that direction in the same way. We're not at the little end of things--we're suspended between, with infinity on either side. It still means we're small, of course, but it makes God something else completely. It puts him beyond size itself, beyond big or small.

Like I said, it's not new to me, but every time I think of it I'm amazed. At any given time, the very atoms of my own body and the world around me are at that moment being held together by Christ because he wills it. How could I not acknowledge such a one as Lord?

Thanks for preaching, Pat. And thanks for the reminder.