“All things were made by him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men.”
Let us read the text again: “All things were made through him, and without him was made not one thing. That which was made in him was life.” The power by which he created the worlds was given him by his father; he had in himself a greater power than that by which he made the worlds. There was something made, not through but in him; something brought into being by himself. Here he creates in his grand way, in himself, as did the Father. “That which was made in him was life.” What is the life the apostle intends? Many forms of life have come to being through the Son, but those were results, not forms of the life that was brought to existence in him. He could not have been employed by the Father in creating, save in virtue of the life that was in him. As to what the life of God is to himself, we can only know that we cannot know it. As to what the life of God is in relation to us, we know that it is the causing life of everything that we call life—of everything that is; and in knowing this, we know something of that life, by the very forms of its force. But the one interminable mystery is first, how can he be self-existent, and next, how he can make other beings exist: self-existence and creation no man will ever understand. The cause of our being is antecedent to our being; we can therefore have no knowledge of our own creation; neither can we understand that which we can do nothing like. If we could make ourselves, we should understand our creation, but to do that we must be God. Nevertheless, if I be a child of God, I must be like him, even in the matter of creative energy.
Commentary
by Earle Canty
As MacDonald clearly states, “As to what the life of God is to himself, we can only know that we cannot know it.” We are not intended by the Creator to understand the life of God. It is a mystery that we will never unravel. The Father and His Son, the creators of all we know, existed before the creation, which means that they existed because of themselves. What we can understand is that the Father gave His Son life and because the Father did that, His Son was endowed with the power to create life. We are a part of that created life, the apex of the creation, but our understanding does not include a fundamental understanding of our creation. The Father and His Son created life and the means by which life is perpetuated. The procreation of man is the means by which life is perpetuated, but provides no understanding of how life was originally created.
Scripture tells us that we were created by the Father and His Son in their image
{Gen 1:26-27}. We are children of God and like God in some ways. The Father and His Son were creators, and one of the attributes with which they endowed man is creative energy, the desire and ability to make and do new things. The history of man is replete with inventions, but none of these inventions involve the creation of life. The power to create forms of life is unfathomable. Even with the scientific advances in today’s world where cloning is now possible, life is not truly being created. Cloned life comes from existing life, life originally created by the Creator.
One of my favorite hymns is “How Great Thou Art”. It beautifully describes the incomprehensible greatness of God and His Creation.