Spirituality Column #790

January 4, 2022

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Holding It Together

By Bob Walters

“… in him all things hold together.” – Colossians 1:17, Paul describing Christ

Mankind, overall, has a great and destructive talent for making an unrecognizable hash of even the best things life has to offer.

Cynical as that sounds, let’s laser-focus on the single best thing of humanity: the human, divine, risen Christ – Jesus – who offers us new birth in God’s love and restoration to the eternal paradise of God’s Kingdom.  It’s what we were made for.

Accepting that gift – choosing and allowing the Holy Spirit to give and teach us new life in Christ – ought to be the most thankful, joyous, satisfying, calming, loving, peace-giving experience of life.  And no doubt for some of us, it is.  But because of mankind’s jealousies, greed, pride, and Satan-supported desire to be god-like within ourselves, we often don’t hold together in this thing that should be most precious to us.

Jesus warned his disciples constantly of the difficulty they would have in following him.  The world would not understand them.  The world would hate them.  The world would mock and persecute them.  In the smallness of their human worldview, it’s likely the disciples thought this only meant the disapproval of the Jewish leaders.  Jesus, however, plays the big game.  Jesus meant everything and everybody. 

As great a gift as Jesus provided to humanity – restored relationship with God – the disapproval of sinful man would follow the disciples everywhere as they took the Word to the ends of the earth.  And the amazing thing is – despite the hatred and persecution – somehow His Word and teaching held together for 2,000 years.

That gives me the hope and confidence it’ll hold together for a couple of thousand more.  In fact, I’d bet on eternity.  You can yell at the truth of Jesus, but you can’t change it.  His truth holds together without fail; it’s people who tend to fall apart.

Certainly, each of us experiences times in our lives when we don’t think things are holding together especially well, Jesus or no Jesus.  Some of the great calamities of my own life came well after I’d accepted the Lord 20 years ago.  But I experienced both calamities and successes before Jesus, and have seen calamities and success since.

The point is that Jesus holds all things together: not just us, not just our sense of well-being.  Jesus is the everything God.  Mankind, as I mentioned above, doesn’t have near the ability to hold itself together as does Jesus.  We tend to see things in small terms of just our own lives: passions, social comforts, finances, health, that kind of stuff.

When Paul says Jesus “holds all things together,” he means all things in creation seen and unseen.  The atomic structure and molecular makeup of all matter?  The vastness of the heavens?  Jesus holds them together because He created them.  As the Gospel of John 1:3 tells us of Jesus, “Through him all things were made; without him, nothing was made that was made.”  Jesus is far bigger than we often imagine.

You aren’t alone if you wonder whether or not mankind can hold things together for another year.  I mean, we do always seem to get to the next New Years, for better or worse.  I doubt this year will be any different.  Humanity will muddle on.

What I’m sure of is that we can rely on Jesus to hold up His infinite end of the bargain. A great New Year’s resolution for us is to make less of a hash of His loving gift.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) knows Jesus is life and that we’re dead without Him.