Chapter 32 — The Son as Maker and Sustainer of All Things
The Incarnate Christ and His Critics (Komoszewski & Bowman, 2024)
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"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." (Genesis 1:1)
The opening words of the Bible establish something foundational: the universe didn't make itself. It isn't eternal, and it isn't an accident. It was made by God, and creation belongs to the Creator, not the other way around. So who that Creator is turns out to be one of the most defining truths about God.
When the New Testament says that Jesus Christ, the man the Romans crucified outside Jerusalem, was the one through whom the universe was made, it's making one of the most radical claims in the Bible about who he is.
And it isn't a one-off claim. It shows up in four different books, written by three different authors, across the first seventy years of Christian history.
The Texts
John 1:3, 10: "All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being that has come into being… He was in the world, and the world came into being through him."
1 Corinthians 8:6 (Paul, written ~AD 54-55): "One Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist."
Colossians 1:16-17: "For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together."
Hebrews 1:2-3: God "has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word."
Creation Through Him
There's a grammatical point worth slowing down on. Every one of these texts says all things were created through the Son, not that God created the Son first and then the Son co-created everything else. The Son isn't part of creation. He's its agent, the one everything else came through.
That directly contradicts the Jehovah's Witness teaching that Jesus was God's first creation. If Jesus created all things, then there's nothing that was created that he didn't create, and he can't be both Creator and a created thing at once. Colossians 1:16 drives this home: "all things have been created through him and for him." He wasn't only the agent of creation. Creation was made for him too, which means it has a purpose and a destination, and that destination is Christ.
Sustaining All Things
Hebrews 1:3 adds something that goes beyond creation: the Son is "sustaining all things by his powerful word." The universe doesn't just happen to exist. It's actively, moment by moment, held in existence by the Son's ongoing power.
Sit with that for a second. The laws of physics that hold atoms together, the gravitational constants that keep planets in orbit, the biological processes sustaining your heartbeat right now, all of it, in some mysterious but real sense, is sustained by Jesus Christ according to the New Testament.
He isn't an absentee creator who set the universe in motion and then stepped back. He holds it together, and he's the reason it keeps going.
Colossians 1:17 says "in him all things hold together." The word translated "hold together" (sunistēmi) suggests that without him, things would fall apart. He isn't just the cause of existence. He's the ground of its coherence.
The "Exact Representation" of God
Hebrews 1:3 has one more phrase worth pausing on: the Son is "the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being." The word translated "exact representation" (Greek: charaktēr) referred in the ancient world to a stamp or impression, the mark a seal leaves in wax, or the image pressed into a coin. The Son isn't a lesser reflection or a copy of God's glory. He's the precise expression of what God is.
To see the Son is to see the exact image of the Father. To know the Son is to know exactly what God is like.
Jesus said it himself: "Whoever has seen me has seen the Father" (John 14:9). Hebrews says the same thing in different words. The Son is the exact stamp of God's nature.
For the Alternative Christologies
Most of the alternative views of Christ deny that the divine Son who became incarnate was the Creator of all things. Unitarians, Muslims, and progressive Christians believe Jesus was a creature like us, born into creation rather than its author. Jehovah's Witnesses and LDS theology accept his preexistence but still place him within creation.
But notice what follows if Jesus really did create all things: none of those positions can be right. You can't be both the agent through whom all creation came into being and one of the created things. You can't be both the one who sustains the universe and a finite creature sustained by forces outside yourself.
The New Testament makes no apologies for placing Jesus on the Creator's side of the line. He made the world. He sustains it. He is its destination.
Closing Meditation
I want to close with something personal. When I look at the night sky, really look, away from city lights, at the scale of the universe, it can feel overwhelming. Billions of galaxies, each with billions of stars, all of it vast beyond what I can actually take in.
And then I remember: the one who holds all of that together is the same one who spoke to fishermen on a shore. Who healed the sick. Who wept for a friend. Who died for me.
He made it all, and he came into it to find you.
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