Last week my wife emailed me a link to a blog post in DesiringGod.org’s blog, a blog we both enjoy reading. (Here is a link to the blog post if you would like to see it.) It was a contest of sorts asking people to write an explanation of Jonathon Edwards’ Miscellanies 125[a]. After you read the Miscellany you will understand why it needs explanation. It is very hard to make sense of. After reading the explanation of the one doing the contest I realized I missed several things Edwards was saying. (Here is the explanation along with the winner’s response.)
Just to clarify, I did not win the contest. My explanation was not so much an explanation as it was a reflection of my own inspired by what Jonathon Edwards wrote. And although my writing ability and style is mediocre at best, the concept is both cool and thought-provoking and one that deserves our consideration. So here it is for your consideration. I encourage you to write your own response as it is very beneficial to exercise the mind in such a way.
Jonathon Edwards writes in Miscellanies 125[a]:
Tis certain with me that the world exists anew every moment, that the existence of things every moment ceases and is every moment renewed. For instance, in the existence of bodies, for there to be resistance, or tendency to some place; ’tis not numerically the same resistance that exists the next moment, ’tis evident, because this existence may be in different places. But yet this existence is continued so far, that there is respect had to it in all the future existences; ’tis evident in all things continually. Now past existence can’t be continued so that respect should be had to it, otherwise than mentally. If the world this moment should be annihilated, so that nothing should really and actually exist any more; the existence of the world could not be continued so that, if another world after a time should be created, that world should exist after this or that manner from respect to the manner of the existence of this, or should be so only because this had been thus or thus. Indeed, we every moment see the same proof of a God as we should have seen, if we had seen [him] create the world at first. Revelation 4:11, “For thy pleasure they are and were created.”
Here is my response/reflection:
God continues His creation (both in sustaining it and continuing the act of it), for the substance of this very moment in time has both disparity and continuity with every other moment in time past and future. Nothing can be as it was because of the other than static nature of this world in which every heartbeat and breath beholds something different; yet what is now, though ever wondrously anew, attests to and clarifies what was then. This being the case, even a singular moment an infinite number of moments from the first moment of all time, though unlike all the moments before it, gives us a certainty and awareness of what once was whether a moment ago or a million moments ago.
Psalm 19:1-2 says, “1 The heavens are telling of the glory of God; and their expanse is declaring the work of His hands. 2 Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night reveals knowledge.” Day to day and night to night each day and night, different from the previous, tell us something new of God and yet they declare the immutable nature of God who is always the same. New and wonderful, constant and unchanging are the revelations of God’s glory which the choirs of creation sing out, and an infinite number of moments in an infinite number of ages expressing an infinite number of novelties about God could never exhaust the facets of his character; but neither would they betray what has been knowable about Him since the beginning of time (Romans 1:20).
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