(c) Preservation implies a natural concurrence of God in all operations of matter and of mind. Though personal beings exist and God's will is not the sole force, it is still true that, without his concurrence, no person or force can continue to exist or to act.
Dorner, System of Doctrine, 2:40-42—“Creation and preservation cannot be the same thing, for then man would be only the product of natural forces supervised by God,—whereas, man is above nature and is inexplicable from nature. Nature is not the whole of the universe, but only the preliminary basis of it.... The rest of God is not cessation of activity, but is a new exercise of power.” Nor is God “the soul of the universe.” This phrase is pantheistic, and implies that God is the only agent.
It is a wonder that physical life continues. The pumping of blood through the heart, whether we sleep or wake, requires an expenditure of energy far beyond our ordinary estimates. The muscle of the heart never rests except between the beats. All the blood in the body passes through the heart in each half-minute. The grip of the heart is greater than that of the fist. The two ventricles of the heart hold on the average ten ounces or five-eighths of a pound, and this amount is pumped out at each beat. At 72 per minute, this is 45 pounds per minute, 2,700 pounds per hour, and 64,800 pounds or 32 and four tenths tons per day. Encyclopædia Britannica, 11:554—“The heart does about one-fifth of the whole mechanical work of the body—a work equivalent to raising its own weight over 13,000 feet an hour. It takes its rest only in short snatches, as it were, its action as a whole being continuous. It must necessarily be the earliest sufferer from any improvidence as regards nutrition, mental emotion being in this respect quite as potential a cause of constitutional bankruptcy as the most violent muscular exertion.”
Before the days of the guillotine in France, when the criminal to be executed sat in a chair and was decapitated by one blow of the sharp sword, an observer declared that the blood spouted up several feet into the air. Yet this great force is exerted by the heart so noiselessly that we are for the most part unconscious of it. The power at work is the power of God, and we call that exercise of power by the name of preservation. Crane, Religion of To-morrow, 130—“We do not get bread because God instituted certain laws of growing wheat or of baking dough, he leaving these laws to run of themselves. But God, personally present in the wheat, makes it grow, and in the dough turns it into bread. He does not make gravitation or cohesion, but these are phases of his present action. Spirit is the reality, matter and law are the modes of its expression. So in redemption it is not by the working of some perfect plan that God saves. He is the immanent God, and all of his benefits are but phases of his person and immediate influence.”
II. Proof of the Doctrine of Preservation.
1. From Scripture.
In a number of Scripture passages, preservation is expressly distinguished from creation. Though God rested from his work of creation and established an order of natural forces, a special and continuous divine activity is declared to be put forth in the upholding of the universe and its [pg 412] powers. This divine activity, moreover, is declared to be the activity of Christ; as he is the mediating agent in creation, so he is the mediating agent in preservation.
Nehemiah 9:6—“Thou art Jehovah, even thou alone; thou hast made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, the earth and all things that are thereon, the seas and all that is in them, and thou preservest them all”; Job 7:20—“O thou watcher [marg. “preserver”] of men!”; Ps. 36:6—“thou preservest man and beast”; 104:29, 30—“Thou takest away their breath, they die, And return to their dust. Thou sendest forth thy Spirit, they are created, And thou renewest the face of the ground.” See Perowne on Ps. 104—“A psalm to the God who is in and with nature for good.” Humboldt, Cosmos, 2:413—“Psalm 104 presents an image of the whole Cosmos.” Acts 17:28—“in him we live, and move, and have our being”; Col. 1:17—“in him all things consist”; Heb. 1:2, 3—“upholding all things by the word of his power.” John 5:17—“My Father worketh even until now, and I work”—refers most naturally to preservation, since creation is a work completed; compare Gen. 2:2—“on the seventh day God finished his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.” God is the upholder of physical life; see Ps. 66:8, 9—“O bless our God ... who holdeth our soul in life.” God is also the upholder of spiritual life; see 1 Tim. 6:13—“I charge thee in the sight of God who preserveth all things alive” (ζωογονοῦντος τὰ πάντα)—the great Preserver enables us to persist in our Christian course. Mat. 4:4—“Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God”—though originally referring to physical nourishment is equally true of spiritual sustentation. In Ps. 104:26—“There go the ships,” Dawson, Mod. Ideas of Evolution, thinks the reference is not to man's works but to God's, as the parallelism: “There is leviathan” would indicate, and that by “ships” are meant “floaters” like the nautilus, which is a “little ship.” The 104th Psalm is a long hymn to the preserving power of God, who keeps alive all the creatures of the deep, both small and great.