Understanding God: God of Sustenance
…In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, before any plant of the field was in the earth and before any herb of the field had grown. For the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the earth, and there was no man to till the ground; but a mist went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground. – Genesis 2:4-6
Today, as we continue our exploration of the personality and nature of God, another of His attributes that we shall dwell on today is sustenance. He is a God of sustenance. He sustains everything and everyone.
From the passage above, we see that before rain started to fall on the earth God had a system in place that would sustain the earth. Even with all the civilizations we have around today, imagine what the earth would have been like without rain, not to talk of the prehistoric times when the earth had not been broken and domesticated by humans. It would have been impossible for life to survive on a parched and unstructured earth. Worse, the earth itself would have caved in and self-destruct without something to keep it moistened.
However, God being ever so thoughtful, methodical in His ways, and with such immense foresight, knew that He needed to have an organism in place to keep the earth wet, and thereby keep it sustained. What did He do? He caused the earth to generate mist from itself in order to wet itself. As simplistic as that sounds, it is an awesome thing to do and another testament to the omniscient power of God.
In other words, God while creating the earth also created the capacity for the earth to sustain itself. The same way He made plants and other living creatures “whose seed is in itself according to its kind” (Genesis 1:11-12) to be self-sustaining. The same way He also made we humans. Our capacity for sustenance however is not because of a random or unexplainable biological configuration. It is God who made us so. He is the One who wired us, an intricate unity, to be self-sustaining.
The Bible says, “the desire of every living thing” is satisfied by God (Psalm 145:16) and He “gives food to all flesh” (Psalm 136:25). That means whatever capacity we have to work for means of livelihood is an endowment from God. Therefore, it is “not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think of anything as being from ourselves, but our sufficiency is from God, who also made us sufficient…” (2 Corinthians 3:5-6).
God is the sustainer of all. Sustenance is one of the social pacts He is sworn by duty to all His creatures, man and beast, believer and non-believer, old and young.
Jesus Loves You!
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