Holding It All Together

Sticky rice, super glue, invisible spirits? What really keeps all matter in its beautiful configuration? Water in stunning lakes or massive oceans. Mountains and hills in spectacular vistas. Wooded forests. Cactus deserts. Sheer rock cliffs. Tables, chairs, and fireplaces. Cotton candy and popcorn. Human bodies in myriad sizes, shapes, and colors. We live amidst it all.

We relish its beauty. We thrive in its grand diversity. And yet scientists have never been able to put their finger on what the “glue” is. What truly holds all things together? What gives the great variety of matter shape, consistency, structure, softness, hardness, in all its unique patterns?

Strong force, gravity, electromagnetism, weak force: all make up what scientists variously have called “the universal glue!” They have gravitated all over the place as they study what explains all we see, touch, taste, and sense. We mostly take it for granted. But it is what we know and experience. This is our universe, and especially our world.

St. Paul answers their questions if you are willing to accept it. “All things were created through Him and for Him,” he writes of Jesus Christ. And in Him, “all things hold together.” You cannot get clearer than that. Jesus is the glue of all creation. No Jesus, no creation.

Are the Scriptures believable then? Their testimony from about 1500 BC to today are unassailable from all objective evidence. But the testimony of the written Word of God does not stand by itself. “The heavens declare the glory of God!” The whole creation speaks a single testimony: God is! Man knows in his own heart because he himself witnesses in the creation that God is her Creator. His inner conscience tells him there truly is a God, even when he speaks otherwise (Romans 1).

Oh, you can wait until the Final Judgment to genuinely accept it, but the Bible lets you know that this is a bit too late. Faith is your justification now. “By faith we understand that the universe was formed by God’s command” (Hebrews 11:3). And without the exercise of faith in this life you will never please God; not today nor tomorrow (Hebrews 11:6). Faith always delivers! And it delivers you!

“My faith has found a resting place, from guilt my soul is freed; I trust the ever living One, his wounds for me shall plead. I need no other argument, I need no other plea, it is enough that Jesus died, and that he died for me.”

(1st verse of Lidie Edmund’s hymn, “My Faith Has Found a Resting Place,” 1891)