Now that is true about creation, in the broadest and in the most absolute sense.  For what does the New Testament say, with the consenting voice of all its writers?  ’In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  Without Him was not anything made that was made.’  His hands laid the foundations of this great house of the universe, with its ‘many mansions.’  And what says Paul?  ’He is the Beginning, in Him all things consist’ ... ’that in all things He might have the pre-eminence.’  And what says He Himself from heaven?  ’I am the First and the Last.’  So, in regard to everything in the universe, Christ is its origin, and Christ is its goal and its end.  He ’has laid the foundation, and His hands shall also finish it.’

But, further, we turn to the application which is the more usual one, and say that He is the Beginner and Finisher of the work of redemption, which is His only from its inception to its accomplishment, from the first breaking of the ground for the foundations of the Temple to the triumphant bringing forth of the last stone that crowns the corner and gleams on the topmost pinnacle of the completed structure.  There is nothing about Jesus Christ, as it seems to me, more manifest, unless our eyes are blinded by prejudice, than that the Carpenter of Nazareth, who grew up amidst the ordinary conditions of infant manhood, was trained as other Jewish children, increased in wisdom, spoke a language that had been moulded by man, and inherited His nation’s mental and spiritual equipment, yet stands forth on the pages of these four Gospels as a perfectly original man, to put it on the lowest ground, and as owing nothing to any predecessor, and not as merely one in a series, or naturally accounted for by reference to His epoch or conditions.  He makes a new beginning; He presents a perfectly fresh thing in the history of human nature.  Just as His coming was the introduction into the heart of humanity of a new type, the second Adam, the Lord from heaven, so the work that He does is all His own.  He does it all Himself, for all that His servants do in carrying out the purposes dear to His heart is done by His working in and through them, and though we are fellow-labourers with Him, His hands alone lay every stone of the Temple.

Not only does my text, in its highest application, point to Jesus Christ as the Author of redemption from its very beginning, but it also declares that all through the ages His hand is at work.  ’Shall also finish it’—­then He is labouring at it now; and we have not to think of a Christ who once worked, and has left to us the task of developing the consequences of His completed activity, but of a Christ who is working on and on, steadily and persistently.  The builders of some great edifice, whilst they are laying its lower courses, are down upon our level, and as the building rises the scaffolding rises, and sometimes the platform where they stand is screened