(From the book “Salvation: by the Will of the Sinner, or by the Will of the Savior?”)
We must never forget that God is the Potter and we are the clay! We are mere creatures whom God created “of the dust of the ground” (Genesis 2:7). We were created at God’s will and for His purpose (Revelation 11).
A. W. Pink reminds us of the solemn reality that God did not have to create us in the first place. More humbling still is Pink’s thought that God did not have to create me as a rational human being, but that He could have created me as a beast of the field or fowl of the air. We would do well to remember our humble origin.
Yet as Martyn Lloyd-Jones said, “warped by sin, we naturally seek to deny our creature-hood and to assert ourselves over against our Creator!”
As creatures of dust we are totally dependent upon God and thus entirely obligated to God for all things, particularly our very lives and continued existence. Acts 17:25 says, “Neither is worshipped with men’s hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things”
But we are instinctively blind to this and we actually feel that God is dependent upon us and obligated to us. This kind of thinking stems not from God’s Word but from human nature, twisted by sin. This kind of reasoning eliminates the whole concept of grace.
From the very outset we must realize that our very existence is a matter of God’s free grace! As we read in Acts 17:28, “For in him we live, and move, and have our being.”