Colossians 1:17

He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

The Deists of the 18th Century had the notion of a Watchmaker God who wound up the universe and let it go while he wandered off to tinker with other universes or laid down for a nap or something.  The problem with this notion is that it presumes the universe is somehow a necessity.  But it’s not.  The universe is radically unnecessary.  That’s the point of today’s verse.  “All things” from quarks to quasars are held in being by Christ.  Without his present will sustaining them in existence from nanosecond to nanosecond, “all things” would simply cease to be.  This is why the grandfatherly senility of the Deist god is inadequate.  As St. Thomas said, if God wanted to destroy the universe, he wouldn’t have to do anything: he would have to stop doing something.  And this means that God is as intimately involved in your life as he can possibly be, not an aloof Olympian deity periodically checking in to see if the experiment is still running.  Today, call upon the God in whom we live and move and have our being.