“By virtue of the believer’s union with Christ, he doth really possess all things. That we know plainly from Scripture (1 Cor. 3:21-23). But it may be asked, how doth he possess all things? What is he the better for it? How is a true Christian so much richer than other men?
To answer this, I’ll tell you what I mean by ‘possessing all things.’ I mean that God three in one, all that He is, and all that He has, and all that He does, all that He has made or done—the whole universe, bodies and spirits, earth and heaven, angels, men and devils, sun, moon, and stars, land and sea, fish and fowls, all the silver and gold, kings and potentates as well as mean men—are as much the Christian’s as the money in his pocket, the clothes he wears, or the house he dwells in, or the victuals he eats, yea more properly his, more advantageously more his, than if he could command all those things mentioned to be just in all respects as he pleased at any time, by virtue of the union with Christ, because Christ, who certainly doth thus possess all things, is entirely his, so that he possesses it all, more than a wife the share of the best and dearest husband, more than the hand possesses what the head doth. It is all his.
The universe is his, only he has not the trouble of managing of it. But Christ, to whom it is no trouble, manages it for him a thousand times as much to his advantage as he could himself if he had the managing of all.
Every atom in the universe is managed by Christ so as to be most to the advantage of the Christian, every particle of air or every ray of the sun, so that he in the other world, when he comes to see it, shall sit and enjoy all this vast inheritance with surprising, amazing joy.”
–Jonathan Edwards, “ff – Union with Christ,” in The “Miscellanies”: Entry Nos. a-z, aa-zz, 1-500, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 13, Ed. Harry S. Stout (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 183-184.
