The Glory of the Creature

Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created. REVELATION 4:11

Most books on the Christian life begin with sin. Murray’s most searching books begin somewhere earlier. Humility opens not with the fall but with creation, under the title The Glory of the Creature, and Waiting on God devotes one of its first readings to The True Place of the Creature. Before he says a word about what has gone wrong with us, Murray wants us to understand what we were made to be. His answer, in a single word, is dependent. Everything else in his teaching grows from that root.

Not once, but every moment

The heart of the idea is simple and far-reaching. When God made the world, He did not make it as a watchmaker makes a watch, winding it up and leaving it to run. He made it as a fountain makes a stream: the stream exists only because the fountain is continually pouring. In Humility Murray writes that the life God bestows “is imparted not once for all, but each moment continuously, by the unceasing operation of His mighty power.”

Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high. HEBREWS 1:3

This means that the creature’s relationship to God is not merely one of origin. It is one of unceasing dependence. We do not owe God our beginning and then carry on by ourselves. We owe Him this breath, this heartbeat, this thought. Murray took Psalm 104 as his text in Waiting on God: the young lions, the birds, the creatures of the sea — these all wait upon God, that He may give them their meat in due season.

These wait all upon thee; that thou mayest give them their meat in due season. That thou givest them they gather: thou openest thine hand, they are filled with good. PSALM 104:27–28

The creature as vessel

What, then, is a creature for? Murray’s answer is lovely and humbling. God created us, he says, to make us partakers of His own goodness and blessedness, and so to show forth His glory. But He did not do this by handing us a quantity of goodness to own and dispose of. He did it by making us vessels. The creature, Murray writes in Humility, must “present itself as an empty vessel, in which God can dwell and manifest His power and goodness.”

But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us. 2 CORINTHIANS 4:7

This reverses our instinct about dignity. We tend to think that to be great is to be independent: to have resources, to need no one, to be self-made. Murray thought that was exactly the lie of Eden. The serpent offered our first parents the chance to be as gods — that is, to stand on their own. The creature’s true glory is not independence but receptivity. A vessel is glorious when it is full, and it is full only of what is poured into it.

For who maketh thee to differ from another? and what hast thou that thou didst not receive? now if thou didst receive it, why dost thou glory, as if thou hadst not received it? 1 CORINTHIANS 4:7

The root of every sin

If dependence is the creature’s glory, then the root of all sin is the refusal of dependence. Murray is unambiguous: pride, the loss of this humble dependence, is in his words “the root of every sin and evil.” The fallen angels looked on themselves with self-satisfaction. Our first parents reached for a life of their own. And every sin since has had the same shape: a creature acting as though it were not a creature.

Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall. PROVERBS 16:18

This is why, for Murray, redemption is not merely forgiveness. It is restoration. Christ came to bring the creature back to its true place, and He did it by taking that place Himself. The eternal Son became a creature and lived in perfect dependence on the Father — the Son can do nothing of Himself, He said. In His life we see what a human being was meant to be. In His death we see dependence carried to the uttermost. And by His Spirit He puts that same dependent life within us.

Then answered Jesus and said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do. JOHN 5:19

Why this is good news

At first all this can sound crushing. Nothing in ourselves; everything received; every moment dependent. But Murray insisted that when a believer really sees it, dependence becomes not a burden but a relief. If God is the one who works, then I do not have to be the source of my own goodness. If He maintains me every moment, then my weakness is not a threat to His supply. The vessel does not have to produce the water. It only has to stay open and turned toward the fountain.

In Waiting on God Murray says that the call to dependence is no arbitrary command, but simply our restoration to our original destiny and our highest nobility as creatures. It is not that God, being great, demands that we grovel. It is that God, being good, delights to give, and a creature is by definition the one who receives.

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. JAMES 1:17

A necessary balance

Murray sometimes pressed the creature’s nothingness in language drawn from William Law and the older mystical writers, and a careless reader can come away thinking that the human person is worthless, or that our wills and gifts count for nothing. That is not Scripture’s view, and it was not Murray’s at his best. God made us in His image and called His work very good. The point is not that we are nothing in value but that we are nothing in ourselves — that everything we are and have is received. A vessel made by a master potter is precious. It is precious as a vessel.

This distinction matters pastorally. People who already despise themselves do not need to hear that they are nothing. They need to hear that they are made, held and loved by a God who delights to fill them. That, in the end, is what Murray meant.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Read Psalm 104 slowly, and notice how every creature in it waits on God. Place yourself among them.

2. At several points today, pause and acknowledge that your very breath is being given to you now.

3. Identify one area where you take pride in being self-sufficient. Confess it as a creature’s forgetfulness.

4. Ask whether your sense of your own worth depends on independence or on being held by God.

5. If you tend to despise yourself, meditate on 2 Corinthians 4:7: you are an earthen vessel, and God has put treasure in you.

A PRAYER

Creator God, You made me, and You hold me in being every moment. I have lived as though my life were my own.

Forgive the pride that reaches for independence. Restore me to the place of a creature, open and dependent on You.

Fill this earthen vessel with Your goodness, that the glory may be Yours and not mine.

And teach me to find in my dependence not a burden but a rest, for You delight to give. Amen.