And, on the other hand, sometimes God’s creating is expressed by his _making all things_; which word, in its common acceptation, is taken for the natural production of things; though, in this instance, it is used for the production of things which are supernatural: thus it is said, in John i. 3. _All things were made by him_; and elsewhere, in Psal. xxxiii. 6. _By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, and all by the host of them by the breath of his mouth._ Therefore it is by the application of these words, to the things produced, that we are more especially to judge of the sense of them. Accordingly, when God is said to create, or make the heavens and earth, or to bring things into being, which before did not exist, this is the most proper sense of the word creation; and in this sense we take it, in the head we are entering upon. It is the production of all things out of nothing, by his almighty word; and this is generally called immediate creation, which was the first display of divine power, a work with which time began; so we are to understand those words, _In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth_, Gen. i. 1. that is, that first matter out of which all things were formed, which has been neither increased nor diminished ever since, nor can be, whatever alterations there may be made in things, without supposing an act of the divine will to annihilate any part thereof, which we have no ground to do. Again, it is sometimes taken for God’s bringing things into that form, in which they are, which is generally called a mediate creation, as in the account we have of it in the first chapter of Genesis; in which God is said, out of that matter which he created at first, to create the heavens, the earth, the sea, and all living creatures that move therein, after their respective kinds, which no finite wisdom, or power, could have done. The work was supernatural, and so differs from the natural production of things by creatures, inasmuch as they can produce nothing, but out of other things, that have in themselves a tendency, according to the fixed laws of nature, to be made, that which is designed to be produced out of them; as when a plant, or a tree, is produced out of a seed, or when the form, or shape of things is altered by the skill of men, where there is a tendency in the things themselves, in a natural way, to answer the end designed by them that made them, in which respect they are said to make, but not create those things; so that creation is a work peculiar to God, from which all creatures are excluded. Accordingly, it is a glory which God often appropriates to himself in scripture: thus he is called, by way of eminence, _The Creator of the ends of the earth_, Isa. xl. 28. and he speaks, concerning himself, with an unparalleled magnificence of expression, _I have made the earth, and created man upon it; I, even my hands, have stretched out the heavens, and all their host have I commanded_, Isa. xlv. 12.