Thomas Goodwin on our nothingness

After God had decreed to make thee, and to give thee an existence and actual being, yet thou wert in reality still nothing, pure nothing in entity. Thy pedigree is from nothing; thy ancestry, and that not far removed, is nothing. Job, in the view of his own rottenness and corruption, humbles himself, chap. xvii. 14 : I have said to corruption. Thou art my father ; to the worm, Thou art my mother, and my sister. But in rehearsing thy original from whence thou camest, I may say that nothing, pure nothing, was thy great grandmother. Thy body was immediately made of dust, that was thy next mother by that line; but that dust was made of the first rude earth, without form, and that was thy grandmother  but that earth was made purely of nothing; so then nothing was thy great grandmother. Thus of thy body.

Then for thy soul, that was immediately created by God out of nothing, and so by that line thy next mother was nothing. And what was thy soul twenty, thirty, or forty years ago, and so many years upwards? Plain nothing. It is observable how, in the Scriptures, when God's confounding the creatures is expressed, the threaten ing runs in these terms, a bringing them to nothing. So in 1 Cor. i. 28, he takes things that are not (that is, are as if they were not, as to such an effect as God useth them for), even to bring to nought things that are, that is, to nothing, as the opposition shews. In these terms the sentence of confusion, and the destruction of things that are, is penned, as thereby reminding them, how that their first root and original was nothing; and so does speak in a way of reflection upon what once they were; even as when he threatened Adam to turn him to dust: Out of dust thou earnest, says he; in a way of debasing of him, minds him of his descent and original. And in like phrase of speech Job utters their destruction: aheunt in nihilum, they go away, or vanish to nothing; that is, they perish. ... we are like those small green flies that creep upon leaves in summer; we men cannot touch them so gently but they die. The whole creation is built upon a quagmire of nothing, and is continually ready to sink into it, and to be swallowed up by it, ....

Humble yourselves therefore in the apprehension of this, and look, as in point of sanctification, although God giveth so great a measure of it to his children, and maketh them very holy, yet in the point of justifying them he would have them for ever to look upon themselves as ungodly, because once they were such, as Rom. iv. 5. And Paul, whilst he did never so much, saith, Yet I am nothing. Thus here, though he hath given us a being and existence, yet because we once were nothing, and that was the state (if a state) he found us in, he would ever have us account our selves as nothing, though now by his grace having all things, as the apostle says.