Experiencing God's Grandeur Series

EXPERIENCING GOD’S GRANDEUR

Psalm 19

INTRODUCTION

A. Psalm 19 has been recognized for many years as great poetry.

1. James Montgomery Boice, long-time pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, tells of his experience with this Psalm:

When I first began to preach through the psalms as part of the Sunday evening services of Tenth Presbyterian Church, which I have served as pastor since 1968, I decided whenever pos-sible to end the services with a hymn based on the psalm being studied. At first I did not know whether our hymnal would have many hymns based on the psalms, but I was surprised to find that it did. The hymnal we used at that time, Trinity Hymnal, contained 730 hymns in all—not a great num¬ber. But I discovered that in one way or another several hundred of these hymns either paraphrase or are developed from 117 of the 150 psalms. Most psalms had only one hymn or at best two hymns based on them, of course. But when I came to Psalm 19, I discovered no fewer than seven hymns developed from this one passage.

2. This tells us a number of things about Psalm 19. For one thing, it is clearly great poetry.

3. This judgment is confirmed by no less a master of literature than C. S. Lewis, who called it "the greatest poem in the Psalter and one of the greatest lyrics in the world."’

B. But just because a verse is great poetry does not necessarily mean that we adapt it to make hymns.

1. It must also contain important theo¬logical and spiritual truths, which Psalm 19 does, of course. This is why it has been formed into the many hymns I mentioned.

2. What it con¬tains is a profound (and moving) statement of the doctrine of divine revelation.

3. Like the Bible’s teaching elsewhere on the subject, of revelation it divides this revelation into two main categories: general revelation, which refers to the revelation of God in nature, and special revelation, in this case the revelation of God in Scripture.

a. The first of these is dis¬cussed in vss. 1-6.

b. The second is discussed in vss. 7-11.

c. Then there is a con¬cluding section in which the psalmist applies this revelation to himself (vss. 12-14).

KEY STATEMENT

We can experience the grandeur of God through God’s revelation of himself.

I. GOD IS REVEALED IN CREATION – Vss. 1-6.

• This is God’s General Revelation of Himself.

A. Creation’s complexity is delicately balanced in order to sustain life.

1. The Bee Movie illustrates this:

Bee Movie centers on the life of Barry B. Benson—a maverick bee who is less than enthusiastic about taking his place in the hive as a life-long worker. When Barry takes an unauthorized trip into the human world, he makes a shocking discovery: humans are stealing the honey that bees work so long and hard to produce.

Incensed at the injustice, Barry files a lawsuit on behalf of all bees demanding an immediate stop to the human exploitation of honey. Amazingly, he wins the case. All of the honey from all the grocery stores in America is returned to the bees, ensuring that Barry and his family never have to work again.

In this clip the humans have begun to pump the honey back into Barry’s hive. As gallons of honey flow into the storage vats, the hive foreman shuts down the complex inner workings of the honey factory. When the machines have all stopped, one of the bees asks, "Well—what do we do now?" The other bees all shrug and look around, confused. Then, a bee that had been stirring a large vat of honey cries, "Cannonball!" and leaps into the bowl (he’s humorously stuck as soon as he hits the viscous liquid). This sparks a mass evacuation as the rest of the worker bees cheer and begin running out of the factory.

In the next shot, the commander of the pollen bees gets on the radio to his aerial squadron, saying, "They’re shutting down honey production. Mission abort!"

"Aborting pollination and nectar detail," answers the lead pollen bee, "returning to base."

The next scene shows the worker bees back at home. Several of them nap in the sun, only moving when a ringing alarm clock reminds them to roll over. As the bees relax, we begin to see the wider consequences of Barry’s victory. Without pollen, the flowers begin to fade and shrivel. A time-lapse video of central park shows the trees fading into colorlessness as several days go by. A man approaches a flower shop, only to see the clerk writing a sign on the door that reads, "No more flowers."

In the midst of all of this, Barry returns to the hive. In a conversation with his best friend, Adam, Barry learns about the rest of the bees’ descent into laziness.