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.
The next scene shows Barry talking with his human friend, Vanessa. "I don’t understand why they’re not happy," he says. "We have so much now; I thought their lives would be better. But they’re doing nothing. It’s amazing—honey really changes people."
"You don’t have any idea what’s going on, do you?" Vanessa asks.
Barry doesn’t answer but says, "What did you want to show me?" She opens a door, revealing a rooftop garden populated by wilted and crumbling flowers. "Oh," Barry breathes, "what happened here?"
"That is not the half of it," Vanessa answers, turning Barry so that he looks out over the roof at central park. The landscape is devastated and totally devoid of all growth and vitality.
"Oh, no," says Barry, looking out in horror over the plants. "They’re all wilting."
"Doesn’t look very good, does it?" Vanessa asks. "And whose fault do you think that is?"
Barry looks sheepish. "You know, I’m going to guess bees," he says.
"Beessssss?" Vanessa asks, emphasizing the plural nature of Barry’s answer.
"Specifically me," Barry admits. "I guess I didn’t think that bees not needing to make honey would affect all these other things."
"It’s not just flowers," Vanessa tells him. "Fruits, vegetables—they all need bees."
"Well, that’s our whole SAT test right there," Barry answers, picking up a small leaf.
"So…" Vanessa continues, "you take away the produce, that affects the entire animal kingdom. And then, of course…"
"The human species," Barry says, finishing her thought. Vanessa harrumphs and raises her eyes, reminding Barry that it also affects individual humans like herself. "Oh—so if there’s no more pollination," Barry continues, watching as his leaf crumbles into pieces, "it could all just go south here, couldn’t it?"
2. This is also apparent in a movie called A Sound of Thunder that I watched on the SciFi channel. The plot here is about a group of time travelers who go back in time to hunt dinosaurs. They have to be very careful not to disturb anything, so as not to upset the future balance of nature – although they never explain why killing a dinosaur would not change the history of time. At any rate, on one of the adventures, an individual accidentally brings back a bacteria that causes the balance of nature to totally shift. Soon cities are being overgrown with primitive foliage. Dinosaurs come into our world and begin attacking people. The heroes have to figure out how to return
3. Both movies, one a cartoon and the other a Science Fiction fantasy, show that God’s creation is a complex, interconnected universe that reveals God to us.
B. The Psalmist shows us how creation reveals God to us.
1. Vs. 1 – The Psalmist describes the stars and the sun, which not only witness to the existence of a Creator, but also witness to his glory. The stars and the sun are so glorious that the one who made them must be more glorious still.
a. The word “glory” can be translated “abundance.” Creation declares to us the abundance, the vastness of God.
b. In Romans 1:20, Paul says, “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.”
c. This is the meaning of glory in Psalm 19—a revelation of God’s existence and power so great that it should lead every human being on the face of the earth to seek God out, to thank him for bringing him or her into existence, and to worship him.
d. Do you remember how our Apollo astronauts came to understand this: Three of our Apollo astronauts read a part of Genesis 1 from space and another one of our astronauts commented upon his return from space that after being out there he knew there was a God.
2. David also describes the nature of this revelation of God.
a. Vs. 2 – It is a continuous revelation. It goes on “day after day” and “night after night.” This is not an intermittent revelation, as if God were to send a prophet one year and then let many silent years go by before sending another. The skies reveal the glory of God every single night of the week, every week of the year, year after year, and they have done this since their creation.
b. Vs. 2 – It is an abundant revelation. This is stronger in the Hebrew text than it appears to be in English, for the image is literally of a gushing spring that copiously pours forth the sweet, refreshing waters of revelation.
• This abundance of revelation by the heavens has been true even of the most recent investigations of the heavens by the greatest scientific minds the human race has produced:
Until well into the last century the prevailing scientific cosmology was what is called the "steady state" theory, which holds that the universe had no beginning and is eternal. The theory satisfied scientists with its corollary that everything has a cause and every cause can be investigated. That view has been entirely overthrown, and the inescapable conviction of today’s scientific community is that the universe did indeed have a beginning about twenty billion years ago. The new view thinks of the origin of the universe as a gigantic fireball explosion known popularly as the "big bang."
The story of this Copernican-like scientific revolution in cosmology is interesting. It began in 1913 with astronomer Vesto Melvin Slipher’s discovery that about a dozen galaxies relatively close to the earth were moving away from us at high speeds, up to two million miles per hour. During the next decade a younger astronomer named Edwin Hubble carried Slipher’s observation further, measuring the velocities of scores of galaxies and formulating the laws for an expanding universe. Hubble discovered that the further away a galaxy is, the faster it is moving. By measuring the speed of these retreating galaxies and plotting them against their distance from us, Hubble was able to pinpoint a moment in the past when all the matter of the universe must have been together, in other words, the moment of creation. It was apparently between fifteen and twenty billion years ago. Finally, in 1965 two scientists from the Bell Telephone Laboratories, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, discovered the leftover radiation or echo of that big bang.
Many scientists did not like this discovery because it pointed to God and to a moment of creation beyond which they could not and would never be able to penetrate.
c. Vss. 3,4 – It is a universal revelation. This revelation is heard in every language. The voice of the universe goes out to the ends of the earth.
• Vss. 4-6 – The sun in particular demonstrates this revelation. God has pitched a tent for the sun – it retreats every night and darkness comes, but it rises like a bridegroom coming forth every morning. It stretches across the entire world.
3. Think about the fine-tuning of the universe:
The fine-tuning of the universe is shown in the precise strengths of four basic forces. Gravity is the best known of these forces, and the weakest, with a relative strength of 1. Next comes the weak nuclear force that holds neutrons together inside an atom. It is 1034 times stronger than gravity but works only at subatomic distances. Electromagnetism is 1,000 times stronger than the weak nuclear force. The strong nuclear force—which keeps protons together in the nucleus of an atom—is 100 times stronger yet. If even one of these forces had a slightly different strength, the life-sustaining universe we know would be impossible.
If gravity were slightly stronger, all stars would be large, like the ones that produce iron and other heavier elements, but they would burn out too rapidly for the development of life. On the other hand, if gravity were weaker, the stars would endure, but none would produce the heavier elements necessary to form planets.
The weak nuclear force controls the decay of neutrons. If it were stronger, neutrons would decay more rapidly, and there would be nothing in the universe but hydrogen. However, if this force were weaker, all the hydrogen would turn into helium and other elements.
The electromagnetic force binds atoms to one another to form molecules. If it were either weaker or stronger, no chemical bonds would form, so no life could exist.
Finally, the strong nuclear force overcomes the electromagnetic force and allows the atomic nucleus to exist. Like the weak nuclear force, changing it would produce a universe with only hydrogen or with no hydrogen.
In sum, without planets, hydrogen, and chemical bonds, there would be no life as we know it. Besides these four factors, there are at least twenty-five others that require pinpoint precision to produce a universe that contains life. Getting each of them exactly right suggests the presence of an Intelligent Designer.
Charles Edward White, "God by the Numbers," Christianity Today (March 2006); submitted by Rich Tatum, Romeoville, Illinois
4. Michael Card showed how this plays out in an interview:
Musician Michael Card said in an interview:
Again and again in China I talked to people who had never heard of Christianity, never heard of Jesus, never heard a single word from the Bible. Yet through nature and their God-given conscience, many believed in God. Not only did they believe God existed, they had derived some understanding about His loving character because he provided food, water, and a beautiful world. One old woman told me, "I’ve known him for years. I just didn’t know his name."
II. GOD IS REVEALED IN HIS WORD – Vss. 7-11.
• This is God’s Specific Revelation of Himself.
A. The Word of God is to be obeyed, and it can be trusted.
1. Here is how a paratrooper learned about this concept.
A young paratrooper was learning to jump, and he was given the following instructions: First, jump when you are told; second, count to 10 and pull the ripcord; third, in the unlikely event that it doesn’t open, pull the second chute open; and fourth, when you get down, a truck will take you back to base.
The plane ascended up to the proper height, the men started peeling out, and the young paratrooper jumped when told. He counted to 10 and pulled the cord, but the chute failed to open. He proceeded to the backup plan. The second chute also failed to open. "Oh boy," he said. "When I get down, I suppose the truck won’t be there either."
2. David uses six terms to describe the Word of God: law, statutes, precepts, commands, fear, and ordinances. These terms describe the Word of God in its various facts. The most compelling thing about David’s description, though, is what it says the Word of God does.
a. We divide God’s Word into its various types of literature, and that is what these terms do; they divide it into the various functions it performs for us when we read it and study it and learn it.
b. Remember we are dealing with poetry here. David does not intend to define terms and concepts for us or to distinguish between them, so much as he meditates on these things and brings spiritual insight to them.
B. There are compelling things that God’s Word does to us:
1. Being perfect, the word of God revives the soul. The Word of God is so complete or perfect that it covers every aspect of life. When life has gotten the most difficult, we can find a refreshing word that revives our souls when we read the word of God.
2. Being trustworthy, the word of God makes the simple wise. The word of God is worthy of our trust because it corresponds to reality. You do not have to be wise to read or understand the word of God, but it will make you wise.
3. Being right, the word of God makes the heart rejoice. Being right in this context does not mean right as opposed to wrong, but Is linked more with the idea of righteousness. Everyone who walks right before God will be filled with joy.
4. Being radiant, the word of God gives light to the eyes. The word of God is so bright and radiant that it enables us to see where we are going and how we are to live without stumbling. Psalm 119:105 embraces these ideas when it says, "Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path."
5. Being pure, the word of God endures forever. The word of God is entirely pure, being without any deficiency, error, fault, or inade¬quacy. Since the word of God is perfect and endures forever, it is wise to build your life on it.
6. Being sure and altogether righteous, the word of God warns us against sin and provides us with the great reward. The parallelism is expanded in this section in order to bring the idea to a conclusion. We are warned by the word of God and receive our reward by following it.
• Philip Yancey illustrates how the word of God will direct us:
Last summer I had an encounter with masked men bearing scalpels. A surgeon operated on my foot, and my life was never in danger. Yet the horizontal recovery time did give me a chance to reflect on pain that we choose voluntarily, sometimes for our own good and sometimes to our peril.
While rehabilitating, I often did exercises that hurt because I knew that working through the soreness would allow my foot to regain its usefulness. On the other hand, the surgeon warned against bicycling, mountain climbing, running, and other activities that might endanger the healing process. Basically, anything that sounded fun, he vetoed.
On one visit I tried to talk him into granting me a premature golf match. "Some friends get together once a year. It’s important to me. I’ve been practicing my swing, and if I use only my upper body and keep my legs and hips very still, could I join them?"
Without a flicker of hesitation, my doctor replied, "It would make me very unhappy if you played golf within the next two months."
"I thought you were a golfer," I said, appealing to his sympathies.
"I am. That’s how I know you can’t swing without rolling that foot inward and putting weight on the parts that are trying to heal."
The point was obvious. My doctor has nothing against my playing golf; as a fellow golfer, he sympathizes with me. But he has my best interests at heart. It will indeed make him unhappy if I do something prematurely that might damage my long-term recovery. He wants me to play golf next year, and the next, and the rest of my life, and for that reason he could not sanction a match too soon after my surgery.
As we talked, I began to appreciate my doctor’s odd choice of words. If he had issued an edict —"No golf!"— I might have stubbornly rebelled. He left me the free choice and expressed the consequences in a most personal way: Disobedience would grieve him, for his job was to restore my health.
The role of a doctor may be the most revealing image in thinking about God and sin. What a doctor does for me physically—guide me toward health—God does for me spiritually. I am learning to view sins not as an arbitrary list of rules drawn up by a cranky Judge, but rather as a list of dangers that must be avoided at all costs—for our own sakes.
Philip Yancey, "Doctor’s Orders,"Christianity Today (12-6-99)
III. HAS GOD REVEALED HIMSELF IN YOU? – Vss. 12-14.
A. The final verses of this Psalm should be our prayer.
1. Unfortunately, for many, this is not the case. Indeed, just the opposite is true:
According to an AP-Ipsos poll conducted in March of 2006, the use of profanity in American culture is increasing. Nearly 75 percent of people questioned said they encounter profanity in public either frequently or occasionally. Two-thirds said they think people swear more often than they did 20 years ago.
Not surprisingly, the respondents were more than "hearers of the words." Sixty-four percent said they use the F-word—ranging from several times a day (8 percent) to a few times a year (15 percent). In addition, younger people admit to using bad language more often than older people. They also encounter it more frequently and are less offended by it. The poll showed that 62 percent of people age 18–34 acknowledge swearing in conversation at least a few times a week, compared to 39 percent of those 35 and older. Swearing is also more pronounced among men: 54 percent of men swear at least a few times a week, compared to 39 percent of women.
In what may or may not be a silver lining, the poll showed that many of those who regularly swear do believe that it’s wrong for them to do so.
2. Instead we should make every effort to let our words and our meditations be acceptable in God’s sight.
B. When we grasp the word of God like that, it makes an amazing difference in our lives as it did for Philosopher Emile Cailliet.
Philosopher Emile Cailliet was born in a small French village near the end of the 19th century. His early education was committed to naturalism, leaving no room for God or supernatural intervention in human affairs. But his naturalistically inspirited studies in philosophy proved of little help during his front-line experiences as a lad of 20 in World War I. Confronted with the horrors of war, he asked:
What use, the ill-kept, ancient type of sophistry in the philosophic banter of the seminar, when your own buddy—at the time speaking to you of his mother—dies standing in front of you, a bullet in his chest. Was there a meaning to it all? A [person] can endure anything if only it appears meaningful…. I, too, felt—not with my reason, but with my whole being—that I was naked and, war or no war, destined to perish miserably when the hour came.
One night a bullet found Cailliet, too. An American field ambulance crew saved his life, and after a nine-month hospital stay, he was discharged and resumed his graduate studies. But he had to admit that the books no longer seemed like the same books, nor was his motivation the same. Reading at length in philosophy and literature, he found himself probing in depth for meaning. He testifies:
During long night watches in the foxholes I had in a strange way been longing—I must say it, however queer it may sound—for a book that would understand me. But I knew of no such book. Now I would in secret prepare one for my own private use. And so, as I went on reading for my courses, I would file passages that would speak to my condition, then carefully copy them in a leather-bound pocket book I would always carry with me. The quotations, which I numbered in red ink for easier reference, would lead me as it were from fear and anguish, through a variety of intervening stages, to supreme utterances of release and jubilation.
At last, the day came when he put the finishing touches on, as he said it, "the book that would understand me." He describes a beautiful, sunny day in which he sat under a tree and opened his precious anthology. As he read, however, he was overcome by a growing disappointment. Instead of speaking to his condition as he expected, the passages only reminded him of their context—of the circumstances of his labor over their selection. Then, Cailliet says, he knew that the whole undertaking would not work, simply because it was of his own making. It carried no strength of persuasion. In a dejected mood, he put the little book back into his pocket.
On that same day, Cailliet’s wife had come into the possession of a Bible by extraordinary circumstances. Emile had always been adamant that religion would be taboo in their home, and at the age of 23 had never even seen a Bible. But at the end of that disappointing day, when she apologetically tried to explain how she had providentially (as he would later realize!) picked up a copy of the Bible, he was eager to see it. He describes what happened next:
I literally grabbed the book and rushed to my study with it. I opened it and "chanced" upon the Beatitudes. I read and read and read—now aloud with an indescribable warmth surging within…. I could not find words to express my awe and wonder. And suddenly the realization dawned upon me: This was the Book that would understand me! I needed it so much, yet, unaware, I had attempted to write my own—in vain. I continued to read deeply into the night, mostly from the Gospels. And lo and behold, as I looked through them, the one of whom they spoke, the one who spoke and acted in them, became alive in me.
