Thanksgiving – November 23, 2011 Psalm 145:15-16
The eyes of all look to you, and you give them their food at the proper time. You open your hand and satisfy the desires of every living thing.
At first blush this verse looks to be a lie. The eyes of all don’t look to God for their food. They look to their job for their food. They look to their parents for their clothes. They look to their 401k plans and Social Security for their future. These are their gods that they look to. And we aren’t much better. We don’t wake up in the morning and pray for food. We don’t thank Him every night for giving us a house and a bed and food to eat. We just assume that the food will come as long as our parents are alive and we have the ability to earn it. Perhaps this should read, “The eyes of a few look to you. The rest take you for granted and expect you to wait on them hand and food without a word of thanks.” That would seem to be more honest.
But this is God’s Word. When he writes that the eyes of ALL look to you, he is referring to all walks of life: all areas of creation. This is clear from Psalm 104 which takes more time to describe the “all.”
Psalm 104:18-30 The high mountains belong to the wild goats; the crags are a refuge for the coneys. The moon marks off the seasons, and the sun knows when to go down. You bring darkness, it becomes night, and all the beasts of the forest prowl. The lions roar for their prey and seek their food from God. The sun rises, and they steal away; they return and lie down in their dens. Then man goes out to his work, to his labor until evening. How many are your works, O LORD! In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures. There is the sea, vast and spacious, teeming with creatures beyond number— living things both large and small. There the ships go to and fro, and the leviathan, which you formed to frolic there. These all look to you to give them their food at the proper time. When you give it to them, they gather it up; when you open your hand, they are satisfied with good things. When you hide your face, they are terrified; when you take away their breath, they die and return to the dust. When you send your Spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the earth.
The wild goats of the mountains and fierce beasts of the sea are fed and sheltered by God. No matter how big or small, how high or low, they all look to the Lord to take care of them. God gladly takes on the feeding of all of them. It is well within His means and might to do so. He takes care of all, and He also wants all to see that He is the giver of everything.
The Eyes of All Look to You
I. Because you have an open hand
One fun game my child likes to play is to hide one object in one of two hands. It is up to the other person to guess which hand it is in. When the hand is opened, then you find out if you picked the right hand or not. God is not a tight fisted God. He loves to give. He has huge hands that can hold tons of blessings. He is a generous God who loves to open His hand; and His palm is never empty; both of His palms are full. You don’t have to guess which one is full; they both are.
He loves to “give them their food.” The word for “food” is used to describe the basic necessities of life. It is used of how God provided for people before the Fall in the Garden of Eden, during the Flood on the ark, and after the Flood. It is also used of the Manna that was found in the desert. No matter what form it is in, fruit of the trees or meat of the animal or Manna on the ground, all is from God. Even the food that is earned and baked is still a gift from God. Deuteronomy 8:17-18 says,
You may say to yourself, “My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.” But remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth, and so confirms his covenant, which he swore to your forefathers, as it is today.
When we give thanks to the Lord we are recognizing where our gifts come from. Our eyes are looking up to Him and saying to Him, “Thank you.” We are publicly acknowledging God as a gracious and giving God. When we only go about our work and pay our bills with the understanding that we will always have the health or the wealth to purchase what we want when we want, we are leaving God out of the picture. We are only looking at our ability for our future. We are not giving God the credit He deserves. We are making ourselves into our own gods. When we complain to Him because we don’t have as many clothes as our classmates; when we don’t have the electronic toys or the big screens; when our jobs don’t pay as well; we are really treating God as if He’s been cheap and tight fisted with us.
Think of how God opens His hand to you every day with clothing and shoes, food and drink, house and home, wife and children, and mother and father. But the greatest thing to come from His hand was when His own Son was born of the virgin Mary and then offered His own flesh and blood on the cross for you. God couldn’t have been any more generous and gracious with you than to give His only Son. Even though God knew we wouldn’t appreciate Him as we should, and even though God knew we would treasure other things much more highly than Him; God gave them to us anyway. In the sending of His Son God did more than just to open His hand. He opened His heart to us. He opened His heart for all of us in order to satisfy the greatest need we have; the need of forgiveness. He wants all to look to Him because He opens His hand.
II. Because you have perfect timing
There’s a saying that goes, “Timing is everything.” When you’re delivering a joke or telling a story, timing is everything. The Bible talks of timing when it says, “He who is full loathes honey, but to the hungry even what is bitter tastes sweet.” (Proverbs 27:7) There are probably times in your life when you love to go to Bible study and other times when you’d rather not. There are times when people are hungry for forgiveness and other times where they don’t give a lick about Jesus. At one point you may eagerly desire a spouse, and at another point in your life you might wish you never had one. If God gave you children at age 15 you might not be as good of a parent as you would be at 25. It all depends on what time you are at in your life as to what you desire and what you don’t desire.
God is the master of timing. “You give them their food at the proper time.” The KJV says it is in “due season.” He knows just the right time to give us our food, so as to make us keep looking to Him and trusting Him and using His gifts in a productive way. Think of how everything comes in season. He gives farmers time to plant and time to water, time to fertilize and time to harvest. They can control the timing of their calves so that it doesn’t happen at the same time as their planting or harvesting. A woman has nine months to prepare for a baby to come from her womb. This is good timing; for it gives the parents time to prepare for taking care of the new life. We all know and cherish the verse that talks about the timing of Jesus’ birth. It says in Galatians 4, "When the time had fully come, God sent forth His Son." Even the death of Christ was perfectly timed. Think about how many times the Jews wanted to arrest Jesus but the Scriptures said they didn’t because “it was not His time.” God knew when the right time was for Jesus to die.
Being thankful involves trusting in the perfect timing of God. He knows when to give you health and He knows when to allow sickness. He knows when to give you children and when to put you to death. He knows when to give you health and when not to. One of the biggest problems we have in life is trusting in God’s timing. When everything happens according to our plans we never stop to thank Him for how smoothly it worked. When it doesn’t come in our timing we are quick to complain. A farmer can pray for rain, but then when the rain comes he complains because he can’t harvest the corn or plant it. When God talks about giving things in their season, this includes the concept that we also have responsibility to act and to work within the seasons that He gives us. It also means not being obsessed with timing; thinking that we are in absolute control of when and how things should happen. People can get all wrapped up on timing; when they want to have children; when they want to retire. But if their plans don’t work out, then they quickly get angry for God not agreeing with their timing. They want to be the god of time but they are not. Luther said this about timing,
If you are thrust into the obligation of having to help make things better, do what is permissible, and God will do what He wills. But if you want to go beyond this and mingle with the world, straighten every curve, cure every evil, and throw Satan out of the world, you will cause yourself nothing but labor and sorrow. You will accomplish no more than if you wanted to forbid the Elbe to flow. Human affairs refuse to be, and cannot be, governed by the will of man, but He who created all things also rules them by His will. (Comments on Ecclesiastes 4:4 - 15:64)
Joseph was not immediately promoted to royalty after his brothers sold him into slavery. He first had to endure years of prison and slavery. He was doing the right thing, but God was not giving good results. Joseph was given a test of his resolve. He kept doing the good and God pleasing thing. After years of suffering and faithfulness, when Joseph was mature enough to handle responsibility, God promoted him to second in charge of Egypt. God knew when the best time was to bring him up; a time that He would be able to bring Judah to Egypt so that the promise of the Savior would be kept alive. God always knows the best time. Open your eyes to the God of time.
III. To satisfy the desires of every living thing
When He finally then decides to open His hand, it is satisfying. You open your hand and satisfy the desires of every living thing. This sounds rather licentious. God will satisfy all of your desires! Some people read this verse and lick their sinful lips; envisioning God as their sugar daddy who will give them all that they desire! But the Bible talks about how insatiable the desires can be.
Ecclesiastes 4:8 There was a man all alone; he had neither son nor brother. There was no end to his toil, yet his eyes were not content with his wealth.
Proverbs 27:20 Death and Destruction are never satisfied, and neither are the eyes of man.
This is the nature of sin; it is never satisfied; even when it is fed. Satan always convinces the sinner that one more will satisfy the desire. One more look; one more drink; one more hit. But "one more" never satisfies. It always wants more.
God in His judgment allows the sinful nature to feed its desires. The Israelites craved meat and complained to Moses for meat. So God gave them what they wanted. They were given meat, and then God made the meat rot in their teeth even while they were eating it as a judgment on their greed. It is not always a good thing when God allows our desires to be satisfied. As Christians we also need to keep on fighting against some of our desires. We don’t want God to give us our sinful desires, for it leads to our destruction.
In total contrast to our will, we see the will of the LORD in Isaiah 53,
It was the LORD’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer,
and though the LORD makes his life an offering for sin,
he will see his offspring and prolong his days,
and the will of the LORD will prosper in his hand.
11 After he has suffered,
he will see the light of life and be satisfied
What a strange will to us! When the Holy Spirit led Jesus into the desert to starve, Jesus wanted to starve. When the Father directed Jesus to go to the cross, Jesus willingly went. He had a singular focus; to save us from hell. He wanted to be the sacrifice. How satisfying it was for Him to cry out "It is finished." The Messiah wasn’t satisfied with a drink. He wasn’t satisfied with seeing His favorite sports team win. He was only satisfied with dying on the cross for the sins of the world. When He was raised from the dead He knew that the price was accepted by the Father. How wonderful it was for Him to go storming into hell as the resurrected Lord.
When God adopts us into His family He gets us to see how pure and precious and gracious His will is. He teaches us to pray, "Thy will be done." Our greatest desire is not to be given our desires, but to be given HIS desire. Whatever He decides to have happen, whenever He decides for it to happen; His will be done. Martin Luther once wrote,
It is imperative that if God’s will is to prevail, our will must be submerged, for these two are at war with each other. We can take an example from Christ, our Lord. When he asked his Father in the garden to remove the cup, he also added, “Not my will, but thine, be done” [Luke 22:42]. If Christ had to surrender his will, which after all was good, yes, undoubtedly and always the best, in order that God’s will be carried out, why should we poor little worms make such a fuss about our will, which is never free of evil and always deserves to be thwarted? (LW 42:45)
When we don’t get what we want or things don’t turn out how we planned, instead of whining and complaining to God; ought we not to thank Him instead for crushing our wills? The only way that God can often times accomplish His desires is when our desires are stopped and hindered. So often we are praying against ourselves; that He would satisfy His desires in spite of our desires. The only way our desires can ever truly be satisfied is when our will is crushed and killed. The most satisfying thing we can learn is that our wills do not matter in comparison to God’s will; because what God ordains is always good.
When we were baptized God gave us a new desire; a desire that is primarily concerned with God’s will. When the Holy Spirit enters in, He does a miraculous job of simplifying our life and giving us a single minded desire. Psalm 27 reflects that desire.
One thing I ask from the LORD,
this only do I seek:
that I may dwell in the house of the LORD
all the days of my life,
to gaze on the beauty of the LORD
and to seek him in his temple.
So we gaze at the Word. We gaze at the Supper and long for it. We finally gaze at the skies for the Final Judgment when we can see our crucified and risen Lord face to face. Even Creation has the same focus. Paul writes in Romans 8:22-23, "We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies." On Judgment Day, those desires will be given. So God focuses us on the One Person who can give us this desire. We focus on Christ crucified in Word and sacrament so the will of God will be done for us.
Tonight we celebrate Thanksgiving. It is typically a time to thank Him for the bounties that America provides. These are good things to be thankful for. But tonight, through these two simple verses, let us thank God for so much more. He has opened our eyes to recognize Him and look to Him as the giver of food. He has enabled us to appreciate and trust in the timing of His gifts. We see that God has always been open handed to us; in giving us our food and clothing and shelter; but more importantly in giving us His Son. This gift has a miraculous way of simplifying our thanks. Food, drink, family, shelter all are gifts from God that we thank Him for, but they pale in comparison to the gift of Jesus Christ on the cross.
This Thanksgiving you may be missing your family or loved ones. You may be saddened over the fact that you don’t have good health or your goals haven’t been reached. Yet I hope and pray that in the midst of your losses and failures that you would appreciate and be thankful for the gift of forgiveness and eternal life in Christ. Keep your eyes to the greatest gift we have; salvation in Christ. He makes us thankful for sickness and death, health and wealth; everything that comes our way; because His Holy Spirit frees us from our selves and focuses us on Himself. We pray that the literal eyes of all would look to Him and be thankful. Amen.
