Today we’re going to look at what C.S. Lewis called “the greatest poem in the Psalter and one the greatest lyrics in the world.”
“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. ?2 Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge.?3 There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard.?4 Their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them he has set a tent for the sun,?5 which comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber, and, like a strong man, runs its course with joy.?6 Its rising is from the end of the heavens, and its circuit to the end of them, and there is nothing hidden from its heat” (Psalm 19:1-6).
Science has been saying to people of religion for years: “You give me your faith, and I will give you my reason.” A philosopher named David Hume (1711-1776) has been influential through this day that a “god” cannot be inferred from creation: “Examine the religious principles, which have, in fact, prevailed in the world. You will scarcely be persuaded, that they are anything but sick men’s dreams.” This is Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and many of his ideas also continue to be influential in our day. It is Freud who tells us that we believe in God simply because it makes simple people feel better about living in a cold and emotionally dismal universe. It’s true that many people come to faith by chance (as Plato wrote many years ago). Yet faith and reason do coexist. The Bible never tells us to take a leap of faith into the darkness and hope that there is somebody out there. Instead, we are called to jump out of darkness into the light.
My goal this morning and this evening is to connect you with the ministry of God through the Skies and tonight, through the Scripture. Perhaps you can remember the content of Psalm 19 this way: verses 1–6 describe the ministry of God through the Skies… and verses 7–11 describe the ministry of God through the Scriptures. The focus of these six verses is that we look up.
1. The Skies Speak for Those Who Will Listen
“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork” (Psalm 19:1).
Each of us is under a divine mandate to become an amateur astronomer. We are commanded to peer into the heavens unto the incalculable depths of the sky and space to behold the handiwork of God. “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved” (Francis Crick, co-discovers of the DNA molecule). Everything that God has made speaks. And therefore everything that God has made ministers—for those who will listen.
Allow me to show you this from this week’s news. This week NASA released the first photos from the Hubble telescope since a NASA crew spent 13 days repairing it in May, 2009. Astronaut K. Megan McArthur, who flew on the mission to repair Hubble, spoke of the newly released photos and her mission: “I’m in awe of the human ingenuity that could conceive of such a thing and then make it happen.” Another astronaut, Michael J. Massimino, simply said of their repairs, “Thank God we didn’t break it.”
Hubble completes on orbit around the Earth every 96 minutes at a speed of around 5 miles per second. It has captured images of over 12 billion light years away. It’s this last photo (shown on the screens) that I want us to focus on for a few minutes as this photo was featured in news media outlets this past week. Know as the “Butterfly” because it resembles dainty butterfly wings. What you are seeing is actually roiling cauldrons of gas heated to more than 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The gas is tearing across space at more than 600,000 miles an hour – fast enough to travel from Earth to the moon in 24 minutes. A dying star that was once about five times the mass of the Sun is at the center of this fury. Dave Leckrone: “What I see is the grandeur of creation, however it got there.” As the report indicates, Leckrone suggested that the Hubble images should evoke “spirituality,” and not merely a respect for science. Leckrone may well be speaking honestly about his lack of concern for “how it got there,” but I doubt that is all there is to it.
How can intelligent people consider the grandeur of the cosmos without pondering, “How it got there?” In the end, the “how” question (or better the “who” question) determines the meaning of the cosmos itself. If the universe (and what lies beyond) is merely an accident of physics, the grandeur is simply in the sheer unlikeliness of it all. If, on the other hand, the cosmos is the work of a sovereign and holy Creator, the cosmos is itself a reflection of His character and power… and the theater of His glory.
1.1 The Skies Speak Continually
“Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge” (Psalm 19:2).
The skies “tell” or they “proclaim.” The words “pours out speech” literally mean “gushing or spewing out.” These words can be translated “keep on declaring and keep on proclaiming. Fix this truth in your minds: God speaks through what He has made, and means for you to hear what He has to say. And since He never speaks in vain, He means for what He has to say to minister to you — to meet some need that you have. At night, the night sky speaks. In the day, the day sky speaks. Or to be precise, speech pours forth. Nature does not whisper — it shouts, and it shouts continually.
Imagine that the thickness of the page in your Bible is 93 million miles, the distance to our sun. The distance to the nearest star (4 1/2 light years) would be 71 feet. The diameter of our own galaxy (100,000 light years) would be 310 miles. The edge of the known universe would be 31 million miles on the same scale! God spoke this universe into existence! What does that tell you about His power and infinitude?
1.2 The Skies Speak with Words and without Words
“There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard” (Psalm 19:3).
God is talking to the world all day and all night, every day and every night, everywhere in the world. The message of God through the skies reaches the mind and the heart without the medium of ordinary words or speech. We know from verses seven and following that David loved the verbal revelation of God (the Scriptures), so he is not belittling that. But he also delights in the visual revelation of God and puts it first probably because it is completed by the verbal and because it comes first in the order of creation (God made things for man before he spoke to man). This is hard to explain. David struggles to say it. Notice the paradox between verses 2 and 3. Verse 2: “Day to day pours out speech…” Verse 3: “There is no speech…” It’s the same Hebrew word for “speech” in both places. The medium of communication — the thing that carries the reality from God’s heart to my heart — is not written words; it’s not spoken words. Instead it’s light and color and contrast and shape and proportion and design and motion and magnitude, etc.
So verse three says: “There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard” (Psalm 19:3). Yet, verse four repeats verse two: “Their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world” (Psalm 19:4). Wordless words… Speechless speech… Voiceless voice… The point is clear: God is pouring forth communication to us through the sky. He is telling and proclaiming and speaking and writing lines and declaring knowledge to everyone who will stop and listen.
1.3 The Skies Speak to Everyone
“Their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world” (Psalm 19:4a).
The voiceless knowledge poured forth by days and nights is available to everyone on the globe who is not physically blind. The moon you see tonight is the same moon that shines down on Shanghai and Moscow and London. And not only that, it is the same moon that Shakespeare looked at when he wrote some of his sonnets. Nature is a trans-geographical and trans-temporal language. You don’t have to be literate to grasp God’s general revelation. It speaks with unwritten words to everyone alike. The result of this is that all men can be held accountable for acknowledging the truth of what nature communicates.
“For they deliberately overlook this fact, that the heavens existed long ago, and the earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God…”(2 Peter 3:5)
It is frequently the idea that in our day, when people examine creation and determine that there is a Creator, they are naïve. We are told that we are uneducated and our judgment is clouded with religious reasons rather than rationality. What does nature communicate?
2. The Skies Tell of the Glory of God
The word “Glory” in verse one comes from a word meaning “weight” or “worth.” We see abundant evidence of God’s weight or worth by looking at His creation, especially at the vastness and grandeur of the universe. Creation speaks of God’s existence and His power. He says next to nothing of His justice, mercy, love, wrath, goodness, and grace. We need the Bible to tell us these things.
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1).
“O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens…. When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place…” (Psalm 8:1, 3).
But there are many today who say “I don’t see anything.” Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. In the clearing were growing many flowers and many weeds. One explorer says, “Some gardener must tend this plot.” The other disagrees, “There is no gardener.” So they pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. “But perhaps he is an invisible gardener.” So they set up a barbed-wire fence. Then they electrified it. They patrol with bloodhounds. But no shrieks ever suggest that some intruder has received a shock. No movements of the wire ever betray an invisible climber. The bloodhounds never give cry. Yet still the Believer is not convinced. “But there is a gardener, invisible, intangible, insensible, to electric shocks, a gardener who has no scent and makes no sound, a gardener who comes secretly to look after the garden which he loves.” At last the Skeptic despairs, “But what remains of your original assertion? Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?”
The reason people do not see the evidence of God is moral, not intellectual.
“For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse” (Romans 1:19-20)
“In past generations he allowed all the nations to walk in their own ways. 17 Yet he did not leave himself without witness, for he did good by giving you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, satisfying your hearts with food and gladness” (Acts 14:16-17).
In them he has set a tent for the sun,?5 which comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber, and, like a strong man, runs its course with joy.?6 Its rising is from the end of the heavens, and its circuit to the end of them, and there is nothing hidden from its heat” (Psalm 19:4b-6).
Verses four through six focus on the sun, arguably the element in the skies which has the most powerful effect on human life. David did not see everything we see when he examined the sun many years ago. He did not know that it was a ball of gases, mostly hydrogen, burning itself up in a vast nuclear reaction. All the while, the sun continues to burn for at least six billion more years. He didn’t know that it took light a mere eight minutes to radiate from the sun’s surface to earth. If you and traveled to the sun by airplane at 550 mph, it would take us around 21 years to get there. The sun is 864,000 miles in diameter and you could line up 100 earths and still not span the diameter of the sun. The sun’s matter is so dense, you can make over 300,000 earth size planets from its matter. David didn’t know that the sun’s surface is around 10,000 degrees. King David has no idea that the sun was part of but one galaxy, called the Milky Way. If you were able to cross our galaxy at the speed of light (186,000 per second) it would take you 100,000 years to travel the Milky Way from beginning to end. What would David write about God if he knew this? Yet for all David didn’t know, he tells us something about the sun despite our vast advances in astronomy.
How is God and the Sun Alike? God is eternal. Verse 1 has done for me is give me a keen sense of the eternality of God. If God made the universe, then there was a time when only God existed. That in itself begins to stagger my mind. Once there was only God. God was all there was. There was no room for anything else, not even nothingness, for all that was, was God. But then I am driven one step further and I realize that this God never had a beginning. He never came into being. And the effect that has on me is to make me tremble at his character. You became the person you are. You grew and learned and changed and matured. But not God. He is good, long-suffering, reliable, honest, righteous, merciful, but He never became that way. He never learned anything from anybody. He never grew. He never changed. He never matured. He simply always was what he is from eternity before eternity before eternity. He is a rock. He cannot cease to be what he has been from all eternity, because there are no forces at work on him which do not have their ultimate origin in him and are limited by him. So my faith in God's future is greatly strengthened by pondering the fact that he is the eternal, glorious creator. God is consistently strong (19:5b). Just as the sun consistently runs its course daily and gives off its life-sustaining warmth, so God is consistently strong. If the sun varied just a few degrees in its temperature, it would either melt the polar ice caps and flood much of the world or cause an ice age on the earth. God is consistently strong like the sun. God is omnipresent and omniscient. Just as the sun’s rays shine everywhere upon the earth and nothing is hid from its heat (especially in the Middle East, where David wrote), so God is. He searches you out and knows all that there is to know about you, so that there is no escaping Him. God is consistent and faithful. Just as the sun faithfully and consistently rises in the east every morning and sets in the west every evening, so God is faithful and consistent. You can count on Him to keep His Word. He never fails. David realizes there is great joy in God. God is radiant in His splendor as is the sun.
David poetically compares the sun to a bridegroom coming out of his bridal chamber, radiant with exuberance and joy. The sun rising in the eastern sky is just a finite picture of the radiance of the infinite God who alone dwells in unapproachable light and on whose splendor no mortal can look. God never get tired. His energy never diminishes. God is infinitely energetic after doing creating and sustaining all things as He was before He “lifted a finger.” God doesn't need a supernatural Rolodex to remember you or your needs. He can name every single person and every single animal and every star. And none of them wear nametags. On top of this, He exerts sufficient power and strength to hold every star in place. God offers us a little bit of His joy. David also realizes that living an eternity in Disneyland with God is miserable. David knows that the soul’s greatest joy and its most profound delight is the contemplation of God and not ourselves. David knew that it was impossible to truly understand appreciate the great things of God without being stirred with passion and zeal… and joy and delight and fervor.
Our church should be characterized by this joy in God. Some churches seem to enjoy the atmosphere of a Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus while other churches bear a striking resemblance to the county morgue. Yet, we shouldn’t be afraid of feelings for God. In heaven, everyone’s affections are ablaze for God. Their enjoyment of God is extravagant.
There is a lie masquerading itself as truth today. The lie says that money and crack and chocolate and a fully equipped SUV is what really satisfies the soul. We must combat the lie that things can do what God cannot. C. S. Lewis: “The person who has God and everything else has no more than he who has only God.” You were not created for boredom. You were created for God. God is glorified in us when our knowledge and experience of Him ignite a forest fire of joy and passion inside of us that consumes all competing pleasures and He alone becomes the treasure that we prize.
Think about heaven with me as we close. Do you think of heaven as stale and boring. Heaven, because of God, will a set ablaze with joy and it will deepen and develop throughout eternity. Our love for Christ and our delight in Him will deepen, Amplify, Unfold, Increase, Broaden, and balloon throughout eternity. Believers in Christ will cherish and relish in Him as they progress and mature.
