The Heavens are Telling

Don’t you wonder why
The stars are in the sky?
They’re telling you and I
Of the glory of God

And every flower and tree
Is there for folks to see
So that there no doubt can be
Of the glory of God

So let the words of my mouth
And the meditation of my heart
Do the same thing for Thee
And a witness be
To the glory of God
To the glory of God

In my younger days, I could name four different songs that were all based on Psalm 19, and as I consider it now, I can think of a few others which have lines which allude to it. There is something to be said for the theory that scripture verses are trending for a few decades and then are replaced by others. These days there is much repetition of

• Be still and know
• “For I know the plans I have for you”
• I can do all things

Readers here will recognize that while these verses have brought much comfort to many people, each has a very specific context which is either not known or ignored by most of the people doing the quoting. (I may claim to be able to all things, but I can’t fly an airplane, dismantle a bomb, or perform brain surgery. I can’t even get the jar of apricot jam open, and I need to ask my wife for help finding the last place the roll of packing tape was cut.)

On the other hand, rediscovering a passage of scripture which had fallen off your radar is somewhat akin to meeting up with an old friend. (I don’t remember the title of the song I quoted above, but feel free to leave its name in the comments.)

Psalm 19 begins:

The heavens proclaim the glory of God.
    The skies display his craftsmanship.
² Day after day they continue to speak;
    night after night they make him known.
³ They speak without a sound or word;
    their voice is never heard
⁴ Yet their message has gone throughout the earth,
    and their words to all the world.

God has made a home in the heavens for the sun.
⁵ It bursts forth like a radiant bridegroom after his wedding.
    It rejoices like a great athlete eager to run the race.
⁶ The sun rises at one end of the heavens
    and follows its course to the other end.
    Nothing can hide from its heat. (NLT)

David wrote this one, and in these first six verses he’s talking about what theologians call the general revelation of God. This is the evidence of God’s being in nature, what scientists who are Christians call the unveiling of intelligent design in the universe. And it’s a non-stop broadcast; verse 2 (NASB) says “Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night reveals knowledge” and this giving of speech is anthropomorphizing either the heavens and skies, or the entire general revelation itself.

Have you ever had a friend who looked at a beautiful scene and said, “It speaks to me.” Well according to verse 2, it really does!

The general revelation can introduce someone to deism, but of course Jesus is not named. Is it sufficient for someone unevangelized to respond to; someone who has never heard the name of Jesus? Objectively, I want to say no, there is no salvation apart from His name, but there have been a few anecdotal accounts of people who decided that not only did there need to be a God behind the skies and heavens, but that this God would want to make himself known; and then they started connecting the dots. These are however, the exception, not the rule; but never rule out anything in terms of God’s ability to get through to human hearts.

The rest of the Psalm — and you could easily try to argue this is a mash-up of two Psalms — concerns God’s law.

The Law of the Lord is perfect, restoring the soul;
The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple.
⁸ The precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart;
The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes.
⁹ The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever;
The judgments of the Lord are true; they are righteous altogether.
¹⁰ They are more desirable than gold, yes, than much pure gold;
Sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb.
¹¹ Moreover, Your servant is warned by them;
In keeping them there is great reward.
¹² Who can discern his errors? Acquit me of hidden faults.
¹³ Also keep Your servant back from presumptuous sins;
Let them not rule over me;
Then I will be innocent,
And I will be blameless of great wrongdoing.
¹⁴ May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart
Be acceptable in Your sight,
Lord, my rock and my Redeemer. (NLT)

Look at the words used: Law, precepts, commandment. It echoes the conveniently numbered Psalm 119. (I don’t want go down the rabbit trail of verse and chapter numbering — a system which sometimes breaks up our reading and can be more harmful than helpful — but there are some interesting things which occur as you study the Bible. I remember in our youth group looking at the interesting collection of “3:16” verse which one finds, but I wouldn’t look to start a new church based such numerical anomalies.)

David loves God’s precepts. He’s got them on his fridge, in posters and plaques on his wall, on bumper stickers on his car.

David loves the law. It’s as simple as that. We groan inwardly when the speaker says, “Turn with me to the book of Leviticus;” but not so David. When I did a consecutive reading of scripture a few years back and came to Leviticus, I remember very specifically praying that God would help me to see the reasoning behind the rules; an understanding of the purpose behind the many intricate details by which Israel would form a distinct identity and be set apart from neighboring nations.

It’s like David is saying, ‘I love traffic lights. I love speed limits.’ (One wonders if in our day he would say, ‘I love having to wear a mask. I love social distancing.’ If he felt that all these things were for our good, he might indeed say those things.) (Please don’t comment on this paragraph. Thank you.)

Then there what I see as a benediction for readers like us. I’ve already shown it here as the translation I used included it with the previous verse, but it could also stand alone.

May these words of my mouth and this meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, LORD, my Rock and my Redeemer. (v14, NIV)

While David ends with this, I’ve used it before as part of prayer of invocation at the start of a worship service, or at the beginning of a sermon. You can use this personally as you start your day; as you go into your school or workplace; as you prepare for a Zoom meeting with family members; or as you are about to type that reply on Facebook or Twitter!

I’ll leave us with the first part of the verse in The Voice Bible:

May the words that come out of my mouth and the musings of my heart meet with Your gracious approval…

 

The Heavens Are Trying To Get Your Attention

Today we’re featuring Charlie LeHardy, who writes at AnotherThink.  At first look, this particular devotional article may seem somewhat elementary, but allow yourself to dig a little deeper with this.  You’re encouraged to read this at source, where it appeared simply as Look Up!

The heavens proclaim the glory of God. The skies display His craftsmanship.
Day after day they continue to speak; night after night they make Him known.
They speak without a sound or word; their voice is never heard.
Yet their message has gone throughout the earth, and their words to all the world.
— Psalm 19:1-4, NLT, a Psalm of King David

On Tuesday night, my friend Parks set his camera up on a hillside and captured an image of the comet Pan-STARRS, below. On Wednesday, Thursday and Friday I attempted the same thing, but failed to even see the comet much less get a photo. Millions of people around the globe saw the comet, but not me. Thousands of people on every continent photographed this visitor as it passed by, but I completely missed it.

The problem, of course (aside from my bad eyes) is that while the heavens are busy proclaiming the glory of God, they do it silently and subtly. What I needed were icons, arrows, and flashing pop-up messages in the sky. If I had been wearing one of those Google Spectacle™ gizmos, I could have turned my head in the general direction of the comet Pan-STARRS and an animated Google Doodle™ would have directed me right to it. Oh brave new world.

Because the heavens “speak” of God’s glory “without a sound or word,” their message is admittedly ambiguous. As David looked up at the night sky, especially on those long night watches in the fields as a shepherd, he had the time to really study what he was seeing, time to ponder what it all meant. He saw beauty. He would have observed the way the stars moved across the sky night after night, always returning to their places for the next night’s performance. He saw the faster-moving planets, the cyclical phases of the moon, streaking meteors, perhaps even a comet or two. When you take the time to look deep and long into the night sky, the universe seems almost alive, immense, ordered but sprinkled with random acts of unpredictability and surprise.

In all that wondrous beauty and ordered chaos, David saw God at work. But what about today?

Well, for one thing, half of us live in the midst of so much artificial light pollution that we never see the stars at all. And even when we might have a chance to look up, there are so many wondrous things dragging our gaze downward that we seldom do.

I ate lunch yesterday at a Thai restaurant with some friends, and during the meal I noticed a table of four young men, all with their heads bowed. I smiled, assuming they were praying together. On closer inspection I could see that each of them was hunched over his smart phone, oblivious to the others sitting nearby, lost in the artificial wonders to be found in a tiny glowing screen.

That may be an apt metaphor for our times: the heavens still declare the glory of God, but we’re all engrossed in our cell phones, too busy surfing and chatting and tweeting to look up.

God is speaking. Are you listening? God’s glory is displayed in the heavens. When was the last time you paused to look up?

Here’s a classic worship song from The Maranatha Singers’ Psalms Alive project based on today’s text:

Finding Your Worship Moment

Psalm 19: 1

The heavens keep telling
    the wonders of God,
    and the skies declare
    what he has done. (CEV)

God’s glory is on tour in the skies,
    God-craft on exhibit across the horizon. (Message)

The heavens proclaim the glory of God.
    The skies display his craftsmanship. (NLT)

The verse above is fairly typical of what we think of when we think of God creative gifts expressed in the natural world. I often tell people to take time during the week to find their ‘worship moment;’ worship prompted not by the singing of a choir or a worship team, but by the majesty of creation. I’ll mention walks in the forest or looking at the sky on days when multiple layers of clouds are struck by an early morning or late day sun.

But God’s handiwork is evident — I would say more evident — in the micro as well as the macro. In the intricate fine tuning of the design elements in creation we see things we would otherwise miss. Some of the ones that apply to humans are more important to us…

^{NIV Psalm 139 : 3} For you created my inmost being;
    you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

…but there are intricacies in the plant and animal world we could never imagine unless someone pointed them out to us. 

Which brings us to this video. This is not a Christian video clip per se, but was intended for people who are interested in mathematics. Starting with the Fibonacci sequence, the numbers are translated into shapes that you should recognize.

I hope for some of you who know the Creator personally, this brief clip becomes a worship moment.

To continue your worship moment with the song Creation Calls by Brian Doerksen, click back to this post from one year ago.

Go deeper with Indescribable with Louis Giglio. The total run time is 27 minutes, this link takes you to part one.