“Where will you be when we find life beyond earth?” That is the question you immediately read on the SETI Institute’s website. SETI stands for Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence. It started in the 80’s with the goal of making contact with intelligent life beyond the earth. In a promotional video at the website Morgan Freeman says, “Finding life beyond earth is no longer a dream. Its a discovery that will likely be made during our lifetime. And it will change everything.”
Isn’t it ironic that while secular man searches so desperately for life out there, the Creator of all life, and everything “out there,” has already revealed Himself to us down here? You don’t need radio-telescopes monitoring millions of channels or “sweeping the skies for alien transmissions” to find intelligent life beyond the earth. The most intelligent life, the Creator who has All-Intelligence, has made Himself known. All the money, education, equipment, energy, hope spent on discovering life – all when the True Life has disclosed Himself to us. Morgan Stanley says discovering extraterrestrial life will change everything. But if you truly want everything to change, find the Creator of all intelligent life. “Whoever seeks,” Jesus said, “will find.”
Our sermon is in Psalm 19 today, and the title is “The Glory of God in All His Revelation.” Psalm 19 divides neatly into 3 parts. The first part focuses on God’s Creation in verses 1-6. The second part focuses on God’s Commandments in verses 7-10. The third part focuses on Our Conscience, verses 11-14.
The relationship of these 3 parts is important to notice. The first and second parts describe the two main ways God has revealed Himself to man, and the third part is man’s response to God’s revelation. God has revealed Himself in Creation, and through personally speaking. Man must respond. Man is supposed to respond to the witness that creation gives, and the witness that scriptures give. Here’s the thing: just like creation points to God, and just like God’s word points to God, so also man is to respond to both by pointing Himself to God. Just like creation glorifies God, and just like God’s word glorifies God, so too man is supposed to respond by himself glorifying God. So when we testify of God to this world by how we live and aligning ourselves with the Word of God, we are the third revelation to the world of God’s glory along with Creation and the Scriptures.
CREATION (1-6)
Creation Glorifies God. Read verse 1-6 with me…God glorifies Himself through His creation.
This really is the thought also in Psalm 8:3-4. Those famous words that say, “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them.” Can you feel what he’s saying? As he looks out on all of creation he feels dwarfed. He feels “punified” at the enormous magnificence of creation. I made that word up, “punified.” It means “to make puny.” Standing in awe of the grandness of creation makes you feel your puniness. But in feeling that about yourself it also overwhelms you with a sense of how enormous and powerful and incredible God is to make this impressive world and universe we live in.
The point here is that we can know things about the Creator by looking at His creation. Just like a painting tells us things about the painter, or the song tells us something about the singer, creation tells us about the Creator. Theologians call this, “General Revelation.” We gain information about the Creator by looking at what He has made. What did Psalm 19 say? “The heavens DECLARE…the skies PROCLAIM…they pour forth SPEECH…they REVEAL…their VOICE GOES OUT…their WORDS….” What is made is informing us about the Maker. Yet they don’t use words, they don’t use language, they don’t speak audible sounds of human language to form words and express thoughts. It is all of creation’s very existence that informs without words a clear picture of who the Creator is.
What is this “clear picture?” What can you learn of this Creator? If you just awoke in this world and began to look around, you can see things about this environment we call earth and sky and you can use your mind this Creator gave you to reason as you look out at it all and intelligently conclude that there must be Someone behind it all. But doing so you can gather more than merely Someone must be behind it all – you can reason your way to some understanding of what this Someone is like. For instance:
- His POWER to create and cause everything to be. “As I look on the heavens…” Psalm 8 said.
- His WISDOM to create order and complexity. It must be a mind behind it all because of the intelligence that has gone into how complex and orderly the world is.
- His CARE for us, as our needs are met and we can exist because of creation He has made for us to live in
- He PROVIDES, all we need to exist is provided for us in this world.
- His BEAUTY as things He made appeal to our senses and are not just functional – think of standing on our dunes and looking out over the vast Lake Michigan as the sun sets, or the flowers budding in the spring, or the colors in the fall, or the fresh white blanket of winters snow.
- His FAITHFULNESS/DEPENDABILITY – seasons come and go as always, sun rises and sets as always, stars run in their courses, rivers run, rain falls on our fields….creation is faithful so the Creator must be faithful
- We see the Creator is RIGHTEOUS. Psalm 50:We could look inward too, at ourselves, and see that we have something inside of us that makes us say “Hey, this is right” or “Hey, that is wrong.” So we could reason that this Someone must be a moral Someone, who made us to be moral, and therefore He is the Source of what is morally right and wrong.
This is all called by theologians, “General Revelation,” or “Natural Revelation.” It just simply means that Creation tells us things about the Creator, just like a painting tells us things about the painter, or the song tells us something about the singer.
Creation is everywhere all around us. Psalm 19:4 says creation’s “voice goes out into all the earth, its words to the ends of the world.” Wherever man is found creation is there preaching to him: if we dive to the deepest oceans, or ride with Elon Musk to the furthest limits of the universe, or we describe the size of the biggest stars, or we look at microscopic atoms under the most powerful microscopes, we will find that all of it testifies of the Creator.
APPLICATION: This means accountability. What do we do with the knowledge we are given about this Creator while His Creation is informing us about Him? Romans 1, “What may be known about God is plain to see, because God has made it plain to all. 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 people are without excuse.” Do you see how that verse is saying everyone can know and is SUPPOSED to know things about the Creator as they look on the created world and so therefore rejecting the Creator will mean when they stand before Him they are WITHOUT EXCUSE.” (that’s the title of the book we give out to guests here, “Without Excuse.”) What do we do with creation’s testimony? Do not deny the Creator by saying it all “just happened.” Do not credit nothing for what the Creator did. Do not credit creation for what the Creator did. Romans 1 warns about that too: “They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator – who is forever praised. Amen.” Romans 1 is making it very clear that to believe the world came about in any other way than God creating it is to reject worshiping God. Worship of God fundamentally entails crediting Him as the Creator.
And here’s something else about the testimony of creation: it makes you seek the Creator. Creation should create in us a desire to personally know the Creator.
GOD’S WORD (7-10)
So God reveals Himself to us through His Creation, but then He goes further and speaks to us. Which leads us into the second part of Psalm 19, verses 7-11. This section switches focus from the natural world made by God to the words spoken by God. Notice how verse 7 begins, “The law of the LORD…” The law is referencing everything God spoke through all the prophets to man, all His commands and requirements, all his teaching of who He is – everything. God has spoken to man, and He has preserved all that He has spoken in the Bible. This is called Special Revelation. Natural revelation means that we can know about God based on looking at His creation. Special revelation is that Creator God speaking to us. Think of what Hebrews 1:1 says, “I the past God spoke to our forefathers at various times and in various ways through the prophets, but in these last days He has spoken to us through His Son.” God speaks. God spoke and creation became. God spoke and the prophets proclaimed. Francis Schaeffer titled one of his books perfectly on this point: “He Is There And He Is Not Silent.”
Special revelation began in the Garden. God spoke personally to Adam, another personal being. God created Adam and then spoke to Adam. Since Adam was put to work in the Garden and he had regular fellowship with God in the Garden, do you ever wonder what God said to Adam? Or what Adam asked God about? I’m sure there is much not recorded for us.: “How does this green plant work? How does a flower bloom? How does the sun move like that? What does that part of an animal do? Why are there so many bugs? How do the stars move like that?” Can you imagine all the knowledge Adam possibly got if he was asking the Creator every day about zoology, biology, astronomy, geology, and so on?
Yet, if so, none of it made it into Scripture. The only words it records for us in Scripture that God gave Adam were a command: Do not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In other words, the only thing that Genesis highlights for us that God spoke to this brand new man was a moral obligation, a rule for him to follow. If you’re the kind of rebellious hearted person who scoffs about this then you utterly miss the point. Man’s glory is in the fact that he is a moral being, like God is moral. Genesis doesn’t emphasize the natural sciences – it emphasizes that glorious aspect of man that nothing else God created has: moral righteousness. The ability to fellowship on such a level with God as another personal being that we can understand and follow what God says. When God said “Let there be light” and there was light, it is not the same thing. Light is not a personal being. Light had no choice, it is not a moral agent, like man. Man acting righteously is man acting in his God-designed glory – the reason is because his Creator is holy and glorious in His holiness, thus being in the Creator’s image means the fullness of a man’s glory is seen in his moral righteousness. Man can’t be glorious apart from holiness, apart from righteousness. Man’s glory is directly related to his moral quality.
This is why we at EFC so energetically emphasize the Bible: it is God’s word. And for us to fully step into what we are supposed to be we are dependent on God’s words to do so. “Man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” (Mt 4:4). “The LORD’s Word is flawless” Psalm 18:30 says. “Now I commit you to God and the WORD of His grace, which can build you up and give you an inheritance among the saints.” (Acts 20:32). “The word that goes out from my mouth will not return to me empty,” the LORD says in Isaiah 55:11, “but it will accomplish what I desire, and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.” The words of God cleanse us, “You are clean because of my word,” Jesus said in John 15. By the word of God we identify truth from error, as Acts 17:11 says, “The Bereans were of more noble character because they searched the scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.”
So here is how I want to break down the rest of our sermon will look. So Psalm 19 divides into 3 sections: Creation, Commands, and Conviction. We’ve covered Creation. Today, we’re going to get halfway through Commands. Next time we’ll come back and we’ll cover the rest of what it says about God’s Commands as well as Conviction (verses 11-14).
The first half tells us a quality of God’s word that is objectively true. The second half tells us the effect on us, the benefit to us that God’s word gives.
God’s word is: perfect, trustworthy, right, radiant, pure, firm, righteous, valuable.
PERFECT. The word perfect in Hebrew means “complete, whole, sound, lacking nothing.” The same word is used by Elihu in Job 37:14 when he describes “those wonders of God who has PERFECT knowledge.” He means complete knowledge. God is not lacking knowledge about anything in the natural world. In the same way, the law of God is perfect, not lacking anything.
Its not lacking because it is God’s word, not man’s. Verse 7 says, “the law OF THE LORD.” We are face to face with the words of God, not merely the words of men.