“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. God has made a home in the heavens for the sun.”
Psalm 19:1-4 NLT
We can just imagine David, lying in a pasture while he was looking after his father’s sheep, and looking up into the night sky, seeing an amazing canopy of small bright dots. Without light pollution, the heavens at night are breath-taking in their beauty. To add to the scene, David would have uttered a “wow” when he saw the sunsets and the sunrises, resplendent in their pinks, yellows, and reds and changing by the minute as the sun traversed the horizon. David, a thinking and deeply spiritual man, attributed the causes to God, because who else could have performed such an amazing light show? David would have been educated in accordance with the Jewish curriculum, and a God-knowledge would have been prominently contained within. But here out in the open David went from book knowledge to heart knowledge, causing him to write “The Heavens proclaim the glory of God”. Earlier we looked at Psalm 8, another Davidic Psalm, which starts, “O Lord, our Lord, your majestic name fills the earth! Your glory is higher than the heavens”. God’s majesty through His name is present here on earth and in consequence His glorious majesty is so great that it extends far beyond what even the most powerful telescope can determine, needing a Name above all names to do Him justice.
The problem that atheists, those who deny that God doesn’t exist, have is that they have no “wow” in their lives. No sense of wonderment that there is a Creator God who created the universe and all that is within it, and in the process He provided a beautiful display of His presence. I’m writing this morning looking out at a grey world, rain splashing in the puddles, and missed what would have been an amazing sunrise bursting through my office window. Sin is a bit like that because it puts a fog of rain clouds in the way, blocking out the glory of the dawn, and by implication, God’s glorious presence. David would have soaked in the wonder of the skies in his long lonely hours musing and meditating on the Person behind what he was seeing, and he never got tired of what he saw. He wrote, “Day after day they continue to speak; night after night they make him known”, declaring that God is eternal and has crafted a universe that never fails to display something new.
There is a story of two prisoners in a cell looking through the bars. One only saw mud, but the other saw stars. To so many, they go through their lives drudging and struggling through the “mud” of life, getting bogged down in what are mostly trivial circumstances, but which nevertheless drains them of any hope for the future. Other people seem to float above their life problems and always seem to have their heads optimistically positioned in higher places, up there with the stars.
In Jesus we have a hope that is just as wonderful as the glory of God displayed in His creation. Paul wrote, “I pray that God, the source of hope, will fill you completely with joy and peace because you trust in him. Then you will overflow with confident hope through the power of the Holy Spirit” (Romans 15:13). What do we pilgrims hope for? I would suggest that through our faith in Jesus, we will one day see the glory of God on a scale that is totally beyond what our human limitations can allow. As the writer to the Hebrews said, “Faith shows the reality of what we hope for; it is the evidence of things we cannot see” (Hebrews 11:1). The glory of God displayed in the Heavens is a hint of what is to come, put there by a merciful and gracious God to support our faith. The disciple Philip one day said to Jesus, “ … Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied” (John 14:8). The following verse reads, “Jesus replied, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and yet you still don’t know who I am? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father! So why are you asking me to show him to you?” Through our faith and belief in Jesus we too have seen the Father, and just to make sure we don’t forget, He announces His glorious presence through His creation, not just once but every day.
Do we pilgrims look up on a dark but clear night and observe with thankful hearts yet another Heavenly display of God’s glory? Of course we do, because we know the Creator who put on the show to proclaim His glory.
Father God. Your wonderful creation is beyond understanding, but we appreciate and enjoy Your glory every day. Amen.
Being a Pilgrim 