The Heavens Proclaim

Posted on by korgrocker

“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.

Uselessness

Posted on by korgrocker

“These people are as useless as dried-up springs or as mist blown away by the wind. They are doomed to blackest darkness.”
2 Peter 2:17 NLT

Still referring to false teachers and false prophets, Peter defines them as being “useless”. Harsh words perhaps? But words that describe the pointlessness of being someone who is preaching against God’s plans and ways or distorting His message. In the context of God’s kingdom, they add little that is positive and much that is negative. So Peter describes them as being “useless“.

A big question sometimes asked is about the purpose of life. What are we humans here on Planet Earth for? Are we here, as some will claim, by accident? Are we too just the useless result of our circumstances? The product of a mix of chemicals formed by chance on a lump of rock that happened to end up at just the right distance from a source of light and heat, creating an environment conducive to the formation of life? That is what many evolutionists would have us think. Unfortunately for them, the facts don’t fit in with their theories. We pilgrims know how we got here, because the Bible tells of how it happened. The Genesis account describes the formation of our planet, and then there is the verse, “Then the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground. He breathed the breath of life into the man’s nostrils, and the man became a living person” (Genesis 2:7). And the man, Adam, ‭‭was given a job to do, “The Lord God placed the man in the Garden of Eden to tend and watch over it” (Genesis 2:15). He was useful, and, better, he was being useful in a way that aligned with God’s desires for him. We can read on in Genesis, and find that farming for food to live on was the first physical priority. So mankind had to be useful in the sense that if they weren’t then human beings would probably have died out through starvation. And we can see that even us pilgrims have to be useful in our societies where keeping alive is the main requirement. Of course, this is a simplified picture, but it doesn’t answer the question, why are we here? Or, what is the purpose of life? 

We turn to the Bible for meaningful answers. Solomon, one of the wisest men who ever lived, concluded after wrestling with these questions, “That’s the whole story. Here now is my final conclusion: Fear God and obey his commands, for this is everyone’s duty. God will judge us for everything we do, including every secret thing, whether good or bad” (Ecclesiastes 12:13-14). Another perspective we must consider is that we pilgrims, Christian believers, are assured of a future beyond the grave. One day, our physical bodies will die. This wasn’t God’s plan, because He originally created perfection, but through sin, our bodies will be corrupted and will die. But because we have accepted Jesus as our Lord and Saviour, He has granted us eternal life. When we die, our spirits will live on with God in Heaven. This will be the time when we will receive a new body. We read in Philippians 3:21, “He will take our weak mortal bodies and change them into glorious bodies like his own, using the same power with which he will bring everything under his control“. 2 Corinthians 5:1, “For we know that when this earthly tent we live in is taken down (that is, when we die and leave this earthly body), we will have a house in heaven, an eternal body made for us by God himself and not by human hands“. 

So we can see that to be useful, we have to have a relationship with God, and work to provide for both ourselves and our families. Those false teachers were going to find, according to Peter, that their uselessness will lead to an end of the “blackest darkness”. The Westminster Shorter Confession says that the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. So in whatever we think or do, is our main focus God, or our own selfish desires? Do we align ourselves to God’s ways, or get absorbed into a society where the main driver is sin? There is no middle ground.

Today we pilgrims have an opportunity to shift our focus from the natural to the spiritual, as we do every day. From our mundane existence into something so amazing and wonderful that it is breathtaking in its implications. We don’t have to wait until we pass over the Great Divide into God’s presence before we can “enjoy Him forever“. He is with us now. We can reach and touch Him. He is that close. There is a poem, which includes, “Two men looking through prison bars; one saw mud, the other saw stars.” Where are we looking today? A useless life will only find mud, but those who are useful will find the stars. Let’s embrace the Creator of those stars today while we have the opportunity.

Dear Father God, our amazing Creator. We reach out to You today, and pray that in whatever we are doing, we will be useful to You and Your purposes. In Jesus’ name. Amen.