I won’t ask for a show of hands but I imagine that most of us have had conversations with friends or co-workers or even family members-conversations in which we were challenged to authenticate our faith…times we were told to somehow VERIFY the existence of the God we claim to know and serve. Perhaps people have said things to you like, “You’re a Christian. Tell me-how do you know that your God is real?”Well, the 19th Psalm is a great text to turn to for help when it comes to answering challenges like this because it’s verses clearly state that not only IS there a God-this psalm also says that He has revealed Himself to us in three ways. Let’s read this psalm of David together now…and as we do see if you notice these three ways in which he says that God has revealed Himself to mankind.
1 – The heavens declare the glory of God; they skies proclaim the work of His hands.
2 – Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge.
3 – There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard.
4 – Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world. In the heavens He has pitched a tent for the sun
5 – which is like a bridegroom coming forth from his pavilion, like a champion rejoicing to run his course.
6 – It rises at one end of the heavens and makes its circuit to the other; nothing is hidden from its heat.
7 – The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul. The statutes of the Lord are trustworthy, making wise the simple.
8 – The precepts of the Lord are right, giving joy to the heart. The commands of the Lord are radiant, giving light to the eyes.
9 – The fear of the Lord is pure, enduring forever. The ordinances of the Lord are sure and altogether righteous.
10 – They are more precious than gold, than much pure gold; they are sweeter than honey, than honey from the comb.
11 – By them is your servant warned; in keeping them there is great reward.
12 – Who can discern his errors? Forgive my hidden faults.
13 – Keep your servant also from willful sins; may they not rule over me. Then will I be blameless, innocent of great transgression.
14 – May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in Your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer.
How did you do? Did you note all three? Let’s review them together. The first proof that David gives is this:(1) In verses 1-6 he states that God has revealed Himself—-in His WORLD.
David realized that the beauty and order of the created world are truly God’s oldest testament. As a young shepherd boy I am certain that he would lie on his back at night out in the pasture and spend hours gazing up at the stars. I imagine he also witnessed spectacular sunrises and sunsets as he cared for his father’s flocks over the years-and as he saw all this God’s Spirit moved in him and he wrote: “The heavens declare the glory of God; they skies proclaim the work of His hands.”
Well, as David spent all those years tending sheep out in the Judean hills he came to understand some OTHER things about this particular revelation of God that he notes in this psalm.
A. First of all he saw that it is…CONTINUOUS
In verse 2 he writes, “Day after day they (the heavens-the created world) pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge.” In other words, David saw that creation is not an intermittent revelation of God, like the prophets He would send one year…and then let many silent years go by before sending another. No-the world in which we live reveals the glory of God every single night of the week, every week of the year, year after year, and they have done this nonstop since the dawn of creation. There has NEVER been a moment in the history of the human race when the heavens were not testifying to us about God’s infinite power and wisdom. The stars and oceans and mountains and animals and fish and birds and insects never tire of saying, “The hands that made us are divine!” As Warren Wiersbe puts it, “Nature preaches a thousand sermons a day to the human heart.”
And then, David states that not only is creation a CONTINUOUS revelation of the existence of God…it is also….
B. …a UNIVERSAL revelation.
In other words it is not just ALL the time…it is every WHERE. As verses 3-4 say, “There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.” So, as Paul Powell writes, “God’s message in nature goes out every day and every night in every LANGUAGE to every land.” If you’ve ever traveled then you know this basic principle of God’s revelation to be true. This past Tuesday night Sue and I went to see Becca play soccer here in the Rockville area and after the game we saw a beautiful sunset. It seemed as if sky in the west was literally on fire! Two weeks ago 700 miles south of here my mom sat on the deck of our rented condo at Ocean Isle, North Carolina and saw a spectacular double rainbow arching over the bay. Two weeks before that-thousands of miles east of here in Nairobi, Kenya…I rode through a game park where we saw zebra and giraffe and water buffalo and lion and ostrich and monkeys and wildebeests-all beautiful examples of God’s amazing creative power. My point is this: every where you go in this world of ours you can see God revealing Himself in what He has made. So, it follows that it should be obvious to anyone, anywhere that there IS a God! I mean, you’d have to be blind not to see this truth! This reminds me of a fictional camping trip story of Sherlock Holmes and his trusted partner Watson. During the night Watson wakes Holmes from a sound sleep and says, “Sorry to wake you, but I wanted to share with someone the incredible beauty of this star-filled sky above us tonight. When I see these stars, I am amazed by their brilliance. What do you think about, Holmes, when you lay on your back and look up to see the stars as we do tonight?” Sherlock replies, “Watson, old boy, here is what I think. I think someone has stolen our tent.”
Well-with or without a tent, no matter where we look-up or down or around or in or under-everywhere we see created beauty so great that it should lead all of us to seek God out.
And you know what I’m talking about. The mind-staggering beauty of creation is why a hush falls on a group of people who step out under the stars in a night sky, when the moon is riding high and the stars glow with glory. We all feel the mystery of the Infinite a reaching-calling out to our spirits-and a silence descends upon us. In times like this we know in the depths of our being that there is a Creator.
And this leads to the third thing David realized. He saw that this particular revelation of God was truly…
C. ….ABUNDANT!
As he says in verse 2 God’s creation constantly, universally… “POURS fourth speech.” Now, the Hebrew here gives the image of a gushing spring that endlessly bubbles forth-gushes forth-the sweet, refreshing waters of revelation. So David is saying that everywhere you look there is ENDLESS evidence of a Creator. Even this young, uneducated shepherd boy had enough sense to see that our world and everything on it did not just happen-for literally everywhere we look we see the fingerprints of God. Each individual part of nature, no matter how tiny, testifies to it’s Creator-His power and wisdom, so much that we can accurately say there really is no such thing as a “simple organism” in this universe of ours. The petals of a flower, a blade of grass, a snowflake, the intricacies of the atom, the nature of light, physical laws like gravitational attraction-they all testify abundantly to the divine mind that lies behind them. The signature of God is etched on ALL of His creation. As Paul writes in Romans 1:19-20, “…what may be known about God is plain to see, because God has made it [abundantly] plain…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…” This truth inspired Elizabeth Barrett Browning to write, “Earth is crammed with heaven and every common bush aflame with God but only those who see take off their shoes. The rest sit around and eat blackberries.”
Well, God’s fingerprints are indeed everywhere-abundant for all who will see. Let’s consider some examples. Have you heard of the world’s most remarkable camera? It automatically aims and focuses in half a second, and automatically adjusts aperture in even less time. The color film on which it records is stereoscopic and self-renewing after every exposure. The development time is a fraction of a second. Expensive? It’s priceless-and you and I own two of them-for I’m referring to the human eye. Even Darwin himself was impressed as he considered our eyes. In his controversial book The Origin of the Species, he wrote, “To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberrations, could have been formed by natural selection seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.”
Let’s go a smaller and consider something Darwin did not have the technology to study: a single human cell. In his book, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, Dr. Michael Denton suggests we imagine magnifying one human cell a thousand million times, until it is twenty kilometers in diameter and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York. Once it was this big we would see on its surface what appears to be millions of portholes, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials flowing in and out. Entering one of these openings we would discover a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity. Dr. Denton writes, “We would see endless highly organized corridors and conduits branching in every direction away from the perimeter of the cell, some leading to the central memory bank in the nucleus and others to assembly plants and processing units a huge range of products and raw materials would shuttle along all the manifold conduits in a highly ordered fashion to and from all the various assembly plants in the outer regions of the cell. We would wonder at the level of control implicit in the movement of so many objects down so many seemingly endless conduits, all in perfect unison. It would resemble an immense automated factory, a factory larger than a city and carrying out almost as many unique functions as all the manufacturing activities of man on earth. In one respect however it would differ radically from the most advanced factory or machine known to man, for the human cell is capable of replicating its entire structure within a matter of a few hours.”
Now consider that there are an estimated 75 trillion of these incredibly sophisticated cells in your body-What keeps them all working together? Well, it’s the DNA strand locked away inside the nucleus of each cell. And, your body’s DNA is estimated to contain instructions that if written out would fill a thousand six-hundred page books, yet all of this information would fit inside an ice cube. I’m not a scientist but I think to conclude that something like this just happened is the height of ignorance!
So let’s review a bit. God’s creative design is plain to see. It is obvious even on the surface. It doesn’t take a college degree for even young David realized this. But today with our modern equipment scientists like Dr. Denton can look much closer-down to the cellular level and even when we look this closely at creation we see the “fingerprints” of our Creator. In fact, the more closely we look the more proof we see that our infinitely powerful and wise God does indeed exist. We realize that behind all this was more than chance. This design is the result of a designer. This is indeed a “designer-label” planet.
Now, we’ve talked about looking IN-down to the cellular level. Another example of all this is found in looking OUT as we study of the creation of the universe itself. For several years many scientists held to a “steady state” theory…which says that the universe had no beginning and is eternal. Well back in 1913 an astronomer named Vesto Slipher discovered that a dozen galaxies relatively close to the earth were moving away at high speeds up to two million miles per hour. Then a younger astronomer named Edwin Hubble took Slipher’s studies and used them to prove that the entire universe is expanding-hence the BIG BANG THEORY. Well this theory disturbed scientists because it proved that the universe had a beginning. It is not eternally existing in a “steady state.” And it troubled them because it means that there was a moment of creation which also means there was a Creator. This led Robert Jastrow, the founder and director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies to write,
“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak. But as he pulls himself over the last rock and reaches the summit he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
Jastrow is saying that through years of research scientists have discovered a fact that believers have accepted by faith for thousands of years: the fact that there is a God-a Creator-a fact that is clearly proclaimed in the first sentence of the Bible which says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” So, in this psalm the first way David says God has revealed Himself is through His world…through what He has WROUGHT. But David also says that God has revealed Himself through what He has WRITTEN…
2. …for he saw proof of God’s existence in the BIBLE…His written WORD.
Let’s look now at what he says about the Bible in this psalm…
A. First of all he says that it is COMPLETE.
That’s what the Hebrew word for “perfect” in verse 7 literally means. It is complete. Nothing is left out. All of life is covered within these precious pages. You see, the revelation of God in nature is wonderful but it is limited. It tells you that God exists but not how to know Him.
The heavens-the stars-our world-they all declare God’s power and glory but they do not declare His will or His plan or His promise of salvation. And this is why God also revealed Himself through the Bible. For it is complete-sufficient for all these things.
It tells us how to raise our children, how to make our marriages work, how to take care of our bodies, how to handle difficult people and situations. It even prepares us to face death by telling us how we can receive forgiveness for our sins so that we are given eternal life. God’s written word is perfect in this sense. It is complete! This fact is why the gospels record that whenever Jesus was confronted by people who had a problem in life and didn’t know how to deal with it, He would first of all ask them, “have you not read?” In other words, He referred them to the WORD of GOD, that is more than sufficient to deal with any situation.
That’s the way the Bible is. It does everything that we need it to do. There is no part of your life, no problem that you will ever face in your life, no question with which you will ever be troubled that the Word of God does not speak to and illuminate and meet. This is what David means in verses 7 and 8, when he says that the Word of God, “…makes the simple wise..”. and that, “it is radiant and gives light to the eyes.”
This week in my study I came across a script to be used for an imaginary “psychiatric hotline,” the kind of recorded message we might hear when we call for psychiatric help. It went like this:
“If you are OBSESSIVE-COMPULSIVE, please press 1 repeatedly.
If you are CO-DEPENDENT, please ask someone else to press 2.
If you have MULTIPLE PERSONALITIES, please press 3, 4, 5, & 6.
If you are PARANOID, we know who you are and what you want.
Just stay on the line and we’ll trace the call.”
Well, if you really want help or guidance you don’t need to access a hotline. No, the first place to go is to God’s Word for it is COMPLETE. It deals with every situation we can face in this life. As 2 Timothy 3:16-17 says, “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful…for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” It is as if our Creator gave us a handbook in the Bible-one that will tell us everything we need to know to live the life He has given us.
President Woodrow Wilson must have understood this because he once said, “There are a good many problems before the American People today and before me as president but I expect to find the solution to [all] those problems just in the proportion that I am faithful to the study of the Word of God. I ask every man and woman that from this day on to realize that a part of the destiny of American relies on the daily perusal of this Good Book.”
B. And then in verse 7 David also says that the WORD of God is….TRUSTWORTHY.
The popular paraphrase, THE MESSAGE words it this way, “The signposts of Yahweh are clear and point out the RIGHT road.” In today’s world, we desperately need guidance that is 100% trustworthy. As I said a few weeks ago when we studied the 23rd Psalm-as human beings we are designed to need guidance. You and I are like dim-witted sheep in that we require reliable and sure leadership as we go through life-and that is what the Good Shepherd has given us in His written Word.
Now-I want to emphasize the fact that this is an important truth for us as Christians to embrace because many of us put our trust in unreliable-untrustworthy-sources of authority.
1. Some of us put our trust in TRADITION.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Tradition is a wonderful thing but it is not completely trustworthy because unfortunately many times we forget WHY we practice certain traditions and when we do they lose their meaning. This reminds me of the story of Grandma’s ham hock. A newly married couple were preparing dinner together. They had purchased a whole ham that they expected to last for several meals. Well the wife cut off the shank-or hock-and threw it way. When she did this her husband said, “Hey, there’s good meat on that. Why did you throw it away?” She responded, “I don’t know….but my mother always did when she prepared a ham.” They were at her mother’s a few days later and so they asked her why she cut off the shank and threw it away and she replied “I don’t know…but Grandma always did.” When Grandma came into the room, they asked her, “Why did you always cut off the ham hock and throw it away?” Grandma responded, “Because my pan was too small for the whole ham.”
That’s the way it is with traditions. If we are not careful we forget why we practice them. So, when it comes to our faith and the way we live it out, traditions must always be compared to the standard of the Scriptures otherwise they can become meaningless. Jesus alluded to the danger of empty tradition in Matthew 15:8-9 when He said, “These people honor Me with their lips but their hearts are far from Me. They worship Me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men.”
2. A second untrustworthy source of authority is EXPERIENCE.
Countless false revivals or religious movements among Christians have been started by a charismatic pastor or leader who said in essence, “Some may tell you this isn’t Scriptural but I have experienced it so I know it is true…” And he begins to teach his people to interpret God’s written Word in light of his human experience, instead of the other way around. This is dangerous ground because think of it-if someone you respect tells you they had a vision from God-in which He told them to do something, how can you be certain that what he or she is saying is true? There is nothing to back it up. You could teach anything you want if you base it only on personal experience. And this is one reason God gave us this written record of truth. By it, you can judge all the experiences that men claim to have come from God. As Hebrews 4:12 says, the Word of God, “…judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.” We can know that if that if experience conflicts with the Word-then it is not authoritative and is something to steer clear of.
3. A third inadequate source of authority is INTELLECT.
This is another popular one-especially in our day and age for many people are determined to make their intellect the final authority in all matters. And you know, in no other way does man more clearly crown himself “God” of his life than when they think their brains are equal to God’s. People who rely on intellect say things like, “I just can’t understand how a good God would do this. It’s not reasonable to believe God would do this.” And so they ignore Scripture and rely instead on their limited intelligence. This is what the Sadducees were doing in Mark 12. They refused to believe in the resurrection. It didn’t make sense to them. It wasn’t logical and they confronted Jesus with their reasoning. Our Lord replied in verses 24 and following by saying, “You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures! Have you not read in the book of Moses, in the account of the bush how God said to him, ‘I AM [right now] the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob?’ He is not the God of the dead but of the living. You [Sadducees] are badly mistaken!”
Today we have believers who make the same mistake. They think they know more than God and they live their lives accordingly. Well, in His Word, God warned us about relying solely on intellect or experience or tradition in Colossians 2:8 where it says,
“See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy [intellect] and empty deception [experience], according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world-rather than according to Christ.”
So, in this Psalm David tells us that God’s written Word is COMPLETE-and that it is TRUSTWORTHY-and then he points to one more characteristic of this particular revelation of God.
C. David says that it is POWERFUL.
Now, there are lots of ways you could describe the POWER of the Word of God but look at what David has said here. First of all in verse 7 he writes that it, “…revives the soul.” In other words, the Bible encourages us to keep on keeping on. Living in this fallen world of ours is tough and discouraging and draining-but God’s written Word is like a breath of fresh air in that it REVIVES us and ENCOURAGES us.
You know Abraham Lincoln had a tough life. He went to the Battle of Blackhawk as a Captain and returned as a private He failed in business twice. He lost 8 elections in a row. One of his sons died while he was in office. His wife had severe emotional problems and spent money they didn’t have. What was it that kept our most loved president going? I believe it was the Word of God and I say this because if you were to take his Bible and place it on a desk and allow it to open by itself it would open to Psalm 34. And if you looked closely at that Psalm you would find a verse that was smudged from a finger that was going over it back and forth-a verse he obviously read over and over. It’s verse 4 which says, “I sought the Lord and He answered me and delivered me from all my fears.” President Lincoln had experienced and relied on the REVIVING power of Scripture.
And then, another aspect of the POWER of the Bible that David talks about is it’s power to CORRECT us when we are living in ways that are contrary to God’s will. As he says in verses 10-12, by reading the Word of God, we are “warned” as it “discerns our errors and hidden faults.” And he is right for the Bible is a plumb line of truth that keeps us living in ways that not only protect us from harm but provide God’s best for us, so it is as David says, “…more precious than gold…”
In the Old Testament we see an example of this. Remember? The wall surrounding the city of Jerusalem had fallen into disrepair, bringing shame to the city and making it vulnerable to enemy attack. Nehemiah organized the people of the city into work parties and together they rebuilt the wall in record time. As they completed their work, they realized something else: not only had the wall of the city fallen into disrepair, so had their lives. They had wandered from the truth and left behind the God of their ancestors. Well, people from all over the nation gathered together and asked Ezra to read from the law-God’s written Word. When they heard what was read, they turned from their sin and committed themselves to live according to God’s law.
As John McArthur points out, this should remind us as Christians that no national revival has ever occurred because of political strategizing or legislative initiatives. Revivals don’t happen when the people of God protest and demonstrate against the sins of unbelievers. Revivals aren’t the fruit of boycotts or debates about public policy. Revivals occur when the Word of God is proclaimed and lived out and when the people are called to repentance.
So, as David says in this Psalm, God has revealed Himself to us in what He has WROUGHT and in what He has WRITTEN. But in the last verse of this psalm David alludes to one other way that God has since revealed Himself to us…
3. ….through the coming REDEEMER…God’s WORD made flesh.
You see it is not enough to know there is a God or even to know about Him. We need to KNOW Him and the only way to know Him: creation to Creator, is through His Son, Jesus Christ. Listen to the words of Hebrews 1:1. “In the past God spoke to our forefathers [He revealed Himself] through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days He has spoken to us by His Son, Whom He appointed heir of all things, and through Whom He made the universe. The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of His being sustaining all things by His powerful Word.”
You see, God revealed Himself and His great Love for us all most clearly through His Son, Who, unlike any other man, lived a perfect, sinless life. And then gave that life freely for you and me by taking our sins on Himself as He hung on the Cross of Calvary. In that way he removed the sin barrier that exists between us and God and made it possible for us to Know our holy God personally.
So, when it comes to proving the existence of God we have all we need-the evidence of His almighty hand in creation and in His written Word and finally in His Word become flesh. God HAS revealed Himself to us and now it is our move. He invites us into relationship with Him. The question is, How will we respond? If you have never responded-if you have never prayed and asked God to forgive you of your sin-if you’ve never committed to follow Jesus as Lord of your life-then I invite you to do so right now because when we do this, He remakes us. He unleashes His creative power on our spirits and we become new people.And, if you wish to make that decision or any other decision public, now is the time to do so as we stand together and sing. Won’t you come now…as God leads?