The heavens declare the glory of God,
     and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours out speech,
    and night to night reveals knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words,
     whose voice is not heard.
Their voice goes out through all the earth,
     and their words to the end of the world.
In them he has set a tent for the sun,
     which comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber,
     and, like a strong man, runs its course with joy.
Its rising is from the end of the heavens,
     and its circuit to the end of them,
     and there is nothing hidden from its heat.—Psalm 19:1–6

Introduction

C.S. Lewis has an amazing chapter on nature in his book, Reflections on the Psalms. He contrasts the concept of a “beginning” in ancient mythology with the way in the Psalms portray the creation. He says that the myths talk about the beginning, but they never reach the lofty, miraculous idea of a creation. Here is how he explains it:

Things “come up out of” something or “are formed in” something. If the stories could, for the moment, be supposed true, they would still be stories about very early events in a process of development, a world-history, which was already going on. When the curtain rises in these myths there are always some “properties” already on the stage and some sort of drama is proceeding. You may say they answer the question, “How did the play begin?” But that is an ambiguous question. Asked by the man who arrived ten minutes late it would be properly answered, say, with the words, “Oh, first three witches came in, and then there was a scene between an old king and a wounded soldier.” That is the sort of question the myths are in fact answering. But the very different question: “How does a play originate? Does it write itself? Do the actors make it up as they go along? Or is there someone—not on the stage, not like the people on the stage—someone we don’t see—who invented it all and caused it to be?—this is rarely asked or answered.

Modern science likes to think they have evolved far beyond ancient mythology. But even modern scientists committed to evolutionary theory end up doing something similar. If the evolution began with some kind of matter, then how did that matter originate—where did it come from? Francis Crick is a world-class scientist, widely known for being the co-discoverer of the DNA double-helix. What is his theory on this matter? In 1981, he wrote a book called Life Itself. It reads a little bit more like science fiction than science. He develops the idea of panspermia (meaning seeds everywhere). A physicist named Arrhenius (end of the 19th century) first proposed the idea saying that life on earth originated from space—spores of micro-organisms that traveled between the planets. But Crick theorized that the radiations of space would be much too intense and thus the spores could not possibly survive. So instead of scrapping the theory, Crick proposed that the spores were transported by an interplanetary spaceship sent by a civilization of aliens!

I am still not sure why anyone could say that believing in God is more of a stretch than believing in interplanetary spaceships and alien civilizations and outer space spores of microorganisms, but even if you did buy that idea, it still begs the same question: Where did the aliens come from?

The Bible cuts right to the chase: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). The Psalmist now looks at the heavens and listens to its message. The main point of Psalm 19:1–6 is that the big book of creation proclaims one unified message: God is glorious! Look at how great God is!

Outline of the Text: 

1. The Stating of the Message: What Creation Says (v. 1)
     a. God is glorious (the message is the same every time)

2. The Sending of the Message: How Creation Says It (v. 2–6)
     a. Non-stop (v. 2)
     b. Non-verbal: no words (v. 3)
     c. Universal: no place it doesn’t go; no one it doesn’t reach (v. 4)
     d. An Example: the sun (vv. 4–6)

1. The Stating of the Message: What Creation Says (v. 1)

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.

Notice that the focus is on the heavens or the sky above. Psalm 19 is like Psalm 8 in looking into the sky above in wonder and awe. Look into the sky long enough and listen close enough and you will receive a message about the glory of God. 

“Glory” is a gloriously hard word to define. The Hebrew word literally means “weight.” Paul plays on this meaning of the word in the New Testament when he talks about the “weight of glory” (2 Corinthians 4:17). The illustration I use is of a treasure chest. Have you noticed that when a treasure chest is opened, it has a great glow? The glow is supposed to represent the greatness of a treasure. The glow itself is not the treasure—it testifies to how beautiful and valuable the treasure is. The word “worship” comes from the word “worthship.” When you worship something, you are saying it has such worth and weight. You do this every time you go to the store. You buy grapes and you pay by the pound—that is going to be like $10 worth of grapes. Gold-dust is worth something—how much more a gold brick—the heavier it is the more it is worth.

That is what creation constantly says to us: Look at how great God is! Look at how worthy and beautiful and valuable he is. His glory is the glow of his greatness. We see the glow of his greatness in everything that he has made everywhere at every moment. The sheer scope of this message is laid out in verses 2–6 in terms of how creation sends this message.

2. The Sending of the Message: How Creation Says It
(vv. 2–6)

a. non-stop (v. 2)
b. non-verbal: no words (v. 3)
c. universal: no where it doesn’t go and no one it doesn’t see it (v. 4)
d. an example: the sun (vv. 4–6)

Verses 2–6 help us see the nature of this communication. Verse two begins by telling us that this speech or knowledge pours forth like a gushing spring all the time—non-stop!
Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge.

Verse 3 teaches us that it is a non-verbal message because there are no words: 
There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard.

Verse 4 adds that this message has gone out everywhere and reached everyone:
Their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.

Verses 4–6 now use the sun as an example:

In them he has set a tent for the sun, which comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber, and, like a strong man, runs its course with joy. Its rising is from the end of the heavens, and its circuit to the end of them, and there is nothing hidden from its heat.

Here the poet has us picture the sun coming up in the morning like coming out of a tent. The darkness of night is like a tent and then the sun comes bursting out in the morning. It comes out with eager, energetic, boundless strength like a bridegroom eagerly leaving his chamber or a powerful runner who runs his race with impressive strength and joy. The sun follows a course—it rises and then it goes on a circuit all around the earth and no corner of the earth is hidden from its heat.

I love what C.S. Lewis says here about the sun. “It is surely because natural objects are no longer taken to be themselves Divine that they can now be magnificent symbols of Divinity. There is little point in comparing a Sun-god with the sun” (Reflections on the Psalms). When nature is emptied of deities, she is now a bearer of messages for the Deity. Lewis says that there is even a sense in which nature-worship silences nature—“as if a child or a savage were so impressed with the postman’s uniform that he omitted to take in the letters.”

Application

The Fall: Psalm 19 and What Is Wrong With the World

Let us pause and let this land on us. Imagine if I were trying to get a hold of you with an urgent message. I called your cell phone. I texted you. I emailed you. I sent you a Facebook message. I called your home phone. I knocked on your door. I stopped by your office cubicle. Could we all agree that I went out of my way to contact you?

If we compared my efforts to this text, my efforts are pitiful and weak. Try to imagine the extent of God’s communication. Creation is like all the letter carriers in the entire postal service coming to your door with a letter for you (from God). Imagine getting a text message every second from God. Imagine your cell phone ringing every second and the name that comes up is “God.” Imagine opening your email account and your inbox says 1 billion new emails and they all say: “from God.”

The seriousness of suppressing the truth about God just became really intense, intentional, and cosmically criminal. You say “delete all” on your email, but they just keep coming and so you shut down your computer. You don’t answer your phone. You block the sender. So you have to suppress the message that God is glorious all the time. There is nowhere you can turn without being confronted with this message or comforted by this message.

Those who reject the message have no reason for doing so. The problem is not the clarity of God’s message. Paul makes this very case in Romans 1.

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.—Romans 1:18–20

Paul here speaks of God making himself known through “the things that have been made” (v. 20). The invisible God makes his invisible attributes like his power and deity visible through what he makes. Literally, Paul says he makes himself known through the poema. We get our English word “poem” from this Greek word. I think it is a fitting analogy at this point.

John Piper preached a sermon on this text in Romans 1 and asked us to imagine going to a beach. Together we discover a mark in the sand. It is ambiguous. It looks a little bit like an “L,” but we are not sure. The waves could have made a mark like that or maybe an animal or it could have been a child carving the letter “L” into the sand with a stick. But no one would debate such a scenario if they came upon a poem in the sand. When they see a poem, they instinctively know that a poet was there. When people see a grand creation, they instinctively know that there is a Great Creator.

If that message is always being sent everywhere to everyone at every moment and we are rejecting it always—then our guilt is great and our offense against him is staggering and the wrath of an Almighty opponent is the worst possible scenario that one could face. 

Consider for a moment not just the judicial cost of our rejection of God, but the intellectual cost. If you reject God’s creation of the world, what is the alternative intellectually? You have no solid reason to trust your reason. You are testifying that random, accidental forces result in order. No analogy works for this. You can’t trust a fluke—isn’t that a flimsy foundation?

If you saw some rocks on a hillside that were arranged in such a way as to spell out a message like “Welcome to Minneapolis,” what would your instincts tell you? Would you say, “What an amazing accident!” I bet those rocks randomly fell down the hill and over the course of many years just happened to spell out that message! You wouldn’t say that—you would know that someone with intelligence and intentionality arranged that message. But let’s say that you did believe that the rocks just randomly fell that way. You still would have no reason to really trust what the rocks say. You are trusting in a total fluke. C.S. Lewis said evolution is like sawing down the branch on which you are standing.

Everywhere we look we see evidence of God’s power and goodness. Everywhere we look we see evidence of sin (the Fall). We deny both. People want to look at all that is wrong with the world and blame God for it. People want to look at all that is good in the world and take credit for it (certainly not thank God for it). In fact, the Bible says that God has handed the world over to judgment because of a fatal flaw: We don’t want God in our knowledge! This spiritual and intellectual condition creates an immoral crisis.

And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.—Romans 1:28

The clarity of the message is clear so our rejection of it makes our condemnation clear. I am amazed at the lengths to which we will go to keep God out of our knowledge. Two examples will have to suffice.

When the Russians went up into space and said that they didn’t see God, C.S. Lewis once again returned to an image like the one we heard him use at the beginning of the sermon. You may remember that he spoke of someone outside of the play—not on the stage—someone not seen—that stands behind it all. Now he returns to an analogy from literature. He said that the conclusion the Russians made was non-sensical—it would be like a created character in a story like Hamlet trying to find Shakespeare in his attic.

The author of the story is not found in the story—he remains outside the story as the creator of it. In the same way, the Creator is not going to be found in one part of his creation—even if it is a lofty location like space—that is like looking in our attic. Don’t make such far-reaching conclusions based on such flimsy considerations (we didn’t see him in space—are you going to make an eternal decision based on that very inadequate observation)?

James Montgomery Boice gives another example from a book by Robert Jastrow (founder and director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies), entitled God and the Astronomers. Jastrow surveyed how fiercely astronomers resisted the idea that the world had a beginning. The prevailing scientific theory until 1965 was called the “steady state” theory. This theory assumed that the world had no beginning and was eternal. This theory satisfied astronomers because they theorized that everything has a cause and then an effect and one could not go back and discover a beginning or an uncaused cause.

But then in 1913 astronomer Vesto Melvin Slipher discovered that about a dozen galaxies relatively close to the earth were moving away from us at high speeds, up to two million miles per hour. During the next decade a younger astronomer named Edwin Hubble carried Slipher’s observation further, measuring the velocities of scores of galaxies and formulating the laws for an expanding universe. Hubble discovered that the further away a galaxy is, the faster it is moving. By measuring the speed of these retreating galaxies and plotting them against their distance from us, Hubble was able to pinpoint a moment in the past when all the mater of the universe must have been together—like a beginning.

Finally, in 1965, two scientists at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, discovered the leftover radiation or echo of what people had started to call “the Big Bang.” Eventually this theory became known as the Big Bang Theory and it is now the almost universal view.

But scientists at first fiercely resisted the idea of a beginning because it sounded too much like what Christians say. Sir Arthur Eddington (British astronomer) said in 1931, “the notion of a beginning is repugnant to me.” In other words, it can’t be true because I don’t like it. A German chemist named Walther Nernst said, “To deny the infinite duration of time would be to betray the very foundations of science.” In other words, it can’t be true because we have never done science that way before.

Philip Morrison from MIT spoke from the heart rather than the head in saying, “I would like to reject it.” Even the great scientist Albert Einstein initially rejected the idea of a Big Bang. “The circumstance [of a beginning or creation] irritates me. To admit such possibilities seems senseless.” After examining Hubble’s work and evidence thoroughly, he declared himself thoroughly convinced.

Robert Jastrow was so amused by these reactions of his fellow scientists that in his book God and the Astronomers he has a deliciously witty conclusion: “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; as he pulls himself over the rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.” 

I remembered a quote that Pastor John had read concerning Albert Einstein so I tracked it down. The quote about Einstein came from Charles Misner. Piper said that Misner was a scientific specialist in general relativity theory, and he commented about Albert Einstein’s view of preaching back in the ‘40’s and ‘50’s.

“I do see the design of the universe as essentially a religious question. That is, one should have some kind of respect and awe for the whole business. … It’s very magnificent and shouldn’t be taken for granted. In fact, I believe that is why Einstein had so little use for organized religion, although he strikes me as a basically very religious man. He must have looked at what the preachers said about God and felt that they were blaspheming. He had seen much more majesty than they had ever imagined, and they were just not talking about the real thing. My guess is that he simply felt that religions he’d run across did not have proper respect . . . for the author of the universe” (Piper sermon from 1993, “God Is a Very Important Person,” Quoting from First Things, Dec 1991).

Conclusion

Redemption and Restoration: How Does the Creator Put Everything to Right?

The lengths to which we will go to reject God are only surpassed by the lengths to which God has gone to reach us. Max Lucado once told a story about how as a boy he went into a barn and saw some sparrows. He longed to play with them, but they would always fly away from him. He desperately wanted to be able to use their language and tell them that he wanted to be with them, not harm them. He longed for the ability to become a sparrow fly up to them to communicate with them so he could be with them. Of course, there was no way that he could do that. It was impossible for him and it was impossible for any human.

But God did the impossible and overcame every obstacle. The eternal God wrote himself into the story. Dear friends, God took on flesh and blood to reach those who are flesh and blood. He came down to us. He dwelt among us. We could not come to him because of our sin. So he took our sin on the cross. We could not defeat death. So he did. He conquered the grave for us. Look at the lengths he went to love you and redeem you. This was the most profound communication of all. There is wonder-working power in the blood. Power to forgive our sin in failing to respond to the flood of messages saying God deserves to receive our thanks and praise and wonder and worship.

Think of all the times we flat out rejected him and turned away. Think of all the times we were wrapped up with ourselves and did not even give him the time of day. Think of all the times we took credit for things and embezzled the praise for ourselves that properly only belongs to God. Think now of all of those messages: return to sender, return to sender like unpaid bills piling up all around us. Now see God take each one and nail it to the cross so that we bear it no more. We look at the cross and say, “God is glorious in love! Mighty to save! Plentiful redemption!”

He is returning. He will call for all bills to be paid. The time is short. Eternity is long. Hell is worse than words can say. Heaven is better than anyone can imagine. Christ is Lord and he is coming soon. There are only two options: The “bills” will be paid by you in hell (bow later by force) or by Jesus on the cross (bow now by joyful choice—confess him as Savior and Lord). A day is coming when the drama of life and death will draw to a close. We referred to C.S. Lewis’ analogy of a stage play at the beginning. The director of the play is outside of the play—he is not seen—until he steps on the stage at the end of the play. That is the sign that the play is over. 

Sermon Discussion Questions

Outline

The Stating of the Message: What Creation Says (v. 1)
     God is glorious (the message is the same every time)

The Sending of the Message: How Creation Says It (vv. 2–6)
     Constant and copious communication (v. 2)
     Communication without words (v. 3)
     Everywhere to everyone (v. 4)
     An example: The sun (vv. 4–6)

Main Point: The big book of creation proclaims one unified message: God is glorious!

Discussion Questions

• What does the big book of creation proclaim to everyone?
• How does the big book of creation get this message across?
• How does Psalm 19:1–6 set the stage for understanding the scope and depth of sin?
• How does Creation and the Fall help set the stage for understanding redemption and restoration?

Application Questions

• What keeps you from listening to the message of God’s glory in creation? What can you do to minimize or eliminate these distractions or hindrances?
• What is your favorite place in creation to see God’s glory? Explain what you see and what you experience in that setting.
• How can you use the four categories of Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Restoration in your evangelistic witness to non-believers? Pray for boldness to do what you propose!

Prayer Focus
Pray for a grace to see and savor the glory of God seen in creation and at the Cross.