Click here to view the entire service
Psalm 19:1-6, The heavens are telling of the glory of God; And their expanse is declaring the work of His hands. [2] Day to day pours forth speech, And night to night reveals knowledge. [3] There is no speech, nor are there words; Their voice is not heard. [4] Their line has gone out through all the earth, And their utterances to the end of the world. In them He has placed a tent for the sun, [5] Which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber; It rejoices as a strong man to run his course. [6] Its rising is from one end of the heavens, And its circuit to the other end of them; And there is nothing hidden from its heat.
C. S. Lewis described Psalm 19 as “the greatest poem in the Psalter and one of the greatest lyrics in the world.” The Psalm is about treasuring God for His magnificent works and word. His creation proclaims His glory (vss. 1-6), and His counsel transforms our souls (vss. 7-9). We can’t see God but He has abundantly revealed Himself, first in general revelation, all that He has created, and then through special revelation, His inspired Word or His counsel preserved for us in 66 books of the Bible. Then in verses 10-14 we are humbled and brought into a personal, God-treasuring relationship with Jesus Christ, our Rock and our Redeemer (vs. 14b).
Before going further I want to commend to you a couple of messages on YouTube by astrophysicist Jason Lisle. I watched them this week. They are so good. In Worlds of Creation Jason takes you on a tour through our solar system, planet by planet. In Astronomy Reveals Creation he focuses on the bigger picture of the universe with all the billions of stars and galaxies and demonstrates how the universe can’t be millions of years. In fact, as the Bible indicates, 6,000 years fits with what we really know for sure about all of creation. John MacArthur’s book, The Battle for the Beginning, is also excellent in comparing evolution with biblical creation.
CREATION OR EVOLUTION?
Let me see if I’ve got this right. “The heavens declare the glory of Time and Chance. All these things we see came into existence over 13 billion years ago at the time of the Big Bang, which got things going, and there it is. No personal Creator or Designer or plan or goal – it just happened.” Not true! However, words similar to what I just said is what the evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould said: “We’re just a cosmic afterthought.” Mr. Gould died in 2002. He knows better now. Isaac Asimov, professor at Boston University, said perhaps in an infinite sea of nothingness through evolutionary changes we are blobs in a period between nothing and nothing. Mr. Asimov died in 1992. He knows better now. And no one man deceived the nations more with his theory of evolution than Charles Darwin. He died in 1882 and knows better now.
Here are four questions to which evolution has no answer.
#1 How do you get something from nothing? As R. C. Sproul said more than once, if there ever was absolutely nothing, there is still nothing. Ex nihilo, nihil fit. Out of nothing, nothing comes.
#2 How do you get life from non-life? Sir Francis Crick, who co-discovered the DNA double helix structure, admitted the “origin of life appears to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions to get it going.” He suggested maybe life spores were sent here from outer space. He died in 2004 and also knows better now that life cannot come from non-life..
#3 How do you get higher forms from lower forms? That requires new DNA information, which doesn’t happen. You can get a mule from a horse and a donkey, but that’s about it. God restricted animals to reproduce only after their original “kind.”
#4 How do you get man from animal? You don’t. We didn’t evolve from the ape or monkey even though sometimes we act like we did. There’s an infinite gap between the smartest animal and the dumbest human, namely, the image of God, which makes human life sacred.
So how did all this vast universe and the tiniest sub-atomic quark get here? When you look up into that clear, starry night, what do you think? When you read about the billions of stars in our Milky Way and at least 100 billion galaxies out there in the far distant light years away, what do you think? When you consider the immensity of the sun, the speed of light, the perfect balance of gravity and velocity of all the created spheres orbiting the sun, what do you think? How did it all get here?
The answer – it is by a personal, infinite, and eternal Creator.
Psalms 33:6,9. By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, And by the breath of His mouth all their host. 9 For He spoke, and it was done; He commanded, and it stood fast.
Jeremiah 10:12, It is He who made the earth by His power, Who established the world by His wisdom; And by His understanding He has stretched out the heavens.
Genesis 1 simply says, “And God said…” And He created it all in six days. You may wonder why it took Him that long, and the answer is He did it for us. He knew we needed a pattern for work and rest. There is nothing in Genesis 1-2 or anywhere else in the Bible to suggest that there were long, extended periods of time in the origin of the universe. As John Whitcomb said, “All efforts to modify Genesis 1-2 to fit in with an evolutionary time schedule attacks the integrity and glory of God our Creator.” God couldn’t be clearer in Scripture.
Exodus 20:11, For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day and made it holy.
And you’ll notice in Genesis 1 that God created the sun, moon, and stars on day four instead of day one, as if to say to the ancients and moderns, “Don’t worship them as gods.” Yet, that’s exactly what men have done. You may say, “What about that light God created on day one?” Yes, God created light on day one (Genesis 1:3-5). He created a source of light that shone out over His coming creation so there was a literal 24-hour period known as one day. But on day four He placed that light into celestial burners and reflectors. The sun is an enormous ball of gaseous fire 93 million miles away, and we’re glad it is. It’s positioned just right to give us the perfect amount of light and heat. Someone figured out if the sun suddenly went out, life as we know it would end in eight minutes. Our Creator God makes no mistakes.
THE UNIVERSE PROCLAIMS GOD’S GLORY (vs. 1)
In verse one you have the created universe itself constantly preaching the glory of God. “We are here because God created us.” Romans 1:20 says from the creation of the world God’s invisible attributes, His eternal power, and divine nature have been clearly seen. This is the glory the heavens declare.
Psalm 104:24, O LORD, how many are Your works! In wisdom You have made them all; The earth is full of Your possessions.
The glory of God speaks of all His wonderful attributes, beginning with his aseity, which means God is an eternal, self-existent Being. He owes His existence to no one or nothing. He is self-existent and absolutely independent of anything else. Paul told the Athenian philosophers God made everything and doesn’t need anything (Acts 17:24-25). Our self-existent God created everything for His own glory!
Along with His self-existence you see His immensity, His incredible power, and His great wisdom. If you look through a telescope or into a microscope, you are looking at the wisdom of God. How do those planets keep orbiting the sun? How do the moons keep orbiting their planets? On earth we only have one moon. Jupiter has 90 moons and they keep discovering more. Saturn has 292 moons. The power of gravity and speed keeps the planets and their moons from flying out into outer space or dropping into the sun. Little Pluto, only discovered in 1930, is way out there 3 billion miles from the sun and is 2/3 the size of our moon. But as small and far away as it is, it is still held in orbit by the gravitational pull of the sun. We’re coming up to 250 years for our nation. That’s about how long it takes Pluto to orbit the sun. The universe proclaims God’s glory. These are all the work of God’s fingers.
Psalm 8:3, When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars, which You have ordained….
GLORY NIGHT AND DAY (vs. 2)
Verse 2 says, “Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night reveals knowledge.” Ever since creation and every day you wake up, God is pouring out or overflowing with knowledge about Himself. Every new day you have a giant fountain of theology, the knowledge of God, to drink from. It’s like we are face-to-face with God Himself – and we actually are. Every night chimes in to magnify God’s knowledge or wisdom. You go outside and look up and there you see that moon with its gravitational pull stirring up earth’s oceans, and you also see other pinpoints of light, either planets or stars or probably galaxies. When you look up and see those gleaming lights, you can be sure God is home. He leaves the lights on for us every single night.
GLORY EVERYWHERE (vss. 3-4a)
Verse 3 says there’s no speech or language around the globe where this daily fountain of knowledge and spectacular glory aren’t understood. The KJV says “where their voice is not heard” and that well may be accurate. Chemist and art collector Albert Barnes said, “The mighty heavens convey great truths to every people, all mankind. They utter a clear message all can understand.” Spurgeon put it like this, “Sun, moon, and stars are God’s traveling preachers; they are apostles upon their journey confirming those who regard the Lord, and judges on circuit condemning those who worship idols.”
Verse 4 says their line, their message, their testimony to God’s glory goes out in every language, at all times, to all places on the face of the earth. No matter where you live on planet earth, God’s creation is displaying His glorious being and holds all mankind accountable to seek the God who created it all. This is exactly what Paul wrote to the Romans in chapter one.
Romans 1:20, For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.
HERE COMES THE SUN! (vss. 4b-6)
Psalm 19:4b-6, In them He has placed a tent for the sun, [5] Which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber; It rejoices as a strong man to run his course. [6] Its rising is from one end of the heavens, And its circuit to the other end of them; And there is nothing hidden from its heat.
The tent is probably poetic for the darkness of night. The sun retreats into the darkness at night and then every morning this greatest of God’s physical blessings for us comes out, beams with light, emanates warmth, and feeds the earth with its life-giving virtue. The sun is huge. It would take over one million earths to fill up the sun. It makes up 99.98% of the mass of our solar system. It’s like a young bridegroom, excited, bright, and joyful. It’s like a victorious athlete, a hero marching across the sky, never weary, never dimming, always speeding onward with consistent swiftness, full of light and heat. The sun is 9,900 degrees F on the surface and 27 million degrees at the core. It is burning up, but don’t worry. It has enough juice to last another five billion years. The sun certainly declares God’s glory.
Calvin calls this entire created realm the theater of God’s glory: “Meanwhile let us not be ashamed to take pious delight in the works of God manifest in this most beautiful theater… Be mindful that wherever we cast our eyes, all things they meet are the works of God…. This most beautiful theater.” This is both glorious and condemning. Though this grand creation gives unmistakable testimony to how great and wonderful God is, man in his depravity and spiritual blindness doesn’t see it. Romans 1:18-23 says this universal witness holds every soul without excuse. What do sinners do with all this evidence? We suppress it. That’s exactly what evolution does. Creation reveals a personal God, and man in sin doesn’t like the idea of a personal God to whom he is responsible. We’d much rather have everything to be god (pantheism), or many gods (polytheism), or just have no god at all (atheism), or convince ourselves everything evolved by random time and chance. Any idea of a biblical beginning is scary to people. British astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington said, “The notion of a beginning is repugnant to me.” But what sinful man declares repugnant is refuted by God to be true. Genesis 1:1 says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
MEDITATE ON THE GREAT WORKS OF GOD’S CREATION
Jonathan Edwards enjoyed meditating on God’s creation. He says he would sit at night and view the moon a long time, and in the daytime the clouds and sky. He would “behold the sweet glory of God in these things.” He came to love thunderstorms. He wrote, “I’d fix myself to view the clouds, and see the lightnings play, and hear the majestic and awful voice of God’s thunder, which often times was exceedingly entertaining, leading me to sweet contemplations of my great and glorious God.”
When you go out on a clear night and look up into that starry sky, what does it teach you? What attributes of God do you learn there? Do you see His eternality and self-existence? Why is there something rather than nothing? Do you see God’s incredible wisdom and goodness and kindness? He clearly created the vast universe and all the stars and planets with the plan to place man on this earth.
Isaiah 45:18, For this is what the Lord says, He who created the heavens (He is the God who formed the earth and made it, He established it and did not create it as a waste place, but formed it to be inhabited): “I am the Lord, and there is no one else.
God placed earth at just the right distance from the sun with the proper percent of oxygen, with the right gravitational pull, at the right axis so the heat and cold would be distributed, with an atmosphere to protect us from incoming meteors. We should treasure God for this theater of His glory on which we live.
SO WHAT?
What does Jesus our Savior have to do with all this? Everything! He is the One who created it all!
John1:2, “All things were made by Him.”
Colossians 1:16, “By Him all things were created.”
Hebrews 1:2, “Through Jesus God made the worlds.”
In 1969 Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon. He said, “That’s one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind.” But astronaut Jim Irwin, the Christian and young earth creationist, said something greater: “The amazing thing is not that man walked on the moon, but that God walked on the earth.”
The glory of creation should send all of us to the One who created it. And that Creator is the same One who later came to earth as the Savior who took sin’s punishment on the cross for those who believe in Him. We should glory in the cross even more than in God’s amazing creation. Creation doesn’t save; Christ on the cross does. Ask Him now to be your Savior.