The Heavens Declare the Glory of God

Psalm 19 starts out with those famous words ... "the heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork."

Reading on we see... " Day unto to day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard."

No matter where you are, at some point, you can see the sky, or the things of earth in some way, shape or form. This Psalm points out that the heavens declare the glory of God. Later in verse 4 says: "Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world..." Everyone is witnessed to by what God has created.

I always think of this Psalm when looking out at a clear sky at night. It is no secret that I love winter, mostly for the cooler temperatures. But also for the clear skies, unmottled by the hazy air of summer. The pure vastness of looking at stars light years from us, and feeling oh so very small always gives me pause.

Of course, if you read further in the Psalm it goes from talking about the heavens declaring the glory of God to the well known verses about the Word of God... "the law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple..." (verse 7).

It is no accident that God put those many verses about His Word right after the whole "heavens declare the glory of God" portion. What does one have to do with another?

When you look up into the night sky, it should elicit an attitude of awe, and wonder, and a sense of who we really are, or aren't. The stars weren't thrown together in accidentally randomness by some "big bang" billions of years ago. Everything in heaven, and on earth, was made by intelligent design, by one Creator.

This week I have read a couple devotionals that have struck a chord along this vein with me.

From the Days of Praise, please read and be blessed.

Signs and Seasons, Days and Years:

"And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years." (Genesis 1:14)

The subject of "time" is enigmatic. Everyone seems to know what is meant by time, but no one cane define it. We may complain about time going too slow, or too fast, but time doesn't go anywhere. But neither does it "stand still".

At least we can measure time intervals - seconds, hours, centuries, etc. This is because of God's gracious forethought in providing means for doing this. He was not a "blind watchmaker," as some evolutionists have called Him. He actually created time "in the beginning" (Genesis 1:1).

Then He set the sun and the moon in the sky, and made the earth to assume a global shape and to rotate on an axis, making the measurement of time in "days" possible. Next He placed stars in the far heavens in various locations and combinations and the earth to orbit around the sun, enabling us to tell how many "days" make up a "year". Then, once the earth's rotational axis was "tilted", that made "seasons" measurable. So we can can at least identify time durations in days and years with their seasons, and we can subdivide or combine these in whatever ways we find convenient (minutes, decades, summer, winter, etc.).

But what about the "signs"? Although this is a controversial question, certain ancient Jewish scholars believed that God named the starts and their groupings (Isaiah 40:26, Job 38: 31-32; etc.) and then revealed their prophetic meanings to patriarch Seth and Enoch in order to record His great plan and purpose in creation permanently in the heavens. If so, it is no longer needed, since the written Word of God, "for ever... settled in heaven" (Psalm 119: 89), has now been transmitted "unto the fathers by the prophets" (Hebrews 1:1) and "shall not pass away" (Matthew 24: 35).

The Witness of Creation:

"Seek him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the morning, and maketh the day dark with night: that calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth: The Lord is his name." (Amos 5:8)

This striking exhortation is inserted in the midst of a prophetic rebuke by God of His people Israel. They were rapidly drifting into pagan idolatry, and Amos was trying to call them back.

His exhortation, given almost 3,800 years ago, is more needed today than it ever was before. Modern pagan scientists have developed elaborate but absurdly impossible theories about the chance origin of the universe from nothing, and the evolution of stars, planets, and people from primordial hydrogen. But the mighty cosmos and its galaxies of start- even the very constellations, such as Orion and Pleiades (the "seven stars"), as well as the solar system -- were made. All of these had to be made by an omniscient, omnipotent Creator, who had a glorious purpose for it all.

Similarly, the global evidences that waters once covered all the earth's mountains (i.e. marine fossils and water-laid sediments at their summits) cannot possibly be explained - as evolutionary geologists try to do - by slow processes acting over aeon's of time. God the Creator had to call massive volumes of water forth from their original reservoirs and pour them out on the earth in His Flood judgment on a rebellious world.

All of these witness to the fact of creation and judgment, not to impotent "gods" personifying natural forces. Men urgently need to seek the true God of creation and salvation before judgment falls again, for "it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God" (Hebrews 10:31).

(All the good stuff is credited to Henry M. Morris, Ph.D, any typos my spell check didn't find are mine.)