Psalm 19 is among what I call the “outstanding chapters” of the Bible. It speaks to our hearts with a vibrant resonance. It also speaks to our minds. It demonstrates the two main ways in which we learn who God is, and what he is like.

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Psalm 19

For the choir director; a psalm of David.

The heavens declare the glory of God,
and the sky displays what his hands have made.

One day tells a story to the next.
One night shares knowledge with the next
        without talking,
        without words,
        without their voices being heard.

 ⌞Yet,⌟ their sound has gone out into the entire world,
their message to the ends of the earth.

He has set up a tent in the heavens for the sun,
        which comes out of its chamber like a bridegroom.
        Like a champion, it is eager to run its course.
        It rises from one end of the heavens.
        It circles around to the other.
        Nothing is hidden from its heat.

The teachings of the LORD are perfect.
They renew the soul.

The testimony of the LORD is dependable.
It makes gullible people wise.

The instructions of the LORD are correct.
They make the heart rejoice.

The command of the LORD is radiant.
It makes the eyes shine.

The fear of the LORD is pure.
It endures forever.

The decisions of the LORD are true.
They are completely fair.

        They are more desirable than gold, even the finest gold.
        They are sweeter than honey, even the drippings from a honeycomb.

         As your servant I am warned by them.
        There is a great reward in following them.

Who can notice every mistake?
Forgive my hidden faults.

Keep me from sinning.
Do not let anyone gain control over me.

        Then I will be blameless,
        and I will be free from any great offense.

May the words from my mouth and the thoughts from my heart
be acceptable to you, 
O LORD, my rock and my defender. (Psalm 19:1-14, God’s Word version)

Psalms #5. Psalm 19:1-14.

Sometimes, in our local churches, when I am unable to complete a sermon, we read a Bible chapter together, and talk about it. When we do that, I try to pick sections of scripture that I think of as “outstanding Bible chapters;” these are sections of scripture whose words and ideas have spoken particularly strongly to Christians throughout the ages. There are a lot of them, of course. I would consider psalm 19 to be among those “outstanding” Bible chapters. There are many reasons for this.

One of the reasons I believe psalm 19 belongs among the Bible “greats” is because it clearly demonstrates something important about how God communicates with us. The first part of the psalm (verses 1-6), shows us that nature speaks to us about God and his glory. Specifically, David writes about the sky, but the basic idea applies to the entire natural world. We considered this briefly in the last message on the psalms, noting that God speaks to us by giving us good gifts (Acts 14:17). This is more specific: God speaks to us through the natural world, which is his own creation. The New Testament also affirms this idea:

¹⁹ What can be known about God is clear to them because he has made it clear to them. ²⁰ From the creation of the world, God’s invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly observed in what he made. As a result, people have no excuse.

(Romans 1:19-20, GW, formatting added for emphasis).

We can clearly observe aspects of God through what he has made; through creation. Often science helps us here. By the way, there is no necessary contradiction between faith and science. I meet people who say, “I’m not a Christian. I believe science.” I usually say, “I am a Christian, and I believe science, too.” In fact my undergraduate degree is a bachelor’s of science, which means I took more hard-science courses than humanities classes. A year ago I spent several months reading books about molecular biology just because it interested me. A few years before that it was astrophysics. I love science; it is a way of learning amazing things about the world. And the more we learn about the world (often through science) the more we learn about our amazing God. Science is not a replacement for God, it’s just a way of learning and discovering things; a very good and useful way.

So, I don’t think Christians need to be unscientific people. For instance, we don’t need to completely oppose the theory of evolution; it could be that God uses evolution to shape his creation. What we must reject however, is the idea that anything in nature (evolution, or any other process) happens without God’s purposeful intention. And, however God brought life into its present form, it is obviously incredibly complex, and wonderful. So many different species of creatures “just happen” to fit perfectly within their environment, and with other species. So many of the processes of life, especially at the level of molecular biochemistry, are intricately and ingeniously formed. We can see in nature that God is mind-blowingly intelligent, and creative, and orderly. The entire natural world shows the glory of God, and you have to be deliberately obtuse to believe it all happened by random chance, with no intelligent design or purpose.

When my youngest daughter was five years old, we were hiking in a national park on a mountainside. The trail passed along some rocks that looked almost like stair-steps. She said: “Daddy, those look almost like someone made them.”

A short way further along we came across some other stair-steps. Pieces of pine logs, stripped of bark, lay neatly across the slope of the trail, and they were backfilled with fine gravel. The steps were orderly in appearance, level, regular-looking, and very convenient. My daughter knew nothing about the national park service, nor had she heard that any humans built or maintained trails. But she said: “Daddy, I know those steps were made by people.”

I looked around the mountainside. There were lots of dead pine trees, still standing, but stripped of bark by a beetle infestation. They could have fallen across the trail to make the stair-fronts. There were many little streams and seeps of water in sight. The water could have eroded the rock into smaller pieces like gravel, and washed it up behind the logs to form those steps across the trail.

But even a five year old child could tell that those simple stair-steps on the trail were built by purposeful intelligence. It was obvious just by looking at them, even to a small child. Most of what we find in nature, even especially at the level of molecular biology is far more complicated and far more orderly than those particular trail steps built by the national park service. It  does not take a genius to deduce that some kind of purposeful intelligence is behind the order and complexity we find in nature.

I want to add one more thing about science and faith. Occasionally I meet someone who says: “I believe in science,” as if it is somehow the same sort of thing as faith in God. But to think that way is to completely misunderstand what science is. It is exactly the same thing as saying, “I believe in my tape measure.” Now, it makes perfect sense to believe that the measurements on your tape measure are valid. You believe the results you get when you measure something. That’s all science is: a way to measure things, a way to learn more about the things we can apprehend with our five senses. But if you believe “in” science, you have made it into a religion. It becomes not just a way to study the things around us, but a way of viewing the world. But science is not, properly speaking, a world view. Many people get confused about this. If we are talking about the value of the world, or the essential nature of human souls, or the meaning of life, what is right and wrong (or if such things even exist), and so on, we have moved beyond what science can actually study. Once science starts talking about anything that cannot be measured or quantified with our five physical senses (or equipment designed to enhance those senses), it ceases to be scientific. If a scientist tries to call anything either morally good or morally wrong, she is no longer doing science. If she tries to make it seem like science can explain the intrinsic meaning or significance of something, that person is no longer acting like a scientist. If a scientist tries to tell you that some thing or another proves that there is no creator, he is speaking about things that science cannot actually prove, or even study.

But there are also many scientists who have faith. David writes specifically about the sky; both the daytime sky, and that of the night. As for the day, I imagine part of what he was thinking about included the beauty of sunrise and sunset. He says the night sky, like the sky during the day, also “speaks.” Hugh Ross is a well respected astronomer. When he was young, he was an atheist, but the more he studied the complexities of the stars and the universe, the more he became convinced that the universe is the work of an intelligent being. One day, he came across this psalm, psalm nineteen, and he thought: “Yes! The sky is speaking to me about the Creator!” He became a Christian. Later he founded an excellent organization called “Reasons to Believe” (RTB). Today they maintain a terrific website that contains a lot of high-level scientific scholarship, along with good Bible scholarship. If you are interested by how modern science and the Christian faith fit together, I strongly encourage you to check them out at http://www.reasons.org

So, David tells us that nature “speaks” to us about God without using words. Theologians picked up on this idea many centuries ago, and sometimes they talk about “the book of nature.” We also call this “general revelation,” because through nature, God reveals himself in a general way to all people, at all times (though we are often not listening).

So, from general revelation (nature) we can easily deduce that there is an intelligent Creator. We can see that the Creator is orderly, creative, vastly intelligent, and endlessly powerful, awe-inspiring, sometimes terrifying, and also, good and beautiful. But we can’t deduce the God of the Bible from nature alone. David knows this, and verse seven, he starts talking about another way that God reveals himself to us: through the law of the Lord. In the translation above, God’s Word [GW] it says “the teachings of the Lord.” In many ways, that is a better way to understand it, but the Hebrew word is actually “law.”

I’ve mentioned this term before. In Hebrew it is “torah,” and it means far more than our English word “law.” Anyone can read the book of nature. But the torah means God’s special revelation, his spoken/written Word, given to specific people at specific times and places. God’s Word tells us things that we could not find out from creation alone. He has to reveal it to us, and he has done so through Moses, through people like David himself, through the prophets, and through the apostles. In other words, whenever we read the term “the law” in the Old Testament, in general it is appropriate to think of it as “the Bible,” which is also God’s Word.

In the GW version above, David uses several other words to describe God’s special revelation: testimony, instructions, commands and decisions. All of this is mainly poetic, but it does reflect an important truth: The words of the Bible come to us through many different types of writing, which we call genres. Sometimes it comes as direct instructions. Sometimes as laws, or in other places as poetry, or prophetic utterances, or teachings, or letters, or narrative history. When we read it, we ought to take into account those genres, as well as the historical and cultural context of the writing.

For instance, right here in this psalm, when David says God sets up a tent in the heavens for the sun, we understand that he is speaking poetically. The Bible is not teaching us that there is an actual physical tent somewhere up in the sky where the sun stays at night. It’s a poetic metaphor. Taking the bible seriously means we need to pay attention to the type of writing that it is, and understand it accordingly.

In verses 12-14, it seems like David is responding to the fact that God reveals himself to human beings. From both nature, and the Word, David realizes that God is awesome and holy, and he, David, is not. He asks God to forgive him, and protect him, and then asks that his words and his thoughts and intentions all be acceptable before God.

So what do we do with all this? I think we can, and should, remember to look at the world around us with appreciation and wonder, and let that wonder direct our thoughts and hearts to God who made it all. Throughout my life, I have heard many people say something like: “When I’m outdoors in the woods, or on the water, that’s my church.” On the one hand, I like that sentiment. It’s not entirely wrong. The beauty and marvel of the natural world should lead us to worship God.

However, there’s part of it that I think is wrong. On its own, praising God for the natural world, and feeling drawn close to him that way is not enough. How do I know this? Because God has also revealed himself through his Word. We can, and should, also learn to look at the Bible with appreciation and wonder, just as we do the natural world. That is part of David’s main point here. We should let the scriptures lead us to joyful worship. David says that every aspect of God’s specially revealed word is wonderful, trustworthy, reliable, good, and correct. God’s Word renews the soul, makes people wise, makes the heart rejoice, makes the eyes shine, is completely right, and endures forever. It is infinitely precious, and there is great reward in following it.

Not only that, but God’s Word itself tells us that we should worship God in fellowship with other believers, singing, praying and encouraging one another together, regularly. For just one example of this principle:

²³ Let us hold tightly without wavering to the hope we affirm, for God can be trusted to keep his promise. ²⁴ Let us think of ways to motivate one another to acts of love and good works. ²⁵ And let us not neglect our meeting together, as some people do, but encourage one another, especially now that the day of his return is drawing near.

(Hebrews 10:23-25, NLT)

So, you should absolutely encounter the Lord through nature. You should certainly praise him for his amazing creation. And, you should, just as much, learn to encounter God in his Word (the Bible) and also, in worship and fellowship with his people. The “book of nature” alone is not enough for us to be rightly related to God. If it was, Jesus would not have needed to come. We could all be redeemed, stop sinning, and receive the power to love one another, just by spending time outdoors.  No, we Christians need to learn from both nature and from the Bible. We need to value both of them highly. Nature alone cannot be our church.

So how is the Lord using this psalm – this part of his revealed word – to speak to you today? Do you need to be reminded to let the natural world speak to you about the beauty and wonder of God? Do you need to remember that science – used correctly – is not an enemy, but rather, a friend, to faith? Perhaps the Lord wants you to learn to appreciate his beauty and wonder by spending more time reading and studying the Bible. Or, maybe you need encouragement to continue to have fellowship and community with other people who have faith.

Let him continue to speak to you right now!