There is a song that runs through all of creation as all creation worships God. Grab your cup of coffee and let's start your day on the right foot.
All creation worships God...
Today's thought:
Psalm 148:3-4 & 7-10, "Praise him, sun and moon; praise him, all you shining stars. Praise him, you highest heavens and you waters above the skies... Praise the LORD from the earth, you great sea creatures and all ocean depths, lightning and hail, snow and clouds, stormy winds that do his bidding, you mountains and all hills, fruit trees and all cedars, wild animals and all cattle, small creatures and flying birds..."
All creation worships God. We rarely stop to think about that. Ever go for a walk in nature, slip into a deep mysterious woods, cast your line into a bubbling brook, look upon a meadow desert of sequoia cactus, hear the distant roar of a misting waterfall, watch a sea of grass roll and wink in a gentle breeze, be lulled to sleep by the rhythmic lapping of salty waves? There is a sense that comes over us. Many interpret that as a closeness to God. Perhaps what we sense is the worship of creation, worshipping its Creator for creating it. There is a sound to creation as it operates as it was created to. It is called bioacoustics.
Research in the field of bioacoustics has revealed that every day we are surrounded by millions of ultrasonic songs. Did you know, for instance, that the electron shell of the carbon atom produces the same harmonic scale as the Gregorian chant? Or that whale songs can travel thousands of miles underwater? Or that meadowlarks have a range of three hundred notes? Supersensitive sound instruments have discovered that even earthworms make faint staccato sounds! Arnold Summerfield, the German physicist and pianist, observed that a single hydrogen atom, which emits one hundred frequencies, is more musical than a grand piano, which only emits eighty-eight frequencies.
Science writer Lewis Thomas summed it up it this way: "If we had better hearing, and could discern the [singing] of sea birds, the rhythmic [drumming] of schools of mollusks, or even the distant harmonics of [flies] hanging over meadows in the sun, the combined sound might lift us off our feet." [Adapted from Mark Batterson, All In (Zondervan, 2013), pp. 118-119]
All creation worships it's Creator. When we lift our praise to God we join a larger song of worship. We are the only aspect of that song that is voluntarily offered. God is seeking those who will join the song. Jesus said, "Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks" (John 4:23).
What creation does best for us is to point our attention to the Creator. Then we can worship Him. Makoto Fujimura, Christian artist and thinker, said, "Perhaps the greatest thing we can do as a Christian community is to behold. Behold our God. Behold his creation. The church has exiled beauty from its conversations, and I think that we need to rediscover the beautiful in order to recover ourselves—our humanity. Jesus seemed to indicate that beauty is a door into the Gospel."
Prayer: Mighty Creator, when we consider the works of Your hands, we bow in awe before You. Your power, majesty, imagination, knowledge and love etched into Your creation calls us to praise Your name and join the song of what You have made. We praise You! For You alone deserve glory, honor and praise, forever! In Jesus name, amen.
How significant you are!
Today's thought:
Psalm 8:3-4, "When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?"
I was backpacking in the back woods of Colorado. It was late but I still had some miles to go. The trail was clear and I had my new headlamp to try out. It was mostly pitch black in the dense woods. At one point the trail ran up a ridge and then out of the tree line. Coming out of the trees onto that high spur of the mountain I suddenly froze. Above me was a picture of the universe that I had seen in books and on a screen but never knew existed in reality. A billion points of light, milky galaxies and shooting stars streaking by, glowing and radiating in a sea of inky night. Alone on the ridge of that mountain I felt smaller than ever before. In that vast space this earth is just a speck of dust, and me, a particle on that spec.
My first response was the only reasonable one, that of insignificance. Nothing makes a human realize his or her insignificance than the cosmos. Ancient man, without as much light pollution, probably felt insignificant on a regular basis. It is the fog of our polluted lives that makes us think of it not as often. I laid on a boulder and gazed up for a long moment. 'What are the odds,' I thought, 'in all this vastness that my one solitary life has just come about?'
In fact probability mathematicians have answered that. The chance that the simplest life form could have come about from chance processes is greater than 1 in 10 to the 40,000th power (10 to the 40,000th is a 10 with 40,000 zeros after it!). If the earth is 30 billion years old, which most evolutionists hold to, in that 30 billion years there are 10 to the 18th power of seconds. So, even if nature could somehow have produced trillions of genetic code combinations every second for 30 billion years, the probabilities against producing the simplest one-celled animal by trial and error would still be inconceivably small.
No, the universe tells of the wonders of God, shows His fingerprints, not that of chance. Beyond the impossible probability of existence there lies the fact of life in the middle of a universe of cold harsh realities that are in every possible way opposed to that life. The forces and laws that must be in place to allow life, perhaps 20 to 50 of them, including things like gravity and the speed of light, have only a fractionally small margin that will allow life as we know it. Every single one of them is fine tuned to the infinitesimally small decimal that would allow life. This fine tuned existence of ours baffles the mind and points to an intelligence beyond the cosmos who dialed each level to its very fine parameters.
I lay there on the boulder with the universe unfurled before me like the flag of God and my conclusions took me from insignificance to a realization of uniqueness, and then to the ultimate conclusion of my God given significance. This is where the Psalmist leads us. One, the vastness of the universe shows our insignificance. Two, the improbability of any life in that universe points to a Creator. Three, we then recieve significance, not because we have it of ourselves, but because God gives it to us through the vastness and complexity of a universe that exists just so we may exist.
As I lay watching the heavens I was enveloped by the incredible implications of these facts. The obvious conclusion, that all this exists, this impossibly vast cosmos, just so we may exist leaves us with this realization: we are incalculably significant. How incredibly important you must be to God! All this just so you could live. Perhaps your life is not as mundane as you once thought.
The conclusion of what the Psalmist writes I see as this: God must love us more than we can fathom, or imagine—a logic defying love—to have put all this effort, creativity, power and intelligence in creating this existence just so you and I could live in it. God must really be fond of us.
Several years ago, Edward Farrell of Detroit took his two-week vacation to Ireland to celebrate his favorite uncle's 80th birthday. On the morning of the great day, Ed and his uncle got up before dawn, dressed in silence, and went for a walk along the shores of Lake Killarney. Just as the sun rose, his uncle turned and stared straight at the rising orb. Ed stood beside him for 20 minutes with not a single word exchanged. Then the elderly uncle began to skip along the shoreline, a radiant smile on his face.
After catching up with him, Ed commented, "Uncle Seamus, you look very happy. Do you want to tell my why?"
"Yes, lad," the old man said, tears washing down his face. "You see, the Father is fond of me. Ah, me Father is so very fond of me." [Brennan Manning, The Wisdom of Tenderness (Harper San Francisco, 2002), pp. 25-26]
God is fond of you. He loves you more than you could comprehend. If you ever doubt that look to the heavens. All that exists so you could exist. See it and know that the One who made it must love you far beyond the very stars. How extravagant is the love of God for you!
Prayer: Creator of the universe, we stand in awe of the implications that we exist and the extravagance You lavished upon us by making it all so we could exist. We hand You our insignificant lives and You hand us back meaning, purpose, significance and destiny. We do not ignore the fact that since You made it all, You own it all, and that includes us. May we give You the honor You deserve since You have crowned us with honor we did not deserve. In Jesus name, amen.