GOD’S WORD FOR MAY 28

GOD’S WORD FOR MAY 28~ ~ Psalm 104:31 ~ ~ “May the glory of the Lord endure forever, may the Lord rejoice in His works”

Taking excerpts from John Piper’s book, “The Pleasures of God”…..

beginning chapter 3—God’s Pleasure in His Creation.

(He begins with a long description of a vacation cabin and the nature around it where he writes, in part:)

Three or four times a day I stoop down to go under the barbed wire fence between the study and the cottage. The metal post holding the wire where we crawl through is hollow. To our amazement we discovered that a little gray frog lives in the post. There is a little water in the hollow and he goes up or down in the post according to the heat and the light. He will let us walk right up to him as he sits on the edge of the post in the evening. It is clearly his place, because he has been there for several weeks now and nothing we do chases him away. This has made me wonder about all the other tree frogs that at night produce such an incredible whirring and buzzing and scratching in these peaceful woods. I have wondered if all the tree frogs are as possessive of their turf as he is. If so, there are thousands of little knotholes and crooks and branches all staked out and claimed by their own little tree frogs. It just be an amazing world of turf and territorialism up in those trees that completely escapes us humans.

Where we swim, at the north end of the lake, the fish eat freckles and moles and chigger bites and other assorted blemishes on my back and legs, so I have to keep moving in the water or go out in the deep part.

The water is always moving peacefully. Early in the morning it catches the sun with ten thousand flashes and makes a constant display of crystal pieces moving on the surface. The leaves between me and the lake turn green-yellow-black-and-back-to-greenish-yellow as the breeze conspires with the reflections of the lake and the shadows to make the whole hillside burst with golden light and life.

The point of all this happy rambling is to say that real life is physical. It has to do with touch and smell and sight and sound and taste. It has to do with trees and stumps and fish and frogs and ants and birds and leaves and water and heat and slaw and iced tea and numb thighs and salty sweat and worms and daddy longlegs and ten thousand other creatures and sensations that come to us because God made a physical world.

I sat down to watch the moon. It’s been making a lower and lower arc over the southeastern hemisphere these last nights. This night it was just above the power lines, and was almost full. The gray-orange face was pocked with beautiful gray blemishes. The constant caressing of the thin clouds could do nothing to cleanse the old man. His defects are too deep and too old.

I sat there and soaked again in the lavish beauty of the sky and the droning crickets and tree frogs, with the soft breeze on my face and the smell of pine; and I marveled that God, who is spirit and cannot be seen or touched, would make an ocean of physical reality that smells and shines and feels and tastes and sounds.

As C.S. Lewis said:

There is no use trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why he uses material things like bread and wine to put a new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not:

He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it…

I know some muddle-headed Christians have talked as if Christianity thought that sex, or the body, or pleasure, were bad in themselves. But they are wrong. Christianity is almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body—which believes that matter is good, that God Himself once took on human body, and that some kind of body is going to be given to us even in Heaven and is going to be an essential part of our happiness, our beauty and our energy.

Genesis chapter 1 describes, not only the fact of a well-ordered creation by

God, but also God’s response to His creation. Six times God stands back, as it were, and takes stock of His creation. Each time the text says that is was “good”.

And when all was finished and man and woman were created in his own image, it says, “
And God saw everything that He had made and behold, it was VERY GOOD.”

I take that to mean at least that God was delighted with His work. He approved of it. He was glad that He had done it. When He looked at it, it gave Him pleasure. It is as though He said, “Yes, that’s it. That will do just fine. That’s exactly right”

We get the clue early on in the story that the root of His delight in creation has to do with imaging forth His own glory, because only after He created man and woman IN HIS IMAGE did God as the word “very” to the word “good”.

The rock-solid confidence of the whole Bible is that the glory of the Lord will not only endure forever but that it will cover the whole earth like the waters cover the sea.

Numbers 14:21 ~ ~ “But as truly as I live, all the earth shall be filled with the glory of the Lord.”

Habakkuk 2:14 ~ ~ “ For the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.”

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