GOD’S WORD FOR JUNE 4

GOD’S WORD FOR JUNE 4 ~ ~ Psalm 8:3 ~ ~ “When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, The moon and the stars, which You have ordained,”

Jeremiah 32:17 ~ ~ “‘Ah, Lord God! Behold, You have made the heavens and the earth by Your great power and outstretched arm. There is nothing too hard for You.”

Finishing excerpts from Chapter 3 of John Piper’s book, “The Pleasures of God”, named, “the Pleasures of God in His Creation”

(The fifth and final reason) God rejoices in the works of creation is because they pint us beyond themselves to GOD HIMSELF.

God means for us to be stunned and awed by His work of creation. But not for its own sake. He means for us to look at His creation and say, “if the mere work of His fingers (JUST HIS FINGERS!–verse of the day above) is so full of wisdom and power and grandeur and majesty and beauty, what must this God be like HIMSELF?!

These are but the backside of His glory, as it were, darkly seen through a glass. What will it be to see the Creator Himself?!

A billion galaxies will not satisfy the human soul. God and God alone is the soul’s end. Jonathon Edwards expressed it like this:

“The enjoyment of God is the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied. To go to heaven, fully to enjoy God, is infinitely better than the most pleasant accommodations here… These are but shadows; but God is the substance. These are but scattered beams, but God is the sun. These are but streams, but God is the ocean.

This is why Psalm 104:31-34 comes to a close like this, with a focus n God Hiself:

May the glory of the Lord endure forever.

May the Lord rejoice in His works,

who looks on the earth and it trembles

who touches the mountains and they smoke!

I will sing to the Lord as long as I live;

I will sing praise to my God while I have being.

May my meditation be pleasing to Him,

for I rejoice in the Lord”

In the end it will not be the seas or mountains or the canyons or even the water spiders of clouds or the great galaxies that fill our heart to breaking with wonder and fill our mouths with eternal praise. It will be God Himself. This is why God has pleasure in His creation. It is the overflow of the satisfaction that God the Father and God the Son have in each other and therefore the revelation and proclamation of God’s glory day and night.

One of the things I would like to happen because of this chapter is that readers would open their eyes even wider to the glory of God in the world around them.

Clyde Kilby had eyes. Oh what eyes he had! He (wrote) eleven resolutions he had made for staying alive to God’s glory. I will only mention one. He said, “I shall sometimes look back at the freshness of the vision I had in childhood and try, at least for a little while, to be, in the words of Lewis Carroll, the ‘child of the pure unclouded brow, and dreaming eyes of wonder. ‘”

One of the tragedies of growing up is that we get used to things. It has its good side, of course, since irritations may cease to be irritations. But there is immense loss when we get used to the redness of the rising sun, and the roundness of the moon, or the whiteness of the snow, the wetness of rain, the blueness of the sky. (when we don’t notice) the buzzing of bumble bees, the stitching of crickets, the invisibility of wind, the unconscious constancy of heart and diaphragm, the weirdness of noses, ears, the number of grains of sand on a thousand beaches, the never-ceasing crash crash crash of countless waves, and ten million kingly-clad flowers flourishing and withering in woods and mountain valleys where no one sees but God.

I invite you, with Clyde Kilby, to seek a “freshness of vision” to look, as though it were the first time, not at the empty product of accumulated millennia of aimless evolutionary accidents —-which no child ever dreamed of—- but at the personal handiwork of an infinitely strong, creative, and exuberant Artist who made the earth and the sea and everything in them.

I invite you to believe—like children believe— “that today, this very day, some stroke is being added to the cosmic canvas that in due course you shall understand with joy as a stroke made by the Architect who calls Himself Alpha and Omega”

(Clyde Kilby’s 10th Resolution)

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