The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): The 104th Psalm extols the wonders of God's creation, and we know that all creation rejoices in its Creator. But have you ever considered the pride God takes in the things that he has made?

Guest (Male): Welcome to The Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically.

May the Lord rejoice in all his works. It's been said that God's chief design in nature is to display his glory, but he is more than just the Creator. Let's join Dr. Boyce as we study Psalm 104 and discover both the provision and the care that God provides for all the wonders of his world.

Dr. James Boice: We're studying Psalm 104 today. It's a great praise psalm, one of the greatest in the Psalter. It has 35 verses and they fall into two unequal parts.

The first 30 verses follow the order of creation in Genesis 1 and rather general terms and show the rejoicing of creation in God. And then the last five verses, beginning with verse 31, surprisingly, to us at least, reveal God rejoicing in his creation and what that should mean for us.

I suppose most of us don't think very often about God rejoicing in his creation. It's somewhat of a new thought, at least it was for John Piper, a Baptist pastor out in Minneapolis, who wrote a book called *The Pleasures of God*.

Before he wrote that book, he had written another one called *Desiring God* in which he argued that God is most glorified by us when we enjoy him. The text for that book was really the answer to the question in the Westminster Catechism which asks, "What is the chief end of man?" And the answer is, "Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever."

So what Piper argued in that first book is that God is most satisfying to us when we know what it is about God that most satisfies God. Now, as a result of that kind of study, he produced this second book called *The Pleasures of God*. He wanted to see what it is that really delights God. Because if we know what delights God, then we will delight in that as well and we'll learn something about him. And one of the things he talks about is creation.

Piper was greatly helped by an essay or dissertation on the same subject by Jonathan Edwards. Those who are students of Edwards' works would be familiar with it perhaps. It's called *A Dissertation Concerning the End for Which God Created the World*.

And at one point, Edwards makes a great deal of a verse that we find in our psalm. It's the verse which says, "May the glory of the Lord endure forever and may the Lord rejoice in all his works."

Now Psalms 103 and 104 go together. A number of people have pointed that out. John Stott is one. He argues that they're a perfect pair and that they contain the right kind of balance, the kind of balance that we find always throughout the Bible. Both begin and end the same way. They begin with the words, "Praise the Lord, oh my soul," and then they end, "Praise the Lord, oh my soul." That sort of links them together.

He says that Psalm 103 talks about the goodness of God in salvation. Psalm 104, the greatness of God in creation. Psalm 103 depicts God as the Father with his children. Psalm 104 as the Creator with his creatures. Psalm 103 lists his benefits. Psalm 104 lists his works. One writer called Psalm 104 the most perfect hymn the world has ever produced, which is perhaps an exaggeration or a prejudice, but it's not an unreasonable one, because it's certainly a very great psalm.

Now, I mentioned a moment ago that the first unequal half of this, the first 30 verses, follow more or less the order of creation that we find in Genesis 1. I think this is an incidental matter to the actual interpretation of the psalm, that is understanding what it's about, but it's not utterly insignificant, and let me just show how it works.

In Genesis, on day one, God creates light, and that's what you find in Psalm 104, verse two, the first part. On the second day of creation, the firmament is used to divide the waters above from the waters beneath. That's what you have in Psalm 104, verses 2B to 4. On the third day of creation, the land and the water are separated. That's mentioned in Psalm 104, verses 5 through 9, and perhaps a little later on, the order isn't exact, verses 10 to 13. And then also on that same day, the creation of the vegetation and the trees. You find that in Psalm 104, verses 14 to 15.

On the fourth day, the moon and the stars and the sun are created. And that's mentioned in Psalm 104, verses 19 to 23. On day five, the creatures of the sea and air are made by God. Psalm 104, verses 25 and 26 talk about that. And then finally, day six, animals and man are created. That's in Psalm 104, verses 21 to 24, and food is appointed for all the creatures, and you find that in verses 27 through 30.

Now, it's not exact, as I said, and for that reason, I don't find that to be the most helpful way of studying the psalm, but it's close enough to show us that the psalmist at least had that first chapter in Genesis in mind as he wrote this great hymn about creation. And why wouldn't he? Anyone who had the Bible and is thinking about creation would think most naturally about the first chapter of Genesis.

Now, there are great differences. We're going to see some of those differences as we go along, but what we should understand at this point is that the psalm, Psalm 104, is more or less a poetic, theological reflection on the actual points of creation that we find there at the very beginning of the Bible.

Now, let's look at the first stanza, verses 1 through 4 in the New International Version. It parallels the account of creation on the first two days, as I've just indicated a moment ago: the creation of light on day one, and the separation of the heavens above and the matter beneath on day two. Now, there's a difference here. When you look at the first chapter of Genesis, the emphasis is upon the power of God expressed in his word. God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. All of the emphasis is upon that.

When we read the psalm, what we discover is that the emphasis is upon creation disclosing or revealing the splendor and the majesty of God. Now, it's a great poetic passage. It's beautiful to read it. "Oh Lord my God, you are very great. You are clothed with splendor and majesty. He wraps himself in light as with a garment. He stretches out the heavens like a tent and lays the beams of his upper chambers on their waters. He makes the clouds his chariot and rides on the wings of the wind. He makes winds his messenger, flames of fire his servants." That's beautiful poetry.

John Stott in his little study, *The Favorite Psalms*, points out that we're not to take it literally. But that's hardly necessary, I think. It's obvious that we're not to take it literally. These are images. But what they're saying is that God has revealed something of his glory in nature. So, so nature becomes an image of that which is actually invisible. That's a very important point because it sets apart biblical religion from the kind of religion that was common in the ancient world. It was chiefly pantheism.

Pantheism is a philosophy that sees God in nature. It identifies God with what is seen. And sometimes it becomes polytheistic pantheism. In fact, it usually is that. So you look at a tree and the tree is a god, or there's the spirit of a god in the tree. And, and you look at the storm and there's a god in the storm, and so on. This is not like that.

That sort of worship of nature becomes debased because what has happened characteristically in nature religions that are pantheistic is that the item of nature that is worshipped is the fecundity of nature, and so they become sexual religions where what is really worshipped is procreation.

Now, the biblical religion is something quite apart. It sees nature as important and glorious, but it's glorious because it points to the God who stands behind it and who has created it. You understand that? That's quite a difference. C.S. Lewis has spelled that out beautifully in his reflection on the Psalms, where he says that when the ancient Jews separated God and nature, they allowed nature to become a vehicle of God's self-revelation.

Here's the way he puts it. "It is surely just because the natural objects are no longer taken to be themselves divine that they can now be magnificent symbols of divinity." "By emptying nature of divinity, or let us say," says Lewis, "of divinities," because it was polytheistic, "you may fill her with Deity, for she's now the bearer of messages."

Now, interestingly enough, that's the same thing that Jonathan Edwards does in that essay I mentioned earlier. He says that God's chief design in creation is to manifest his glory. The glory of God consists in the attributes of God. So when we glorify God, or we praise him, and we manifest his glory, we recognize the manifestation of his glory, what we really are doing are recognizing his attributes.

So says Jonathan Edwards, that's what we see in nature. We see various attributes of God displayed, and we glorify him when we recognize them. Now, that's exactly what you have in the psalm. The first verses display God's greatness in the creation of the heavens and the earth. Verse 24 speaks of his wisdom in creating all things. "How many are your works, oh Lord! In wisdom you made them all." Verses 27 to 30 emphasize God's perfect provision for his creatures. So what we're thinking about there is God's goodness.

And then verse 31, which really is the key to the psalm, in my understanding, it speaks of God's happiness. "May the glory of the Lord endure forever, may the Lord rejoice in all his works." Now that verse is not a prayer for something that might not happen. It's rather an anticipation of something that is sure to happen. You understand those two phrases go together in verse 31. The glory of the Lord is certainly going to endure forever. Although the psalmist is saying, "May the glory of the Lord endure forever," but he means it certainly is. So, in the same way, when he says, "May the Lord rejoice in all his works," what he's really saying is that God is going to rejoice in all his work. He does and he will forever.

Well, no wonder this psalm is such a happy psalm. And no wonder it's given us such happy hymns, as the ones that we've been singing. "God, All Nature Sings Thy Glory" is one. It's based on Beethoven's Hymn, "Ode to Joy." It's written by David Crowney. It's a new hymn, a recent one. And then the two that we sang earlier, "Oh Worship the King" by Robert Grant and "My Soul, Bless the Lord," which is from the Psalter of 1912.

Now let's move on. The next three stanzas of this psalm, verses 5 through 23, cover days three and four of creation. Day three, the separation of the land and the water, which is what you find in verses 9 and 10 of Genesis 1, and the creation of trees and vegetation, verses 11 to 13 in Genesis 1. And then day four, the creation of the moon and the sun as timekeepers, verses 14 to 19.

But now, just as in stanza one, the emphasis isn't upon creation itself or the act of creation, as it is in the first chapter of Genesis, but rather, it's on creation as it displays God's glory. And let's just look through these quickly. First of all, you've got the separation of land and water. That's stanza 5 to 9. What makes this stanza interesting is the overtones of danger which are associated with water. This was true in the Hebrew mind. You have to remember that the Jews were not seafaring people. To them, the ocean was a threat, it was dangerous, it stirred itself up into storms from time to time, people drowned in the ocean. And besides that, sometimes storms would cover the land, and floods would sweep down from the hills, houses would be washed away, crops would be destroyed, and all of that.

You see, it's important then to them that the Lord has set the earth on its foundations, verse 5, and that at his rebuke the waters fled, verse 7. That last verse is probably a reference to the flood of Noah's day, and it certainly comes in in verse 9, where God promises that never again will the waters cover the earth.

Well, what we begin to see in this stanza is something that grows as we go throughout the psalm, and that is the continuing care of God for his creation, or his provision for it. Now look, it comes out very clearly in the next stanza, 10 to 18. John Stott, whom I mentioned a moment ago, points out correctly that at this point, the verbs in the psalm, which for the most part have been in the past tense up to now, "He has done it, he accomplished this" and so on, now become present tense verbs.

And that's significant because what that is saying is that God is not merely a God who at one point in the past created the world and the universe and then let it go on its own without any further involvement from him, but rather he's the one that continually operates in the universe, sustaining it and providing for his creatures. In other words, what I'm saying there is that at this point, the biblical view is quite different from Deism.

We already saw in the earlier stanza that it's quite different from Pantheism. God is not identified with the creation. It's what he made. He stands apart from it, it manifests his glory. Here he's separated from Deism. Now, Deism is that philosophy that grew up in the Western world between the demise of Theism and full-blown secularism or materialism.

In Theism, God was a God who controlled everything. He was active in everything. He was a God who had created us and to whom we must give an accounting. As real religion began to fade from people's minds in the 1700s, people began to see the world as something that operated on its own, that didn't need God or involve God in any way. But they still wanted to retain the idea of God. So they talked about a God who is somewhat like a great clockmaker. That was the image that was often used. This God who with great wisdom created the infinite and amazing universe in which we live, in great detail, who then wound it up and set it upon a shelf and has never looked at it since.

That was the view of the Deist. Of course, Deism doesn't last very long because if you get rid of God's intervention in the world along the way, and you only have a God that set it up at the beginning, why do you need a God even then? And so Deism slid very quickly into materialism or secularism. But but what we have here is something that sets the Christian view apart from Deism. In other words, it takes it right back to classical Theism. God is not a God who is unconcerned. God is involved, and this is what is spelled out here at great length.

Look, as far as the animals are concerned, God provides water, without which they can't live, verses 10 to 13. He provides homes for them in the trees and the mountains, verses 12, 17, and 18. As far as domestic animals are concerned, like cattle, he provides grass for food. And as far as human beings are concerned, well, he's lavish. Verse 15 says, "He gives wine that gladdens the heart of man, oil to make his face shine, and bread that sustains his heart." Those were the three life staples of people that were living in the ancient world, and it's saying that God is the one who provides it all.

Let's look at it another way, using a word that's very common today. What the psalmist is really describing here is what we call ecology. Ecology is God's marvelous adaptation of the earth's resources to the needs of his living creatures and vice versa. We, we call this marvelous adaptation today something that's just happened by blind chance or nature. But at this point, the biblical view stands apart even from our materialism, our mechanistic kind of universe. It says, "No, no." No, all of this that works so well out there is something that has been planned by God and is sustained by God. The only thing that messes it up, of course, is sinful man.

Well, verses 19 to 23 describe the beneficial regulation of time. This corresponds to the fourth day of creation in Genesis 1, where God creates the sun and the moon. And Psalm 104, this is seen as it benefits creation. That night is established as the time for the animals to seek their food, and the day is established as the time for man to go out to his work to labor until evening. So you begin to get how the psalm is flowing along.

Now, like the middle section of the psalm, which we've just looked at, the next two stanzas, that is stanzas 5 and 6, speak of the dependence of creation on God, and of God's provision for his creatures every need. But they also do something else. What begins to emerge here is the special note of the joy of creation in God. And it's a beautiful section. As I said, this whole psalm is beautiful. It's beautiful poetry, but listen to how this reads. "The earth is full of your creatures. There is the sea, vast and spacious, teeming with creatures beyond number, living things both large and small. These all look to you to give them their food at their proper time. When you give it to them, they gather it up. When you open your hand, they are satisfied with good things."

One of the great commentators on the psalm, an old Lutheran commentator whose name was Leopold, said, "This is a picture that is drawn on so vast a scale that one scarcely knows whether one should be more amazed at the prolific imagination of the writer or at the abounding gifts of God."

Now, what I just read gave you the positive side of God's provision. That is, God has given food and provision to his creatures that they might not perish. You have a change here because what the psalmist says next, negatively, is that on the other hand, if God withholds these things—the example he chiefly gives is their breath—even for a moment, then they die and return to dust. That's verse 29.

What's interesting here is that that word breath and the word translated spirit in the very next verse, verse 30, are the same thing. And the reason for that is that in Hebrew, as well as in the other ancient languages, the word that is translated spirit is the same word that's translated breath. So the spirit of God is something like the breath of God. When you realize that and realize that God provides that, you are tapped into a whole range, a great scope of Bible teaching.

Because on the one hand, this takes us back to the creation in Genesis, where we read that God breathed into man's nostrils the breath of life so he became a living soul. So God breathed some of his spirit into man, and as a result of that, man became a living being. It also stretches us forward into the New Testament where you'll recall Jesus was talking to Nicodemus about the new birth and he said to Nicodemus, "Unless a man is born of water and the spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God."

So on the one hand, you're talking about physical life, on the other hand, you're talking about spiritual life, but in both cases, it's the word spirit or breath that's being used, and it's a way of saying, all we need comes from God. And if God takes it away for a second, we perish. God removes our breath, we die. Without his spirit, we die eternally. We are utterly, constantly, fully, totally dependent on Almighty God. And those who are wise will praise him for it.

Well, we come to the very end of the psalm now, and it's the section that I referred to earlier as the surprising part. It's not so surprising for us to say that creation rejoices in God. It is surprising that we don't do it better. Man is the problem in this area. But we are somewhat surprised when we come to the end and we find that God is actually rejoicing in his creation.

Now, in that work by John Piper that I referred to earlier, he calls attention to some interesting verses in the 38th chapter of Job. God is interrogating Job in this passage, and he asks Job where he was when God created the universe, and, here I quote, "All the sons of God," that is the angels, "shouted for joy."

Now Piper argues that since the angels are spirit beings, and since they existed before the material creation, not one of the angels had ever seen anything material before that point. All of the things that we associate with the creation, form, weight, motion, texture, action, all of that was not only unseen, but unimagined by the angelic host.

And then at some point, it's almost as if God said to the angels, "Now, give me your attention for a minute. I want you to see something. Watch this!" Bam! And he created the universe. I, I don't know anything to compare that to, except a burst of a firecracker on the Fourth of July, except that this was the big bang of creation. And in the creation of a firecracker, all those bright little lights very soon fade away and twinkle out and it's gone.

What happened when God created the universe is that all of that went on unfolding and unfolding and getting bigger and better and grander day after day after day. No wonder the angels rejoiced in that. They, they must have been literally jumping up and down with joy. They, they, they'd never seen a star, they'd never seen a quasar, they'd never seen a universe, they'd never seen a galaxy. Suddenly all of that is unfolding before them and they must have said, "Oh, that's wonderful! Oh, look at that!"

And, and it's true that Job doesn't say that God rejoiced, but I think God must have been rejoicing too. He must have said, "Yeah, that's pretty good, isn't it?" That's what it says in Genesis 1, doesn't it? He created and he said, "That's all right. That's good." And the angels said, "Boy, it sure is."

Well, there's something else about the angels because if we ask, "What did the angels do?" The answer is that they thrilled with what they saw, but notice, the angels didn't fall down and worship creation. But what they did was turn back to God alone and give him the glory. And that's how the psalmist himself ends.

You see, you get to the very end of this psalm, and what the psalmist says is that he's going to sing to the Lord all his life and he's going to praise him as long as he lives. As far as he's concerned, it will take an entire lifetime of praise to give God glory, and even that won't be enough.

There's only one jarring note, and that's the writer's wish, you find it at the very end, that "sinners may vanish from the earth and the wicked be no more." Some moderns read that and they say, "That doesn't fit. This has been a happy psalm, the psalmist is rejoicing, suddenly here's this verse that talks about the judgment of the wicked. It doesn't belong there." Modern scholars want to weed it out somehow.

But you know, that wasn't incongruous to the biblical writers. They looked at the creation and they said it's all harmonious, except except for sinful man. And so they said, "Real glory is going to come to God in one of two ways. Either when sinners repent and come to praise God," what the psalmist is encouraging us to do, "or where sinners are judged for their sin."

You know, it ends with the word Hallelujah. It reminds us that in the New Testament that occurs in that great chapter in Revelation where Mystery Babylon that represents all the sinful, rebellious kingdoms of this world is judged. And the people that are singing the Hallelujah are the saints.

Sinners will perish. Salvation is now. To God be the glory.

Let's pray. Our Father, we're thankful for this psalm, for the way it stretches our minds to think in a more biblical way. We don't think biblically naturally. We have to be taught. And because we don't think in a biblical way, we don't act biblically either. And our Father, here's another part of your revelation to direct our thoughts rightly. We might see you as the great God who has created and who provides for all things, who rejoices in that which is your own, and who has given us the privilege of rejoicing too, as we find that you're not only our Creator but our Savior too. So Father, bring people to yourself through Christ. We pray in his name. Amen.

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