The Bible Study Hour

Dr. James Boice: Mankind has an instinctive need to worship, but often that worship is misdirected. If we don't end up worshiping some force of nature or nature itself, we end up idolizing ourselves.

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

Dr. James Boice: The natural world praises God by its mere existence. But man is to praise God because he has revealed himself to us, not only through nature, but through his word as well. Let's join Dr. Boice as he looks at Psalm 148, a psalm that answers the questions of who should worship and whom we are to worship.

Dr. James Boice: We've been asking a number of important questions about worship as we've made our way through these last psalms in the Psalter. Trying to find answers to such things as what worship is, how we should worship, where we should worship and so on.

Dr. James Boice: We find more answers to questions we may have in Psalm 148, which is the psalm to which we come now. This psalm answers the question, who should worship and where? And the answer is this: everyone, everywhere should praise God from the highest heavens to the lowest spots on earth.

Dr. James Boice: And not just human beings. Fish of the sea, wild animals, cattle, birds, angels, even the inanimate creation should worship God. The sun, the moon, the stars, lightning, hail, snow, clouds, mountains, hills, fruit trees, great cedars, everyone and everything should praise God.

Dr. James Boice: Derek Kidner says, starting with the angelic host and descending through the skies to the various forms and creatures on earth, and then summoning the family of man and finally the chosen people. This call to praise unites the whole creation.

Dr. James Boice: One of the great English preachers of our day, a good expositor that I have referred to, his name is Roy Clements and he has an interesting paragraph at this point where he observes how the psalmist explores just about every area of human knowledge in order to find who it is and what things should be praising God.

Dr. James Boice: He does it like this. First of all, the field of cosmology. Angels, stars and waters above the skies. And when he has satisfied himself that he's satisfied the celestial realm, he turns to the terrestrial, to marine biology, great sea creatures and all ocean depths.

Dr. James Boice: Meteorology, lightning and hail, snow and clouds, stormy winds that do his bidding. Geomorphology and dendrology, mountains and hills, fruit trees and all cedars. Zoology and ornithology, wild animals, cattle, small creatures and flying birds.

Dr. James Boice: And to cap it all, political geography, sociology and anthropology because he turns to the kings of the earth, all nations, princes, rulers, young men and maidens, old men and children.

Dr. James Boice: When he gets to the end of that paragraph, he says there can't really have been many unthumbed articles left in his encyclopedia. Well, the preceding Psalm 147 told us why we should praise God, it's for his care of his people, his care of animals, his delight in the godly, his provision for Jerusalem, his rule over all creation and above all his gift of the written word.

Dr. James Boice: Here he calls on creation to acknowledge this and worship God.

Dr. James Boice: Now this is a great psalm, and it's not surprising that it has been picked up by many poets, especially in the English language and put into common verse. One great example of it is John Milton, who uses it in Paradise Lost, in book five, where Adam and Eve are in the garden before their fall. And they use in one way or another, somewhat loosely, the words of this hymn in order to worship God as part of their morning worship.

Dr. James Boice: They're calling on all the creation over which they have been made vice regions to join them in their praise of the Maker. It may be the last time in all history that all creatures have actually done that.

Dr. James Boice: William Cullen Bryant, who lived in the last century, wrote a poem that expanded on verse 6. Another lesser known poet named Peter Patt wrote a poem similar to Bryan's way back in the 15th century. But probably the poetry that we know best is the hymn that comes from the Bible songs hymnal of 1927.

Dr. James Boice: It's worth going through the words of that psalm because it is a close poetic rendering of what the psalm itself actually says. It goes like this: Hallelujah, Praise Jehovah from the heavens, praise his name. Praise Jehovah in the highest, all his angels praise his name. All his hosts together praise him. Sun and moon and stars on high, praise him. Oh, you heaven of heavens and you floods above the sky.

Dr. James Boice: Let them praises give Jehovah. They were made at his command, them forever. He established his decree shall ever stand. From the earth, oh, praise Jehovah. All you seas, you monsters all, fire and hail and snow and vapor, stormy winds that here is called. All you fruitful trees and cedars, all you hills and mountains high. Creeping things and birds and cattle, birds that in the heavens fly.

Dr. James Boice: Kings of earth and all you people, princes, great earth's judges all, praise his name. Young men and maidens, aged men and children small, let them praises give Jehovah, for his name alone is high and his glory is exalted far above the earth and sky. That's our God. And that's what this psalm is all about.

Dr. James Boice: Now, the psalmist begins by looking upward. And as he looks up, the first two entities he sees that he urges to praise God are, first of all, the angels, and secondly, the heavenly bodies. They're above man in the cosmic order, in exactly the same way they are in Psalm 8.

Dr. James Boice: You'll recall that Psalm 8 talks about God being exalted and looks upward to the moon and the stars and the heavenly beings which are called the Elohim, the gods. Now, as far as the angels are concerned, the problem here is that there has always been a basic tendency in human nature to worship them, either fallen or unfallen, rather than to worship God.

Dr. James Boice: Pagan worship of the gods and goddesses would be one example, but an even better example is a movement that was active in the early days of the church known as Gnosticism. The Gnostics worshipped what they called emanations. That is, beings that somehow made their way out from the great high God.

Dr. James Boice: There was a whole series of them. The idea was this, God himself, being utterly above matter, is unable not only to touch it, he's even unable to create it. But from the Most High God came a God who was a little bit less than that God, and from that God came another God who was a little bit less than that God and so on through a long, long series of emanations until you finally got to a God who had descended low enough that he could actually make the earth.

Dr. James Boice: Now, what these Gnostics said was that all of these beings are gods to some degree. And so what you have to do is know how to worship them, and that's what this Gnostic philosophy was all about. Gnosis, from which the word Gnostic comes, means knowledge, and the knowledge that was taught to the disciples all had to do with the worship of these so-called semi-angelic or demonic beings.

Dr. James Boice: Now, sadly, we've had a somewhat of a revival of Gnosticism in our day. Not exactly in that way, of course, but in such new age movements as est, Scientology, witchcraft, channeling, the occult, astrology, the worship of a female deity under such names as Sophia, the Great Earth Mother and Gaia. And also in the deification of self, which has been popularized most clearly by Shirley MacLaine.

Dr. James Boice: Now many people today buy into this Gnostic New Age outlook, sometimes not even realizing it. They do it whenever they dismiss the Christian God as cruel, whenever they imagine Christ to be simply one of many lesser gods, when they talk about man as fundamentally good, and the path to salvation as a discovery of one's self.

Dr. James Boice: Now, Psalm 148 has nothing to do with this kind of paganism because it looks to the angels not as gods, but as beings who were made by God and who themselves must worship God, as all creation must do. It says, he commanded and they were created. And so the angels, like man, must worship their creator.

Dr. James Boice: Now the second thing he sees as he looks upward is the heavenly bodies. If fallen men and women don't worship the angels, the next thing, sadly, we do is worship the heavenly bodies. The sun, the moon, the stars and the planets. This took place in the ancient world, of course.

Dr. James Boice: And we are told not to do that because the heavenly bodies, like the angels, have been made by God and therefore they're to join in the praise of God. And they do. The heavenly bodies glorify God. That's what Psalm 19 says. The psalm which really should be taken together with Psalm 148 when we're studying either.

Dr. James Boice: Psalm 19 says the heavens declare the glory of God, the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech, night after night they display knowledge. There's no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.

Dr. James Boice: Now as I say, that Psalm, Psalm 19, the first half of it especially, helps us understand Psalm 148 because we're not to suppose that the writer here actually imagines that the sun, the moon and the stars and so forth are alive beings and have voices, so they actually articulate praise to God. That's not what he means. They glorify God by their mere existence.

Dr. James Boice: To see something like the sun, blazing away in its glory, is to point it to a creator. And so on for the other beings as well. But they are models for our worship in two respects. First of all, their worship of God is always visible. Says in Psalm 19, their voice goes out into all the earth. Their words to the ends of the world. So it's not hidden or secret.

Dr. James Boice: And then secondly, their worship of God is constant, it doesn't vary, it doesn't go away. You see it from generation to generation. And that's what Psalm 148, verse 6 means when he says he, that is God, set them in place forever and ever.

Dr. James Boice: So we look upward and we begin to get some instruction as to how we should praise God. Now, having looked upward to the heavens, the psalmist next looks downward to the earth and he calls upon all things terrestrial to join in this great worship chorus. Worship on earth in other words, is to be an echo of the worship of heaven.

Dr. James Boice: Now, here he also turns to two entities. He was looking to the angels and the heavenly bodies when he looked upward, now he looks downward and what he sees here is the animal creation and then finally human beings, which of course is where the psalm is moving.

Dr. James Boice: Now, I've spoken of the animal creation, but strictly speaking, this part of the psalm talks about inanimate creation as well. This is kind of a flow of thought here. The psalmist began up and came down, now when he begins to talk about the earth, he goes down and comes up.

Dr. James Boice: He begins by talking about the sea creatures, those things that are found in the ocean depths. He moves upward to speak about lightning and hail, snow, clouds and stormy winds, then the mountains and the hills, the fruit trees, the cedars, all the wild and domestic animals and finally even the smallest creatures and birds before concluding with human beings.

Dr. James Boice: And his point is that all of this that God has created must worship God as well. Ah, but here's that problem again. The angels worship God, the heavenly bodies praise him by their mere existence, created beings on earth praise God by their existence, but not man. Man doesn't do it.

Dr. James Boice: Man redirects his worship. He doesn't want to acknowledge the God who has made him because he's in rebellion against God, and so what happens is what the Apostle Paul describes in Romans 1. He says, although they claim to be wise, as people in our day do, they actually became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.

Dr. James Boice: The sad thing that in our fallen state when we turn to nature, we make either one of two errors concerning it. Either we regard nature as something that's to be raped for our own benefit, that is, stripping the earth for however it might benefit us short-term. We forget that it's made by God and has a purpose of its own apart from its immediate benefit to us.

Dr. James Boice: Or if we don't do that, we tend to fall down and worship the earth. We express it in different ways. Sometimes we talk about the force as they did in the Star Wars saga. Other times we talk about nature with a capital N, rather than God with a capital G. As if nature itself has the capacity for self-realization.

Dr. James Boice: And so we worship this great hidden force out there somewhere, but it's all a way of avoiding the worship of God. In opposition to what is really paganism, in our day or in the day of the psalmist, the writer of this psalm tells us that we must worship God.

Dr. James Boice: Now we come at last to human beings. It's what he talks about in verses 11 and 12. They're the climax of God's creation. They're made in God's image, that's what we're told in Genesis 1 verses 26 and 27, and therefore being made in God's image, we're able to commune with God, actually to know him, to hear from him and to praise him, doing it with our minds and by words.

Dr. James Boice: Here's an interesting comparison that one of the writers brings out, talking about the worship of the heavenly bodies as compared with the worship of human beings. In verse 5, the celestial bodies are called to praise God simply by the fact of their existence. He commanded and they were created.

Dr. James Boice: But in verse 13, we praise God consciously since he has revealed himself, for his name has been revealed and exalted. In the same way, God's glory in the natural world is the reign of law, the regularity which invites us to search out his works. But among his people, his glory is redemptive love because he raises up a horn for them.

Dr. James Boice: It means a strong deliverer and above all in bringing them near to him. So that's the climax of the Psalm that this God whom all of nature worships comes near to us and makes it possible for us to draw near to him. The sad thing is that in our fallen state, we seek out substitutes for God, and if we don't worship the angels or the heavenly bodies or some force in nature, we end up worshiping ourselves.

Dr. James Boice: Now in the final analysis, that's what we all do apart from the grace of God in Jesus Christ. We put ourselves in God's place. Adam and Eve did it in Eden, Nebuchadnezzar did it as the great king of Babylon, and we do it too, sometimes subtly, but we do it nonetheless. I suppose in our day the worship of man directly is most visible in some of the statements of the New Age movement that I mentioned earlier.

Dr. James Boice: I mentioned Shirley MacLaine, she did a television special some years ago based on her book Out on a Limb. She is shown cavorting on the beach in Malibu, and as she runs down the beach gaily, she's holding her arms in the air and she's saying, I am God.

Dr. James Boice: Here's what she wrote in another place: A great awakening has taken place. Individuals across the world are tapping into their internal power to understand who they are and are using that knowledge to elevate their lives and their circumstances to a higher octave of happiness and productivity. It's actually deifying man and his ability.

Dr. James Boice: Another New Age writer, her name is Carol Christ, wrote, I found God in myself and I loved her fiercely. Well, that's why we have the last stanza of Psalm 148. Throughout the psalm, the writer has been calling on the entire creation to worship God, which the animals, angels, and nature do.

Dr. James Boice: But the psalmist is no fool. He's called on the kings of the earth, and all you nations, you princes, and all rulers of earth, young men and maidens, old men and children, all to worship God. But he knows that kings, princes, and people as a whole don't do that, although they should.

Dr. James Boice: And so in this last few lines of the psalm, he turns to those who have actually experienced God's salvation and he holds them out as ones in whom the heathen may actually see God's saving acts and learn to worship him.

Dr. James Boice: In verse 14, that word horn is a biblical way of talking about strength. So what he's thinking about here is probably the restoration of strength to Israel after their days of exile. In other words, he's saying God is working through Israel, that's where God is to be seen and therefore Israel praises him.

Dr. James Boice: And that's where we need to see ourselves in the picture if we've come to know God through Jesus Christ, because that's the importance of Israel. The fact that God called this people as a nation through whom he would eventually send the Messiah who was the Savior.

Dr. James Boice: If you want to know who God is like, you find him in that descendant of Israel. You find him in Jesus. And it's in the church that God's to be seen and worshiped now because the church knows him and the church proclaims him.

Dr. James Boice: You know, we've been talking about angels and the natural creation and the peoples of this world. It is significant as the Bible talks about the church, that it's in the church that each of these entities of the created order is actually to find out something about God and worship God.

Dr. James Boice: Think about the angels first of all. Paul writes about them in Ephesians. He's talking about the church. He says God's intent was that now through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms, that is to the angels, according to his eternal purpose which he accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Dr. James Boice: The angels are worshiping God at this moment. That's their business, they do it constantly. But what Paul is telling us in Ephesians, that as they look at the church and see what is being done in the people of God by God for his glory, the angels constantly find more and more for which they should praise God. Is that true of you?

Dr. James Boice: Are you demonstrating something of the grace and power of God in your life so that even the angels look on and say, isn't that wonderful what God is doing in that person? Or again, the natural creation. Paul writes about that in Romans 8. He's describing the creation as being in bondage as a result of human sin and God's judgment on it for man's transgression, but then he says this.

Dr. James Boice: The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subject to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.

Dr. James Boice: He seems to be saying that like human beings, the creation itself will one day experience something like a resurrection as God blesses it as well. It will share in our redemption.

Dr. James Boice: And then finally, what about the kings and the princes and the people of this world? At the present, they're not worshiping God, on the contrary, they're taking their stand against the Lord and against his anointed. They're saying, let's cast off their fetters, let's break their bonds and be free.

Dr. James Boice: But God only laughs at that. He knows that the day is coming when Jesus, whom he has appointed as his king, will rule from Zion and rule even these kings with an iron scepter. And he's established a day when every knee will bow and every one in heaven and on earth and under the earth. Every tongue will confess that Jesus is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

Dr. James Boice: So the psalm brings us to this final point, and the final question is this, are you among that great company who have confessed that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father? If not, this is the time to do it. To leave the company of those who are resisting him, human beings alone in all of creation, and instead join the company of those who rejoice in Christ's death for their sin and his resurrection as the proof of their eternal life and who begin to serve him.

Dr. James Boice: These are the people who are close to God's heart. It's what verse 14 talks about. They look forward to the day when every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and on the sea and all that is in them will sing as it says in Revelation 5:13, to him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be praise and honor and glory and power forever and ever.

Dr. James Boice: If we're going to join that great chorus then, why don't we begin by taking part in it even now? Let's pray. Our Father, we're thankful for this psalm, for the way it points us to join the rest of creation in worship of you as the only wise and glorious God, and to do so through Jesus Christ who has saved us from our sin.

Dr. James Boice: We ask that you would bless us as we try to do that in church, by our worship and our singing, and also as we go from this place and bear testimony before the world of your grace. We pray in Jesus name. Amen.

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