The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): Today on the Bible Study Hour with Dr. James Boice, David is surveying the sky, marveling at our wondrous God's glorious creation revealed in the sun and the heavens above. Join us as we study the first half of Psalm 19 and learn more about God's revelation through His creation.

Guest (Male): Welcome to the Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically. The heavens declare His glory. In the first half of Psalm 19, God reveals Himself to us through His creation. David can see God's handiwork in the heavens above, and his poetry in this psalm reveals the splendor of both the creation and the creator. If you have your Bible, turn to Psalm 19, verses 1 through 6.

Dr. James Boice: When I first began this study of the Psalms those many months ago, I thought it would be interesting, if possible, to end the service at which we're studying the psalm each time with a hymn embodying the words of the psalm we've been studying. I didn't know whether that was possible. I had no idea how many hymns in the Bible were based upon the Psalms, but when I began to look through the hymnal to discover whether that could be done, I was surprised how many of our hymns are based upon Psalms.

Our Trinity Hymnal has 730 hymns, not a great number. There are hymnals that are bigger, but I discovered that several hundred of that 730 hymns were psalm paraphrases or in some other way rather directly related to the Psalms. And when I began to look through the Psalms themselves to see which ones were treated as hymns, I discovered that 117 of the 150 Psalms were so treated. In other words, all but 33.

Most of them had just one hymn based upon them, of course, sometimes two, but here's the interesting thing. When I came to Psalm 19, I discovered that no less than seven hymns in our hymnal were based upon it. Spacious Firmament on High, Joseph Addison's great hymn. The Heavens Declare Thy Glory, hymn by Thomas Birks. The Heavens Declare Thy Glory, Lord, a similar hymn by Isaac Watts. Lord, Thy Word Abideth, by Henry Baker. Jehovah's Perfect Law Restores the Soul Again, from the Psalter of 1912. The Law of God is Good and Wise, a hymn by Matthias Loy. And Most Perfect is the Law of God, again from the 1912 Psalter.

Well, I think that tells us a number of things about this psalm. One thing it tells us is that it's great poetry. That's why it has lent itself so easily to hymns. It's a judgment that is reflected by no less a master of literature than C.S. Lewis. As you know, he did a small book of study on the Psalms called Reflections on the Psalms, in the midst of which he says that Psalm 19 is the greatest poem in the Psalter and one of the greatest lyrics in the world. I think as we study that, we can pretty much concur with his judgment.

But you know, it's not just the fact that a poem is great poetry that makes it suitable for a hymn. Least of all, not for seven or eight or 10, however many hymns based on this psalm there may actually be. What's required is that it contain great doctrinal teaching or something that speaks directly to the heart. That's what most of the Psalms do, and as far as the doctrine goes, that's what this psalm does to a remarkable degree.

This is the great Old Testament statement of the doctrine of divine revelation. It's a doctrine that's unfolded in different ways elsewhere, sometimes merely being assumed. Again and again in the Old Testament, we read the words, "Thus saith the Lord," or "Jehovah says," or some such thing. That, of course, is a statement of the doctrine of revelation, but it's not unfolded doctrinally or theologically.

Here in the psalm, surprisingly it is. We normally think of the Psalms as poetry and therefore having largely an emotional content, and this psalm certainly has that as well. But it's more. It really is an unfolding of this doctrine of revelation. In the Bible, the doctrine of revelation has two main parts. There's general revelation, which means a revelation of God in nature, and then there's special revelation.

Special revelation involves God's revelation of Himself in Jesus Christ, which of course was not fully known or even fully anticipated in the Old Testament. There's the revelation of God to our hearts by His Holy Spirit, and above all, there's the revelation of God in Scripture. Now that twofold division between general revelation on the one hand and special revelation on the other is what this psalm is all about. As a matter of fact, that's its outline.

The psalm actually has three parts. Verses 1 through 6 talk about the general revelation, the revelation of God in nature. Verses 7 through 11 speak of the special revelation. And then finally, the end, beginning with verse 12, you have the response of the psalmist himself to the revelation, above all, the revelation of God in Scripture.

I've called these two parts of revelation the revelation of God in His big book and His little book. The big book is the cosmos or the universe, and the little book is the Bible. And what we want to do as we study this psalm is look at the first six verses in this study, which talk about the general revelation and see what it says about that, and then in our next study, look at verses 7 through the end and see what it has to say about the special revelation or the Bible.

The first verse sets the tone of the psalm. Speaking of the general revelation, it says, "The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His hands." A way of saying that the stars and the heavens and the sun, which is seen by day, point to the very existence of God. And yet, not only the existence of God, that is, pointing to the one who made them, a divine being alone capable of creating the stars and the sun and all of the other things that we see. Not only that, not only God's existence, but also the fact that God is glorious.

The stars are glorious. The sun is glorious. And so, the one who made them must obviously be even more glorious. That's what David is saying. Now that's a very limited revelation, as the general revelation is.

Alexander MacLaren, when he writes about this, points out that the glory of God does not contain any moral element as it's used here in the psalm. What he means by that is that the revelation of God in nature, which shows His glory, does not reveal His moral qualities.

What are the moral qualities? Well, they are things like justice, love, compassion, mercy, and such things. None of this is revealed in nature. You might say, "Well, you obviously see the love of God in nature because it's so beautiful. God cares about us and makes it beautiful." Well, yes, but the revelation in that respect is ambiguous because we not only have beautiful things in nature, we have what would seem to be terrible things too.

There are also earthquakes and hurricanes and other elements of great danger, at least to human beings. So you don't see the moral qualities of God in nature. At best, you would say God is indifferent in these areas. You have to learn that in other ways.

But what you do see is that there is a God, and this God is glorious in the sense that He is sovereign and powerful, that is, able to create the glorious things that we see. Now this is exactly what's taught in the New Testament. It's hard to talk about Psalm 19 without talking about Romans 1 because it's most likely that Paul, when he wrote the first chapter of Romans, had this psalm in mind even though he doesn't quote it directly. The theology is so corresponding.

What Paul says in the first chapter of Romans is that God has revealed Himself in nature in clear ways and that the invisible qualities of God are clearly seen there. He spells out what those invisible qualities are. It's God's eternal power, he says, and His godhead, that is, the fact that He exists and the fact that He's all-powerful.

I've often talked about that because we've been studying Romans, and I pointed out that there's a philosophical way of expressing exactly what Paul says in Romans 1. Philosophers talk about a supreme being. They may not believe in a supreme being; it may only be what some philosophers call a God hypothesis. But the God of the philosophers, apart from revelation, is only that, a supreme being with a capital S and a capital B.

B, being, corresponds to His godhead, that's what Paul is talking of, and supreme talks and reflects of His holy nature, His powerful nature. So when you look at nature, that's what you see. A limited revelation, but nevertheless a very important one. When Paul says that's what's revealed, he's reflecting Psalm 19, which says, "The heavens declare the glory of God and the skies proclaim the work of His hands."

Now Psalm 19 teaches a great deal about this limited revelation. Limited, yes, but nevertheless extremely important. And the verses that follow, verses 2, 3, and 4, teach us three things about it, that is, the nature and the scope of this general revelation. First thing they teach us is that this revelation of God in nature is continuous.

It's expressed in the words day after day and night after night. It's not as if, when we're talking about the general revelation, God were sending prophets. He could send a prophet who would appear on earth in one decade and teach the will of God and do it articulately and forcefully, empowered by God and blessed by Him. But then, because he's a man or because she would be a woman, he would die and then be gone, and generations might go by before God would send another prophet.

We know as we speak of the Old Testament that there were periods in which the voice of God was not heard in any special way. The period between the ending of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New is called by some writers the 400 silent years. God sent no prophet during that time.

But that's not the case when we're talking about the general revelation. What David says about the revelation of God in nature is that it's something that is going on day after day and night after night and week after week and year after year. If the earth and the universe is as old as the scientists are saying it is, 20 billion years, then this is a revelation that has continued for 20 billion years.

If we're talking only about the life of man on this earth, it has continued certainly for many thousands of years, if not hundreds of thousands of years or even more. The result of this, of course, is that any human being that has lived at any period of history in any place has heard and is responsible for a correct response to that general revelation.

I suppose this is where Addison's great hymn has most effect. I referred to it earlier. One of the verses, the last of three in that hymn, reads this way: "What though in solemn silence all move round this dark terrestrial ball. What though no real voice nor sound amidst their radiant orbs be found. In reason's ear they all rejoice and utter forth a glorious voice. Forever singing as they shine, the hand that made us is divine." That is the general revelation.

There's something else this psalm teaches us about the general revelation. Not only that it is continuous, as it is, but also that it is abundant. Now that's not quite as visible in the English text as it is in the Hebrew, but the English text contains the words pour forth. Day after day they pour forth speech, and then the parallel to that in the next line is display knowledge.

The word there, pour forth, is actually a word that would be used of a spring where water is gushing up freely and continuously. And so, when David says that this revelation of God in nature is pouring forth, he's really saying that it is an abundant revelation. Like a spring, general revelation is pouring up abundantly and continuously to feed and bless the soul, if we would have it.

There are several ways in which the abundance of that revelation can be understood, and I don't know what way in particular David had in mind, but let me suggest a few ways that it could be understood. First of all, it could be understood in terms of the direction in which we look.

Paul is certainly thinking along those lines in Romans 1 when he says that the revelation of God is made clear in the things that are made, that is, in all things that are made. Meaning that no matter where you look, you find the hand of God on display.

If you look at a snowflake and see the intricacy of the detail and the infinite variety among the snowflakes, you say, "Well, there is a God of great detail and infinite variety who has made it." If you look at a grain of sand and analyze it, discovering what it is, breaking it down into its chemical compounds and analyzing those, you say, "There is an intricate mathematical mind that stands behind that."

If you look at a fingerprint, you have evidence of the grace of God. The flower of a petal, the stars, the laws of gravity or thermodynamics or the law of relativity or whatever it may be that you're able to discover in the universe, wherever you look, in whatever direction, whether superficially or deep, everything you see testifies to the creator. Creation literally pours forth an abundant revelation.

But it's not only in that sense that it does it. It also does it in this sense. The more you investigate it, the more you find the revelation to be present. What I mean by that is sometimes you find people in our day saying, "Well, you know, if you have a rather superficial mind and are rather naive, I suppose it's possible that you could look at creation and say, 'Well, goodness, it's certainly mysterious. It's beyond me. God must have made it.'"

But as soon as you begin to investigate it, you say to yourself, "Well, it's not all that mysterious. It's all simply a question of cause and effect, and when we analyze it, we can begin to understand how it all came about by mechanical means." Some people think like that, but that actually is not the way it is. The more you examine it, the more you're forced back, if you do so honestly, to the fact that it could only have come into being and come into being in the form it has by a creator.

There's been a very interesting development of that particular argument in science in the last generation or so. In the theories that have gone on about the origin of the universe itself. As you may know, and undoubtedly you do, that until early in this century, the prevailing view of the cosmos was what was called at that time and is still called the steady state theory.

It meant that the universe is eternal and doesn't change. It may be changes within it, but it's all change according to certain laws, and it's always been there and it will always be there, and it will continue to exist in exactly the way we find it today, doing exactly the same things.

All of that began to change, as I say, early in this century, and what has come in the place of that has been the theory that now goes by the very popular name of the Big Bang. It began way back in 1913. There was an astronomer whose name was Vesto Melvin Slipher, who had been examining some of the relatively close galaxies.

He didn't have very powerful equipment in those days, and he couldn't study galaxies that were very distant in the universe, but as he studied six or seven of them that were relatively close, Andromeda and so on, he began to notice something interesting. He noticed that they apparently were moving away from the earth at relatively fast speeds, up to two million miles an hour. You say, "Well, how did he determine that?"

The way he determined it was by what is called a red shift in the light coming from those stars, the light being generated within the galaxies. And what that red shift means is that the object creating the light is moving. It's similar to the effect you have with sound waves. You know, if you're standing beside a railroad track and a train comes toward you, as it approaches, the sound will dip, and then as it moves off into the distance, the sound will rise. It's called the Doppler effect when you're having to do with sound, and the same thing is true with the speed of light and this red shift.

What happens is that they can tell the elements of an object that's burning by using a spectrograph. The spectrograph will produce a band of light with little black lines in it, and the little black lines have a pattern like a fingerprint that tells you what element is burning. And what Slipher noted is that when he studied these near galaxies compared with the others, all of these little lines were there indicating what particular element was burning, but it was all shifted toward the red end of the spectrum. And the only possible explanation of that is that the objects themselves were rushing away, and so the light waves were being stretched out because of the distance.

He presented that at a gathering of astronomers, and sitting in the audience was a very young man whose name was Edwin Hubble. He was very impressed by that and he went to work on it. Hubble had the advantage at that point of using the great telescope on Mount Palomar out in California, and he simply extended Slipher's findings to a great extent.

And he simply extended Slipher's findings to a great extent. He studied perhaps 20, 30, 40 of these galaxies, studying those that were increasingly far from earth, which was determined by the faintness of the light. Apparently, everything is moving away from everything else at enormous speeds.

The further away the object was, the faster it was moving. So those that were close to earth seemed to be moving away at two million miles an hour or so, those that were further were moving away at perhaps 10 million miles an hour. And it was very easy, once he had tracked this out, plotted it on a graph, to produce what was called the law for an expanding universe.

If you know it's moving away and you know how fast it's moving away, it's not very hard to plot that backwards and find out when it got started. And apparently, the universe came into existence in what must have been a gigantic fireball explosion about 20 billion years ago, according to the scientific evidence.

Interestingly enough, some years later in 1965, two scientists at the Bell Laboratories by the name of Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were studying radiation coming from space. They were trying to determine radiation coming from stellar bodies, and they noticed something interesting. They noticed that no matter what direction in space they turned their telescope, the radiation was the same. It was coming everywhere, even from what we would regard as empty space.

And what they concluded from that is that they had discovered actually the leftover echo or radiation of the Big Bang explosion. All of those things have gone together to produce a literal revolution in science. Now the interesting thing about all of that is that the scientists didn't like it.

Robert Jastrow, the director and founder of the Goddard Space Institute for NASA, wrote a book some years ago—he had written a number of popular books on science—and this one was called God and the Astronomers. He was amused, he says as much in his book, by the reaction of his fellow scientists to this change.

Arthur Eddington, who was a British astronomer, wrote in 1931, when all of this was beginning to come into vogue, "The notion of a beginning is repugnant to me." The German chemist Walter Nernst said, "To deny the infinite duration of time would be to betray the very foundations of science." Philip Morrison of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said of the Big Bang theory, "I would like to reject it."

Now Jastrow found that very interesting, and he analyzes it in the book. He says the problem you see is that if there is a moment of creation, then that is the point beyond which science can't go. Your ability to track things by the law of cause and effect breaks down at the moment of the Big Bang explosion. You can't go beyond that. You can't explain everything, and you have to fall back on something like a creator. And many didn't like that. Even Albert Einstein, whose theory of relativity, interestingly enough, predicted the idea of an expanding universe, though he himself didn't discover it, he recognized this.

He said, "The circumstance irritates me. To admit such possibility seems senseless." But after he examined the evidence, Einstein himself was convinced. Here's the way Jastrow sums it up. It's fascinating.

He says, "For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance. He is about to conquer the highest peak. As he pulls himself over the last rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."

Well, he's a scientist, I'm a theologian. He knows them, I know the theologians, and I know that it has been many, many years since all those theologians were on the mountain. A lot of them started to climb down years ago to join the scientists, but nevertheless, he has a point. You see, that is what the psalm is saying. This revelation is continuous, it's abundant, and the more you investigate it, the more you're pushed back in the direction of a creator. Now scientists don't like that, unbelieving scientists, unbelieving people of any profession don't like it. We do everything we can to concoct another explanation, but no sooner is that invented than it breaks down, and there we are back at the beginning again.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. It's what the psalm is saying. There's one other thing it says here about this general revelation, it's worth pointing it out. It says that it's universal. It's there in the phrase "unto all the earth." There's some question about how verse 3 should be interpreted. "There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard." In the Hebrew, the word "where" is not there.

You'll notice in the footnote to the NIV that the verse can be translated as saying, "They have no speech, there are no words, no sound is heard from them." It would be a verse that's talking about the silence of the heavens, which nevertheless in their silence speak. And that may be the right way to translate it.

The NIV has assumed that it means there is no speech or language where their voice is not heard, but whether you leave the word out or put it back in, the idea is the same. You don't hear anything coming from the stars and the sun, but what they say without words is universal. It goes out into all the earth. Verse 4 says it explicitly.

Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world. That's what Paul talks about in Romans 1. He says all are guilty, no matter where you come from, no matter what your experience is, because God has made His existence and power so clear in nature.

And yet, of course, we do everything we can to force it down. Psalm 19 doesn't explain in so many words what Paul says explicitly in Romans 1, but I think it is implied. What Paul says in Romans 1 is this: men suppress the revelation. The revelation is there. We know it.

If we allowed it to speak to us as it ought, it would lead us to the creator before whom we know we should bow down, worship, and give thanks. But we don't want to do that. If there is a creator, if He's all-powerful, He has claims on us. It means we're only creatures, and because we don't want to be creatures, we want to be creators ourselves, we do everything we can to suppress the revelation. We push it down, rejecting it even though we know where it ought to lead us. And it's because of that Paul says in Romans that the wrath of God comes on us.

As I say, that is not said explicitly here, but I think it's implied for this reason. The first six verses talk about this revelation in nature. Then it talks about the Scripture, and it is at the end of that, that is, after the Scripture, that David begins to apply it, recognizing that the Scriptures, not the general revelation in nature, point out his errors, reveal his hidden faults, keep him from willful sins, and lead him in God's way.

You see, the Scriptures are given to do what we desperately need, and it is in them and their revelation of the coming of Christ that we find salvation. Well, there's another section to this. We've looked at the first verse, which is the statement of the theory of general revelation. Then there's an analysis of the way in which it operates. That's what we've just studied.

Beginning in verse 4b and in 5 and 6, we have the glory of the sun described. That, of course, is the element of the heavens that David was most conscious of. We are as well. It's the only thing we see in the heavens by day. The light of the sun is so bright, it blots out the stars which nevertheless are there and shining. John Stott, in his study of the Psalms, says that at this point in verse 4b, David brings in a particular example of the general revelation. But it's actually more than that. It's not only a particular example; from David's point of view and perhaps from ours as well, it is the crowning achievement of God in the creation.

He speaks about it with two images. He says the sun is like a bridegroom coming forth from his pavilion and like a champion, that is, an athletic champion, rejoicing to run his course. Both of those images speak of youthful vitality, vigor, and contagious joy. The sun, he says, is like that.

David didn't know all we know about the sun. He didn't know that it is about a million miles across, that it's a ball of hot gas, largely hydrogen, that it is burning a nuclear reaction and that's what's producing the light.

All of those great mysteries concerning the sun were not known to David. He didn't live in a scientific age. But the interesting thing is although he knew less about the sun, he praised God more. He was more conscious as he looked up at the blazing sun that it was God who stood behind it. And we look up, and although we know more about it and understand the mysteries even beyond David, well, we take it lightly.

And yet, that's what David says. C.S. Lewis makes a comment about the last line that leads us into what comes next and can be anticipated here. The last line of those verses says, speaking of the sun, "Nothing is hidden from its heat." C.S. Lewis says that's the key verse in the psalm because it's what ties part one to part two.

And the point is that just as the sun penetrates everywhere, sustaining life and purifying things in a burning, penetrating way, so also do the Scriptures function. The Scriptures likewise are life-giving and penetrating and correcting. Only, of course, here we're talking about moral values and spiritual things. This is the point at which we need to put the two together.

We're going to go on, as I said, in our next study to talk about the law of God. There's enough to be said about that to demand an entire study too. But here you have the two together. You have the general revelation on the one hand in the first six verses, and you have the special revelation following in verses 7 to the end. And the question is, what do you think of the two? How do you hold them together in your mind? Well, first of all, we have to acknowledge that there is no conflict between the two.

That there is no conflict whatever between the testimony of nature and the testimony of the word of God. If there is, we are either misunderstanding nature or we are misunderstanding Scripture, or what is probably likely, we are misunderstanding both.

The task of the Bible commentator and the task of the scientist to one extent are the same, that is, to get to the God who stands behind both. Charles Haddon Spurgeon said something similar. "He is wisest who reads both the world book and the word book as two volumes of the same work and feels concerning them, 'My Father wrote them both.'"

So that's the first thing. The second thing we have to say about general revelation and the special revelation is this: nature points to God, but it is not God. C.S. Lewis, in that book I referred to earlier, has a chapter on nature in which he spells out some of the implications of that, and he does it in a very helpful way, I believe. He says when you separate God and nature, as the Christian revelation does, but recognize God as the creator of nature, you accomplish two things. First of all, you divest nature of divinity.

So when you look at trees and stones and oceans and rivers and stars and suns, you don't say they are God. They are not God. The thing that makes and the thing that is made are two; they can't be the same. And so, nature is emptied of divinity. That is why the biblical people look at nature so differently. They are not like the pagans around them who find gods in everything. That's the first thing you do.

But secondly, says Lewis, when you empty nature of divinity, you also raise it to a higher level because you make it the bearer of divine messages. You see, if nature is itself God, then that's as far as you go. There's the stream, the stream is God, what else can you say? But if the stream is made by God and because it's made by God is the bearer of messages about God, then you can reflect backward from the stream and understand something about the one who created it.

And he says you see, that's the way Christians look at nature. They look at it, they marvel at it, they rejoice in it, but they say it testifies to God. And so, we see nature and what we do is rejoice in Him. You see, if you don't have that perspective, you do what I'm afraid many of our contemporaries do do. That is, you fall into one of two errors.

Either you glorify nature itself, worshipping nature, that was chiefly an error of the paganism of the past, but it's cropped up in a new kind of paganism in which we make ourselves gods, the New Age movement does that. You either make nature—we ourselves being a part of it—God, and that's an error.

Either you make nature God, and that's an error. Or if you don't do that, you strip away the deity, and if it's not created by God and made as a bearer of His messages, then you debase it, you take advantage of it, and so you find yourself ruining nature, which of course is what our technological society also does.

The Christian view, the biblical view, the view of David as well as that of Paul in the New Testament takes us beyond that. Do we value nature? Answer is yes, in many cases we do. Certainly, we have people in the world who do. We have environmentalists in this country, and we have the Green movement.

All of that is good. But here's the point. If you value the revelation of God in the big book, shouldn't you value the revelation in the little book even more? Especially since it tells us so much more about God. For every thought you have about nature and thanks to God for it, you should have an even stronger, greater thought for what He's given us in the Bible. And if you're concerned with preserving nature, you should be concerned with getting to know the Scriptures.

The one who will do that is being led by God, and being led by God will find God and will find Him to be far greater than even the big book enables us to think of Him when we look and see God's handiwork in the heavens. Let us pray. Father, we thank you for the teaching here in Psalm 19 about your creation and how we're to regard it. We don't want to do what is so often done, either consider it something that is not divine or disregard it, failing to recognize that you've made it and it teaches about you. Help us to see both and see them rightly and learn from you, but above all, to learn from you where you are abundantly revealed, and that is Scripture. As we come to a continuation of this study, we ask that you'll bless our hearts as we contemplate that revelation too. In Jesus' name, amen.

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