Thoughts on Psalm 104, Priests of Creation

Last night, Michelle and I prayed from Psalm 104, which is an incredible song of the glories of God expressed in creation. It reminded me of a great quote from James Torrance:

“God has made all creatures for his glory. Without knowing it, the lilies of the field in their beauty glorify God with a glory greater than that of Solomon, the sparrow on the housetop glorifies God, and the universe in its vastness and remoteness is the theatre of God’s glory. But God made men and women in his own image to be the priests of creation and to express on behalf of all creatures the praises of God, so that through human lips the heavens might declare the glory of God. When we, who know we are God’s creatures, worship God together, we gather up the worship of all creation. Our chief end is to glorify God, and creation realizes its own creaturely glory in glorifying God through human lips.”

This is one of my favorite thoughts: that we are the priests of all creation. We bring the worship of the world before the creator and express it in words. We are the voice, the mouthpiece of the whole world. In our worship, the natural world finds its meaning. To appreciate and express the beauty of the creation is one of the most human things we can do.

Of course, our sin is that we turn our praise away from God and honor the created world above the Creator (Romans 1). With the priests of creation directing praise everywhere but where it belongs, the created world is unfulfilled. It’s purpose is short-circuited. It groans to be what it was meant to be, an expression of the glory of God, completed in the articulated praise of humanity.

Thanks be to God for the Great High Priest, Jesus, who being the perfect human, brings perfect worship to the Father. He intercedes for us, offers our prayers and praises in the presence of God, and fulfills the purpose of humanity. He, our living and ascended head, represents humanity the way humanity was to represent creation, and so in Christ all of creation finds its meaning. In Christ, the cosmos comes together in worship. Jesus, true God, worshiped in glory is Jesus, true human, the only perfect worshiper.

Two Thoughts from Psalm 103

Last night, Michelle and I were praying from Psalm 103, which is one of my favorite passages. A couple of thoughts struck me as we read. The first was a thought from verses 14-17. It is a simple thought, but one that is deeply reassuring to me:

“For he knows our frame he remembers that we are dust. As for man, his days are like grass; he flourishes like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more. But the steadfast love of the LORD is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him…”

That image that we are dust feels so true some times. There are times when you feel weak, dry, insubstantial, like dust. You feel passing and light, tossed around by the wind. You feel breakable. Your life feels like it is small. We tire and crack. And in the end it all blows away. But then the hope…the love of the Lord is forever. When our life feels insubstantial and tiring, the love of God is real. It is solid. It lasts. It is the ultimate reality. The love of God is firm and substantive, rich and full. And God’s love is for those who fear him, people like you and me who can seem to face the reality of God because we are so fleeting and weak. We are small and humble before God, and his love is for us. His love for us is everlasting. The reality behind our life is the unchanging, solid love of God. That is good news.

The second thought is from verses 20-22:

“Bless the LORD, O you his angels, you mighty ones who do his word, obeying the voice of his word! Bless the LORD, all his hosts, his ministers, who do his will! Bless the LORD, all his works, in all places of his dominion. Bless the LORD, O my soul!”

Most times when I read this Psalm, these are the verses that are the least exciting for me. Telling the angels to bless the Lord seems sort of distant from my life, sort of hard to imagine, and frankly, I figured angels know better than I do that they ought to praise God. Isn’t that what they do all the time? It is weird if God’s angels don’t praise him.

But then I realized, perhaps we ought to marvel at the fact that the angels praise God? Perhaps it is a wonder that the angelic hosts bow their knee. Have you noticed how every time an angel appears in the Bible, they have to say, “Don’t be afraid!”? Have you ever imagined what it would be like to actually see the leader of the heavenly army, like Joshua did, or be visited by the cherubim who guard the very presence of God, like Ezekiel, or be stopped on the road by a angel sent to kill you like Balaam? It would be terrifying! John, in the book of Revelation had to be told not to worship the angels because that was his instinctive response to seeing one. Perhaps if we realized the fierceness and the beauty of angels we would marvel that they submit to anyone at all. We might be amazed that they bow down to any being or worship anything. We don’t expect a tornado to obey anyone’s command? We don’t expect the sun to do what someone says? Lightning and volcanoes and stars and fires do not submit to anyone, why should angels? Why should the warriors of heaven? Perhaps if we knew the nature of angels we wouldn’t find an angelic rebellion so surprising?…Until we encountered God. Because God is the one who commands, and the angels obey. God is the one who speaks a word, and the fiercest most uncontrollable beings in existence do what he says. God, with the voice to shape winds and waves and flame, whose whispers break mountains and melt glaciers, God is to be feared and obeyed. All his works submit to him. All his works praise him.

Even the angels.
Even the forces of nature.
Even the dust.

Because this same God is the one whose love is from everlasting to everlasting. Alleluia. Amen.

A Crying Baby at the Lord’s Table

A few Sundays ago, I was in one of the morning worship services at our church. It was a Communion Sunday, which I love. I deeply cherish Communion, and I try to give my full attention to the presence of God among us whenever I receive the bread and the cup.

On this particular Sunday, however, my concentration was broken as I prayed, waiting to partake in the bread that had just been given to me. About ten rows back, a baby started to cry. It was not a shrill cry or a scream. It was just the typical fussiness that little babies often have, and so the mother did not immediately remove the baby from the sanctuary. The baby cried for thirty seconds or more, and I must admit, I was a little frustrated. In my mind, I started criticizing the mother.

“Why can’t you just have some respect and take your kid out of the room for just a couple minutes,” I thought. “We only have Communion once a month, so why do you have to ruin it for everyone?” (Of course, I didn’t bother thinking about the fact that this Mom might want to receive Communion as well, and didn’t want to miss it because her baby was making a little noise.)

I tried to refocus my thoughts on Communion. I tried to think about the fact that God was present with us, and that Jesus came in the flesh, and how this ceremony vividly showed this. But, as I meditated on this, a thought came to me, “I wonder if Jesus ever cried in the synagogue as a baby?”

Now, I don’t know much about synagogue practices in the 1st century. I don’t know if children were present, or how old they had to be if they were. I don’t know if it was expected that crying babies be removed from the services, or if in those days parents knew how to keep their children better behaved. I really don’t know about that particular situation, but I certainly can imagine that there were sometimes babies present at moments when it would have been distracting if they were crying.

Of course, I can imagine Jesus crying as a baby. Many people don’t think about this, but it is important. I have often ranted about the worst Christmas song of all time, “Away in a Manger,” which celebrates the docetism we ought to be rejecting most strongly at Christmas time. “The little Lord Jesus no crying he makes…” On a holiday when we should be astounded by the mess, the pain, and the physicality of God becoming man and being birthed from a womb, we paint a picture of a baby who is so surreally peaceful, he hardly seems human. Once we realize that Jesus was not some super-baby, but was really, truly human, we have to start imagining what to many are unfamiliar pictures of him. God was a baby who needed to be fed every few hours, but could not communicate his need for food. God was embodied as a child whose only means of getting help was to cry for his mother. God went through development, and that probably means he went through phases where he couldn’t easily sit still for too long, even if he was in a worship service. It means at some point he was teething. He got colds. He puked all over Mary’s clothing. Other than sin, for Jesus to be human means everything that it meant for us to be human. That means he probably cried and fussed at awkward times, maybe even in a worship service, or while someone was reading the Scriptures. Perhaps he even cried during a Passover meal.

As I ate the bread, I realized, there is no incongruity in having a crying baby at the Lord’s Table. It should be a more vivid reminder of what I am celebrating. When we take the bread as a symbol of the body of Christ, we celebrate his incarnation, his humanity. Jesus took on the body of a baby so that he could one day give his body to his people. At one point, a child crying in a worship service was God with us. Or, in other words, there would be no reason to celebrate Communion, if God hadn’t, at one point, interrupted a worship service because he was hungry.

Ant School

This is a really cool discovery that makes me marvel at God's creation: Ant School: First Formal Classroom Found in Nature.

Random Thoughts from a Visit to the Field Museum of Natural History

Well, as I continue to sort through the random documents and notes on my computer, I found a “journal entry” of sorts from this summer. Michelle and I had spent the day at the Field Museum in Chicago, and when we got home, I wrote this down. It was my reaction to an exibit on animals. It was definately a doxological moment for me, and so, I share it with you here.

---

Tuesday, August 23, 2005

My favorite exhibit that we looked at was called, “What is an Animal?” It covered the definition of animal (which apparently includes sponges and coral and sea cucumbers…amazing!). It also had a section on the different ways animals move, sense things, and reproduce. It was definitely a doxological place. How can you not worship the God who made these things? I was astounded to learn about all the different types of senses animals have. The idea of sensing is mind-boggling in itself. We detect data from the world, convert it into chemical information in our bodies, and then some how experience the data in a meaningful way…it makes you ponder the mind-body problem…but I’m not going there. What amazes me is that some animals can sense things like electricity and magnetism. Some fish have such sensitive electrical sensors that they can detect the presence of their prey, not by sight or smell, but by sensing the electrical impulses of their muscles. There are also fish that can sense pressure in such a way that they can feel the movement of another fish several feet away as they move. That is how fish swim in schools and turn in unison. It is not by sight, but by remote sensing of movement via minute pressure changes in the water. Unbelievable! There are also animals that can sense light like we can, that is electromagnetic radiation, but not in the same ranges as us. They see infrared and ultraviolet…I was thinking about this on my walk to work this morning. I was admiring the shadows and light that came through the trees on Wheaton College campus, and I realized that I could have been made in such a way that I could not see the shadows I see. I could have had a broader range of visible light, and as a result, I would be able to detect the light that passes through the trees and walls because it is at a longer wavelength. God made us to see visible light in a certain way, so that many of the objects we see are opaque and shadow-making to us. If we could see a broader range, they would be translucent or transparent. Crazy, eh?…What is also astounding is the way certain deep-sea fish reproduce. In one species, the male fish is significantly smaller than the female. During sex, the male bites the female, never to let go for the rest of his life. The female’s skin grows around the male, and eventually, their bloodstreams merge. Then the male fertilizes the female’s eggs. Talk about becoming one! Unreal! What a variety of life? What innovation? Truly amazing.