The Heavens Teach
Think On These Things
Psalm 19:1 says,
The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
You can learn about a carpenter through their handiwork, a software developer by their code, and an artist through their paintings. God has created this world and we learn of him through it.
Therefore, Christians ought to recognize the importance of nature. We value it more than the materialist or naturalist.
By definition, to the naturalist, nature is all there is. There is nothing truly “other” since everything exists as a product of chance. The sun is not beautiful; the stars deserve no compliments. They are efficient, perhaps. They are pragmatic. Useful, even. But there’s no objective beauty. No majestic wonder. No glory.
Psalm 1:2 says,
Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge.
When was the last time you listened to the heavens? Each day you wake up is yet another day where they have something to tell you.
We live in a selfie, selfish, and self-focused world. The other stuff around us is not mere matter but God’s matter which means it matters. As Romans 1:20 says, “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.”
Some of us, content on describing the Christian life as “a relationship with God,” can forget about the first five days of creation. Before God had a relationship with humanity he had a relationship with pebbles, iguanas, and daffodils — and it was good.
Psalm 19:3-4:
They have no speech, they use no words;
no sound is heard from them.
yet their voice goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world.
There is a great difficulty here. While all the earth hears God’s creation, we have become dumb to wonder and deaf to matter. We are ignorant. Some have called this the noetic effect of sin where our minds have a murkiness that clouds our understanding.
The psalmist is writing with the aim of clearing the air, removing the dirt in his brain, and returning to the spirit-filled dust humanity once was. To do this, he looks up.
Psalm 19:5:
He has set a tent for the sun,
which comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber,
and, like a strong man, runs its course with joy.
This is a fun one. The psalmist looks and, like a child, tells us what the clouds remind him of. It is as if he’s lying back on the grass with an outstretched finger, saying, “Look, Father! Look! It’s like a tent that is covering up the sun!”
He even goes on to say, “May these words of my mouth and this meditation of my heart, be pleasing in your sight, Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer,” (verse 14).
The tent is a sunset. The “bridegroom leaving his chamber” is an ancient way of describing of honeymoon. And, the strong man running its course with joy is the the sunrise. He ponders all this as part of his duty to love God. A joyful obligation.
The psalmist was not wasting his time, looking up. Neither will you.
There is a moment in C.S. Lewis’ Ransom Trilogy where the main character is stuck in a spaceship and looks out the window. This is a long quote to end with, but it’s worth it.
There was an endless night on one side of the ship and an endless day on the other: each was marvellous and he moved from the one to the other at his will, delighted.
In the nights, which he could create by turning the handle of a door, he lay for hours in contemplation of the skylight. The Earth’s disk was nowhere to be seen; the stars, thick as daisies on an uncut lawn, reigned perpetually with no cloud, no moon, no sunrise to dispute their sway.
There were planets of unbelievable majesty, and constellations undreamed of: there were celestial sapphires, rubies, emeralds and pin-pricks of burning gold; far out on the left of the picture hung a comet, tiny and remote: and between all and behind all, far more emphatic and palpable than it showed on Earth, the undimensioned, enigmatic blackness…
Often he rose after only a few hours’ sleep to return, drawn by an irresistible attraction, to the regions of light; he could not cease to wonder at the noon which always awaited you however early you went to seek it. There, totally immersed in a bath of pure ethereal colour, he felt his body and mind daily rubbed and scoured and filled with new vitality.
Weston, in one of his brief, reluctant answers, admitted a scientific basis for these sensations: they were receiving, he said, many rays that never penetrated the terrestrial atmosphere.
But Ransom, as time wore on, became aware of another and more spiritual cause for his progressive lightening and exultation of heart. A nightmare, long engendered in the modern mind by the mythology that follows in the wake of science, was falling off him.
He had read of ‘Space’: at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how much it affected him till now—now that the very name ‘Space’ seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam.
He could not call it ‘dead’; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment. How indeed should it be otherwise, since out of this ocean the worlds and all their life had come? He had thought it barren: he saw now that it was the womb of worlds, whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly even upon the earth with so many eyes—and here, with how many more! No: Space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens —
This post is a continuation of my earlier reflection on Rediscovering Wonder in our Inside-Out World.
If you are interested in a more detailed account of how the heavens teach, I’d encourage you to read Natural Law: A Brief Introduction and Biblical Defense (Davenant Guides) by David Haines. It was one of my top ten books of 2022.