We spend a lot of time, in this life, looking for things. We spend a lot of time looking for things, and we are often frustrated because we can’t find what we want. Looking for things takes time. We lose things and can’t find them, or we have something very specific in mind that we want to buy, but none of the stores in town sell it. But beyond these minor frustrations, there’s often a gnawing sense, at the center of our being, that something really important is missing, that we’re looking for something that we can’t seem to find. Something is wrong, but we don’t know how to make it right. We are not even sure, much of the time, what it is we are looking for. Walker Percy’s book title, Lost in the Cosmos, is a good description of our condition as sinners living in a fallen world. What we’ve lost is ourselves. We’re lost in the cosmos, and we spend much time and effort trying to find our way back to a sense of wholeness and belonging.
Near the beginning of the book, Percy has this exercise:
“Imagine that you are reading a book about the Cosmos. You find it so interesting that you go out and buy a telescope. One fine clear moonless night you set up your telescope and focus on the brightest star in the sky. It is a planet, not a star, with a reddish spot and several moons. Excited, you look up the planets in your book about the Cosmos. You read a description of the planets. You read a sentence about a large yellowish planet with a red spot and several moons. You recognize both the description and the picture. Clearly, you have been looking at Jupiter.
You have no difficulty at all in saying that it is Jupiter, not Mars or Saturn, even though the object you are looking at is something you have never seen before and is hundreds of millions of miles distant.
Now imagine that you are reading a newspaper. You come to the astrology column. You may or may not believe in astrology, but to judge from the popularity of astrology these days, you will probably read your horoscope. According to a recent poll, more Americans set store in astrology than in science or God.
You are an Aries. You open your newspaper to the astrology column and read an analysis of the Aries personality. It says, among other things:
You have the knack of creating an atmosphere of thought and movement, unhampered by petty jealousies. But you have the tendency to scatter your talents to the four winds.
Hm, you say, quite true. I’m like that.
Suddenly you realize that you’ve made a mistake. You’ve read the Gemini column. So you go back to Aries:
Nothing hurts you more than to be unjustly mistreated or suspected. But you have a way about you, a gift for seeing things through despite all obstacles and distractions. You also have a desperate need to be liked. So you have been wounded more often than you will admit.
Hm, you say, quite true. I’m like that.
The first question is: Why is it that both descriptions seem to fit you–or, for that matter, why do you seem to recognize yourself in the self-analysis of all twelve astrological signs? Or, to put it another way, why is it that you can recognize and identify the planets Jupiter and Venus so readily after reading a bit and taking one look, yet have so much trouble identifying yourself from twelve descriptions when, presumably, you know yourself much better than you know Jupiter and Venus?” (pp. 5-6).
The very first thing John Calvin says in his great work, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, is this: “Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves” (Book 1, Chapter 1.1). He goes on to say that these two things are closely tied together, that a true knowledge of ourselves will lead us to God, and that knowledge of God will give us a truer knowledge of ourselves. The problem, as Percy shows, is that we don’t really know ourselves. Our self-perception is distorted. By nature, as sinners in a fallen world, we are alienated from God and from ourselves. We don’t know God; we don’t know the truth about Him. And we don’t know ourselves either. We don’t know the truth about ourselves. Our inner world is full of illusions and false imaginations. It’s easier for us to identify a planet, millions of miles away, than to perceive the truth about who we are.
In 1978, I had an interesting conversation with a Hindu holy man, or sadhu. We spoke about what I believed and why I had come to India. And he spoke about why he had become a sadhu. I guessed him to be in his mid-late sixties, and he said he had been seeking God all his life. He had become a sadhu so that he could give all his time to seeking; everything else was trivial. He wanted to lay it all aside and give himself wholly to the search. But he hadn’t yet found God and said he really didn’t expect to do so. His whole life was defined by this quest, but he fully expected to spend the rest of his life searching but not finding. We’re alienated from God. We don’t know Him, and all our schemes for finding Him lead us nowhere. We can spend a whole lifetime seeking Him, laying aside everything else, and be no closer to our goal at the end than we were at the beginning.
But Psalm 19 speaks to us in our lostness and alienation with this message: God reveals Himself to those who obediently seek Him. God wants to make Himself known to us. God reveals Himself to those who seek Him in the places where He makes Himself known, to those who give attention to Him. All-too-often the focus is on us, even when we’re talking about knowing God. We are focused on our own spirituality, on all the things we’re doing to seek Him, how diligent we’ve been in our attempts, and all the frustrations we’ve had to endure, all the things we’ve given up for His sake. But in Psalm 19, the focus is not on us. The focus is on God and on the ways He’s chosen to make Himself known. God reveals Himself to those who obediently seek Him, who will lay aside their own expectations and accept his revelation.
In the first section of this Psalm, verses 1-6, the psalmist says that God is inescapably revealed in the created world: “God’s glory is on tour in the skies, God-craft on exhibit across the horizon” (The Message). The created world bears constant witness to the glory and majesty of God. It’s full of wonder and mystery. The more we learn about it, the more we realize how little we really know. And this great, vast universe is dependent on God every moment for its continued existence. The creation is a window, through which we can see something of the greatness of God. Theologians call this general revelation, or natural revelation.
This revelation is constant: “Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge” (v. 2). It’s always there; the evidence is before us all the time, day or night, in all the changing of the seasons. And this revelation is inescapable: “There is 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” (vv. 3-4). No matter where we go, everywhere we turn, the creation shouts to us about God the Creator. Since the 19th century, the theories of Charles Darwin have been popular as an explanation of how this world could have come into existence without God. But there’s a growing movement in the scientific community which is dissatisfied with the explanations of Darwin and his followers. The scientists in this movement assert that this world has unmistakable evidence of intelligent design. It couldn’t have come into existence by a process of blind chance. One author on the subject says this: “The world is a mirror representing the divine life” (“Signs of Intelligence,” in Touchstone, July/August 1999, p. 84). No matter how hard we try to escape it, this world was made in such a way that it reveals its Creator. We can’t escape the fact that we are God’s creatures, and that we live in His world, a world that constantly, inescapably, declares the glory of God.
“The heavens declare the glory of God.” But they don’t tell us how to know Him, so we’d be in trouble if we only had the revelation of God that comes through His creation. I suspect that the sadhu I spoke with in 1978 would have agreed that the created world tells us something of what God is like. The created world tells us something about the glory and majesty of God; it tells us something of His infinite beauty and power. But it doesn’t tell us what we really need to know. It doesn’t tell us how we can come to know Him or how we can live lives that are pleasing to Him. And it doesn’t tell us why we feel so alienated from Him or what we can do about it. It doesn’t tell us the truth about ourselves. So the next section of the Psalm, verses 7-11, talks about God’s revelation in human language. This revelation in human language is usually called special revelation
God’s Word is perfectly suited to our needs. Listen to verses 7-11 in The Message: “The revelation of Yahweh is whole and pulls our lives together. The signposts of Yahweh are clear and point out the right road. The life-maps of Yahweh are right, showing the way to joy. The directions of Yahweh are plain and easy on the eyes. Yahweh’s reputation is twenty-four carat gold, with a lifetime guarantee. The decisions of Yahweh are accurate down to the nth degree. God’s Word is better than a diamond, better than a diamond set between emeralds. You’ll like it better than strawberries in spring, better than red, ripe strawberries. There’s more: God’s Word warns us of danger and directs us to hidden treasure. Otherwise how will we find our way? Or know when we play the fool?”
Because we are lost in the cosmos, because we’re alienated from God and don’t know how to find Him on our own, this revelation is precious beyond all description: “They are more precious than gold; they are sweeter than honey, than honey from the comb.” I read an interview with Francis Schaeffer near the end of his life and he talked about how precious the Bible was to him, how thankful he was for it. He read it all the time, prayed over it, sought to order his life in obedience to it. He said sometimes if he woke up in the night he would reach over and put his hand on the Bible on his night stand and give thanks to God for it. He spoke all the time with people who were lost in this dark world, with no sense of purpose or direction, and he was filled with gratitude to God for giving us a clear revelation of Himself.
During his first missionary term, Hudson Taylor went through a very difficult time. He was sharing a house with two families, was enduring a cold winter, and had no money. All around him, he saw Chinese people suffering as a result of the Taiping rebellion, and he was frustrated with the ineptitude of his mission society. During this time, he wrote these words to his sister: “I don’t know how it is, but I can seldom read Scripture now without tears of joy and gratitude” (Hudson Taylor’s Spiritual Secret, p. 58). When we realize our lostness in this dark world then come to see that God has spoken in ways that we can understand, His Word becomes precious to us. It doesn’t sit on our shelf, making us feel guilty because we see it there but never open it. Reading it, praying over it, meditating on it, ordering our lives in conformity with its instructions, becomes central to our lives. Reading God’s Word isn’t an irksome duty that we just have to do no matter how miserable we feel about it. God’s Word is precious, more precious than any of the other things we accumulate in our lives.
But we can’t know God merely as an object of study. Knowing the truth about God, we’re called to respond to Him in obedience by submitting our lives to His will. I know a man who’s made a hobby of reading about Bible prophecy. He’s not a Christian; he makes no pretense of being one. He doesn’t seek to order his life in obedience to God’s Word, and I’ve never heard of him being in a church (other than for a wedding or something). But he reads books about Bible prophecy, and he’s especially interested when there’s a relationship between something in prophecy and an event in the news. But it does him no good at all. He doesn’t know God, and I’ve never gotten the sense that he has even a slight interest in knowing Him.
It’s a dangerous thing to make a hobby of God’s Word. God’s Word tells us the truth about God and about ourselves, and when we see these things we’re called to respond in a personal way in obedience and faith. We can see this in the last section of this psalm, verses 12-14. The psalmist, in verse 12, recognizes his own blindness. He would have agreed with Walker Percy; we don’t know ourselves very well: “Who can discern his errors?” Or, here it is in the New Living Translation: “How can I know all the sins lurking in my heart?” But he doesn’t stop with the question. He goes on to pray, “Cleanse me from all these hidden faults.” It’s not enough just to know the truth. We need to respond to the truth, in faith and obedience. So he prays, “Because of my blindness, forgive and cleanse my hidden faults.”
But his problem, and ours, is not just blindness. We’re not only blind; we’re also weak in the face of temptation, and we’re presumptuous. We sin willfully because we presume that God is merciful and will forgive us anyway. Paul has a strong warning against the sin of presumption in Galatians 6:7: “Do not be deceived; God cannot be mocked, a man reaps what he sows.” Our tendency is to be careless and to give little thought to the kinds of seeds we're sowing. Or we consistently sow one kind of seed and expect to harvest something better. It is easy to begin thinking that because God is merciful and forgiving we don't have to worry about the consequences of our actions. We are saved by grace, so it's really not such a big deal if we indulge in little sins. It's easy to begin thinking that God's forgiveness frees us from concern about the natural consequences of our actions. It's tempting to develop the mentality that we can “get away with it” because God is merciful and forgiving. Paul reminds us that we are deceiving ourselves, and that we will, inevitably, reap what we sow. The psalmist also recognizes the deceitfulness of his own heart, so he prays: “Keep me from deliberate sins! Don’t let them control me” (NLT).
But responding to God’s Word is not only about keeping away from the wrong things. We don’t define our lives as Christians by the things we avoid. We say no to sin so that we can then go on to say yes to God’s call on our lives. The psalmist concludes his prayer with a longing that his life might be pleasing to God, in verse 14: “May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer.” He wants to be able to say, at the end of his life: “I have fought a good fight, I have finished the race, and I have remained faithful. And now the prize awaits me–the crown of righteousness that the Lord, the righteous Judge, will give me on that great day of his return. And the prize is not just for me but for all who eagerly look forward to his glorious return” (2 Timothy 4:7-8, NLT). And if we want to say that at the end of our lives, we need to be praying now, “May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer.”
Seeking God won’t help us much if we seek Him in the wrong places. It won’t help us to seek Him by enjoying the beauty and wonder of creation if, at the same time, we neglect His Word and live in disobedience to His commands. Our study of His Word won’t do us any good if we persist in our disobedience, if we fill our minds with the truth but refuse to submit to the God who reveals Himself in His Word.
St.Patrick grew up in what is now England, in a Christian home. His grandfather was a priest, and he had been taught the truth of God’s Word from an early age. But as a youth, he rejected the gospel. When he was 16, he was captured by Celtic pirates and sold as a slave in Ireland, where he worked in the wilderness, herding cattle. Living out in the elements, observing the changing seasons, he became increasingly aware of the presence of God the Creator. And he turned to Him in faith. He says “After I had arrived in Ireland, I found myself pasturing flocks daily and I prayed a number of times each day. More and more the love and fear of God came to me, and faith grew and my spirit was exercised , until I was praying up to a hundred times each day and in the night nearly as often “(quoted by George Hunter III, The Celtic way of Evangelism, p.14). Both kinds of revelation worked together. He saw the presence of God in creation, and this led him to the truth he had been taught as a child.
But it wasn’t just an abstract knowledge. He went on to cultivate a relationship with the living God. After 6 years as a slave, he escaped and returned to England, where he went into training to become a priest and then God later called him to return to Ireland to preach the gospel. Here’s the progression - it is the same one we can see in Psalm 19: He saw the glory of God proclaimed in creation, which drove him to the truth of scripture. And seeing the truth about himself and about God, he bowed before the lordship of Jesus Christ; he laid his life on the altar to be used according to God’s will. And he spent the rest of his life laying aside his own plans, seeking to live in obedience to God, who had made Himself known through His creation and through His Word.
“Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.” Scripture tells us truth in both areas, but it’s not an abstract truth that we can possess and control. It’s not ours to possess and use as we like. It tells us that we are hopelessly lost in the cosmos, that the world lies in the power of the evil one and that we are sold into his service. It tells us that our hearts are deceitful and wicked, that we are without hope and without God in this dark world, but that God, in His infinite mercy, gave His only Son to rescue us. And it calls us, in response, to cast ourselves upon His mercy and grace, to turn away from our sins and begin ordering our lives in obedience to His instructions. It calls us to spend the rest of our lives cultivating a relationship with this God who went to such lengths to rescue us from our sinful rebellion. The truth revealed in God’s Word calls us to give our lives to Him.
A good place to begin, or to begin again, is by praying verses 12-14 in Eugene Peterson’s translation, The Message: “Clean the slate, God, so we can start the day fresh! Keep me from stupid sins, from thinking I can take over your work; Then I can start this day sun-washed, scrubbed clean of the grime of sin. These are the words in my mouth; these are what I chew on and pray.” “May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer.”
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