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A brief bit of encouragement for your day from God's Word
Warm Monday. Looks like we're in for a nice reminder that it's still summer. Isn't it great? I hope you appreciate that and realizing we've still got, what, maybe another month of summer left. I do enjoy fall, but I hate to see it come too soon because, well, everybody knows what comes after fall.
Anyway, hope you had a good weekend. We're able to get to church, be encouraged by God's Word over the weekend and fellowship with God's people, if not in person, then I hope at least by live streaming and just getting that encouragement from the Word of God.
You know, we live in really some unprecedented days when it comes to access to information. Imagine that you lived in March in the year 1456. And the reason I picked that date is that's just before, well, that was the month in which Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type.
Prior to that time, access to information was incredibly difficult. You just didn't have, you didn't have a library. Well, you look behind me and you see this is, I mean, our church library, and you see several bookshelves with books on the shelves of this library.
That wasn't possible for a church in the 15th century. In fact, that period of time prior to the invention of the printing press was called the Dark Ages. And one of the reasons it was called that is due to the spiritual darkness of the times.
And a significant contributor to the spiritual darkness was the fact that the only people who had any access to a copy of the Scriptures were the clergy in the Roman Catholic Church. The average person that would be a part of the church, they never saw a Bible other than a copy that maybe, maybe their priest would open on the Lord's Day if they happened to even do that.
The priests were only the ones that had a copy of the Scriptures. And that all changed with the invention of the movable type, the invention of the printing press, I should say. So you think about how easily information is accessible in our day.
If you want to find out the details on the invention of the printing press, you open up your computer, your search engine, Bing or Google or whatever it is, and you just type in, invention of printing press.
And all of a sudden you'll get thousands and thousands of responses of pages that you could sift through to get information. That was absolutely, absolutely unheard of. You couldn't go to an encyclopedia, you couldn't go anywhere to get information.
But like I said, that all changed with the printing press. So Gutenberg invented this thing and all of a sudden now books could be published. You know how that worked, don't you? He had this on the lower part of his press, he had this area where the type was put in letter by letter, individually, for what was going to be in this book.
And of course, had to be backwards. And so he'd put that type in and then roll ink over the type, then take a piece of paper or vellum and lay it on top of that type, and then take the press, you know, wheel it down.
And the top part of that press would press the paper against the type so that the ink gets indelibly impressed upon that type. Unscrew the thing so that the press comes back up and carefully lift the page off of the type so that the ink doesn't smear and set it off to dry.
And then take another piece of vellum and put it on the type and re-ink it if necessary and go through that process again. Painfully, painfully slow from our perspective, but from Gutenberg's perspective and society's perspective at the time, that was in the 15th century what a laser printer would be in the 21st century.
This was unheard of, unprecedented ability to print. And that changed everything. That changed everything radically because within the next 60 years, Bibles were published and then they were translated into the vernacular, into the language of the people.
And more and more people got to have a copy of the scriptures in their own language, in their own hands. And as time went on, it was only like 60 years after the invention of the printing press that Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the church door in the castle of Wittenberg in Germany and the Reformation is ushered in.
So what had been known as the dark ages was transformed by the enlightenment of the publication of God's word. As people got into God's word, the light came on. Now, Psalm 19 is actually, in the scriptures, is actually a song of praise to God for enlightening man's mind.
And that psalm divides into three sections. And a couple of the things you can do to look at the psalm and see how it divides is look at the names used for God. So in the first four verses of the psalm, first six verses of the psalm, you have praise to God for his revelation of his almighty power.
Praise to God for his almighty power. So the name for God in this first section of the psalm is the name God itself, Elohim. But then that changes in the next section in verses seven through nine and following.
The name is no longer God or Elohim, but it is in your English Bible, it would be printed LORD with all caps. And that tells you that it's a reference to the name Yahweh or Jehovah, depending on how one wants to pronounce it.
And that is the covenant name, the personal covenant name of God. So the first section of this psalm, verses one through six, God confronts us by revealing to us, God confronts us with his supreme power.
And then the second section of the psalm, through his special revelation, that is God verbally revealing himself to man. The Lord confronts you with his personal power. And then the psalm closes in the last section with our response.
How should we respond to this revelation that God has given to us, to this enlightened mind that God gives to us through his revelation? So I want to take a minute this morning or this afternoon and just think about that first section of psalm 19, verses one to six.
And in these verses, we're told about the communication power of creation, that creation communicates or reveals to us the God who created all this thing. So listen to what the first few verses say. It says, the heavens declare the glory of God and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours out speech and night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words whose voice is not heard. Their voice goes out through all the earth and their words to the end of the world.
So what these couple of verses tell us is that this supreme power of God is in the first place declared universally throughout the entire world. And it does so without using any human language whatsoever.
There is no speech or language that is used by creation to communicate to man, to reveal to man, this truth. It doesn't make any sound that is recognizable by the human ear that can be interpreted or translated in the mind into speech, into some words.
Creation is making all kinds of sounds and all you have to do, like I do every morning in the summertime, most mornings in the summertime, I get up early and go out on patio with my Bible and a cup of coffee and all I hear are the sounds of creation.
I hear the birds chirping. I hear the squirrels cackling and yelling at one another. Occasionally a dog barks and so on and so forth. So there is all kinds of sound being made by creation, but I can't understand a thing those birds are saying.
Not from their speech. That's not the point of this passage. The point of the passage is that what creation does in its very existence is it shows to us the glory of God. The heavens are declaring the glory of God.
The sky above is showing, is a testimony. It's telling us about, it reveals His handiwork and all the creation does is revealing knowledge. If we will but pay attention, if we will but listen to this creation.
So His supreme power is declared and it's declared universally and then it's in the next few verses that power is illustrated in a very practical way and the passage goes on to describe what we see in the relationship between the earth and the sun.
Listen to what it says, in them, in the heavens, He, God, has set a tent for the sun which comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber, speaking of sunrise, and like a strong man runs its course with joy.
Its rising is from the end of the heavens and its circuit to the end of them and there is nothing hidden from its heat. So the psalmist isolates, in all of creation, isolates this one aspect of what God has made, the sun and the earth, and he is simply talking about our perception of how this works.
You know, again, if you get up early enough in the morning and I did today and went outside on the patio, it was about six o 'clock and the sun hadn't risen yet, it was dawning, it was light enough that I could sit out there, but I actually have a fan that has a light on it under my patio roof and so, you know, I had to turn that fan on to actually, or the light on, to actually read this morning, but it wasn't long before the sun broke over the horizon and then a couple of hours or so later, I got done with my reading and stuff and went inside and changed into some tennis shoes, walking shoes and clothes for walking and then went walking around for a couple of miles and the sun was much higher in the sky and it was a whole lot warmer too and now here we are midday and the sun has reached its halfway point or pretty close to reaching its halfway point and then tonight about 7 30 we'll look to the western sky and we'll see the sun dip behind the horizon on the western sky and we see this every day and what a testimony to God's creative power that he has provided this cycle for our planet day after day after day and you think about how critical that cycle is if the, and we know, we know from scientific study and all the rest of this stuff that the earth is rotating and so forth, but you know, God could have created the planet so that it didn't rotate and it was just stationary constantly, one side of the planet facing the sun all the time, what would happen to the other side of the planet, you see, so God in his wisdom and in his care for this planet has created the sun and the cycle of the sun in its day after day rising and setting and think about all that's necessary for life on this planet that comes from the sun, so God in creation reveals his supreme power, he declares that creation does universally and creation illustrates that divine power, that supreme power in a very practical way and yet that aspect of God's revelation is only partial, it's only partial, verse 1 says the heavens are declaring the glory of God, the sky is showing his handiwork, so the glory of the creator is revealed in creation, the glory of the creator, but the glory of the creator as savior is concealed, we need more to tell us about that and we'll come back tomorrow and pick this up again and look at the next section of Psalm 19 where we have the almighty God, the Lord revealing his personal power to us, I hope you'll be back for that, let's have a word of prayer and give thanks for the revelation that comes in creation, our Father and our God, we're thankful today that even as we experience the heat of the sun, we can in the existence of that sun, in the warmth of the sun, its effects on this planet, we can see your powerful creative work, may we glorify you in what we see, this we pray in Jesus' name, amen.
All right, well I trust you'll have a good Monday, your work week will be getting off to a good start and we'll see God's faithfulness through the course of the week, let's keep our eyes open to it, shall we?
Have a good day, God bless.