The underlying truths of the psalm, how that informs our considerations as we look to the reading of God’s Word. If you join with me in prayer, Father, we do thank you and bless you that you have given us your word preserved from one generation to the next. And Father, as we come before you today with questions of our generation, we ask then that you would continue to speak your eternal truths which do not change to those things which trouble us this day. And, Lord God, that you would continue through your word to change us into the image and the likeness of our Savior Jesus. We bless you for the light that you have shown to us.
We praise you for your goodness. We adore you, Lord God, for the kindness that we have received from your hand and all of this we offer before you through our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. Beginning in verse one, praise the Lord. I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart in the company of the upright in the congregation.
Great are the works of the Lord, studied by all who delight in them. Full of splendor and majesty is his work, and his righteousness endures forever. He has caused his wondrous works to be remembered. The Lord is gracious and merciful. He.
He provides food for those who fear him. He remembers his covenant forever. He has shown his people the power of his works in giving them the inheritance of the nations. The works of his hands are faithful and just. All his precepts are trustworthy.
They are established forever and ever to be performed with faithfulness and uprightness. He sent redemption to his people. He has commanded his covenant forever. Holy and awesome is his name. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
All those who practice it have good understanding. His praise endures forever. The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
In 1874, Psalm 111:2 was carved into the entry of the hallway of the newly built Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, Cambridge Professor James Maxwell was the founder of the laboratory. He’s considered one of the fathers of modern physics. Maxwell was a devout Christian and a Presbyterian elder. He’s often listed behind Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein as the third greatest physicist of all time. Maxwell wanted those words from the verse carved into the great oak doors going into the building, though in Latin it read, the works of Lord are great sought out of all of them that have pleasure therein.
And when the new lab was constructed 100 years later, in 1973, a student suggested that the phrase be put above the new entrance doors, and this time in English, surprising to everyone, it was agreed upon with no dispute. They’re now on their third laboratory. It was finished this year, and as far as I know, they’re not keeping the tradition going. But it’s an appropriate inscription for a building that is concerned with researching and exploring the wonders of the cosmos. For there is no conflict between our faith in God and our exploring his creation through science.
Yet there is conflict between our faith and a view of science that precludes it rules out any possibility of God. A belief that says there is nothing beyond nature. All that is real is what I can observe. A belief that has removed God from the field of inquiry. And yet the Lord our God has made the heavens and the earth.
And we are to take delight in studying his great works, his glorious character. And that’s what Psalm 111 celebrates. The Psalm is an acrostic psalm, which means each line is the first letter in the Hebrew Alphabet falling in succession. And we see the repetition of God’s works highlighted here. Verse 2, the great works of the Lord, verse 3, splendid works, verse 4, his wondrous works, verse 6, power of his works, verse 7, the works of his hand.
These great works include his creation and his great deeds in the history of his people. Both of these can be experienced by those who take pleasure in Him. We consider then this morning, the world around us, God’s creation as well as God himself. God our Creator. Looking first, then at the creation, the psalmist begins and ends with praise to God in verses 1, verse 10.
There’s no separation between his contemplation of creation and who God is. It’s this very idea, though, that is disputed. Faith can get separated from reason. Faith is relegated to the domain of religion and reason is given to the domain of science. At one time theology was actually considered and referred to as the queen of the sciences.
Now it’s been relegated to sort of a redhead stepchild status by many.
For you who are a bit older, you have noticed there has been a shift in sort of the cultural mindset over the last 30 years. If you are 50 and above, you can recall that Christian apologists, those defending the faith, were often right defending the supernatural as well as miracles. And today most people have no problem believing in supernatural things. Certainly there are still hardcore atheists out there, and it’s a prevailing view in the hard sciences. But most people readily talk about ideas of spirit and soul.
The problem is that people separate these internal spiritual ideas from the so called external facts of science. And yet what is often assumed as a scientific fact is really just a hidden religious belief. An atheist viewpoint is still a religious viewpoint.
One has to make assumptions that are completely unprovable for that to work, to be able to say that only that which is observable is true, that is not actually observable. The same line of thinking is there are absolutely no absolutes. It’s the same idea. This is a personal commitment and not a fact. Two great Christian astronomers, Nicolaus Copernicus and Johannes Kepler, were convinced of their scientific pursuits, which led to revolutionary changes in astronomy because, as Copernicus stated, the universe has been made for us by a supremely good and orderly creator.
It was Kepler who discovered that planets travel in ellipses. And he was convinced that God had a master plan when he created this orderly, beautiful and mathematically perfect world. His pursuit for the understanding that he gained was a pursuit of knowing God through God’s creation. A clear echo of our psalmist who declares in verse two, Great are the works of the Lord, studied by all who delight in them. Full of splendor and majesty is his works.
His righteousness endures forever. He has caused his wondrous works to be remembered. The Lord is gracious and merciful, that word to study in verse two, to seek out, to ponder. That’s not a dry and merely academic study. But it is a delight, a pleasure in the Lord’s works, because in them we see the nature of God himself.
But of course, someone might object. He says, your faith is messing up your objective view of science or your biases are getting in your way. Appreciate Jack Collins. He’s retired professor at Covenant Seminary. He also holds degrees in a master’s in computer science and systems engineering from mit.
He put it this way, when it comes to faith, no sound Christian would really think that the intellectual content of his or her faith is separated from their relational commitment to God. And what he means is that our heart’s disposition, our loyalties, our likes, our dislikes, all play a part in our thinking and in our knowing. Knowing is never just the facts and logic. Knowing includes our social relationship. Psychology.
Knowing always is relational. We see that at work in verses 7 and 8. The works of his hands are faithful and just. His precepts are trustworthy. They are established forever and ever to be performed with faithfulness and uprightness.
It’s relational. It is this belief that moved Copernicus, Kepler, Maxwell and a host of other great Christian scientists to pursue knowledge of the world, to pursue an orderly and systematic research of creation.
Let’s compare that with well known atheist Bertrand Russell. He’s a famous British philosopher mathematician and he wrote that we must build our lives upon the firm foundation of unyielding despair. Because for Russell, there’s no God. Humanity must be willing to stare, as he said, into the great abyss of nothingness, of meaningless, with dignity and bravado. Where does that belief come from?
Why, why not just throw the covers of your head and shake and cry in fear? Where’s the stoicism? Where’s the bravado? That’s a belief that he brings in to his very closed system. You see, you don’t bend down and look through a microscope and then come up and say, wow, there’s no God found here.
You bring that belief with you before you ever look through the lens. How different and honest the psalmist. The works of God’s hands are faithful and just. His precepts are trustworthy. Some of you might know the name Francis Crick.
He was one of the leading early pioneers of DNA. And he said that there’s natural selection, that’s all there is. And he would write natural selection is motivated by chance events. It’s not pre programmed but is driven by chance events. Well that’s not science, that’s a religious viewpoint.
And just because science studies natural causes does not mean that there are no other causes that exist. What is really telling about many of these atheists, these religious naturalists, is they cannot help but to personalize their beliefs. They scoff at our psalmist talking personally of his God or his religious claims, his religious bias. Yet they use the same personal language talking about their positions. Francis Crick will speak of nature as being clever, as thinking he refers to as a she and not an it.
Personal statements about a supposed impersonal idea. Others speak of nature or macroevolution as granting us and equipping us, designing us. They can’t help but use these personal modifiers even though they’re trying to say there’s nothing personal there. That’s really intellectually dishonest.
Now I’m using that word evolution as a religious belief that only the natural world exists. Time + Chance + Material is all that there is. I’m aware that you can use that word in different ways. Often where there’s a lot of confusion comes from those who believe science has somehow disproved the basic beliefs of Christianity. And that word can get used in different ways by different people.
And it’s important to recognize that. Here’s a statement, put it in your bulletin from Christian philosopher Alvin Planikna. Science doesn’t address some of the topics which we most need. Enlightenment, religion, politics, morals, a Scientist pontificating on matters outside her field is no better than anyone else pontificating on matters outside her field. Now, this is also true of Christians.
It’s true of everybody. So many atheists and agnostics end up making a whole lot of philosophical theological statements that are way out of their depths. In the New York Times review, fellow atheist Thomas Nagel, he actually spoke about this in his review of another atheist, Christopher Hitchens. And he took up the task for doing this very thing of bringing and importing in all these philosophical theological ideas into his system that things that he actually knew very little about.
But this applies to pastors, too. My field is the Bible theology. It’s not science. I know there are a great many Christians who have differing understandings of how the world that God makes, how it works. Some hold to young earth, some to an old earth, some hold to a global flood, others to a local one, both believing in the inerrancy of Scripture.
There are differing views held by very good people. And we need to be very careful how easy it is to pontificate in areas where we’re not experts.
Fifteen minutes of watching something on YouTube doesn’t exactly qualify.
We throw out terms like liberal and conservative. There’s no charity, no humility towards one another. And we see anyone who differs with us. We can say, on the one hand, things like, they’re soft on Scripture, they’re being influenced by the world, or on the other, or they’re just naive, they’re superficial. Not every difference is a slippery slope, and these issues of creation are certainly important.
But there needs to be a great deal of humility that’s required in these conversations of knowing when you’ve left your lane and you’re in an area where you’re really not an expert. To be able to have that type of charity towards others who may or may not know more than you. That is so profoundly lost. And I can tell you as Christians, we should be at the forefront of that. There ought to be a great humility in our awareness because we understand the greatness of our God and we just scratch the surface of our knowledge of who he is.
But we do have true knowledge of who our God is, not simply through what’s created, but through what he has revealed to us. And we see in our psalm how readily the psalmist connects God’s creation to his Creator in praise and in worship.
Verse one, Praise the Lord. I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart in the company of the upright in the congregation. Verse one is deeply personal as cor Corporate. The individual knows that his faith is nurtured in the life of the congregation. The congregation draws upon the faith and the piety of the individual.
Those should should interwork and be interlaced. Knowing God enables us to know the world around us. It is a commitment to the Lord. With the psalmist, we must have verse 2 paired with verse 10. Great are the works of Lord, studied by all who delight in them.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, that relational connection. All those who practice have good understanding. His praise endures forever. If we do not keep these together, we will become like those in Romans 1, where Paul says, professing to be wise, they become fools. Paul writes there, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.
For since the creation of the world, God’s invisible qualities, his eternal power, divine nature, have been clearly seen being understood from what he has made. So that people are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to Him. But their thinking became futile and their foolishness, their hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools.
That’s the problem. We separate those out.
Thomas Nagel, again, he was a New York NYU philosopher and teacher of law. He understood this idea very well. He’s very intellectually honest. In reviewing one of Alvin Planting, this Christian author, he wisely said, he says, from planting this point of view, by contrast, I suffer from a kind of spiritual blindness from which I am unwilling to be cured. And he recognized that.
He understood the valid arguments that Christianity brings up. But in the end, he simply does not believe them, even while acknowledging that his belief system has holes in it that he can’t account for. That’s an intellectual honesty that very few have. He also wrote frequently about the absurdity of life. We see that again, Bertrand Russell with the meaninglessness, staring into the great abyss with great bravado.
See, the difference? For the psalmist is clearly seen in the personal nature of his commitment. Life is not absurd because a faithful and righteous God has made it. He commends the Lord not just for his great works out there, but his personal works for God’s people. Verse 5.
He, God provides food for those who fear him. He remembers his covenant forever. He has shown his people the power of his works in giving them the inheritance of the nations. He sent redemption to his people. He has commanded his covenant forever.
Holy and awesome is his name. God’s redemption is the very foundation of his delight. It’s not cold and abstract, not reasoning, separated from his relationship to God. The great reality, great fulfillment of this psalm is found in the Lord’s personal communication, his action that he has with his people. And ultimately we see this psalm fulfilled truly and fully in Jesus.
Look at verse 9. God sent redemption to his people. He has commanded his covenant forever that is fulfilled in the personal work of Christ.
See, a rebellious man looks up and he wants the stars to spell out his name. Prove you exist. Prove yourself to me. And a great God has done something far greater than spelling with the stars. He’s entered into his creation as one of us.
Jesus said, when you see me, you see the Father. Look at verse 5. He provides food for those who fear Him. In Jesus we have the true bread of heaven for six. He has shown his people the power of his works.
And in Jesus we have the awesome display of God’s power as he comes perfect personally to restore a broken creation, redeemed sinners. We have all of that at our disposal. And this ought to motivate us in our thinking, in our research, in our looking out at the broader world around us to see the connections, to see with great delight how the Lord has brought all these threads together, expecting that a good and righteous God has made things to follow a good and orderly pattern. Not random, not chance. It speaks of who he is and more than that, for us who are walking according to his special revelation, it gives a greater light to that general revelation.
Those are wedded together. And as I said, this should fill us with not only a great joy, but certainly a great humility.
We’re not here to argue and prove we’re right as an end goal.
If it’s about winning an argument, you’ve missed it. It’s about communicating the greatness and the grandeur of your God who has redeemed you.
That those who do not know, who have not seen the glory of the light of Christ Jesus, would have that presented to them, that they too would be able to know that it is Jesus who has redeemed them, that he is the absolute perfection of God, visible.
We don’t have to run from what is called biases. Everybody has them. There are no pure facts out there. Everything is interpreted.
And in light of that, we see the world around us with the revelation of God wedded together in a way that makes sense. And when we struggle with doubts, when we struggle with areas that we’re not sure of over here, the clear ones we know over here enable us to look further into the things we don’t Know with a joy and expectation of seeing the wonder around us, that God has put us here for his delight, for his purposes, for his glory. And we’re able to communicate that we don’t have to hide, we don’t have to run away. Our answers make sense to the world around us.
And as all things, as finite creatures, we come to the limit of our knowledge and we simply have to come to there and bow down and worship a good, great and magnificent God. Not claiming to know every answer, knowing that we have an eternity to mine out the vastness of God’s creation of who he is. There should be a thrill in our heart along with a fear of reverence towards him in the pursuit of knowledge in Christ, knowledge of creation. And I encourage you to bring that joy, to bring that curiosity, to bring that solidity of faith as we see here. This with the psalmist everywhere, just chuck through it undergirds everything that he does.
It should undergird everything that we do, stepping boldly into those areas, Knowing then too that we don’t know it all. That we can receive truth and understanding even from those who do not profess faith because God has given them insight into his creation.
Praising God for the discoveries that have been made, even with the limitations that we are plagued with as fallen, sinful human beings.
That we would delight in the works of the Lord, that we would study them, that we would see who he is, who he has made us to be, how he is bringing all things together under the banner of His Son, in perfect fulfillment. And here we are, poised in this time, in this place for his purposes, armed and giving these truths as a light and a joy to the world. Pray with me, Father, as we come before you, we just want to say thank you. We are fearfully and wonderfully made. You have created everything around us, Father, and it just reflects your character, your goodness.
And Lord, we would also ask where we have failed to put these together, Lord, where we have turned away from your words of truth, where our hearts have been darkened. We ask that you would forgive us and, Lord, that you would continue to reveal the light and the glory of Jesus Christ given to us in the Gospel, the good news. And Father, that you would continue to equip us as the body of Christ to engage this world, Father, in a way that shows the love, the humility and the joy that is ours through your Son, Jesus, in whose name we now pray. Amen.
Discaimer: This sermon text was generated by an automated transcription service.