Church: Reformed Baptist Church of Franconia | Text: Psalm 19 | Date: January 28, 2024 | Speaker: Fred Zaspel

We continue our series on the Psalms this morning, Psalm 19. And I decided that I cannot—as much as I want to get through each Psalm in one message—I just can’t do this here. And if I tried to get through this entire Psalm today, I decided I would have to tell you ahead of time to bring a lunch. So what we’ll do is we’ll look at the first stanza.

Verses one to six, I had intended also to give something of an introduction to the psalm like I often do, pointing out the structure of it. I don’t think I have time to do that this morning either. I’ll just make a couple of mentions on that. And I think we will just focus simply on verses one to six. So I think I’ll just read that this morning and we’ll leave the remainder of the psalm for next time.

Psalm 19, you’ll notice in the superscript it is a psalm of David.

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, there are no words, whose, that is, heaven’s voice is not heard. Their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world. In them 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. 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.

Let’s bow together in prayer. Our Father, this is a well-known and a marvelous psalm, a psalm of your revelation, a psalm that tells us where we find your glory in your works and in your word. We pray that you’d give us a new appreciation for that this morning as we seek to examine and unpack what the psalmist has for us in these first six verses. Help us to see your glory in your works. We pray that you will use this, your word, to make us more mindful of that and to glorify and honor you more faithfully. We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.

This is something of a praise psalm. Verses 1 to 6, the first stanza, we have a song of praise to God for his works in creation. Verses 7 to 12, we have the praise of God for his special revelation, his scripture that is given. It’s not just a praise psalm, it’s something of a Torah psalm as well then, a wisdom psalm. It has some of those themes in it. It’s also a petition psalm that we find in the last two verses, verses 13 and 14. And so the genre of this psalm is something mixed. But we have these three stanzas: verses one to six, seven to 12, and then 11 to 14, we have this petition as well.

You’ll notice, by the way, there at the top of Psalm 20, we have what is the subscript or the postscript to Psalm 19: “To the choirmaster.” So this was intended to be sung by the people of God together. Presumably it was sung as part of the temple worship together.

Praise for God’s Glory as Displayed in the Heavens

All right, verses one to six. We have praise for God’s glory as displayed in the heavens. Verse one: “The heavens declare the glory of God and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.” So here David directs us to learn about God from his creation. Verse one is something of the thesis of the entire first stanza. Verses two through six, we’ll just unpack what we find in verse one. Verse one, the heavens declare the glory of God, the sky above proclaims his handiwork. And then verses two and following just unpack that in various ways that we’ll see briefly as we go along.

But his thesis is, verse one, what God has made says something about God himself. The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. So what is made says something about its maker. Now we’re conditioned today to look at the universe and think in terms of naturalistic development, just in terms of sheer naturalism. The universe itself, the whole cosmic order, it’s to be understood—and we’re led to think this way today—simply in naturalistic terms. What’s there is there, and you explain it in terms of what is there. It is pure naturalism.

I want to take a minute or two to talk about that. There are some obvious problems with naturalism. You may remember, those of you who are in the adult class in Genesis, in those early chapters when I taught, we took a good bit of time, and I think a few years ago as well, to talk about this problem of naturalism. But I’ll just point out two problems with it here this morning.

First of all, that naturalistic outlook leaves the question of ultimate origins unanswered. It leaves the question of ultimate origins unanswered. When we’re conditioned to think in terms of naturalism, in terms of what you see, you’re just not supposed to ask, “Where did this universe come from? Where did the stuff that makes up the universe come from?” Okay, there was a Big Bang. Okay, what banged? What is it that exploded and gave us this expanding universe? What is the explanation for the origin of the original stuff? And we can speak in terms of evolution, you can speak in terms of Big Bang, but it doesn’t answer the question of the original stuff and where it came from.

Now many of you are familiar with R.C. Sproul. He’s been gone now several years. He used to love to push this point, one of the most fundamental dictums of logic. And you know he liked to push that kind of thing, one of the most fundamental dictums of philosophical thought. And he gets your attention and then he would say it: Ex nihilo, nihil fit. And everybody sits there and says, “Oh yeah.” Well, you do that, you say it in Latin because it sounds more official, you know. And then of course you translate it. Ex nihilo, simply a phrase, “out of nothing.” Nihil, “nothing.” Fit, “happens, occurs, comes about.” Out of nothing, nothing comes. That’s one of the most fundamental dictums of logic.

Out of nothing, nothing happens. Because if you have nothing, then nothing can happen because nothing has anything to make something. And if you have something, then something caused that. But if you have nothing, it can’t do anything. Out of nothing, nothing comes. And to the point then, the origins of our universe: no one today wants to affirm the eternality of matter. Nobody wants to affirm today that the universe has always existed. That’s the whole point of the Big Bang. It exploded and now you have it expanding and all of that. So no one wants to affirm the eternity of matter or that the universe is eternal. If the universe had a beginning, then something was there to cause it because nothing comes out of nothing. If you have something, it came out of something. And so if the universe had a beginning, it had a cause. It had a maker. It didn’t arise out of nothing.

Now, the new atheists today, they’ve been around for a little more than a generation now, they have tried to answer. The new atheists, by the way, are really no different from the old atheists, except that they’re a little more sophisticated. They use, they think, science to prove that God doesn’t exist and things like that. And one of the most outspoken of the new atheists was Stephen Hawking. He was a graduate of Oxford and of Cambridge, professor at Cambridge, professor of mathematics and of cosmology. And he wrote several books, but one of the books he wrote was The Grand Design, which is an ironic title for a new atheist. The Grand Design, and there he argues that the universe created itself out of nothing.

That’s not just a by-the-way remark; that’s a central argument of his book. And his statement is—I’ll read it to you—”The universe exists because it needed to exist. And because it needed to exist, it therefore created itself.” Now I don’t know about you, I read something like that and I think, okay, Stephen Hawking is a whole lot smarter than me. “The universe exists because it needed to exist; because it needed to exist, it therefore created itself.” And he is smarter than me, but that sounds to me like nonsense. And in fact, John Lennox, who is an Oxford professor who’s turned in recent years to become a very outspoken apologist for Christianity and loves to debate these guys—Stephen Hawking is gone now, but he loved to debate these guys—he read that statement and he said, “Nonsense is nonsense even when it’s spoken by a famous scientist.” But that’s the nonsense you’re forced to embrace if you deny the existence of God.

So number one, naturalism leaves the question of ultimate origins unanswered. Number two, it ignores the obvious marks of design. Not just origins and cause, but it ignores the obvious marks of design, purposeful intent in creation. Now if you look at just about any object, you can see design in it. We’re trained not to think that way in terms of the universe itself. We’re trained to think in terms of naturalism. But if you look at anything, you can see it’s designed for a purpose, whether it’s this chair or the building or the pulpit, whatever it is.

I remember one time going into someone’s house, we were visiting, and they had on the wall a plaque. It was fascinating. It was a beautiful picture, a beautiful flower—just the face of the flower, not the stem. It was the petals and what are those other parts, the stigma and all of that, parts of the flower. And it was beautiful, bright colors. And you look at it a little more closely, and what you have is this square piece of hardwood, and then nails driven into it at varying heights. And then the heads of the nails are painted in all these colors. And it’s just a beautiful flower. You look at that and you think, “Man, somebody’s really clever.” And then you take it off the wall—and I was given permission—I took it off the wall and you look at it sideways in the varying heights of the nails. It’s a skyline of New York City. It’s fascinating. And nobody looks at something like that and says, “Isn’t that neat how that just happened?” You think, “Somebody designed that.” And you look at that and you think, “That is one clever artist.”

As most of you know, in the last year or so, I took up a hobby for when I can: woodworking. And I try to do some woodworking and I go to YouTube University and I learn there and things like that. One of the things that has just impressed me to no end is the creativity of some of these guys. They come up with these wood joints and these various creations with their wood. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it 100 times to my wife, “Why couldn’t I have been that smart? How did they come up with that?” I can do my flawed way of imitating that, but how do they come up with that? And what’s made reflects something about the maker. He’s really clever.

Or take a piece of machinery. I’m setting you up with this because I’ll come back to it in a minute. But pick a piece of machinery; take a rotary motor. You have a rotary motor, you’ve got various parts that make that up and have to make that up. You have a drive shaft, you’ve got the rotor, you’ve got a stator—that’s the steady part of the mechanism. You’ve got U-joints, you’ve got bushings, you’ve got bearings; all of that makes up this rotary motor. You look at that and say, “It’s really brilliant the way that’s been put together.” Take something as simple as a lead pencil. You’ve got a piece of wood, got some graphite down the middle, you got some paint, you got a brass ring on the top, you’ve got a rubber eraser on the top—really pretty simple thing. But it obviously has been made, designed for a purpose.

Now, Christian scholars and apologists have, in recent years, picked up on that thought of design, and they’ve gone on the offensive. Many of you have probably heard of the intelligent design movement, that they argue then that the created order evidences God. Design in the created order gives evidence of God. It’s the intelligent design movement. Some simple observations that they have done in the past—it’s gotten more sophisticated than this in recent years, but some simple observations regarding the universe itself: The sun is at just the exact right distance from the earth to sustain life. The moon is exactly the right distance from the earth to control the tides and the flow back and forth of the tides so that water stops at its proper level. The Earth’s tilt is at just the right axis so as to provide for seasons, and the seasons aren’t so extreme as to annihilate life. Earth’s atmosphere is just right. A little less oxygen, we wouldn’t be able to breathe. A little more oxygen, it’d burn up plant life. Earth’s gravity is just right. If the Earth were just a little bit smaller, the atmospheric pressure would be too small; we wouldn’t be able to breathe. If it were just a little bit bigger, it’d produce a greenhouse effect; the temperatures would rise in the summer and burn us all off. Earth’s water, that perfect scientific anomaly, expanding as it does when it freezes. And that’s a good thing it does because if it didn’t expand when it froze, it’d freeze to the bottoms of the lakes and the oceans and kill off all marine life. And you think, “Well, isn’t that lucky?”

Now you start listing all of those things together and pretty soon you start thinking, “You know, it looks like this was designed for life for us here.” It has marks of design. Now a lot of scientists have now taken that kind of idea a whole lot further and they look at the complexities of the universe, the regularities and the order of life and the universe, even down to the human cell, and they look at it all and it bears the marks of intelligent design. One of the most famous of these in the last 30 years or so has been Michael Behe, a professor of biology up here at Lehigh University. He’s written some books. In 1996, he came out with Darwin’s Black Box, which has just created a great stir in the scientific community. And Michael Behe has made—and I’m sure this is something you talk about all the time—the flagellar motor. He has made the flagellar motor popular, something like a rock star in fact, in those kinds of circles.

It’s a marvelous piece of nanotechnology within the human cell. And I’ll give you my way of explaining what he has to say in that book. This flagellar motor is a tiny machine within the cell that is nothing less than a rotary motor. That’s why I introduced that a little bit earlier. This rotary motor in the cell has a drive shaft, it has a rotor, it has the stator, it has the U-joints, it has bushings, it has the bearings. You look at pictures of it, look it up on the internet, you’ll see drawings of it and animations and pictures. It’s a fascinating thing. This is what goes on in your cell. And then on the back of this thing, it’s got a whip-like tail. And this rotor rotates at something like 100,000 RPMs—quick one way for a half second and then back the other way for another second—and enables this bacterium, this thing, to swim through the liquid in your cell in order to track down its food supply. Look at the picture; it’s a fascinating thing. And the flagellar motor is just one; there are others like that. It’s a fascinating illustration of the inner workings of the human cell.

Now it gets more complex than that. To build a system like the flagellar motor, you need 30 proteins. And he says these must be arranged and integrated in exactly the right order. But to do that then, you need what’s called a genetic code program. It’s like you have somebody programming your computer. These cells are programmed to do this. And so you’ve got the construction of the cell, you’ve got these proteins that program it to do what it does. And scientists now have been able to decipher that genetic code, and it spells out into this longest word you ever saw. Now you’d look at that thing as just a bunch of letters, but it’s actually a meaningful word spelling out this genetic code. And once you see that, you wonder: who wrote that word? Who came up with that? You have your computer, you have a program, you understand intuitively that someone programmed that thing to work the way it works. And here we have something so enormously complex. Who paid that? What made that happen?

Now, the new atheists typically have liked to mock Christians with what they call the “God of the gaps.” And what they mean by that is that when Christians come across something in nature and in science that they can’t explain, it’s a blank spot. Christians like to say, “Well, see, that must be God. You can’t understand it any other way, it must be God.” So it’s the God of the gaps. John Lennox, the professor from Oxford that I mentioned earlier, he looks at that and he says, “No, the problem is it’s not what we don’t understand. It’s what we do understand that points us to God.” And he says, “Of course, of course I reject atheism because I believe Christianity to be true. But I also reject atheism because I’m a scientist.” It points us to him.

I came across this just recently in one of the works from Nancy Pearcey in one of her books. This is a quote from the Roman orator Cicero. This is first century BC. He’s a scholar, a statesman, a lawyer, an orator—well-known name. He writes—keep in mind, it’s first century BC, he’s a pagan:

When we see something moved by machinery, like an orrery [that’s a model of the planetary system], when we see something moved by machinery, or a clock, or many other such things, we do not doubt that these contrivances are the works of reason.

And then he drew the conclusion:

When therefore we behold the whole compass of the heaven moving with revolutions of marvelous velocity, perfect regularity, how can we doubt that all of this is effected not merely by reason, but by a reason that is transcendent and divine?

Now this is fascinating because, as I say, Cicero’s a Roman pagan of the first century. I doubt he ever saw any part of the Bible. But here he is using almost biblical language. When you look at the created order, you’re forced, even though you don’t see God, you’re forced to acknowledge him.

Well, this is David in Psalm 19 and verse one. When we see the sheer vastness, complexity, the interrelatedness of the created order. You look at the heavenly bodies and their predictable orbits and their massive complexity and their vastness. You have to say, “What a maker could do that?” Now, if it weren’t for sin’s blindness, it’d be unmistakable. David says you look at this created order and you think, “What kind of God? Clearly it’s made. What kind of a God could have done this?”

Now we should notice here in Psalm 19 that David is not speaking simply in terms of God’s existence. David does not write in verse one, “The heavens proclaim the existence of God.” He says, “The heavens declare the glory of God.” The skies above with all of its vastness and its massive planets, the complexities of it all, the intricacies of it all, the regularities of movement, the predictable orbits—all of that that you see not only reveals that there’s a maker, but it says something about that maker. Who could make all of that? It’s clear that it’s been designed, it’s been put in order. What kind of a being could do that?

In fact, I love to give this quote every time I can. Einstein, who was clearly no advocate of Christianity and no champion of theism even, but he marveled at the laws of nature: the law of gravity, the law of motion, the law of thermodynamics, laws of planetary motion and so on, laws of buoyancy. He looked at these laws of nature and he marveled that all of these fixed laws can be reduced to mathematical equations. And here we have Einstein, who’s no Christian, scarcely even wanting to acknowledge that there’s a God, and he looks at all these mathematical equations that make up these scientific laws, and he writes these things—and I’m quoting him—”They point beyond the physical universe to some spirit [that’s what he calls it] to some spirit vastly superior to that of man.” Yeah, well, I guess so. And so you look at these mathematical equations that explain the law of motion, the law of gravity, the law of buoyancy. You look at these mathematical equations, you say, “Who wrote those? Who put that in place?”

Now, David in Psalm 19 is not looking as a scientist, but he’s an observer just the same. And even if it is on a simpler level, he’s stunned by what he sees. And he’s simply saying, “Who could make such a thing?” And to see the greatness of it, and the vastness of it, and the intricacies of it, and the well-orderedness of it—what does it say about the maker? What greatness, what power could explain all of this?

In fact, this is the first purpose of Genesis chapter one and the creation account. The first purpose of Genesis chapter one and the creation account is not to give you information to argue with the evolutionists. It’ll do that, but that’s not its first purpose. The first purpose of Genesis one and the creation account is to tell us about God. So you open your Bibles at the get-go, and the first thing you read: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, darkness upon the face of the deep, the spirit of God moved on the face of the water. And God said, ‘Let there be light.’ And there was light.” And you read that, unless you’re just not thinking, that’s just stunning. And then seven times through Genesis chapter one, “And God said, ‘Let it be this way.’ And it was that way. And God said, ‘Let it be this way.’ And it was that way.” And unless you’re just not thinking, this is stunning. He just speaks and the world is there and it’s all put in order. The man, the animal, the vegetation, the water—let the waters be gathered up and let the dry land appear. Let there be fish and birds in the air and let them make their way through—he only had to say it, and there it is. And you read through that in Genesis 1, in the creation account, and as I say, unless you’re just not thinking, you have to say, “This is just stunning.”

What does this say about God? Well, what it says about God, among other things, is number one, he’s transcendent. He’s above this created order; there’s a creature distinction for sure. And God came when there was nothing else, just God and nothing. And God speaks, and now there’s what is, and all that is is because God made it, and all he did was say it, and it came, and God is transcendent. He’s above and distinct from the created order. He’s not caught up in it. And once you’ve said that, you have to say, well, he’s more than transcendent, he’s eternal. Because before all of this was put in order that makes time, time, there was God, and he’s the one that made all of that that makes time. Is it bending your mind yet?

And once you say God is transcendent and God’s eternal, you have to say more. He’s more than that, he’s self-existent. Because he’s not dependent on this created order in any way, shape, or form. This is a doctrine the older theologians used to call the aseity of God that I keep reminding you about. God exists a se, “from himself.” The independence of God, the self-existence of God. You and I are dependent on all kinds of factors for our existence. When we’re born, we’re completely helpless, and all through life, we need food, we need oxygen, we need shelter, we need all kinds of factors that keep us alive. God is absolutely self-sufficient. He exists a se, from himself. God is transcendent. God is eternal, God is self-existent.

And you read the creation account and you think, oh, there’s more than that. God is omnipotent. What kind of power is this that just speaks and the worlds come into existence? As David will tell us in Psalm 33, he spoke and it was done; he commanded and it stood fast. It’s an amazing thing. And not just his power—think also of his wisdom and knowledge. What kind of wisdom, what infinite knowledge is it that placed all of this in order and wrote all of those codes and those programs and those mathematical equations? And what he did is just say, “Let it be this way,” and there it was. We also see in the created order—and Paul argues this in Acts chapter 14—we see in the created order echoes of the goodness of God as well. He provides the seasons and the rains and food and vegetation for us.

In other words, creation is revelation. It speaks; creation declares. Now it’s natural revelation; it’s not special revelation written in a book—that’ll come in the book that we have now. The created order is revelation just the same. It reveals the greatness of the God who made it. It’s as clear as day that such a vast, intricate, balanced, orderly universe was made; it was designed. And if it does all of that, then what does it say about its maker? What kind of being is this? What power? What wisdom? Well, David says, “The heavens declare the glory of God.”

It’s not too much to say, it’s not at all too much to say that the very role of science, its very reason for being, is to discover and understand what God said in Genesis 1. Genesis 1, as I mentioned, seven times over, “And God said, ‘Let there be,’ and God said, ‘Let it be this way,’ and God said, ‘Let it be this way,’ and let it,” and it was that way. And the whole role of science is to uncover and understand exactly what God said when he said all of that and put it in place. To put it another way, the scientific endeavor is merely learning to think God’s thoughts after him. And whether we look in terms of the broad expanse of the heavens or we get with a microscope and look at the human cell like I’ve mentioned, however we do it, we see marks, the thumbprint, if you will, of the maker. What a maker he is.

Well, that’s verses one to six: the heavens declare the glory of God. Now notice here, we’ve got to make sure we clarify this: there is nothing here even approaching nature worship. David is not marveling simply at the beauty and the vastness and the greatness and the majesty of creation. David is marveling from the beauty and the vastness and the greatness of creation to the greatness and the glory of God who made it. The praise doesn’t terminate on the created order; it terminates on the God who made it.

Now David is thinking here clearly in verse one and following primarily in terms of the heavenly bodies and the vastness of the universe. That’s verse one: “the heavens,” “the sky above.” He’s thinking in terms of the heavenly bodies. They declare the glory of God; they proclaim his handiwork. Verse two, this revelation is perpetual: “Day to day pours out speech, night to night it reveals knowledge.” Day and day, day after day, day after day, night after night, day and night and day and night and day and night, it’s just pouring out this knowledge of the creator. It’s continuous. It’s unrelenting. And it just screams, “What a God who made it!”

Verse four—verse two, this revelation is perpetual, continual—verse four, it’s universal: “Their voice goes out through all the earth and their words to the ends of the world.” That is, God’s self-revelation is coextensive with the created order. In all of the remotest corners of the universe, the proclamation of God’s glory remains constant. There’s no place so remote that you don’t see God declaring himself in his created order. So verse two, this revelation is perpetual. Verse four, it’s universal.

Now in between we have verse three, which is something of an irony, where he tells us this perpetual and universal declaration of God’s glory is actually silent. Verse three: “There is no speech, nor are there words, whose [that is, heaven’s] voice is not heard.” Now, it seems to be in a bit of a conflict, at least on the surface of it, with verses one, two, and four. Verse one says the created order’s declaring and proclaiming God’s glory. Verse two, their speech is being poured out. Verse four, their voice and their words go out. And yet, verse three, there are no words. There’s no voice.

Now to help with that, you might remember those of you who, like I did, grew up with the King James Version; the King James translators insert a little word “where.” “There is no voice or language where his voice is not heard.” And I don’t think that’s quite what he’s getting at. He’s saying that God is proclaiming, he’s speaking, he’s making it plain, but verse three clarifies it’s silent. There are no actual words. It’s there in the general created order for all to see. It’s self-evident, it’s a silent declaration, it’s intuitively recognized by all. So the created order speaks; it speaks with an unspoken eloquence that’s just unmistakable.

Verse two, at the end of the verse: “night to night reveals knowledge.” That is, it’s understood, it’s perceived, it’s understandable, and it’s understood. Now, atheists may deny it. Of course they can—they do. But in denying it, they’re simply denying something they previously knew. It’s not like the atheist had no idea of this God thing, and no idea of it, and somebody came and introduced him to this idea of God, and then he rejects it. He’s rejecting something that’s intuitive and that’s recognized. And that’s why back in Psalm 14, you remember, David can say, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.'” It doesn’t say the fool thinks in his heart, “There is no God.” He knows better. He doesn’t think in his heart, “There is no God.” He says in his heart, “There is no God, there is no God, there is no God,” but he knows better, and that’s what makes him such a fool. Psalm 19 verses 1 to 3 here tells us the created order screams of God and his glory in such a way that it just can’t be missed.

Now, our time is running. I don’t have time to go there, but you’re familiar with Romans chapter 1. In Romans chapter 1, the Apostle Paul expands on Psalm 19 in these opening verses. And there Paul tells us that the knowledge of God is unavoidably obvious. It’s inexpungible. I’ll read it for you, Romans 1:18 and following:

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made.

There is in the heart of every man an intuitive recognition of God. Paul uses the word “knowledge.” There’s a knowledge of God in the heart of every man intuitively. And if it weren’t for the natural rebellion of the human heart suppressing that truth, it would be unmistakable. So Paul says in verse 21, they know God, but they refuse to honor him as God. Paul argues there, as you know, that the sinfulness of humanity is not carried out in ignorance. We know better. Humanity’s problem is not ignorance. Humanity’s problem is rebellion against what has been revealed already.

So verse 20 here in Romans 1: God’s self-revelation in the created order is so plain that it renders every man without excuse. God’s self-revelation in the created order does not declare the gospel, but it does declare enough about God to render every man responsible. The display of God’s power is universal, it’s perpetual, and in fact, it’s recognized by everyone. No one can say, “I didn’t know.” There’s a God above. He’s displayed his glory for everyone to see. He is to be worshiped accordingly in reverence and in submission and in obedience.

And so back to Psalm 19. Verses one to four, God’s self-revelation is universal. It’s perpetual. It’s in fact understood. And we don’t have time to unpack this, but verses four, the end of verse four through verse six, he expands in metaphorical terms: the sun bursting its way into every nook and cranny of the earth. It does so so boldly. It’s like a young man running out to his wedding or an athlete ready to run a race. It just conquers everywhere it goes. And he argues in these verses that God has not left himself without witness. He proclaims his majesty universally for everyone to see. It’s without words, but it is perpetual, it’s universal, and in fact, it’s recognized by all.

And yet, as Romans 1 tells us, God is not worshiped universally as he ought to be. Romans 1 tells us that because of the wickedness of our hearts, man has suppressed the truth. And that’s why the following chapters, Romans 3 and following, go on to explain at length God’s gracious act of restoration, justification in Christ. We get to Romans chapter 10. If you’d like, take a moment there, we’ll look there just quickly, Romans chapter 10. It’s a familiar passage. Paul has just argued this great doctrine of justification by faith. In chapter nine, he takes up the question then, what about Israel? Great promises have been made to Israel. What’s happened? Has God broken his promise? And he explains that through chapter nine in various kinds of ways.

And he gets to chapter 10, and he’s dealing here still with the problem of Israel’s failure. In verses one and following, he argues their problem is not ignorance. Their problem is they have refused Christ. They’ve gone about trying to establish their own righteousness, and they’ve stumbled over the answer to their problem, and they’ve rejected Christ, and that’s why they have missed out on the promises so far. Verses 8 and following then, he argues of the necessity of the gospel mission. People can’t believe if they don’t hear the message; we’ve got to get this message out. And then verses 18 and following, here Paul speaks with a bit of hyperbole. Verse 18, he tells us the whole world has heard the message. Well, he cites Psalm 19, verse four: “Their voice has gone out to all the earth and their words to the end of the world.”

Just as God’s self-revelation in nature is universal, so the proclamation of the gospel is universal also. Now, there is some hyperbole in that. The gospel at this point has not yet gone to the ends of the world, but that is exactly the purpose of this age that God has stated. Jesus told us that. This message of the kingdom will be proclaimed to all the world as a testimony to all the nations, and then the end will come. And that’s why the prophets could foresee a day when the knowledge of the Lord will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. What Paul tells us here is that wherever the sun shines, the gospel will prevail also. The sun, with its universal, perpetual testimony to the glory of God, anticipates the gospel, which one day will fill every corner of the world as well. This world will not always be marked by the rebellion that marks it today, but just as the sun shines in every nook and cranny of the world, so the gospel will prevail as well. And one day, the praises of Jesus will sound from every corner of the earth, and the triumph of the gospel will be as universal as that of the sun. What Paul tells us here in Psalm 19, there is this general revelation from God. It anticipates a special revelation to come. And in fact, he will tell us about that in the next stanza, verses seven and following. We’ll see that next time. Let’s bow together for prayer.