Psalms 103, 104, 113, 114, 117

Psalms 103, 104, 113, 114, 117

 

I have been blessed to see many beautiful scenes that celebrate and glorify God as Creator.  He is so creative, majestic, and made an amazing world filled with His touch.  There have been a few times in my life when I have stood in a place, totally speechless in amazement.  An old friend and I would describe these images as awe-full.  Helplessly overfilled with awe.  The writer of these psalms said it best when they describe God's perfect wisdom in His creation.  

 

It's so practical and common sense, but I love the section in Psalm 104 describing God's handy works.  God made the grass…perfect.  Cows eat the grass…we eat the cows, and so on and so on.  The trees have their purpose, the birds that fly in the air, live in the trees.  As elementary as this is, great teachers from John Piper to Charles Spurgeon dedicate complete sermons on these verses, glorifying God's sovereign and perfect plan. 

 

We see a lot of God's attributes and characteristics in these chapters.  Creator, Artist, Compassionate, Ruler, Almighty, and Father.   In Psalm 103, "As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him."  And a few verses later, " But from everlasting to everlasting, the Lord's love is with those who fear Him,"  I thought it was a little ironic that in these praise filled chapters, about God's beauty, we are still reminded to fear God.  A light bulb went on when I heard the way John Piper described what this meant.  "I think fearing God means that God is so powerful and so holy and so awesome to us that we would not dare to run away from him, but only run to him for all that he promises to be for us. So fearing God is not different from coming to the Messiah, Jesus. It's the way we come. We come reverently. We come humbly. We come without presumption that God owes us anything. We come trembling—as we saw last time, we come broken and contrite."

 

We praise the Lord like David did and I'm thankful that we can lean upon these words because they say it so much better than I ever could.  Beauty and life surrounds us, the water, the green grass, the sun and the moon, the stars.  I pray that I never get tired of it or lose the awe.  I pray that in this beauty I will fear God and run to Him.  He is good.  He is beautiful.