Gateway Church Sermons
Ashley Road Site | 21st July 2024 | Richard Stamp | Psalm 104
'Even the natural world, even the waters.' These verses are meant to remind us that he is fundamentally tied up and deeply involved with what he has made. The creation order reflects his glory, it reflects his nature. Then we see in verses 10 to 30 how the Lord produces and provides every natural resource to sustain us and to sustain life. Verse 10 he makes springs pour out water. And verse 11 he does that to provide for the beasts and for the birds. Verse 14 he makes the grass grow for the cattle and plants for people to cultivate, bringing forward food from the earth. When we think about the sovereignty of God who did these things in our lives, this is useful imagery. The sovereignty of God means that he is fully in control of events in the world and in your life. He has provided sun and gravity and rain so that plants grow, food springs up from the ground and sovereignty means that as he governs over creation, he sustains all this stuff by his power. Nothing happens without his say so and his authority, no grass grows, no bird flies. No thing happens to you and I unless God allows it within the framework of his created order and all of it is purposeful. It serves to do you good in some way and to bring glory to him. And that's why we get verses 31 to 35 to conclude this arm. The response of the psalmist to all these things. Verse 33 I will sing to the Lord all my life. I will sing praise to my God as long as I live. Praise the Lord my soul. Praise the Lord. Next time you see a sunset, next time you feel the warmth of the sun on your face, next time it rains so that plants and grass can grow. Next time you see the wild horses running through the new forest, think about the God who has produced and provided. And the God who has given it to you and I to enjoy, to lie on beaches and to stare at mountains and to eat tasty food from trees that grow in soil that he has produced from rain and that he sends and consider his glory in these things and give thanks. They should stir us to thanksgiving and wander. Let's consider this a bit more. There's four things in the psalm that I want to highlight this morning. We're going to cover a lot of ground and we're going to think about deep space and we're going to think about the deep seas and we're going to think about pigs. Height, depth and land and all that God has made and what we might learn about him from these things, things that might cause wonder and gratitude and praise to rise up in us. The first thing I want us to see and this is obvious, is that God is great. Hebrews 11 verse 3 is a profound statement of faith. It's utterly controversial in our secular age and it's outrageous as a claim unless you know God and what he's like. But it's been a transformative verse for me over the years. It says Hebrews 11-3, "By faith we understand that the universe was created at God's command." The writer to the Hebrews is writing to Jews in various places who were facing persecution for following Jesus. The whole book of Hebrews is essentially an encouragement to hold fast to Christ, to not return to the old ways of Judaism, to live by faith in Jesus and not by what you did or didn't do under the constraints of the law of Moses. It's one long letter to exercise and to live by faith in Christ and probably the most famous passage in the Bible about the nature of faith. Hebrews 11, the writer starts by establishing the baseline facets of what it means to understand that we live in a world created and governed over by the God in whom all things are possible. By faith we understand that the universe was created at God's command. If you get that into you, if you truly believe that, the rest just kind of falls into place. If God created the universe, if God creates stars and galaxies and rainfall and grass and cattle and birds and humans, if God creates all that we see, then is there anything that He cannot do, often marvel, chuckle sometimes at my own lack of faith in situations. A few days ago, as I was preparing the sermon, I was stressing about paying a household bill. In the past few days, I felt stressed about money, about my daughter schooling, about the health of some of the people in this church, about all sorts of things, and I know we all do it. Gateway. He made the sun. He breathed out the Milky Way. The Andromeda galaxy breathed out, spoken into creation. Listen to what he says to Job and his mates, who are also sweating the small stuff in their lives. God speaks out of a storm and says to them, "Where were you when I laid the earth foundations? Tell me if you understand." Who marked off its dimensions, surely you know, who stretched a measuring line across it, who laid its cornerstone while the listen to this morning stars sang together and the angels shouted for joy. Gateway he made the sun. He made the stars. He made the galaxies. The stars, according to this, make a joyful noise as they reverberate and resonate in deep space. All of creation is made by him. It speaks of him. It points to his glory and he is very pleased with it all. In amongst the 200 billion or so known galaxies, there are many more that are unknown as yet is our sun, which is a relatively small star in the known universe. The sun is about 100 times bigger than the earth. The sun loses about 6 million tons of mass every second. The sun loses the equivalent of 1 million African ball elephants every second, and it doesn't even make a dent, breathed out, created and sustained by God. To say that the God who created it all is great, doesn't really cover it, but it's the best language we've got in English. I come in here every week and raise my hands and sing songs like, "Oh my Lord my God, when I am an awesome wonder, consider all the works that I have made. I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder, I power throughout the universe displayed, and then I can go straight home and get the faith knocks straight out of me by how I'm going to afford to pay for new tires on my car or something. We all do this. It's human, but we would do well to remember that we live in the grace and the favor of a father who calls you and I, son and daughter, and who is great over all creation and over all provision." He spoke out billions of galaxies, all the stars. By faith, Hebrews 11-3 we believe this, and he created hummingbirds and peacocks and ants, the snailfish that lives five miles under the sea, all for his pleasure, all for his glory and all for us to enjoy. He made pigs gateway. He tells us something about himself through pigs, we're going to come back to that in a minute. How God is great, 1 million African bull elephants per second, 200 billion galaxies. Antares is a giant, is a red giant superstar, is a red super giant star. We're still in the Milky Way at the moment, by the way, we haven't even left the neighborhood. Antares is 910 million times the size of the earth. Most people haven't even heard of Antares, but it'll be up there tonight offering response to all the people who say God can't possibly do that or know that or fix that or provide for that. The Beatles, Oasis, the builders of the Titanic, they all say that they were bigger and more important than God. Antares bigs to differ. He can take care of your utility bills, he can take care of your relationships, he can take care of your health, he can take care of wars and skirmishes around the world. By faith, we understand that the universe was created at God's command. How great is our God? Next time we find ourselves facing financial hardship or stress or mountains that look unmovable or financial or emotional or relational challenges, consider the greatness, the vastness, the power and the glory and the majesty and the might of our great big God and join with the prophet Jeremiah one day as he looked up to the skies and he said, "Ah, sovereign Lord, you have made the heavens and the earth by your great power and your outstretched arm." Everything is too hard for you. Gateway our God is great. By faith we understand that he created the universe out of his command and nothing, nothing in your life or otherwise is too hard for him. The second thing I want us to see is that God is kind. My good friend Paul came to faith sitting on a grassy hill one day, just asking himself if he looked up at the sky, why things are beautiful. There's just no reason in a blind universe that is sprung up by itself for things to be beautiful. Things should be functional. There's no reason for a peacock to have bright turquoise and green feathers or for rainbows to stream color or for apples to taste nice. Evolutionary biologists will offer all sorts of theories, but that's all they are, they're just theories. A much more believable theory of evolution if you ask me would be to have everything in the world just grey and tasteless, but with just enough nutrients to sustain us and to give us just enough energy to procreate. But that's not what God has done. When you look at the creature, the created thing, you will do well to look at the creator to understand it. My kids just kind of look like Vicks and I, they behave quite similarly to us. So when you meet them, you should kind of understand something about us. That's how created things work, but the fact that we don't just live in a grayscale world with tasteless nutrients speaks of the creative kindness of our God. He creates beautiful things. That's significant to think about when you consider that he created us in his beautiful image, to rule over his beautiful world, and to enjoy it and to fill it up with more beautiful image bearers, calling people into his family and fully express and bear his image in which they were created. And he calls us, all of us, to imitate his creativity with our own as we stitch and weave and shovel and garden and build and paint and bring beauty and order out of chaos and blankness and darkness. That's why creativity in our own lives is important and has meaning. Our creativity images and reflects the God of creativity. That's what God did in the creation account in Genesis 1. He took the raw materials of the universe and brought order out of chaos. He brought beauty out of formless darkness. And then he said, here you go, this is yours now. Go and complete the work, call in other image bearers and make dark and formless situations orderly and beautiful. He didn't have to create a physical world, didn't have to do that. He just made a spiritual one, but such is the deep joy and satisfaction and love within the triune God that it just bubbles up and pours out and pours over into physical creation. A God of perfect joy and love and goodness cannot help but express these things as he creates a physical world. When I think about why I had my own kids, sorry girls, it wasn't a logical reason. If I can't actually think of logical reasons, I have kids. I don't know anyone who looks at their budget and says, I want to spend a whole lot more money and I want to have a whole lot more sleep this nights and I want to spend the rest of my life worried about another human being. It's not a matter of logic, it's desire. It's a deep love that spills over into wanting to create and share life with another and to demonstrate kindness and love and provision for that baby and to grow with them and to see the world, help them to see the world through your eyes and to hand over one day all that is yours so that they can enjoy it too and be grateful to you for life and provision. And that's how it is without God and us. And so rather than grayscale nutrient pills, God gives us bread, which is from the earth and it's tasty and you can chew it and you can spread honey on it, which comes from the miracle of bees, the God who doesn't even have a stomach conceived of honey that is rich and nutritious and that drips down the throat and coats your tongue in sweetness. He made that for us, honey that is eternally sweet. If you dig up honey from an ancient Egyptian tomb this afternoon, that honey will still be good, it never goes off, you can spread it on your toast, that's what he makes and that's what he's given us and it just speaks of his eternal sweetness and his provision for his children. He gives us bread from the earth and tasty wine from the vine and he says, look, eat and drink and feast on this. And as you do, think of my son. This bread is like his body that hung on the cross for you. The wine speaks of sacrifice, blood spilled for you, so that you can enjoy me forever. In Genesis 1, verse 2, there is a Hebrew phrase, Tohu Wabohu, if you join us on the advance theology course in September, we talk about this a lot. Tohu Wabohu describes the condition of the earth just before the creation of light. It was formless and it was void, chaotic and dark. It was meaningless. And then God spoke and creation happened. He spoke and light came streaming from his mouth at 300 million meters per second and in the first three episodes of creation, he forms what is formless. Have a look at this, day one, light and darkness, day two, sky and sea, day three, land. And then in the next three days, he takes what he has formed and he fills it up. Day four, sun and moon in the sky. Day five, birds and fish in the seas and the air. Day six, man and woman and animal. He forms and then he fills. That's what he's always done. So he creates the sky and he puts the moon in it and he forms Australia and he puts eucalyptus into it and he places man and woman into this garden that he's formed. And as he forms man and woman out of the dust, he fills us with his breath of life, with his image, with his spirit. He fills us and he didn't have to do it. He was perfectly okay without us. He didn't need to create mankind. He didn't need to create honey or sunsets or blue whales or lakes. He did it because he is a god of love and his love overflows to creative kindness. He is kind so he provides for what he has made. He formed you and I in his image and then he filled us with his spirit so that we can have our eyes opened and we can see him and we can enjoy him. And because he's a good father who does good things, he gives you honey, gives you bread, gives you wine, gives you flowers and he says, "Consider these flowers. See how they grow. They do not labor or spin. They're not stressed out about how they're going to provide for themselves. Yet I tell you that not even the glorious Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God closed the grass of the field which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you? He forms and he fills. He loves and he creates and he provides for all that he has made and he has filled you and I with all that we need to see him, to love him and to go on loving him. Look around at the created world. It just oozes his kindness to us. Third thing, God invites us to enjoy what he is doing. I've made this point already today but what we should see in creation is that God makes us, makes a beautiful world and then he invites us to share in who he is and what he is doing through it all. The Bible teaches us that he chose us before the foundations of the earth and then he did something about it, he knitted us together in our mother's womb and that he invites us in to relationship with him. He imagined us and he spoke and he created us into life and then he invited us into life with him and partnership with his creative purposes in the earth. We see this right at the start. He makes the birds and the animals and he tells Adam to name them all and he tells them to enjoy creation, eat of the land, make stuff, enjoy the trees, eat what grows on them, create new cities and homes and gardens, continue the outline of my creative work already. Enjoy it as I enjoy you. God enjoys what he makes and he invites us to enjoy it with him. It's his gift to us. Look at what it says in today's Psalm verse 25 and 26. I spent a lot of time scratching my head about this one this week. There is the sea, vast and spacious, there the ships go to and fro and Leviathan which you formed to frolic there. Most scholars believe that Leviathan was an ancient world term for a whale. Think about what the Psalm is telling us. God made the sea, he formed it and then he filled it, not with grayscale nutrient pills but with blue whales, why, to frolic, he creates blue whales to play. He forms the universe and then he fills it with beauty for us to enjoy and create and play and so we should, we should enjoy the things of the earth. Next time you walk past some natural wood touch it, smell it, smell the sweetness of a piece of freshly cut oak, it's one of my favorite smells. If you're buying a desk, if you can afford to, buy a natural wood one rather than a pre-packaged chipboard one so that when you're working from it from home you can look at the grain in the wood and you can feel it and you can enjoy how it looks and smells and you can think of God who made it. Parents next time you're taking your kids to soft play, take them to a field instead. I've got nothing against soft play, in fact that's not true, one of my girls once vomited in a soft-played ball pit, traumatised me and everyone else there which makes my point even more valid, they're evil. Go and roll down a hill and smell the grass and observe the wonder and the beauty and the care of God in ladybirds and dragonflies. Stay away from the ball pits they're covered in vomit. Final thing, I want to talk to you for a moment about pigs. Now I realise that pigs is an unusual way to end a sermon, especially given how pigs are described in the Bible, but they too are a creation of God and should tell us something. As you probably know, one of the major dietary prohibitions of the Old Testament is that we weren't supposed to eat pigs as they were considered unclean and yet under the covenants of grace that followed Jesus' death on the cross which fulfilled all the Old Testament laws, pigs have also now become one of the tastiest foods that we can eat. And the book I talked about this is Andrew Wilson helps to make this point quite well I think in quite a humorous way. He says surely the smell of sizzling bacon is the most delicious aroma there is with apologies to fresh bread and coffee and baked cookies. He says bizarrely, if you were to create a smell spectrum from the vilest stench to one of the most enticing aromas, pigs would find themselves on both sides of it, which I think is quite funny. The question he asks is how can something that smells so bad when it is alive, smell so good when it isn't? How can death transform something from filthy and untouchable to aromatic and delightful? Hold that thought. Because this is actually the point of the gospel. The law of Moses, pigs were considered completely unclean, off-limits and untouchable, and in a number of places in both the Old and the New Testament, pigs and other unclean animals are associated one way or another with Gentiles, non-Jews, people outside of the people of God, until death, in this case the death of Jesus, opened up the way for all people of all backgrounds to come to the Father, Jew and Gentile. Britt, Nigerian, Zambian, Brazilian, South African, Australian, all of us, all of us that he is filled up into the world can now come to him as one new person in Christ and no relationship with him and be in him and know his salvation. Death has taken away what was once stinky and untouchable, us, and made us an aromatic and delightful gift by the grace of God. He has removed us from the stinky pig column on the spreadsheet and placed us into the soaring like eagles column. Because of Christ, we have been and anyone who says yes to him can be lifted up out of the pigsty of our own making and placed up in heavenly places with him. That's grace. That's mercy, that's kindness. What do pigs tell us that we who were once unclean, distanced from God, stuck in the my replay, have now, because of Jesus, become clean, a welcome delight to him? Andrew highlights that in Scripture there are two significant stories about pigs. In one, a demon-possessed man is set free by Jesus who drives the demons out of him and into a herd of pigs who run off a cliff and drown. In that story, this man who is so badly possessed was forced to live outside of the town away from his people in the tombs along with the dead people, cast away from his society, naked and ashamed, and in chains it says. He is as far away from God as a person can be. It's actually a good illustration, I think, of what life apart from God is often like. Isolated in pain and chains, crying out in pain beyond the help of any human power until he encounters Jesus who commands the demons out of him and into the pigs. The man is restored to his former self and his enemies are humiliated by being driven into stinky pigs and he is told to return to his village and to tell them how much the Lord has done for you and how he has had mercy on you. The second story is the prodigal son in Luke 15 who distances himself away from his father, squanders his inheritance, ends up in a pigsty working with pigs and eating their food. Again, it's as far away from the father as you can get for a young Jewish man who would have been a really shocking story in those days until he ventures to return to his father in shame and embarrassment, to ask for his forgiveness and to acknowledge that he is no longer good enough and worthy enough to be called his son and to beg for a job on the farm like one of the hired hands. Of course, the story that we are given is one of a son in his ragged smelly pig farm overalls coming home in shame and of his father seeing him coming from afar and running towards him and embracing him and cleaning him and restoring him to relationship and into the family. There's no other story in scripture that shaped my own understanding of the father quite like that this one has in the three decades that I've known him. In both stories, men who are with the pigs as far away as you can be from God through his kindness and mercy, through two stories about pigs are shown his welcome and brought back into the family. God knows you. He made you. He loves you. He cares about you personally. He wants you. When he was taking communion on the moon, Buzz Aldrin had planned to read out a verse of scripture and NASA actually asked him not to, they thought it would be too divisive and too offensive. This is what it was. Psalm 8 verse 3 to 5, "When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place, what is mankind that your mindful of them, human beings that you care for them? You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor. At one time we were like that son with the pigs far off and unclean and have been shown the unmerited kindness and mercy and grace and love of God through the gift of his son Jesus, the bread of life, the living water, the bright morning star, the one who wraps himself in light, the one who rebukes the waters and they submit to him, the one who is with the father when he spoke out the stars, the maker of grapes and honey of lakes and mountains, the eternal father who saw us with the pigs, saw us in our own death and because nothing is too hard for him said I'm going to deal with that for them and through his own death made us alive that we might now be set free, unchained and cleaned up and brought into the family, crowned us with glory and honor. I've got his great, I've got his kind, I've got his gracious and merciful he provides for all that he has made. This offer is open to you even today Gateway, our God is great. Enjoy him, enjoy his goodness, enjoy his greatness, enjoy his creation, this week look for opportunities to see and save him in all that he has made and worship. Shall we pray? Father, thank you for your greatness and your great gift of love. Thank you that out of your greatness and your kindness and your mercy, all things were made. It spilled out of you. Life spills out of you. It pours into the universe, it pours into our lives. Thank you that you, the same God who made Antares, who made the Milky Way saw us as individuals from the foundations of the earth and spoke us into life, knitted us personally together in our mothers' wombs, called us, invited us into your family, saw us in the pigs' life of our own making and made a way for us to come into relationship with you and stay in relationship with you, thank you Holy Spirit for filling us, for opening our eyes, for sustaining our faith. A lot of pray here for my brothers and sisters, even this week, if there's any sense of insignificance or meaninglessness or hopelessness or self-doubt or depression amongst us, Lord, help us this week to consider you, consider your greatness and consider how every single person highly valued and made by you for your glory and your great pleasure, who you desire to love. Would we love you? We're grateful for you. King Jesus, be glorified amongst us now as we sing in your name, Amen.