Expository Sermon on Psalm 104
by Maylan Schurch
Bellevue Seventh-day Adventist Church 7/9/2022
©2022 by Maylan Schurch
To hear this week’s entire worship service, click this link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdEsgmnHHQA
Please open your Bibles to Psalm 104.
By yesterday morning, I had pretty much completed outlining today’s sermon. Then, at breakfast I read an online article which made me realize just how important a Bible passage like Psalm 104 can be.
The article is written by Amanda Ripley, who hosts a Slate podcast, and is also an opinion columnist for the Washington Post. Her title startled me, and I just had to read it: “I’m a journalist who stopped reading the news.”
Let me read you a few paragraphs (and I’ll put the link in the manuscript version of the sermon when I put it online. Here it is:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/08/how-to-fix-news-media/
Amanda Ripley says, “I have a secret. I kept it hidden for longer than I care to admit. It felt unprofessional, vaguely shameful. It wasn’t who I wanted to be. But here it is: I’ve been actively avoiding the news for years.
“It wasn’t always this way. I’ve been a journalist for two decades, and I used to spend hours consuming the news and calling it “work.” . . . .But half a dozen years ago, something changed. The news started to get under my skin. After my morning reading, I felt so drained that I couldn’t write — or do anything creative. I’d listen to [NPR’s] “Morning Edition” and feel lethargic, unmotivated, and the day had barely begun.
“What was my problem? I used to cover terrorist attacks, hurricanes, plane crashes, all manner of human suffering. But now? I was too permeable. It was like I’d developed a gluten allergy. And here I was — a wheat farmer!”
As I read her article – and it’s an excellent one – I found myself feeling the same way. In the last three or four years I have found it very difficult to “get into” the news the way I used to.
Amanda Ripley says that she secretly shared her feelings about this with other journalists, and several told her the same thing – even though they work in the news business, they find that they can get overwhelmed.
Well, like a good journalist, Amanda researched this problem for a whole year in the midst of her other work. She says,
“I’ve spent the past year trying to figure out what news designed for 21st-century humans might look like — interviewing physicians who specialize in communicating bad news to patients, behavioral scientists who understand what humans need to live full, informed lives and psychologists who have been treating patients for “headline stress disorder.” (Yes, this is a thing.)
“When I distilled everything they told me, I found that there are three simple ingredients that are missing from the news as we know it.”
And then she goes on to tell us what those ingredients are. “First,” she says, “we need hope to get up in the morning.” She quoted one of her research sources as saying, “You need to have something to believe in.”
Next, she says, “humans need a sense of agency.” In other words, as we are fed all the negative news, it becomes overwhelming unless we can be told how – even in small ways – we ourselves can do something to make things better.
Finally, she says, “we need dignity.” She quotes another of her sources as saying that dignity is “the feeling I have that I matter, that my life has some worth.” One way to show this is that as journalists go out to interview people, they need to give them the dignity of really listening to them.
That’s what she herself did. She held a firm opinion on one side of a very contentious issue, but when she went to interview people on the other side, she spent hours just listening to them tell their side of the story, finding out just why they believed what they did.
She says, “I didn’t try to extract the most chilling quote or the vivid, ironic anecdote. I just asked deeper questions, without judgment. It felt less transactional, more human. I also felt more informed.”
Well, as you know, a Sabbath morning sermon shouldn’t really be a lecture on how to be a better journalist. But I am very sure that all of us, and the people we know, need hope, and we also need the feeling that there’s something we can do to make things better, and we need a sense of dignity – a sense that our lives are worthwhile.
And as it happens, Psalm 104 can go a long way toward providing those exact needs for us. Most of us aren’t journalists – although nowadays we all have the potential of being self-publishers. You can type a couple of paragraphs onto whatever social media you use, and you have the potential of being read by a lot of people.
And I believe that if you and I write with hope, with God-based solutions, and with the knowledge that every human life is valuable, we can encourage people who read what we write.
So let’s get into Psalm 104. And I believe that when we reach the end, you’ll discover how it provides hope, and assurance that we can make a difference, and the knowledge that we are very valuable.
As you’ll see, Psalm 104 is something like a “nature walk.” This afternoon just after the church service, we’ll be having a picnic down at Kelsey Creek Park. And there we’ll be surrounded by a lot of what Psalm 104 is talking about. I’ve entitled this year-long sermon series “Finding the Heart of God.” 04We’ve been going through the Bible according to our Bible year plan, and now we are in the Psalms.
And I have discovered that Psalm 104 contains at least five encouraging truths we can learn about God’s heart. So let’s get started.
Psalm 1:1 – 4 [NKJV]: Bless the LORD, O my soul! O LORD my God, You are very great: You are clothed with honor and majesty, Who cover Yourself with light as with a garment, Who stretch out the heavens like a curtain. He lays the beams of His upper chambers in the waters, Who makes the clouds His chariot, Who walks on the wings of the wind, Who makes His angels spirits, His ministers a flame of fire.
What’s the first thing we can learn about God’s heart? If you’re taking sermon notes, here comes Sermon Point One.
God shows up.
Why is this important? Because a lot of what you hear in secular education today, or science articles, or pretty much any other subject, is that God is absent. This old planet rolls slowly along through space, the sun warming it as it rolls, but God seems to be absent.
Our journalist can tell us we need hope, and a sense that we can change things for the better, and also the dignity of knowing we are of value. But if it’s true that there is no God – if God has never shown up, has never done anything for us – it’s no wonder a lot of people feel hopeless, and helpless, and worthless.
Yet since God has built into us a longing for Someone beyond us — someone who can give us answers — a lot of people have hunted around for something they can call a god, or someone they can worship, someone or some philosophy they can trust their lives to.
But they don’t have to do that, because God shows up. And whoever wrote Psalm 104 knew this. So – before getting into all of the natural beauty and wonders that God created, this psalm tells us that God is someone who has been here, and is here. God has shown up.
Several of you know the story of how Shelley and I met. I was teaching English at Union College, in Lincoln, Nebraska. Shelley was teaching in a one-room Adventist elementary school in a logging camp in Alaska.
A friend suggested I write to Shelley, and after several months of seeing her beautiful handwriting, and listening to her thoughts-on-paper, I invited Shelley to Nebraska to visit me. (Providentially, her sister was a librarian on campus, so I invited Shelley to visit her sister and family.)
And Shelley showed up. In just a few days, on this July 17, it will have been 45 years since Shelley and I met at the airport in Lincoln. It was love at first sight, but it was actually love built up and transmitted through the written word, and the occasional and the occasional photo, and the occasional phone call when she was visiting her parents back in Juneau, which was the only time we could talk by phone.
And meeting Shelley for the first time was so natural, because we knew each other so well already. And the following May 14, she and I were married.
What would have happened if Shelley hadn’t shown up? I dare not think about that. But she did show up. She had a heart for me, so she stepped off that passenger jet into the Nebraska landscape. And her arrival has made me incredibly happy.
So what do I do, now that I have been reminded that God shows up? I need to remember that one of Jesus’ prophesied names was Immanuel, literally “with-us God.” God not only showed up in the beginning, but He is with us now. His Son became one of us, and his Holy Spirit moves among us. They are here.
Now let’s keep reading through Psalm 104 discover another truth about God’s heart. (By the way, as I mentioned last Sabbath, many of the Psalms are written in a “dual address” mode. What that means is that part of the time the psalmist talks to God, and that part of the time talks to us about God. And that’s what’s happening in this psalm too.)
Verses 5 – 13: You who laid the foundations of the earth, So that it should not be moved forever, You covered it with the deep as with a garment; The waters stood above the mountains. At Your rebuke they fled; At the voice of Your thunder they hastened away. They went up over the mountains; They went down into the valleys, To the place which You founded for them. You have set a boundary that they may not pass over, That they may not return to cover the earth. He sends the springs into the valleys; They flow among the hills. They give drink to every beast of the field; The wild donkeys quench their thirst. By them the birds of the heavens have their home; They sing among the branches. He waters the hills from His upper chambers; The earth is satisfied with the fruit of Your works.
So, what’s the next important thing we learn about God’s heart from this psalm? Here comes Sermon Point Two.
So far we’ve learned that God shows up. Now we learn that God repurposes chaos.
What would you and I ever do if we didn’t believe in a God who – back in the beginning, and throughout history, and into the prophesied future – can repurpose chaos?
In the verses we’ve just read, we get an echo of what happened both at Creation and then at the time of the flood. In both cases, water covered the earth, and in both cases God then set channels and boundaries for the water so that it would be useful rather than destructive. God repurposes chaos.
Do you experience the same kind of eerie feeling I do as we see those sharp photos of the surface of Mars from the Perseverance Rover? We see rocks like the ones we have on earth. In the recent photos, we see big slabs of rock tilted at an angle. There’s one photo where a rock that looks about the size of a basketball is balanced delicately on the upper ledge of one of those boulders, like somebody carefully placed it there.
We don’t know what happened to Mars to bring it into this condition. I’m sure that meteoric impacts have caused a lot of the chaos. And on the surface of Mars we see a place where chaos has not yet been repurposed the way God did for us here on earth.
Yet if we were to go down to the atomic level within those rocks, and in that dust, we would see protons and electrons spinning just as rapidly as the ones in the cement in the sidewalks and parking lot outside this building.
What does this tell me about God’s heart? It tells me that God’s heart isn’t the heart of a careless discarder, a mindless thrower-away of things. God’s heart is the heart of a Creator and a Keeper. Just think of how serenely and how methodically, in such a step-by-step way, God created the earth in six days.
If you happened to check out yesterday’s entry on the Daily Photo Parable on our church website, you saw my photo of the Bellevue Barnes and Noble store. Over the last couple of decades, that store has often often been a Saturday night date place for Shelley and me. In the photo you see the store, and a couple of silver high-rises behind it, and beyond that a blue sky with some clouds.
That bookstore will be gone in a couple of months. Actually, not totally gone, because they are moving those books to a slightly smaller location in Crossroads Mall. But the current bookstore building will be demolished, and the land will be redeveloped into probably another those high-rises.
In the blog, I quoted second Peter 3:10-13, about how the elements will melt with fervent heat, and there will be a new heaven and a new earth. So in that photo, the bookstore will of course be gone, but those high-rises will also be destroyed, and even the sky and the clouds. Once again, God will repurpose chaos. He will bring the new out of the old, and the clean out of the unclean, so we can enjoy a happy, fear-free, disease-free eternity with Him.
God repurposes chaos. What do I do with that? Well, as I look around, I need to do a couple of things. I need to study how – even in the midst of what seems to be chaos — there is still much of the orderliness that God created. But I also need to remember that God will finally return us to Eden, and Eden will be on this planet. And so will a mammoth golden city, God’s home, and ours.
But let’s keep moving through Psalm 104. We need to discover another truth about God’s heart.
Verses 14 – 18: He causes the grass to grow for the cattle, And vegetation for the service of man, That he may bring forth food from the earth, And wine that makes glad the heart of man, Oil to make his face shine, And bread which strengthens man’s heart. The trees of the LORD are full of sap, The cedars of Lebanon which He planted, Where the birds make their nests; The stork has her home in the fir trees. The high hills are for the wild goats; The cliffs are a refuge for the rock badgers.
Isn’t that amazing?
So far we’ve learned that God shows up. God repurposes chaos. And God nourishes life.
This past Monday, Shelley and I were getting ready to do a a bit of out-and-abouting for the holiday. Before we got started, I was waiting out in the car for her while she was making some sandwiches to take along with us. While I waited, I began to study the hedge just outside my car window.
I noticed several bees buzzing around it, but since the hedge was a solid, dark green, I couldn’t understand why those bees found it so interesting.
As we walk around our neighborhood, Shelley and I are used to seeing bees working among big bright flowers. But there didn’t seem to be any flowers on this hedge, at least none that I could see. All I could see was green. So why were bees buzzing around that hedge? And they weren’t just buzzing – they were burrowing. What did they find worthwhile there?
But then I took a closer look at the hedge—and found that it does indeed have flowers. These flowers are — to use an expression of my mother’s — “nothing much to write home about.” But there they were. I picked a couple, and put them in my palm, and took a picture of them. And you can see that photo if you go to today’s Daily Photo Parable.
And while the average flower you often see bees buzzing around are maybe an inch wide, or 2 inches, or 3 inches wide, those tiny flowers on that hedge are about 1/8 of an inch wide, no bigger. They’re true little flowers, they have little white petals, and they’re attached to tiny little stalks.
So what puzzles me immensely is, how did the bees know that were are flowers in that hedge? The flowers are not visible. They are tucked behind the green leaves of the hedge. How do the bees know that they are there?
Well, one of the bees probably could’ve done his little dance in the hive and pointed the way for the others, but what is it that makes them spend so much time at that hedge, when there are other, brighter flowers not far away?
To me, this is still another heart-stopping proof of how thoroughly and completely God nourishes life. God created hedges, God created the little flowers in the hedges, God created the bees, and God created within those bees’ minds the idea that those tiny, invisible hedge flowers need to be pollinated. And He taught those bees to do it.
God nourishes life.
So what do I do, now that I’ve been reminded of this? I need to keep pulling my mind away from the sadness, the negativity, the terror, and focus on all the nurturing going on around me. As I say, I put this bee story on today’s Daily Photo Parable, and in that blog I quoted Matthew 6:25-34, the verses where Jesus tells us not to worry, because God cares for us.
Another thing I need to do is ask myself how I can be more of a nurturer. How can I treat people so that they will understand that they are valuable, because God is their creator and sustainer?
Now here’s another truth about God’s heart in this psalm.
Verses 19 – 23: He appointed the moon for seasons; The sun knows its going down. You make darkness, and it is night, In which all the beasts of the forest creep about. The young lions roar after their prey, And seek their food from God. When the sun rises, they gather together And lie down in their dens. Man goes out to his work And to his labor until the evening.
God shows up. God repurposes chaos. God nourishes life. And in these verses we learn that God controls the cosmos.
I mean, the surface of Mars may be all smashed up for whatever reason. It’s basically a desert, with surface temperatures ranging from about 220 below zero at the poles to sometimes 70 above at the equator.
But the mysterious force of gravity still swings that planet around the sun. Its year is about twice as long as ours, but its orbit is so steady and predictable that we can shoot spaceships at where Mars will end up in a few months, and they can land.
I don’t know whether you saw the deep-space test photograph taken by the James Webb space telescope, released by NASA this week. It is not a color-filtered photo like the kind we will see in a few weeks. This was just a test shot. What they did was to aim the telescope at a spot out in space, and keep it there for eight days, a long time-exposure photo.
And, as happened with the Hubble, the longer you focus the camera in one direction, the more light arrives and you see more detail.
The more I stared at this orange photo, the more breathless I felt. What you see are two bright stars, and those are dramatic, but it’s what you see behind those stars that is so awe-inspiring. There are a lot of little disc-shaped objects, maybe 100 or more, just in that photo. The discs are of different sizes, and if you look at them you see that one disc is tilted one direction and another disk is tilted a different way.
Each of those discs is one entire galaxy, like our Milky Way. Each of those galaxies presumably has many solar systems, with planets orbiting around suns. And we see this by just pointing the Webb telescope camera in one direction for a long time. Imagine how many galaxies are out there, surrounding us, containing planets and possibly beings of some kind.
Whoever wrote Psalm 104 didn’t know the details about galaxies that we do, of course. But the psalmist did know that God controls the cosmos. The moon and the sun rise and set in predictable ways. And this shows a God who is not a God of chaos, but a God of careful control.
Yet He is not a God who controls the human power of choice. We were made in His image, with the ability to make our own choices.
And we were given the wisdom to contemplate God through His works. In Psalm 104 and in the rest of the Bible, we can see that God shows up, God repurposes chaos, God nourishes life, and that far above our spinning planet, God controls the cosmos.
And there’s one final truth I found in this Psalm. In a way, it’s a summary of what we’ve just discovered. But it’s one more truth we need to learn about God’s heart.
Verses 24 – 35: O LORD, how manifold are Your works! In wisdom You have made them all. The earth is full of Your possessions— This great and wide sea, In which are innumerable teeming things, Living things both small and great. There the ships sail about; There is that Leviathan Which You have made to play there. These all wait for You, That You may give them their food in due season. What You give them they gather in; You open Your hand, they are filled with good. You hide Your face, they are troubled; You take away their breath, they die and return to their dust. You send forth Your Spirit, they are created; And You renew the face of the earth. May the glory of the LORD endure forever; May the LORD rejoice in His works. He looks on the earth, and it trembles; He touches the hills, and they smoke. I will sing to the LORD as long as I live; I will sing praise to my God while I have my being. May my meditation be sweet to Him; I will be glad in the LORD. May sinners be consumed from the earth, And the wicked be no more. Bless the LORD, O my soul! Praise the LORD!
God shows up. God repurposes chaos. God nourishes life. God controls the cosmos. All of which points to this final truth: God deserves my love.
Thursday morning I drove Shelley to work, and on the way back I spent five minutes at a Goodwill store looking for used books. I actually did buy one—a “One-Year Bible” in the New King James Version.
While I was at the counter paying for it, I noticed a sign posted behind the cashier. To me, it’s one of the most powerful quotes I’ve recently seen. Here’s what it says:
The secret to having it all is knowing you already do.
I can’t think of a better way of summing up Psalm 104.
What about you? Do you believe God deserves your love? And even more breathtakingly, do you believe that in Him, you have everything you need? Would you raise your hand if that’s what you believe?