Psalm 19
Sermon preached at Barclay Church, Edinburgh by Rev D. Graham Leitch
18 August 2002

A REMARKABLE STORY
Some news stories are soon forgotten and the names they feature pass quickly from our minds.
Others, though remain.

On New Year’s Eve 1996, when Tony Bullimore set sail from Perth in Western Australia, taking part in the Vendee Globe solo ‘round the world yacht race his name meant nothing to or to most folk - but a fortnight later his name was everywhere because his survival had provided the media with just the kind of story they love.

He had been reported missing in the race and was feared lost in a storm in the Southern Sea. His boat had indeed been caught in a storm. Waves more than 50’ high whipped up by winds touching 70 knots had turned the sea into a white fury for three days - turning his boat upside down.

For four days he survived in an air pocket, perched on a makeshift hammock in the icy blackness of the upturned hull ,waiting and hoping - longing for any sound to indicate that someone had spotted his boat - until in the early hours of the fifth day (when surely he must have been fearing that there was no-one for a thousand miles), he heard the sound of banging and the voice of one of his rescuers calling “Hello!”

Despite the fact that Tony Bullimore was an accomplished yachtsman who had travelled many thousands of miles alone, the long and lonely days and the cold nights must have been hard to bear. Never, surely, in his entire life had he so much wanted to hear a sound, any sound, to herald the presence of another!!

That remarkable event has its spiritual counterpart. Life isn’t “plain sailing” for most people.

Most of us know the meaning of “rough seas” because we have encountered them on our voyage through life or one day will. And this is nothing new!

ROUGH SEAS!
The writer of Psalm 42 (which we were considering last week) speaks (42:7) of waves and breakers sweeping over him. In the same way David elsewhere (in Psalm 69) cries out because he feels the waters engulfing him and fears that he’s about to go under:

“I’m worn out calling for help...my throat is parched.. my eyes fail..”

There are time for all of us when something or someone “rocks the boat “ or “capsizes” it and we feel abandoned, frightened, helpless and alone. And the thing we long for most of all at such times - and the only thing that can restore hope and and make the future bright again - is to know that Someone’s there.

When the waves tower over us and the sea is a white fury and the storm force winds are unrelenting - when it’s all going wrong , when we cry and no-one seems to hear, and things instead get worse, we ask:

Is there a God? Does God care?

IS THERE ANYONE THERE?
The Psalm we read together this morning, Psalm 19, introduces us to a God who, even in the silences and in the loneliness of the darkest night, in the worst of storms when our sails are torn and the mast is broken and the waves and breakers are sweeping over us, SPEAKS.

One of the great things about the God of the Bible - the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ - the God you and I are meeting here to worship - the God we believe in - is that HE is never silent!

There’s a verse in the old version of the Bible in Job where Job, recounting his experience, says “there was silence and I heard a voice.” When we feel trapped - when we feel abandoned and alone - when fear has gripped us, when uncertainty crowds in, when the waters have come up to our neck - is there a God? Does God care?

Can we KNOW that we are not alone - HOW can we hear God? In what ways can we know the presence of Another - the great Outsider knocking on the upturned hull and calling “Hello!”?

PSALM 19
In Psalm 19 - the Psalm we are considering this morning - TWO MAIN WAYS God has spoken and speaks are highlighted.

1. GOD SPEAKS THROUGH CREATION
The first one is CREATION. David was an artist - a poet and musician. For him God’s voice in nature was plain. As a shepherd boy in the fields of Jesse his father, David had spent many a night musing and counting the stars - the majesty of the heavens were neither strange nor mute to David - they spoke to him of their Creator - GOD!!

And if David had spent many a dark night under the starry skies, sitting keeping watch over his father’s flocks and herds, so surely he had stood in the freshness of many a morning as an admiring witness of the sunrise.

As a poet, David vividly captures, in the first six verses of Psalm 19, what for him was the breathtaking wonder of both. For him it was self-evident. In his day many deified nature - for them nature WAS God!! But for David it was different. For him, nature was but the herald of God and nature’s works an unceasing witness to HIM:

“The heavens declare the glory of God...the skies proclaim the work of His hands...(4)...their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.”

WE ARE WITHOUT EXCUSE!
According to the Bible, this is why even those who have never heard about Jesus Christ are guilty and stand condemned. In Romans 1 Paul practically says “The basic reality of God is plain enough. Open your eyes and there it is!!” His argument, as he presents God’s case in Roman 1:19-20 , is that by taking a long hard and thoughtful look at what God has created, anyone can see what his eyes as such can’t see - God’s power and the mystery of his reality - “so that” he says “all persons are without excuse.”

God has spoken and God speaks to us though His extraordinary, supernatural and glorious creation. It’s God’s world and it’s God’s universe - and in creation HIS VOICE is heard.

AN UNCEASING VOICE
The witness of creation - the sun, moon and stars - the Bible says, is unceasing. Look at v.2:

“Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge”

A UNIVERSAL VOICE
The witness of creation crosses every national boundary and extends to every language group. Look at v.3-4:

“There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.”

The witness of creation - the sun, moon and stars - is both UNCEASING and UNIVERSAL.

And then (from 4b -6) David paints two vivid pictures of the sunrise. In v.5 he compares the dawn’s sunrise to the the emergence of the oriental bridegroom decked in all his finery on his wedding day. And then he pictures the sun as a triumphant athletics champion, garlanded and crowned, taking his lap of honour.

“The morning sun is a new husband, leaping from his honeymoon bed, the day-breaking sun’s an athlete racing to the tape...” (The Message)

THE DANGER OF SCIENCE
Science is a great boon but wrongly approached contains a great danger. Its investigative potential is its great strength - the mysteries of nature and the macrocosmic and microcosmic wonders of creation, properly regarded, testify to their Creator. But when science reduces nature to mathematical formulae, laws of physics, and reduces every unfolding flower and glorious sunrise to a nothing more than a natural process, instead of enriching the world it impoverishes it, by stifling creation’s song.

It is partly the result of the growing confidence of science and its preoccupation with creation, without due regard to its Creator, that still today, to quote John Calvin, writing in his famous Institutes of the Christian Religion:

“the greater part of mankind walk blindfold in this glorious theatre.”

Are you blind to nature’s art and deaf to creation’s song? Have you been failing to hear God’s “Hello!” in both?

2. GOD SPEAKS THROUGH SCRIPTURE
But in the tradition of the church (the New Israel), as in the tradition of the Jews (the old Israel), God speaks not only through NATURE, but through SCRIPTURE - not only by HIS WORLD but by HIS WORD.

To the Christian, as to the Jew before him, God has provided a WRITTEN REVELATION which speaks to the heart and soul of humankind.

When the Bible is carried into the pulpit by the Church Officer at the beginning of each service it isn’t a meaningless tradition - it’s a way of proclaiming and of reminding ourselves that the God who bears testimony to his own power and divinity in nature, bears testimony to his concern for all humanity - for each one of us in SCRIPTURE.

The knowledge of God David derived from the world of nature was complemented by the knowledge of God he derived from the word of Scripture. No-one who reads the book of Psalms can doubt that David often fed his spirit upon the written word of God.

AN OPEN BOOK
His Bible was an open book to Him - a book he meditated upon day and night. And as a result he found, as the saints of every age have found since David’s day, that in the pages of Scripture God Himself spoke to him.

Again and again it happens, when we make a time of listening to God in the pages of His Word a part of our lives, that a particular word, or phrase, a command or rebuke, an assurance or a promise, speaks to our spirits with an overwhelming power and personal force that cannot leave us unchanged.

But of course this experience will be quite foreign to us as long as we let the Bible remain merely as a piece of literary bric-a-brac to gather dust upon our shelves.

This book is a book that has changed countless lives and shaped human history - the course of the great river of civilisation has never been so dramatically altered by any influence as by the power of this One Book.

PSALM 19 - PART 2
In the second section of his Psalm (Psalm 19) - in vv.7-11 - David turns from God’s first volume of evidence - “nature” - to God’s second volume of evidence or testimony - SCRIPTURE.

In the same way as David’s sense of joy and wonder in God’s creation are products of his nights under the canopy of heaven and witness of the spectacle of the dawn and the sunrise, so his sense of delight in in SCRIPTURE is the product of his own personal experience of its power.

We meet, in David, someone who has experienced the rewards of meditating upon God’s Word - who knows its power and effect upon the soul of man. Don’t underestimate the POWER of God’s Word to ACT in your life and affect it for good - for good in a double sense!!
for good - in the sense of improving your character
and
for good - in the sense of permanently and everlastingly!!

The phrases David uses in vv.7-11 for God’s written word differ greatly - he speaks variously of “the law of the Lord” (7a); “the statutes of the Lord” (7m) ; “the precepts of the Lord” (8a) ; “the commands of the Lord” (8m) and “the ordinances of the Lord” (9m) - but in each case the reference is identical and the meaning the same. He’s speaking about God’s written Word or
the Scriptures.

Notice how he extols their spiritual value and celebrates their practical usefulness!! Take not of what Scripture will accomplish for those who will humbly turn to it and heed its teaching.

FOUR LESSONS
There is so much here but notice just four things which the written revelation of God promises:

i) THE BIBLE REVIVES THE SOUL (7m)
* It REVIVES the soul. There is, in the word of Scripture, the power to waken the dead
and to beget new life!!

In the year 386AD the professor of Rhetoric at Milan University sat weeping in the garden of a friend’s house - he had tasted all the pleasures the world offered yet still knew a hunger unsatisfied in his heart. Until, hearing the voice of a child at play singing in Latin “Tolle, lege; tolle lege” and picking up a portion of the Bible lying beside him, read:

“stop behaving as people do in the dark and be ready to live in the light...”

It was the verse God used to call St Augustine to himself. “A clear light flooded my heart” is how Augustine described it “and all the darkness of doubt vanished away.” None can measure the debt the church and the world owe to that influx of light!

In the same way it was through the word of Scripture over a thousand years later that Martin Luther found his life changed in a moment - “I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone though open doors into paradise..” is the way he put it - and the Protestant Reformation, one of the greatest turning points in the life of the church, was the result.

And countless is the number of ordinary men and women - people just like you and me - to whom the life of God has come as they have listened to the Bible or read its pages.

“The Law of the Lord is perfect - it gives us new life” as the CEV puts it.

ii) IT MAKES WISE THE SIMPLE
It revives the soul. Secondly, it makes wise the simple. “His teachings” the CEV reads “give wisdom to ordinary people.”

When the monarch of Great Britain is crowned the Moderator of the General Assembly - representing the Church of Scotland - hands the new King or Queen a copy of the Scriptures with these words “Here is Wisdom”

There is a larger wisdom than the universities can impart; a deeper wisdom than science alone can reveal. It is the wisdom of God. In one of his letters to Timothy Paul the apostle characterises the Scriptures as “able to make wise”

But this wisdom is not only for monarchs but for ALL - including you and me!!

Here is teaching upon which the simplest may build with confidence. Here are values that ennoble human life. Here is wisdom that directs the human spirit aright in everything and in what matters most. It is “the holy Scriptures” Paul says in one of his letter to young Timothy, which are able to make us “wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.”

iii) IT GIVES LIGHT TO THE EYES
Thirdly, the “commands of the Lord are radiant, giving light to the eyes.” Not literally, of course, but spiritually. It helps us to see the true value of all things and life itself as God intends.
It removes the murk and gloom and show us the way!

iv) IT GIVES JOY TO THE HEART
Fourthly, it gives JOY to the heart. Here are promises to comfort the sorrowing, to strengthen the weak and give hope to the desperate. It is within the power of God’s written revelation in the Scriptures to impart JOY - not just to bring comfort but to make people HAPPY.

This is because the truest HAPPINESS is to be found in obedience - in living the way God intends -in living up to our full potential.

“The precepts of the Lord” David declares“give JOY to the heart.”

The Word of Scripture not only reveals the substance (the “what”) of a HAPPY life but introduces us to its source - the “how” of a happy life - God’s gift of Jesus Christ to free us from sin, the Holy Spirit to fill us with God’s power and His enabling to enter into the happiness he intends for us.

No wonder David later describes the Word of God as “sweeter than honey” and“more precious than gold!”

In it is POWER to make us new, WISDOM to direct us well, LIGHT to banish darkness and JOY to cheer our hearts.

CAN WE KNOW?
Can we KNOW that we are not alone - HOW can we hear God? In what ways can we know the presence of Another - the great Outsider knocking on the upturned hull and calling “Hello!”?
It is the Christian belief and the teaching of Psalm 19 that God speaks to us both in the world of nature and in the words of Scripture.

The big question is not whether GOD is speaking but who’s listening!! Life is so full of rush and clamour and noise....we’re rushed off our feet.. there’s no time to notice or to listen. If that describes you, you’re not being fair to yourself...

God made you to notice.....and God made you to listen!

Give yourself the time and the space.... take His Book with you and head for the hills and perhaps you will confess with Job on your return:

“there was silence and I heard a voice”

AMEN

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