DUST SHALL SING

What is it about music that moves us? Why is it that a song has the power to call forth our emotions, to elicit such joy and sorrow, such pleasure? After all, we are just talking about sound waves here. Why the magic? The unbeliever makes a weak stab at this question, but the mystery remains. So we go all the way back to the book of Job, one of the most ancient of the Old Testament writings. Here is God’s question for Job:

^NIV Job 38:4-7 Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
    Tell me, if you understand.
⁵ Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
    Who stretched a measuring line across it?
⁶ On what were its footings set,
    or who laid its cornerstone—
⁷ while the morning stars sang together
    and all the angels shouted for joy?

There it is – the morning stars sang together before time began.  God gave the song. Mystery solved. And even better, the song that Christ puts in our hearts, the song of the redeemed, goes on and on. It defies even death, this never ending song. Isaiah picks it up here:

NIV  Is. 26:19 But your dead will live, Lord;
    their bodies will rise—
let those who dwell in the dust
    wake up and shout for joy—
your dew is like the dew of the morning;
    the earth will give birth to her dead.

Yes, dust shall sing. We were made from the dust of the ground. We are always in the process of dying, even from birth. And then comes the Good News, the Song. God himself became flesh, made like us in every way, yet without sin. Obedient all the way to the Cross, that we who are dust might be born again into the Kingdom of God. Nothingness filled with eternity; death that teems with life; dust that will rise in resurrection power to sing eternally in His Presence.

We can start singing right now. Has God given you a song? He’d love to hear it today, no matter how you are feeling. Think of this – the sea roars with His pleasure. All of His trees clap their hands in worship. The mountains ring with His praises. They were created for Him and have no choice. But we are the only voice in His Creation that chooses to sing to Him. When He hears His children singing praises, He stops and listens with great joy!  

BRING YOUR BRAIN TO CHURCH

None of us can fathom the mystery of God. But that does not mean that our faith is a blind “leap into the dark”. Faith, by definition, is always based on what God speaks to us personally, just as He did to Abraham, the father of faith. And our Father has graciously spoken to us in many ways.

One of His messages comes through clearly in Romans 1:19, 20:

       …what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.  For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

Here the Apostle Paul reinforces the justice of God in judging sin. He tells us that we are all accountable to God because He has revealed Himself to mankind in two ways. The first way is through Creation – we can see His eternal power in what we see around us. Everywhere we look, we see order and design in the universe. From the unfathomable heavens to the tiniest subatomic particle, it all functions together. Design demands a Designer. Would an explosion in a print shop produce a dictionary? We can understand God’s power by looking at what He has created. The Psalmist sings about this truth:

^NIV Psalm 19:1 The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech;
    night after night they reveal knowledge. They have no speech, they use no words;
    no sound is heard from them.
⁴ Yet their voicegoes out into all the earth,
    their words to the ends of the world.

Everyone who has ever lived can see Who God is through His Creation.But what about Paul’s second point, His Godhead? Here we

But what about Paul’s second point, His Godhead? Here we run into the magnificence of the Trinity, unique to our Christian faith. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit – one God, three Persons. The Trinity gives us reasons for our human behavior. We all experience love. We all long to communicate with each other. We feel our uniqueness, our personality, our value. We all, at some level, have a sense of right and wrong. Where does all this come from? It is based in the Trinity, before Space/Time was created by God’s Love. The Father loves the Son. The Holy Spirit is respectful of the Father. The Son does not lie to the Holy Spirit. They are good to each other, and we see these moral motions in our human behavior, however imperfectly. Why do we think this way? Because the Triune, loving God created everything, and He reveals Himself to us.

We can rejoice in the rationality of our faith. Christianity makes sense; it comports with what we see and experience. Not all questions are answered until we see Him as He is, but now, in this life, we can be confident in His “Eternal Power and Godhead”. We can bow before Him and say, “You are my God!” Bring your brain to church – our Faith makes sense.

THOSE WHO REFUSE TO SING

There is an old line in a hymn that goes like this:

“Let those refuse to sing

Who never knew our God

But children of the heavenly King

May speak their joys abroad.

Old fashioned words for sure. But think about it for a minute.

Who refuses to sing in our day? I could name a few: Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and several others. The new atheists. Their works ooze ascerbic joylessness. Dour commentators. Prognosticators of doom and gloom. People without hope and without God in the world.

Here’s a quote from India Today, August 29, 2021:

“The Taliban have banned music and female voices on television and radio channels in Afghanistan’s Kandahar”. Now why do you suppose that is? Who on earth bans music?

The greatest tragedy is to live without knowing why you are alive.

As G.K. Chesterton put it, for the Christian joy is central and sorrow is peripheral, for the essential questions of life have been answered. You can’t really argue with the joy of the Lord. It just comes down, and when it does, we just have to sing!

“Blessed is the people that know the joyful sound: they shall walk, O Lord, in the light of thy countenance. In thy name shall they rejoice all the day: and in thy righteousness shall they be exalted. ( Psalm 89:15, 16). The sound of praise, the sound of worship, the sound of rejoicing – It’s ours!

FAITH – A LEAP IN THE DARK?

What is faith?

Imagine this. You’ve gone for a hike to the top of Mt.Chocorua in the White Mountains and lingered just a little too long at the summit. Taking a shortcut to get down the mountain before dark, you become disoriented. What seemed like a straight shot was a huge mistake, and everywhere you look, the forest is closing in on you. As darkness settles and the wind picks up, the temperature drops to dangerous levels. Hypothermia is a serious threat. You need to hunker down on the ledge where you find yourself, tucking under the overhang, for the night. Not until daylight will you be able to see the way back to the trail.

It’s possible that you could drop off the ledge into the darkness, in the hope of landing in a lower, more sheltered spot. But it’s so dark, so inky. Your flashlight is a pinprick in the blackness. You can’t see a thing over the edge. Still, you could take that chance.

But what about this? Suppose you hear a voice out of the darkness, just below the ledge.

“I know where you are. I’ve been a guide in these mountains for many years. If you hang and drop, you’ll land just five feet down at the entrance to a cave, where you can shelter for the night. I’ll come and get you in the morning.”

This is a very different proposition from that leap into the darkness. Someone has spoken in clear, trustworthy terms.

This is walking by faith –believing what God says to you. Not a leap in the dark, not a vague hope that things will turn out OK, not wishful thinking. It’s stopping to listen for the voice of God, hearing from Him, and believing what He tells you.

Remember Abraham, the Father of Faith? God spoke to him, he believed what God said, and he obeyed. Pretty simple. Abraham didn’t have to try to figure out what to believe. He just had to listen for God’s voice and do what God told him to do. The rest is history, the history of salvation in Christ, our history.

“But what if God doesn’t say anything to me?”

He will. Our God is a communicator. He is always speaking to us. In crises large and small, if we will just be still and listen, he will guide, direct and comfort. Remember Israel’s dilemma at the Red Sea? Mountains on either side, Pharaoh’s chariots behind them, the impassable sea before them. No way out. God told Moses, “Stretch out your hand”. Moses heard God speak, believed Him, and acted on those words straight from God’s mouth. And that hidden path through the sea opened up for Israel.  

Here is every day, practical, supernatural faith. Romans 10:17 tells us, “Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God”. Trust and obey – what a concept!

ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL?

In order to more fully understand the nature of the conflict in our nation today, it is helpful for believers to take a few steps back and consider the history of the human race. Ever since our beginnings, oppression has ruled the day. The strong have abused the weak. The idea that “might makes right” has made existence miserable for too many – countless men, women and children have lived out their lives in helpless subjugation to self-seeking oppressors who just happened to get the upper hand.

Now we have something different in the world. It didn’t happen in ancient Egypt or Assyria. It didn’t happen in supposedly enlightened Greece and Rome, where slavery ruled the day and women were literally thought to be inferior to men. Just ask Aristotle and Plato. It certainly didn’t happen in the Far East, or in the long and tiresome list of monarchs ruling in Europe over the centuries. It was always and ever the abuse of the powerless by the powerful. “Who died and made you king?” was accepted for truth.

But here are these beautiful life-changing words. “All men are created equal”. Where did they come from? We go back to the words of our Lord. “Whoever would be great among you must be the servant of all”. This is the perfect One poured out his life on the cross as a common criminal, “despised and rejected”. What wondrous love is this? Then on to the Apostle Paul. “In Christ there is neither male nor female, slave nor free, Jew nor Gentile”. And the world changed forever. Yes, we have a very long way to go. But we have it right; we have been given the foundation for what gives all of us dignity and freedom at the deepest level of our existence. Let’s give thanks!

WHO CREATED GOD?

I was chatting with our friends’ 8 year old son Seth when out of his mouth popped this question. “Miss Rose, who made God?” I scrambled to answer this precocious blue eyed boy as best I could, on his terms.
“Well, Seth, you can’t go back any further than God. He was in Eternity before Time/Space. That’s why we say, ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’. And you know how He did it? He used his words!”

Words, words, words. Mathematician and apologist John Lennox opens our understanding from a scientist’s viewpoint. Why is there something instead of nothing? God put the universe there; all things were made through Him. The atheist insists that mathematics created the universe. But as Lennox notes, mathematics creates nothing. The laws of physics don’t create; they can only describe.

Hebrews 11:3 tells us,“By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.” Information is invisible and immaterial. But it is very real. Our brains are filled with it. Out of this information, out of our thoughts, we speak, we create. This is one way in which we mirror God’s image, however flawed our efforts. This concept of information, which floods our culture today, goes back to language, words that communicate, flowing from rational thought. Push back as far as you will, and you will bump into a loving, all powerful God, who thinks, who plans, who creates with His Word, speaking the universe into being.

In the book of John we read, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Here is Jesus, the Word, the essence of communication, creating out of nothing. No cold and inhuman mechanistic process here, but a living, breathing Savior. And the process goes on, down through the ages, as our Lord communicates the Father’s love to us every day. He is walking and talking His children through these strange times. “This is, (after all, still) my Father’s world.”