Thursday
Thursday
Psalm 104—the Works of God in Nature
How many are your works, O LORD! In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures.
Psalm 104:24
Psalm 104 expresses what C. S. Lewis called the psalmist’s “gusto for nature.” He has in mind the creation narrative of Genesis 1, following approximately the same order, and describing with great poetic beauty how God made and sustains the heavens and the earth (vv. 1–9).
Then in the middle of the psalm the psalmist shows how God provides food, drink, and shelter for all the earth’s birds and beasts (vv. 10–23). Ecology would be a term too grandiosely scientific to apply to this paragraph, yet this is what the author is depicting. He is fascinated by God’s marvelous adaptation of the earth’s resources to the needs of living creatures, and vice versa.
Food and life are the basic needs of every creature, and here their presence is attributed to the open hand and quickening breath of God, and their absence to his hidden face. To our modern ears it all sounds very naïve, and indeed it is figurative, whether in the use of poetic or of anthropomorphic imagery.
But the truth behind the figures stands. God the Creator is Lord of his creation. He has not abdicated his throne. He rules what he has made. No Christian can have a mechanistic view of nature. The universe is not a gigantic machine that operates by inflexible laws, nor has God made laws to which he is himself now a slave. The very term natural law is only a convenient expression for the observed consistency of God’s working. He is living and active in his world, and we depend upon him for our “life and breath and everything else” (Acts 17:25). So it is right to thank him not only for our creation but for our preservation as well.
For further reading: Psalm 104:10–31