Psalm 19 • God’s Revelation and our Response
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This article is from a chapel message delivered by Dr. Stan Toussaint, one of Dallas Theologial Seminary’s most beloved professors. I learned so much from him in the free online courses offered by DTS. Dr. Toussaint went to be with His Lord in 2017. When I read his words, I knew it was worth sharing with all of my readers. This is how it begins…
If God has spoken, nothing is more important than to listen to what He has said. He has revealed Himself in many ways—supremely, in the Lord Jesus, who “is the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15, NASB).
There’s a revelation of God in nature and a revelation of God in the Bible. Many people say that’s the outline of Psalm 19. However, the psalm doesn’t just have two points; Psalm 19, like all good sermons, has three points. There is the revelation of God in the skies (vv. 1–6), the revelation of God in the Scriptures (vv. 7–11), and the response of the psalmist to God’s revelation (vv. 12–14), which needs to become our response today.
God’s Revelation in the Skies
The idea that Psalm 19 refers to the revelation of God in nature is generally true, but it’s not precise. You don’t find when you read Psalm 19 anything about mountains or animals or trees, nothing about this planet. What you have are the stars, the sun, the moon. In other words, it’s not the revelation of God in nature; it’s more specific—it’s the revelation of God in the skies.
So, let’s look at the revelation in the skies. First of all, it’s continual. “The heavens are telling of the glory of God; and their expanse is declaring the work of His hands. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night reveals knowledge” (vv. 1–2). These participles in verse 1 denote continual action; constantly, day to day, night to night, the skies are revealing the glory of God. There’s not a split second when God is not revealing Himself in the skies. When you lie on your back and gaze into the stars, you realize it is the closest thing to infinity that you will see before you die. You begin to see what God is like in the skies.
The next thing about God’s revelation in the skies is that it’s universal. “There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard. Their line has gone out through all the earth, and their utterances to the end of the world” (vv. 3–4). If you have been in a foreign country whose language you don’t speak, you know that language can be a horrible barrier to communication.
Some years ago I was in a suburb of Mexico City for a missions conference and decided to get a haircut. I went down the street explaining that I didn’t speak Spanish: “Por favor, no hablo Español, barbershop, haircut?” I got just shrugs until I stopped a person and said, “Por favor, no hablo Español, bzzzz” while making the motion of a barber’s shears at my head. He took me right to the barbershop!
Not everybody understands a particular language, but everybody can hear and see and sense God in the skies: the sun, the moon, and the stars. The psalmist illustrated his point with the sun: “In [the skies] He has placed a tent for the sun, which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber; it rejoices as a strong man to run his course” (vv. 4b–5). Unlike in our culture, in the Bible the center of attention at a wedding is the groom. That’s why, while the church is the bride of Christ, it is our Groom who receives the glory.
So here in Psalm 19 we have the picture of a groom at a wedding coming out of his tent dressed in his finery—young, strong, handsome. That’s what the sunrise is like. The sun is also like a strong man running his course. In other words, the sun is going to finish its course: sunrise, sunset, continually.
Furthermore, the psalmist wrote, “Its rising is from one end of the heavens, and its circuit to the
other end of them; and there is nothing hidden from its heat” (v. 6). The words “end” should be plural,
“ends,” showing the completeness of the sun’s circuit. The sun is universal, with nothing on earth
hidden from it. The sun is an illustration of God’s revelation in the skies that any thinking person can
see.
During the French Revolution when everything ran amok, an infamous revolutionist said to a
simple peasant, “We are going to destroy your churches and pull down your steeples, so you’ll have
nothing to remind you of your vain stupid superstitions.”
That simple peasant looked back and smiled. “But, sir, what are you going to do with the sun,
the moon, and the stars?” There’s a revelation of God in the skies that cannot be denied.
AI was not used to generate this post.