Creation and its Subtitles

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So again, that’s Romans chapter 10. We’re reading from verse 13 to 18 on page 1140. For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. But how are they to call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him in whom they have never heard?

And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, how beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news! But they have not all obeyed the gospel. For Isaiah says, Lord, who has believed what he has heard from us?

So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ. But I ask, have they not heard? Indeed they have, for their voice has gone out to all the earth and their words to the ends of the world.

Thank you very much, Hannah, for reading. And please, can you turn back to Psalm 19 on page 547 in the church Bibles? And let me wish you whatever it is, something in between a Happy Christmas and a Happy New Year this Sunday.

Let’s pray. Heavenly Father, I pray that the words of my mouth, the meditation of my heart and our hearts would be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen. Well, I chose this psalm as just a one-off. We’re going to be starting a series in Genesis next Sunday morning.

We just finished obviously celebrating Christmas, so this Sunday just a one-off, and I picked one of my favourite psalms, Psalm 19, as the heavens declare the glory of God. And I have my illustration ready, as I thought, I was going to bring in that wonderful David Attenborough book, Planet Earth, with its incredible illustrations of the amazing camera shots of the glories of God’s creation. On the front cover, there’s a picture of a stampede of elephants with some birds flying overhead. Quite breathtaking. Inside, my favourite scene is the mountain of bat dung that fills a cave.

Hundreds of metres high, and the entire ecosystem that subsists just on the refuse from these bats. And really just extraordinary picture after picture of God’s glory. Now it turns out that in the chaos of Christmas packing, I got home, I couldn’t find this book anywhere. I thought, bother, I’ve lost my illustration. And instead, as a nod to those of you who live in Islington, I found on my shelf instead my other passion, which is a cookery book, Otto Lengy’s cookery book, and I thought actually even cookery books declare God’s glory, because you can only have amazing recipes like the one in this book because there are things like red plums and chillies and cinnamon sticks and red wine vinegar and champagne rhubarb, whatever that is, and fresh ginger.

And I thought actually even as we eat, we enjoy the wonderful variety of creation. God could have just made one food that would feed us every day, but instead makes Hundreds of foods in all of their variety. And every corner of creation tells us that God is amazing. The heavens declare the glory of God. The sky above proclaims his handiwork.

You could turn to cooking. You can turn to planet Earth. My own research for my PhD was on the human ear. The ear’s pretty amazing. So within the ear, coiled up very tightly, is a long membrane that if you stretch it out is floppy at one end, and stiff at the other end.

And so the floppy end vibrates at low frequencies, and the stiff end vibrates at high frequencies. And so as you’re listening to someone speaking to you, it’s as if a whole piano is being played inside your ear, separating out all the different component frequencies of the sound, and doing what mathematicians called a Fourier transform, which is extraordinarily difficult for computers to do even today. But the ear does in a split second. Everywhere where you look in creation, you find testimony to the glory of God, the incredible power, the intricate design of the God who spoke the universe into being. It’s caused poets to get excited.

So here is my favourite one by Gerald Manley Hopkins: The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out like shining from shook foil. It gathers to a greatness like the ooze of oil crushed. Everywhere you look, this world’s full of God’s glory. But the poet in Psalm 19, he doesn’t go to a cookery book.

He doesn’t go to the ear. Instead, he considers the sun. Verse 4, and then he set a tent for the sun. Which comes out like a bridegroom leaving its chamber, like a strong man runs its course with joy. Its rising is from the end of the heavens, its circuit to the end of them.

There is nothing hidden from its heat. He considers and he thinks, let’s imagine what a wonderful job it is that the sun has doing his tour of the whole of the world. Now, of course, some people scoff at this and they say, look, what a primitive text. He doesn’t understand Copernican cosmology. But actually that’s unnecessary to talk of it like that because we even speak in our own day, don’t we, about sunrise and sunset even though we know that it’s the Earth that’s turning.

But from our perspective it’s as if the sun appears in one edge of the heavens and then hurries round to the other. And actually that means that there’s nowhere that doesn’t see the sun at some time of day at some time of the year. Yes, if you live in the Arctic Circle, it’s dark, I think, for about 2 months, but even you get to see the sun. In the summer, it gets a chance to, to say hello to everywhere in the world, and to say to everywhere in the world, what a glorious God there is who’s made me. Do you know, the scientists tell us that the sun burns 7 billion tonnes of fuel every second.

It’s just impossible to get your head around, isn’t it, that kind of number? And yet such is its great size that it still has enough fuel to keep burning for another 5 billion years. That’s the sun. The sun is not a particularly exceptional or large star in the galaxy of many stars that make up the Milky Way. In a universe that is comprised of many such universes.

And all of them are telling as we look out into the night sky, perhaps. Not in London. If you look into the night sky in London, what do you see? Some dimly glowing smog, that’s all. But I was on holiday last week in Cornwall, and you look up into the night sky in Cornwall and you do see millions of stars, each one of which the Lord spoke into being.

And they tell us God is a glorious God. My grandfather always used to sing us the song, the sun has got his hat on, hip hip hip hooray. But if the song has a song to sing, it is the song of Psalm 19. God is a glorious God, the God who has made me. Now, so far so straightforward, I guess.

We can consider creation, we can think of different things about creation, that give us cause to reflect on God’s greatness: the ear, our cooking, planet Earth, your holidays, the star, the night sky in Cornwall. That’s the easy bit, but the difficult thing about preaching this psalm, understanding this psalm, is trying to understand how the 2 halves of it fit together. So even as we were trying to choose a theme for this Sunday, we had this paradox. Do we make it a Sunday about creation? Well, that’s what we plumbed for in the end.

Or do you make it a Sunday about God’s word? And that’s why we had the interview. And even as we’re going through the service, those two sat slightly awkwardly together. Charlie did his best to connect them for us, but it looks like two different Bible themes. God made everything, that’s good news, and God’s word speaks to us about him.

And that’s wonderful news. And this Psalm seems to be about both of those. So verses 1 to 6 is about creation, and verses 7 onwards is about God’s Word. But how do the two fit together? What are the— what’s the relationship between the two of them?

Well, often Christians have said, well, this is a Psalm about the two different ways that God makes himself known to us. So firstly, God makes himself known through creation. Creation is speaking about God to us, and it tells you things like that God is powerful, that God is eternal, that God is a glorious God. But that’s about as far as it can go, the creation. But then God also speaks to us through his word, the Bible, and that’s much more specific.

That tells us about his character, It tells us about our sin. It tells us about salvation through Jesus. So people said maybe this is a psalm about the 2 different ways that God speaks: to everyone in creation and to those who’ve had the privilege of opening a Bible through the Scriptures. And for many years I thought that was right, but then I struggled with it when I got to the book of Romans. And that’s why we have this second reading.

So perhaps you can keep a thumb in page 547 and turn over again to page 1140 to Romans chapter 10 and to our second reading. And this is really where we need to do a bit harder work and to put our thinking caps on.

Romans chapter 10 is a passage that’s about the need of people to hear the gospel message of Jesus in order to believe in Jesus and to be saved. Verse 13, everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. And then Paul goes on to say that, well, in order to hear the word of the Lord, you need somebody to tell you the word of the Lord. And so, how beautiful are the feet of those who preach. But some of the people who hear don’t listen, and they reject it.

What a tragedy, to hear the message by which you can be saved, and to reject it. But in this section of Romans, Paul is speaking about his, uh, the witness to the, the people of Israel and their failure to trust the gospel. And then he puts the argument this way, and I think it’s quite a surprise, um, as we look at the way in which he uses Psalm 19. So look at verse 17 of Romans chapter 10. So faith comes through hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.

You can’t believe, you can’t be saved without hearing the gospel message. Okay, we understand that. So far, so good. But, they ask, haven’t they heard? Indeed they have, for, quote from Psalm 19, their voice has gone out to all the earth, their words to the end of the world.

Now, I think that is very, very confusing. Paul says that everyone needs to hear the gospel. He says the Jewish people need to hear the gospel. But have they heard the gospel? Yes.

And a quote from Psalm 19. And a quote from which part of Psalm 19? The first bit. The creation bit. Well, this raises all kinds of thorny issues, and I want to go through a few of them before taking you with me to where my resolution is.

The first thorny issue is, does this mean then that creation is telling you the gospel, and so people don’t need to preach? That’s one possible reading of this. The word of Christ, you need to hear the word of Christ to believe, but they have heard the word of Christ because Psalm 19, about the sun, about the stars, their voice has gone out to all the earth. So maybe it’s enough for people just to hug a tree, or to sit on their back in the desert and look up into the night sky, and from that they can infer that, that they need to trust in the gospel, and that’s all they need. So we needn’t bother with evangelism, we don’t really need the New Testament, we don’t need the message of Jesus, we just need creation.

Well, that’s the kind of interpretation that should have our heresiometers flashing, should make us feel uneasy. That would be an interpretation of this verse that contradicts the rest of the New Testament. Always very unsafe to interpret one part of the Bible in such a way as contradicts what’s clear everywhere else. But in that case, why does he quote from the first part of Psalm 19 in support of the idea that the Jewish people are responsible for their failure to trust in the Messiah, because they already knew about him from his word. Why quote from the creation bit?

That’s one struggle. The other way of going on this is to say that Paul, when he quotes from the Old Testament, plays a bit fast and loose with the rules of Bible interpretation. So he knows that in context this isn’t really about the gospel message going forth, but he thinks, well, this is a verse about words going out and being universally known, I’ll just use that verse out of context to support my argument here. Now, I have to say that, that view of the Old Testament, that the New Testament authors don’t bother too much about reading carefully and reading in context as they grab a verse that suits their argument, that idea is actually alarmingly common, even amongst scholars who go by the name of evangelical nowadays. The idea that the New Testament just uses the Old Testament in a sloppy way.

Quite a common idea, but I think, again, not an acceptable idea for us as biblical Christians. Actually, if the Old Testament is being used in a sloppy way like that, then actually the argument of the apostles entirely loses its force. They want to say that they can prove Christ from the Scriptures. But that argument only has force if the way they’re using the Scriptures is according to the sense and the meaning that the Old Testament Scriptures genuinely have. Well, it’s been my discovery, and I’m sure yours as well, that as you look carefully at the way in which the New Testament uses the Old, as we consider carefully what the argument is and how it’s being made, we always find that the apostles were good Bible readers.

They did know how to understand the Psalms, and they are very careful in the way in which they interpret it. So what is going on here? How can Paul quote from the creation bit of Psalm 19 to say that the gospel was known to the Jewish people? How can— what can his thinking be? Well, I think the resolution is this: that the 2 halves of Psalm 19 are always supposed to belong together.

The, the Word of God, the revelation of God in the creative world, and the revelation of God through the Jewish Scriptures, are in Psalm 19 considered together as a piece. And what Paul is getting at as he quotes the Psalm is not the idea that the stars by themselves could tell you about a baby in a manger. Or a Messiah nailed to a cross, and the need to turn in repentance and faith to be saved? How could you infer that just from the night sky? Now he’s not saying that creation alone is enough to say that.

He’s saying that creation, when read through the lens of Scripture— creation in one hand, and the Bible to understand what it is that we see, to make sense of the world around us, in the other. That between them then we understand the storey of God and his gospel. And I think actually, as you go back into Psalm 19, you discover that there are clues even within the psalm that the 2 halves belong together in that way. So back into Psalm 19, page 547, and let me introduce you to a paradox in the first half of the psalm. He starts by saying that the sun has got a lot to say.

So the heavens declare the glory of God, the sky proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, night to night reveals knowledge. It’s speaking, it’s proclaiming. But then a paradox, verse 3. Very difficult to translate this verse, but literally verse 3 says this: there is no speech, Nor are there words, their voice is not heard.

So it’s this strange tension that the sun has lots to say, but it doesn’t have any words to say it. The stars have lots they want to proclaim, but they don’t have vocal cords with which to proclaim them. And so if you go and hug a tree or you gaze up into the sky, and it’s very, very quiet and you listen, listen very, very hard, you hear nothing. That’s the problem, isn’t it? That creation ought to be able to tell us about God’s wonderful glory, but it doesn’t have the vocabulary or the voice or the words to do so.

And yet the second half of the psalm, well, I’ve put it like this on our handout, it’s as if God’s word gives us the subtitles. Imagine if you were to look at planet Earth without David Attenborough telling you, this is a wonderful world that came about by random chance, as he tragically thinks. And instead, as you were looking at the elephants and the mountain of dung and whatever it is, you had the subtitles coming from the words of God that gave you insights such as, for example, Genesis chapter 1, verse 1, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And you thought, oh, that’s why they’re here. Or you read in Genesis 1 that God gave to each of the animals the seed-bearing crops according to their kinds.

And you say, oh, that explains the foraging behaviour of this little nuthatch or whatever it is, because God has assigned it this food to eat. Or you were in a lecture on the inner ear and you were reading Psalm 139, I praise you because I’m fearfully and wonderfully made, and you thought, oh, that explains why we have this membrane that’s stiff on the one end and floppy on the other that plays like a piano whenever we hear a sound. And as you read the Scriptures, they give you the lenses through which you can understand the creation.

Paul in— sorry, the psalmist in Psalm 19, I don’t think he’s ever intending to say that creation has a voice of its own independent of the Scriptures. Put the 2 halves of the psalm together and you discover that God’s words, it gives you the subtitles that explain what you see around you.

It tells you that God is the Creator God. Who made everything. It tells you that he is the sustainer God who keeps the universe ticking along moment by moment. He tells you that God is the God who gives all mankind life and breath and everything else. And so armed with a Bible and looking into the night sky, then you can say, this is the God who said, let there be light.

And all of this appeared. Armed with the Scriptures and watching Planet Earth, you can marvel at his creativity. Having just had a quiet time and tucking into an Ottolenghi salad, you can think God invented pistachios and oranges and garlic and all of the other delicious ingredients that he’s made for my lunch.

And so the psalmist continues by praising God’s word for the way in which it instructs us about the world that we live in. Verse 7: The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul. The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. The precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart. The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes.

The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever. The rules of the Lord are true, and righteous altogether. And then to show you just how precious it is to be able to understand the world around you, he gives a couple of analogies. He says, well, it’s better than gold, even fine gold. If you had a choice then— let’s make it practical— if you had a choice between the winning lottery ticket to the EuroMillions kind of 8 times rollover, whatever it is, £80 million this week, and somebody somehow knew that this was a winning ticket, or maybe they— let’s make it even more certain— they just have won it and this is a winning ticket, but they’re willing to give it to you instead.

You had a choice between that or this book, then this would be a more valuable thing to have. It really would be. And I think we’re not easily convinced of that, are we, in our materialistic culture? Well, we think of all the things that money can buy. Money can’t buy the lenses through which you can understand your world and your life and know where you belong and know where eternity is headed.

And there’s nothing as precious as that in all of the world. More to be desired. And then he goes from the world of finance to the world of eating again, so obviously the psalmist would approve a little bit of my Ottolenghi analogy. Sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb. So if you had a choice between a meal in restaurant Gordon Ramsay or whatever Michelin 3-star restaurant you choose, or a night in with the bread that comes from the mouth of God, this would be a more enjoyable meal.

I mean, maybe you could do both sometimes, but this would be more nourishing. Even than the best food. Apparently, the cake that some of us ate as we came in— there’s more of it left over there for coffee at the end— was, I think, a present for James Chesney’s mum on her retirement. So James Chesney, thank you for bringing your mum’s cake for us to share. But someone told me that it beautifully— her colleagues had given her a retirement cake, and it was a picture of her, I think, and they put a Bible in her hand because they knew she was a Christian.

But unfortunately one of the little kids has already eaten the Bible, so you’ll have to take my word for it. But the cake over there was a sweet cake with a Bible in it. And yet even sweeter than that cake, to the taste, are the words of God. Why? Well, because they teach us how to live in this world.

They show us how to be wise in this world. They help us to understand what’s going on. Why the sun is shining, why the world is spinning, why gravity is pulling us downwards. Why our ear has a membrane that’s floppy at one end and stiff at the other.

God’s Word provides the subtitles.

And yet, of course, they’re not the only subtitles that people place along the narrative of creation. And that— therein lies the problem really, doesn’t it? Because it’s not only Christian believers who see the sun shine.

It’s not only Christian believers who experience gravity rooting them to the ground.

But people who aren’t Christian believers will often put a different narrative to go with what the sun is trying to say. They’ll say things like the sun came about by accident as the result of the condensation of early particles shortly after the expansion at the Big Bang. By chance. Just there. The Earth is maybe debris from a particular star that span into orbit randomly.

By chance. The fact that you have apricots and pistachio nuts and, and all the different variety of creation, well, that’s just the random outcome of natural selection. Different plants adapting to different environments without any guiding principles. Those are the kind of narratives. And so even in something— and this is why I wish I did have Planet Earth rather than Otto Lengy— even something like Planet Earth, this bizarre paradox of wonder at what you see and at the same time dismissal of the whole thing as being— I think in the opening paragraph of that book, quotes, a lucky throw in the cosmic lottery.

So wonder mixed with disdain, randomness, dismissiveness. Not the only subtitles. And I wonder if actually our psalm gives us a clue about why. Just look at what he says about the law of the Lord again. The testimony of the Lord, verse 7, is sure, making wise the simple.

Enlightening the eyes, much to be desired. And I wonder whether it’s right to see just an echo there, to discern just an echo of some words earlier in the Bible, where the first man and the first woman were offered the opportunity of becoming wise, and they saw something which was desirable to the eyes. And which was much to be desired. The vocabulary, the scholars tell us, is an echo of the serpent’s words in the Garden of Eden, when he effectively offers them a different pair of lenses through which to view the world around them, the created world. God is the spoilsport creator.

Your freedom and autonomy is the thing most to be sought and the opportunity independently of God to enjoy this world. Different lenses, different subtitles. And of course you know the storey that Adam and Eve believed the serpent’s lie. They ate the fruit seeking enlightenment, but instead of enlightenment their eyes were darkened, their hearts became dull, they became foolish and futile in their thinking. Because they had exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.

And so sin, by not reading creation according to the words of its Creator, has subverted and distorted what we see around them. And I think that’s the logic that runs through the psalm that then leads to verse 12. It’s a mystery otherwise, isn’t it? How do you get from these, these different themes of creation, verses 1 to 6, to the Bible, verses 7 to 11, to acknowledgement of guilt and sin, verse 12? Well, I think this is the logic: that creation has something to say but not the words to say it.

That the Bible provides the subtitles that explain what we see. But that even as we read creation through the Bible’s words, we become conscious that we have been guilty of an alternative soundtrack. We’ve enjoyed creation without reference to the God who made it, seeking autonomy from him. And so immediately the Christian who reflects on the glory of the world through the lens of the Scriptures is brought to his knees in repentance. Verse 12, who can discern his errors?

Declare me innocent from hidden faults. Keep your servant back from presumptuous sins. Let them not have dominion over me. Then I shall be blameless and innocent of great transgression. I don’t know what Christmas has been like for you.

I still remember Charlie’s— I think it was Charlie’s sermon where he told us that statistically the first argument— was this you? First argument on Christmas Day. Maybe it was William. The first argument on Christmas Day happens before about 11 o’clock in the day. And statistically it’s one of an average of 5 arguments that you have with your family on Christmas Day.

Well, I think I had one, but it was a bad one, a difficult chat with my father, and I guess you might have had the same. Christmas can be a time of celebration, but also of realising your sin and of the mess of this world. As we enjoy creation, we at the same time see spoiled creation. As we enjoy family, we, we see spoiled family. As we rejoice in our created bodies, we have the creaks and the strains of spoiled bodies.

As we think about the creation, as we enjoy the creation, and yet we read the Scriptures, we become aware of how different, how full, how much it’s fallen short of the world it was made to be. And so we find ourselves praying, keep us from those sins, Lord. Please hold me back from the way in which my heart can so distort this world. And so he ends, and what a great way for us to close this year, with a prayer. Lord, as I see this world, this amazing world that declares your glory, As I read your word, which explains it to me so wonderfully, I become conscious of the gap between your design and my heart.

And so I pray, let the words of my mouth, the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in your sight. In other words, Lord, please would my life be lived out according to the subtitles that you have given. Would my heart chime in with the words of the sun, if he had the words to say what he wants to, as he hurries round in his orbit? Namely, God is a glorious God. God is much to be praised.

And so at the close of this year, let’s ourselves pray to God that our hearts would match the true version of creation’s storey. As we find it day by day, refined and realigned as we read the words of God. So I suggest we’ll finish just with a pause to consider these things, and then we’ll pray together verse 14. I’ve printed it on the handout, but also it’s there in your Bibles. So just a moment’s quiet, and then we’ll pray.

Together, let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.