Another worship song

…the twenty-four elders fall down before him who is seated on the throne and worship him who lives forever and ever. They cast their crowns before the throne, saying, "Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created."

Revelation 4:10-11

Revelation is full of these scenes of worship, and they are well worth stopping to linger on their significance. This chapter is a vision of the throne of God. John witnesses the throne and sees it surrounded by 24 “elders” and 4 “living creatures”. The elders appear to be human and the creatures appear to be covering angels. The angels worship the Holy God Who always is. It is the elders’ worship that is most fascinating.

The elders have smaller thrones of their own right, and they quickly desert them, throw their crowns down before God’s own throne and worship God. There song is one that acknowledges the worth of God. In in they pledge three things and exclaim why God is worth the pledge of these three things.

The song pledges to God glory. They cannot add to the glory that is already His. But they can acknowledge that the glory the human heart might hold for itself, or for some other thing greater than a man, is fully due to God. The second pledge is honor. We honor what we admire as great. And God alone deserves true honor and respect. And keep in mind, the description of the elders makes it clear they are great people, honored by God with their position before His throne. And they give all honor to God. The final pledge is the pledge of power. Again, we cannot add to the Almighty in terms of power. But we can offer to Him whatever resources and power are ours for His service. He deserves what energy, all energy, that we have to serve Him.

The reason these 24 elders pledge these things has to do with God’s supremacy. And it is seen in the first thing we learn about God in the Bible: He created all things. He deserves recognition from all men. He is the source of all things. And His will brought everything, the entire universe, into existence. That is a crucial thought. It is why insidious naturalism and scientism are not to be ends in and of themselves. We cannot let our appreciation of the understanding of the universe become greater than the mind that created it! That is why acknowledging that by the will of God everything exists is one of the strongest statements of worship. Those closest to God around His throne are thrilled to acknowledge His Intelligent Design, and to worship their Creator!

Technorati Tags: Worship,Creation,Intelligent Design

The Earth Remains

While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.
Genesis 8:22

This is God's promise that the order of the universe will generally not be disrupted by Him while the earth remains. Eschatologically this means that as long as God has purposes for the current universe, it will run by the laws in which He created it. It allows for the possibility that God may re-make the universe (the new heavens and earth described later in scripture). And that is really what Newtonian physics (and for that matter even Einstein's theories) can currently describe for us. What God has decreed is empirically discernible. Of course, it is true that God created it to work this way even if we had not gotten all scientific as humans! We just have the awesome ability to begin to peek behind the curtain of the universe's big show. And God's work is impressive.

I highly recommend the work of Francis Collins (director of the human genome project) on just how impressive God's work is biologically. The other really good person on this is William Demski. In terms of the astrophysics involved in this sort of understanding, I like to read Hugh Ross, though I do not always find myself in agreement with his methods. Why all this exposure to scientists who make observations about the design and make-up of the universe? Simple. I believe that what God has decreed, what God has made, what God does is consistent with what His Word says. That means that I can trust His Word with no reservations because it is consistent with the world around me.

In the case of what God promised Noah after the Flood, He made it clear that the general operation of the universe would function according to the way in which He created it. That sheer normalcy is a divine reality. I like to think of it as the Great Divine Routine that bears witness to the Creator. The very fact that things occur according to the "rules" of gravity, or relativity, or nuclear forces, or even something as "normal" as tidal action, weather patterns, and seasonal changes based on the axis of the planet, let me know that God exists and is in control. Chance would seem to produce inconsistency and trauma. Design and God's Sovereign control has placed my soul to live in an ordered universe that ultimately brings glory to Him with every day that the earth remains.