Sermon
The Heavens Declare The Glory Of God (Part 1)
July 7-8, 2001
Pastor Donald Sheley

I'm going to ask you to take your Bible and join with me to a new Psalm today. We're spending the summer in the Psalms. And today we're going to talk about Psalm 19, and I pray that all of you have your notes. If you don't have notes, there are plenty for everyone so just raise your hand and the ushers will be delighted to give them to you, because there's some fascinating information we've included in the notes today and I think you'll want to take them home and read them.

The psalmist says, and I'll only be able to read the first two or three or four verses because we'll be in this Psalm now for a number of Sundays, but he begins by saying: The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows His handiwork. Day unto day utters speech, and night unto night reveals knowledge. There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard. Their line has gone throughout all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.

When you walk away today and someone asks you, what did the pastor preach on? You can say, I can say it in one sentence -- the heavens declare the glory of God. To our message, the book of nature has three leaves: heaven, earth, and sea, of which heaven is the first and the most glorious, and by its aid we are able to see the beauties of the other two. The heavens -- that's our subject today. Of the hundreds of occurrences of the word heaven in our English Bible, almost all of those come from translations from the Hebrew word, and we give it to you there, or the Greek word and it's itemized on page 2. Now I'm not a language scholar so I'll leave it for you to be able to figure out the pronunciation of those words. But the Hebrew word means literally" the heights," while the Greek word has a related but slightly different meaning, "that which is raised up."

Now considering all the various shades of meaning which may be said to be attached to the original words, and to the English word, it's undeniable that the primary meaning of the actual word heaven is "that which is above." Now the word heaven in the Bible may refer to one of three major realms: the atmospheric heavens, which are immediately above us, in which we live and move. Then there's the stellar heavens, which ultimately must include the entire universe. And then there's the heaven of heavens, which is the abode of God.

Now the first of the three heavens depicted for us in the Holy Scriptures is the atmospheric heavens, specifically the atmosphere which surrounds our globe. The blanket of air that surrounds the earth, that which we breathe, is contained within the space known as the troposphere, which does not extend more than twenty miles above the earth.

All normal clouds are within a distance of seven miles above the earth. Then from twenty to thirty miles beyond, the space is known as the stratosphere, while the space from thirty to fifty miles high is known as the mesosphere. The ionosphere ranges from fifty up to three hundred miles, and of the exosphere, beginning at two hundred or three hundred miles, can be argued as extending anywhere from eight hundred to twenty thousand miles.

The heavens declare the glory of God. Now the heavens are plural for their variety, comprising the watery heavens with their clouds and countless forms, the aerial heavens with their calms and tempests, the solar heavens with all the glories of the day, and the starry heavens with all the marvels of the night. And what the Heaven of heavens must be hath not entered into the heart of man, but it's still chief. What they're saying, telling us of the glory of God!

Now I'm going to give to you a great number of numbers, and I'm not here to try to impress you with numbers, but I somehow have asked God to help me to help you see the magnificence, the magnitude, and the wonder of God's heavens. So let's begin with the numbers. I can't read them. Our earth is one of nine planets revolving around the sun, and has a diameter of 8,000 miles. Its mass is estimated to be -- and you can figure it out - tons. Let's stop there.

You know, while I was preparing this I was thinking of a lad that has been in our church, Jeff who just sang for us, his boy. Michael has been with us since he was a little tiny guy, but God gifted Michael with a brilliant mind. It's faster than a computer. You can give him numbers as fast as you'd like to and he'll add them for you and give you the total. So I decided I'm going to have Michael help me with the sermon. So in the last service, now he's helping with the youth group right now, and he'll be back at the 11:30 service, and so on Tuesday I gave him a copy of my notes. And I said, Michael, what I'd like for you to do is to somehow put these great big numbers in something that we can relate to as human beings.

So he sends me back his note; and I'm suggesting, I said now Michael, if Tony who has a dump truck and it contains 20 cubic yards, and we said to Tony, back your truck up to the earth and haul it away. How many dump truck loads would it take to haul away the earth? So Michael comes back on Thursday with this great sheet of paper with all these 0000000000000000. It would be a lot of dump truck loads. And Tony was in the second service and I said, Tony, if you got a buck for each load you could tell old Bill Gates to sit in the back of the auditorium. When you consider the mass in tonnage...now the distance from the earth to the moon is 250,000 miles; while the distance to the sun is 93,000,000 miles. And the sun has a diameter of 866,500 miles, and a mass of 330,000 times that of the earth. Now you multiply that 600000...by 330,000 times.

The sun; and here the mind begins to stagger at such enormous distances and innumerable masses. The sun is only one star in a galaxy of some one hundred billion other stars, a galaxy that has a mass of about seventy billion times that of the sun. Now distances become so great that we will find it cumbersome to use the measure of a mile. We will find it is necessary to construct a more practical unit, which is called a light year. Light travels at the speed of 186,000 miles per second, and that's generally referred to as m.p.s., or 11,160,000 miles in one minute. Now the sun is eight light minutes away, and a light year then means the distance that light will travel in one year, or 5 and all those zeros behind it.

Now I said to Michael, put that one so I can understand it. He said, all right pastor, the distance from San Francisco to New York is 3000 miles and back, so round-trip approximately 6000 miles. One light year is the distance of one billion trips to New York and back, and he said, Pastor, don't forget the frequent-flier miles. (Congregation and pastor laugh) One light year is the equivalent of one billion trips to New York and back. That's immense, isn't it?

Our solar system has a diameter of 660 light minutes; but the galaxy of which it is a very small part has a diameter of 100,000 light years. And the old psalmist says, the heavens declare the glory of God. Now enormous as the galaxy is in which our solar system moves, it is only one of innumerable other galaxies, possibly one thousand million of them, the nearest of which is the Andromeda galaxy, 1,500,000 light years distance.

If in each of these thousand million galaxies there are, as astronomers believe, 100,000 million stars, then in the entire universe there are some 150 million million million stars. I said to Michael in the last service, to what power it is the 150 million? He says to the 18th power. Numbers we cannot grapple with our little minds. The heavens declare the glory of God.

On a clear night as many as 2,000 stars can be seen with the naked eye by a person standing at one spot. The total number of stars visible in the entire sky is estimated at about 6,000, and by the one-inch telescope, some 225,000 stars can be observed. With the one-hundred-inch telescope about 1,500,000,000 stars. However, with the two-hundred-inch telescope nearly one billion galaxies are brought within observation, which includes objects as far away as two billion light years.

Listen to the psalmist: When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, and the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained or put in place; What is man, that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honor. And probably the most frequently quoted volume on cosmology is the one by a teacher, a late teacher, a professor of mathematics in the University of Oxford, who concludes his great work with the simple statement: I do most fervently believe that this universe was created by Almighty God.

Now the second chapter of Genesis opens with a statement regarding this initial creative activity that contains a word not found in the earlier pronouncement: "And the heavens and the earth were finished and all the HOST of them." And the host refers to this mass of galaxies beyond us. Spurgeon writes in his great commentary: "The heavens declare, or are declaring, for the continuance of their testimony is intended by the participles employed; every moment God's existence, power, and wisdom and goodness, are being sounded abroad by the heavenly heralds which shine upon us from above." What he is saying is that word 'declare' is a continuous action. Every day since the beginning of creation, the psalmist says, God speaks of His glory and His majesty in this marvelous universe we enjoy. The heavens day after day, minute after minute, hour after hour continue to declare the glory of God.

And he goes on; He who would guess at divine sublimity should gaze into the starry vault; he who would imagine infinity must peer into the boundless expanse; he who desires to see divine wisdom should consider the balancing of the orbs; he who would attain some conception of divine power, and greatness, and majesty, must estimate the forces of attraction, the magnitude of the fixed stars, and the brightness of the whole celestial train. It is not merely glory that the heavens declare, but it's THE GLORY OF GOD, for they deliver to us such unanswerable arguments for a conscious, intelligent, planning, controlling, and presiding Creator, that no unprejudiced person can remain unconvinced by them.

Scientists who have committed themselves to a non-biblical perspective have often used their platform as a scientist to proclaim that the universe could have come about by natural means, as astronomer Stenger states, and that the universe exploded out of nothing. These scientists who have been honest about the question of where matter and energy originated have admitted two things: first, the problem is impossible to solve through science, and second, that this state of affairs is exceedingly frustrating to the scientist.

Internationally respected astronomer, self-confessed agnostic, Robert Jastrow, and if you go study astronomy in University you'll study from his book surely, admits that the scientists have been traumatized by coming up against a problem that must forever remain beyond them. In his book, GOD AND THE ASTRONOMERS, Jastrow says, "The development is unexpected because science has had such extraordinary success in tracing the chain of cause and effect backward in time." The situation violates a deeply held religious faith in science itself, the belief that science should eventually be able to discover the forces and the laws to explain everything. After all, Carl Sagan tells us that science is applicable to everything. With this tool we vanquish the impossible.

But Jastrow writes, and answers back: "Consider the enormity of the problem. Science has proven that the Universe exploded into being at a certain moment. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The scientists tell us that our earth exploded into being at a certain moment. It asks, then what cause produced this effect? Who or what put the matter and the energy into the Universe? And science cannot answer these questions, because, according to the astronomers, in the first moments of its existence the Universe was compressed into an extraordinary degree, and consumed by the heat of a fire beyond human imagination."

Now Jastrow says that the universe began under circumstances that seem to make it impossible--not just now, but ever--to find out what force or forces brought the world into being. Anticipating all such questions about the unknowable moment of creation, Isaiah tells us that no one can fathom the understanding of the Creator. But as to who and what is the cause for this effect, the Bible raises the question, Shouldn't we have known the answer all along? Listen to Isaiah, "Lift your eyes and look to the heavens: Who created these? Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator..."

Compared to the alternative of supposing that matter and energy somehow always existed, British physicist Edmund Whittaker says, "it's simpler to postulate creation EX NIHILO, that is, Divine will constituting nature from nothingness." And Parker agrees: "We do, of course, have an alternative. We could say that there was no creation and that the universe has always been here. But this is even more difficult to accept than creation." Now after considering this discovery that our universe has a beginning and that science is incapable of ever discovering what went before, astronomer Jastrow concludes -- and I think this has to be the classic sentence of all science books that were ever written. Look at what the agnostic ends his great book, if you go to University or college you'll study from: he writes, For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance and he is about to conquer the highest peak, and he pulls himself over the final rock; there he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries. (Pastor laughs) Isn't that fantastic? Here's the agnostic, he says when all of we as scientists have climbed all these mountains of ignorance, when we've scaled the last one, we'll look over and there sit the Christians with the Bible in their hand, and they've had the answer from the very beginning. Isn't that a classic? The heavens declare a glorious God.

Now in Hebrew thought we call it parallelism, because you'll find in Hebrew writing one statement then a parallel statement. They both are very similar, but they bring the same truth. And so that's how our Psalm begins, the heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament -- it's another word for the heavens -- show forth His handiwork. In fact, the NIV translation says, the skies proclaim the work of His hands. And old Spurgeon says, he who looks up to the firmament and then writes himself down as an atheist, brands himself at the same moment as either an idiot or a liar. What I'm suggesting, you have to purposely close your eyes to ignore the fact of God.

I've listed for you there some of the great discoveries. Einstein, right in the middle of the page, eventually renounced his belief in an eternal universe and admitted that the universe must have had a beginning. And old Edwin Hubble fought in World War II, I think he was a boxer for a while, but he was fascinated with astronomy. And Hubble then went to University, got his Ph.D., went to the Wilson Conservatory here in California and he studied the stars in that big 200 inch telescope. And he came up with a fascinating discovery. In fact, all scientists agree it's probably the most substantiating fact the story of creation. Old Hubble peered into the distance and he saw something fascinating so he decided to photograph it, hour after hour, and what he found was that these galaxies and these stars are retreating from us at a high velocity. And he was able to determine by the brightness of the star its density and other calculations that he came up which were amazing; and I've noted for you the Hubble Law is one of the great discoveries in science. It is one of the main supports of the scientific story of Genesis.

I bring this to your attention because all of us are aware there's a new experiment going on in space, and the experiment is to determine the origins of the universe. And I believe old Isaiah saw that moment when the scientists make their last discovery and have to bow and say God did it all. And old Isaiah says, then the glory of the Lord shall fill the whole earth! when science bows and says, God did it all. The glory of the Lord shall fill the earth.

Down to the bottom of page 7 and have I have to stop. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. The Hebrew's have an interesting way in their poetry, they personalize inanimate things, such as the rocks are shouting, and the trees are clapping their hands, and the mountains rejoice with glee. They personify nature and so what the psalmist does is he opens our Psalm, he says, everyday God preaches a sermon to all mankind of His glory and His greatness. Every day it utters its speech in a sermon of God. Ah, it's true. If you stand out here in the parking lot at 6:00 in the morning and you watch the rising of the sun in the eastern sky; I stood there the other morning -- it seemed like God was taking a paintbrush and just brushing it. I mean, the clouds were taking the most beautiful form, and I thought to myself, God, You must be having fun. The old psalmist says everyday, if we're wide awake enough to realize it, God's telling of His wonder and His glory in the beauty of every day. Every day is different.

And he says, the night showeth His handiwork. Stand in the countryside on a clear evening and look up into the skies, and immediately, you're with God. The old psalmist says if you'll just listen to God's sermon, everyday He tells us in His creation, His love, and His mercy, and His greatness for us. And every night if you'll look into the skies, you'll see the work of God once again.

Now I end down at the bottom of page 8. Here's what old Spurgeon says: "The lesson of day and night is one which it were well if all men learned. It should be among our day-thoughts and night-thoughts to remember the flight of time, the changeful character of earthly things, the brevity both of joy and sorrow, the preciousness of life, our utter powerlessness to recall the hours once flown, and the irresistible approach of eternity." Spurgeon says everyday God preaches a new sermon to us. It should tell us of the moments (Pastor snaps fingers several times), they are fleeting; opportunities that will never come again, tears that may flow today, joys that will come tomorrow. Old Spurgeon said if you and I could just listen to God preach to us the lessons of everyday.

So the psalmist begins all of heaven in its masses, all of its galaxies, all of its stars tell us that there is a glorious God; and if we listen, He'll preach us a sermon every day from life. Aren't those two tremendous sentences?

Father, help us to enjoy the world, the universe, and its beauty, and its glory, and its majesty as You have given it to us to enjoy. Amen. God bless you folks, God bless you.