(upbeat music) This spring during the quarantine, my youngest son and I have taken up a new hobby. We go outside in the dark to the backyard, we lay down and we stare straight up into the clear, dark Arizona sky to behold the dazzling stars. The more our eyes adjust, the more stars we begin to see, but about the only stars visible to us at night are the big boys, the stars that are mostly brighter and larger than our own sun.

I love to hear the awe in my son's voice as I recite to him the stats on what we're looking at, the size and the distance of each visible star. He still finds it hard to believe that anything can be larger or brighter than the hot sun over Arizona, but in these moments we hear, we hear the voice of the creator.

In the sky, God speaks to us, kinda. Here's Pastor John in a 1990 sermon on Psalm 19 to explain what we hear. - What you see when you look up outdoors, speaks, it tells, it proclaims. You see those verbs? But here's the verb I like best in verse two.

Day unto day, what is it? Pours forth speech. Now I looked that verb up in Hebrew just to check it out, and it is a very exciting word. It means gush forth, spew out knowledge and speech. So fix this truth very firmly in your minds. Every time the sun rises, or every time the stars come up, or every time the thunder rolls and the lightning strikes, every time there is a lavender, gold, yellow, sunrise or sunset, God is gushing forth speech to you.

And He means for you to hear it. And He means for you to be ministered to by it. He means for you to be helped by it. Do you believe God speaks in vain? Do you believe God speaks without love? Do you believe He just rambles on with no purpose like some people do?

No! Whenever God speaks, every word is designed for your good. And so the second point is simply, when you look up, God is speaking to you. And we need to learn to hear Him. We need to learn to interpret and be helped by what He's saying. The message comes without words, without speech, without voice.

Now, this is difficult, because most of us are so word-dependent - I am - that thinking of something coming from God's heart to my heart, minus words, is very difficult. That's what's happening when you look up. Something is being communicated from God's mind and heart to your mind and heart without any vehicle of language.

No reasonings, no arguments, no words. Now, you can tell how hard this is because David has to use paradox to get it across. Look at the paradox between verses 2 and 3. Verse 2 says, "Day to day pours forth speech." Then look at verse 3. "There is no speech." Now, you talk like that.

That's the same Hebrew word, by the way. There's no different word there, no fancy meaning. Same thing in English that it is in Hebrew. Speech is being poured forth. "There is no speech." You get it? It's not easy to get. We're not good at it. I'm not good at it.

Getting messages from God not through words, but through light, color, shape, contrast, proportion, design, magnitude, and a lot of other things I'm sure I can't think of that make up what the eye inhales when it looks up. God is communicating without words, without voice, without speech. And yet, verse 4 goes right back to verse 2 and says, "Yet their line..." That may be written line, may be plumb line, sound, voice.

There's a lot of uncertainty about what that word means, but we get the idea. "Their line goes out through all the earth, and their words..." There it is. Hey, I thought there were no words. Well, there aren't, but there are. "...words to the end of the world." Wordless words, speechless speech, voiceless voice.

From God's heart to your heart to minister healing and wholeness and happiness and humility and hope. Are you good at it? Do you get it? Or are you too busy even to look up? And listen, the message that comes without words through the sky is about God. Day and night, everywhere in the world, God is speaking about God.

You see it in verse 1. "The heavens are telling the glory of God." We are not New Age pantheists. In the beginning, God, who always was without nature, full and complete in His triune happiness, said, "Let there be nature." And there was nature. And it is not God. We are not pantheists.

We believe in God Almighty, the Maker of heaven and earth. We are light years away from the kind of being that the New Age puts forth, calling all God. There were mornings on the study leave, the cottage was at the bottom of the hill and about 20 or 30 yards into the woods was this little trailer where I sat most of the days working on this book that I was working on.

And mornings I would walk and I would just stop about halfway in the woods. And I would look down through the pine trees, probably 80 or 100 years old, to the little four-acre lake that's down there and I would see the sun spangled with those diamonds dancing across the water.

You know how it does on the lake in the morning. And then I would begin to look up. It's about nine. The sun is about at this angle, just blazing through and there's the shield of hickory and oak and sweet gum and maple leaves all doing like this in the breeze.

And they're all yellow-green and gold. And then I looked on up and there was the big, broad, expansive blue and the cool morning breeze was hitting me in the face and all I could do was say, "Glory, glory, glory." And I didn't reason it out either. I didn't lecture myself.

It was just there. It's just there. When you open your eyes to see what God has done, you see glory. The glory of God is not something that can be transferred merely by words. It is transferred by words in the Gospel, by gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit, by the Scriptures and by the skies, but it is only being transferred.

The glory of God is always something more than sky. It's always something more than Scripture. It's always something more than gifts and fruit of the Holy Spirit. The glory of God is tasted by spiritual perception within. It is perceived by the gift of God's revelation. It is an awesome thing to behold the glory of God in the sky.

- This excerpt was taken from John Piper's sermon on August 26, 1990, titled, Do You See the Joy of God in the Sun? And you can find the whole thing at DesiringGod.org. And thanks for listening. If you want new episodes of this podcast delivered to you, subscribe to Ask Pastor John in your favorite podcast app at Spotify or by subscribing to DG's YouTube channel.

And to find other episodes in our archive or to submit a question to us of your own, do that online at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn. Next time we take up another important Bible question, which characters in Job can we trust? Most of the book's characters say things we can't trust. So it's a very important question up next on Friday.

I'm Tony Reinke, and we'll see you then. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)