What Do You See When You Look at the Sky?
00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)
00:00:02.580 | This spring during the quarantine,
00:00:06.100 | my youngest son and I have taken up a new hobby.
00:00:08.940 | We go outside in the dark to the backyard,
00:00:11.980 | we lay down and we stare straight up
00:00:13.980 | into the clear, dark Arizona sky
00:00:16.500 | to behold the dazzling stars.
00:00:19.500 | The more our eyes adjust, the more stars we begin to see,
00:00:22.420 | but about the only stars visible to us at night
00:00:25.220 | are the big boys, the stars that are mostly brighter
00:00:28.440 | and larger than our own sun.
00:00:30.460 | I love to hear the awe in my son's voice
00:00:33.780 | as I recite to him the stats on what we're looking at,
00:00:36.540 | the size and the distance of each visible star.
00:00:40.040 | He still finds it hard to believe that anything
00:00:42.220 | can be larger or brighter than the hot sun over Arizona,
00:00:45.680 | but in these moments we hear,
00:00:47.700 | we hear the voice of the creator.
00:00:50.600 | In the sky, God speaks to us, kinda.
00:00:54.460 | Here's Pastor John in a 1990 sermon on Psalm 19
00:00:57.740 | to explain what we hear.
00:01:00.660 | - What you see when you look up outdoors,
00:01:05.060 | speaks, it tells, it proclaims.
00:01:10.940 | You see those verbs?
00:01:13.220 | But here's the verb I like best in verse two.
00:01:15.980 | Day unto day, what is it?
00:01:19.180 | Pours forth speech.
00:01:21.580 | Now I looked that verb up in Hebrew just to check it out,
00:01:25.000 | and it is a very exciting word.
00:01:27.540 | It means gush forth, spew out knowledge and speech.
00:01:32.540 | So fix this truth very firmly in your minds.
00:01:37.940 | Every time the sun rises,
00:01:41.780 | or every time the stars come up,
00:01:44.420 | or every time the thunder rolls and the lightning strikes,
00:01:48.860 | every time there is a lavender, gold, yellow,
00:01:52.820 | sunrise or sunset,
00:01:55.580 | God is gushing forth speech to you.
00:02:00.580 | And He means for you to hear it.
00:02:04.420 | And He means for you to be ministered to by it.
00:02:08.180 | He means for you to be helped by it.
00:02:10.420 | Do you believe God speaks in vain?
00:02:13.020 | Do you believe God speaks without love?
00:02:17.900 | Do you believe He just rambles on
00:02:20.260 | with no purpose like some people do?
00:02:23.900 | No!
00:02:25.260 | Whenever God speaks,
00:02:27.660 | every word is designed for your good.
00:02:32.660 | And so the second point is simply,
00:02:35.740 | when you look up, God is speaking to you.
00:02:39.900 | And we need to learn to hear Him.
00:02:41.820 | We need to learn to interpret
00:02:43.740 | and be helped by what He's saying.
00:02:47.060 | The message comes without words,
00:02:51.620 | without speech,
00:02:54.180 | without voice.
00:02:56.900 | Now, this is difficult,
00:03:00.620 | because most of us are so word-dependent -
00:03:04.580 | I am -
00:03:06.020 | that thinking of something coming
00:03:08.460 | from God's heart to my heart,
00:03:11.180 | minus words, is very difficult.
00:03:14.700 | That's what's happening when you look up.
00:03:17.540 | Something is being communicated
00:03:19.460 | from God's mind and heart
00:03:21.620 | to your mind and heart
00:03:23.260 | without any vehicle of language.
00:03:27.020 | No reasonings, no arguments, no words.
00:03:32.020 | Now, you can tell how hard this is
00:03:34.260 | because David has to use paradox
00:03:37.460 | to get it across.
00:03:38.980 | Look at the paradox between verses 2 and 3.
00:03:42.740 | Verse 2 says, "Day to day pours forth speech."
00:03:47.460 | Then look at verse 3.
00:03:48.860 | "There is no speech."
00:03:52.300 | Now, you talk like that.
00:03:53.580 | That's the same Hebrew word, by the way.
00:03:55.620 | There's no different word there, no fancy meaning.
00:03:57.820 | Same thing in English that it is in Hebrew.
00:04:00.700 | Speech is being poured forth.
00:04:02.860 | "There is no speech."
00:04:05.420 | You get it?
00:04:07.260 | It's not easy to get.
00:04:09.540 | We're not good at it.
00:04:11.340 | I'm not good at it.
00:04:12.900 | Getting messages from God
00:04:17.620 | not through words,
00:04:19.380 | but through light, color, shape,
00:04:23.860 | contrast, proportion, design, magnitude,
00:04:30.420 | and a lot of other things I'm sure I can't think of
00:04:32.940 | that make up what the eye inhales
00:04:36.220 | when it looks up.
00:04:38.020 | God is communicating without words,
00:04:42.340 | without voice, without speech.
00:04:46.220 | And yet, verse 4 goes right back to verse 2
00:04:49.900 | and says, "Yet their line..."
00:04:52.700 | That may be written line,
00:04:53.980 | may be plumb line, sound, voice.
00:04:55.900 | There's a lot of uncertainty about what that word means,
00:04:58.660 | but we get the idea.
00:04:59.700 | "Their line goes out through all the earth,
00:05:02.220 | and their words..."
00:05:03.420 | There it is. Hey, I thought there were no words.
00:05:05.380 | Well, there aren't, but there are.
00:05:07.060 | "...words to the end of the world."
00:05:09.180 | Wordless words, speechless speech, voiceless voice.
00:05:13.580 | From God's heart to your heart
00:05:15.900 | to minister healing and wholeness
00:05:19.380 | and happiness and humility and hope.
00:05:23.900 | Are you good at it?
00:05:25.460 | Do you get it?
00:05:26.980 | Or are you too busy even to look up?
00:05:29.620 | And listen, the message that comes without words
00:05:33.980 | through the sky is about God.
00:05:39.060 | Day and night, everywhere in the world,
00:05:41.260 | God is speaking about God.
00:05:44.860 | You see it in verse 1.
00:05:46.780 | "The heavens are telling the glory of God."
00:05:53.140 | We are not New Age pantheists.
00:05:56.260 | In the beginning,
00:05:58.060 | God, who always was without nature,
00:06:04.100 | full and complete in His triune happiness,
00:06:09.260 | said, "Let there be nature."
00:06:13.660 | And there was nature.
00:06:14.860 | And it is not God.
00:06:18.060 | We are not pantheists.
00:06:21.180 | We believe in God Almighty,
00:06:23.780 | the Maker of heaven and earth.
00:06:28.220 | We are light years away
00:06:30.980 | from the kind of being
00:06:35.020 | that the New Age puts forth,
00:06:38.060 | calling all God.
00:06:42.660 | There were mornings on the study leave,
00:06:46.100 | the cottage was at the bottom of the hill
00:06:48.180 | and about 20 or 30 yards into the woods
00:06:51.980 | was this little trailer
00:06:53.660 | where I sat most of the days
00:06:55.100 | working on this book that I was working on.
00:06:58.380 | And mornings I would walk
00:07:01.340 | and I would just stop about halfway in the woods.
00:07:04.700 | And I would look down through the pine trees,
00:07:07.380 | probably 80 or 100 years old,
00:07:09.620 | to the little four-acre lake that's down there
00:07:12.500 | and I would see the sun spangled
00:07:15.020 | with those diamonds dancing across the water.
00:07:17.140 | You know how it does on the lake in the morning.
00:07:19.500 | And then I would begin to look up.
00:07:21.380 | It's about nine.
00:07:22.380 | The sun is about at this angle,
00:07:23.780 | just blazing through
00:07:25.380 | and there's the shield of hickory and oak
00:07:27.500 | and sweet gum and maple leaves
00:07:29.380 | all doing like this in the breeze.
00:07:31.220 | And they're all yellow-green and gold.
00:07:34.340 | And then I looked on up
00:07:35.660 | and there was the big, broad, expansive blue
00:07:38.540 | and the cool morning breeze was hitting me in the face
00:07:41.180 | and all I could do was say,
00:07:42.820 | "Glory, glory, glory."
00:07:47.180 | And I didn't reason it out either.
00:07:50.620 | I didn't lecture myself.
00:07:52.460 | It was just there.
00:07:54.020 | It's just there.
00:07:55.380 | When you open your eyes to see what God has done,
00:07:58.580 | you see glory.
00:08:01.380 | The glory of God is not something
00:08:03.740 | that can be transferred merely by words.
00:08:07.500 | It is transferred by words in the Gospel,
00:08:12.420 | by gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit,
00:08:14.980 | by the Scriptures and by the skies,
00:08:16.940 | but it is only being transferred.
00:08:19.500 | The glory of God is always something more than sky.
00:08:22.660 | It's always something more than Scripture.
00:08:24.940 | It's always something more than gifts
00:08:26.900 | and fruit of the Holy Spirit.
00:08:28.900 | The glory of God is tasted by spiritual perception within.
00:08:33.500 | It is perceived by the gift of God's revelation.
00:08:38.700 | It is an awesome thing to behold
00:08:41.100 | the glory of God in the sky.
00:08:44.420 | - This excerpt was taken from John Piper's sermon
00:08:46.380 | on August 26, 1990, titled,
00:08:49.060 | Do You See the Joy of God in the Sun?
00:08:52.460 | And you can find the whole thing at DesiringGod.org.
00:08:55.900 | And thanks for listening.
00:08:56.820 | If you want new episodes of this podcast delivered to you,
00:08:59.700 | subscribe to Ask Pastor John
00:09:01.020 | in your favorite podcast app at Spotify
00:09:02.820 | or by subscribing to DG's YouTube channel.
00:09:05.540 | And to find other episodes in our archive
00:09:07.380 | or to submit a question to us of your own,
00:09:09.060 | do that online at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.
00:09:14.060 | Next time we take up another important Bible question,
00:09:17.980 | which characters in Job can we trust?
00:09:21.460 | Most of the book's characters say things we can't trust.
00:09:24.260 | So it's a very important question up next on Friday.
00:09:28.020 | I'm Tony Reinke, and we'll see you then.
00:09:30.020 | (upbeat music)
00:09:32.600 | (upbeat music)
00:09:35.180 | [BLANK_AUDIO]