On Sunday Our pastor preached on Psalm 115 in a service we actually attended in person, praise the Lord! It was a powerful sermon on a profound Psalm that addresses our everyday experience in the 21st century. The first verse sets the tone:
Not to us, Lord, not to us
but to your name be the glory,
because of your love and faithfulness.
More on this in a moment. The context is the nations and their idols who think that Israel’s God, our God, is MIA, missing in action. Oh, but he certainly is not! The writer compares God for Israel, and us, to the useless idols of the nations:
3 Our God is in heaven;
he does whatever pleases him.
4 But their idols are silver and gold,
made by human hands.
5 They have mouths, but cannot speak,
eyes, but cannot see.
6 They have ears, but cannot hear,
noses, but cannot smell.
7 They have hands, but cannot feel,
feet, but cannot walk,
nor can they utter a sound with their throats.
8 Those who make them will be like them,
and so will all who trust in them.
The whole scope of redemptive history in the Old Testament is captured in these verses: God verses idols. The Creator of the universe verses . . . nothing, literally. God and his prophets make a habit of mocking idols to show his people that it makes no sense to worship nothing, to seek favor from nothing, to fear nothing. Rather they ought to worship, seek, and fear the true and living God! The God who is there, in a phrase made famous by Francis Schaeffer. This points to the fundamentally, mutually exclusive, and dichotomous nature of reality. It’s one or the other. There is, as our pastor said, no Switzerland in the biblical view of reality, a reference to that nation’s neutrality in WWII. There is no such things as a metaphysical or spiritual neutrality; it’s idols or God.
In the age of the “nones,” non-religious people think their agnosticism gets them off the hook. It doesn’t. Claiming you can’t know is a faith commitment to anything but God, and therefore it can only be a life of idolatry. We can see this played out everywhere in our culture. When people reject the living God, their Creator, they still long for what only their Creator can provide. Things like fulfillment, significance, identity, love, meaning, hope, purpose, etc. They turn perfectly good things, like sex and love and family and work and money and career and power and entertainment and food and hobbies, into ultimate things. The Apostle Paul puts it plainly in Romans 1:
25 They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.
It’s so sadly pathetic to see people destroyed by the empty promise of things. Kanye West is a great example. He had everything until he realized he had nothing. Those, like Kanye, who proclaim the glory of God in Christ (verse 1) can enjoy the perfectly good things in life as gifts given to us by our loving Father. We can truly enjoy them without ripping them out of their proper role as a created things, and distorting them beyond their ability to give us what we think we want.
On the way home from church my son and I were listening to a podcast, perfect timing, and the speaker said that we reflect God’s glory as the moon reflects the sun. A simple analogy, but profoundly powerful when you ponder it. What is the moon without the sun, but a gray, lifeless rock covered with dust in the dark expanse of lifeless space. When the sun shines it’s light upon that rock it becomes . . . . the moon! Romance, beauty, an object of enchantment and wonder, something it could never be without the sun! In the same way, God’s glory reflects on us and the rest of his creation, and turns it into a bright reflection of his goodness and love and faithfulness.
One of the most powerful things you can teach your children, or share with your friends and family who embrace our God in Christ, is God’s glory in all things. Without him everything is missing its ultimate context that gives it meaning beyond the thing itself. Without him all we have are puzzle pieces without the puzzle. With him, seen in the light he shines upon them as Creator, we can be grateful and enjoy all of them without turning them into idols that will always disappoint. Only God in Christ delivers, and that forever!
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