In the third volume of J.R.R. Tolkien’s masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the two hobbits Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee reach the apex of their sufferings in their quest to destroy the One Ring of power that, if fallen into the wrong hands, could spell doom for all of Middle Earth. As the two hobbits inch their way through the dry, desolate, barren land of Mordor, they do so always under the dark shadow of the evil lord Sauron, who has begun to spread the shadow from his own land of Mordor to other parts of the world. In fact, so important is the shadow motif to Tolkien’s story that the chapter that describes Frodo and Sam’s trek through Mordor is entitled “The Land of Shadow.” With the hobbits reaching near exhaustion, with their food and water supply running out, and with no realistic prospect of them being able to return home alive even if they do succeed in this quest, the sheer darkness of the situation becomes palpable at this point in the story, as the shadow hangs over everything. And yet, at one moment when Frodo falls asleep, Sam decides to gaze around for a little while, when he notices a break in the shadow. This is how Tolkien narrates it:
“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach. . . . Now, for a moment, his own fate, and even his master’s ceased to trouble him. He crawled back into the brambles and laid himself by Frodo’s side, and putting away all fear he cast himself into a deep untroubled sleep.”
For Sam, hope was rekindled by perspective. And perspective came to him when he saw, even for a brief moment, that the ever-present shadow he had come to know was not ultimate. In fact, there is beauty and goodness beyond the reach of that shadow. And for that brief moment, Sam was carried outside of himself, outside of his own afflictions, where he found rest in the objective beauty of a twinkling star, a symbol of the ultimate triumph of all that is good over all that is evil.
Psalm 104 is a psalm that seeks to carry us outside of ourselves, outside of our problems, outside of the narrow world we inhabit most of the time, one that is too often covered in shadow. It invites us to look up and to look all around, to be drawn away from our own narrow concerns so that we may have eyes to see the wonders of God all around us in a world that continues to exhibit beauty and goodness, no matter what we are facing. This psalm summons us to summon ourselves to worship God because of his wonders all around us. Yes, you heard that correctly. It summons us to summon ourselves. Notice the phrasing in verse 1: “Bless the LORD, O my soul!” The same is repeated in verse 35. This psalm is one of only two (with Psalm 103) that employs this specific command. The psalmist preaches to himself. He commands himself to praise God for his wonders. How often do I do the opposite of this! Instead of preaching to myself, I let myself preach to me. In other words, I allow my frail ego to preoccupy my attention and start making its demands, which, when left unfulfilled, inevitably lead to depression and despair. But if I follow the psalmist’s example here, I will not allow my ego to direct the conversation. Instead, I will preach to myself. I will tell myself, “Quiet! I’m not listening to your self-centered pity party today. You need to straighten up, look around you at the ubiquitous wonders of God, and let your joy overflow with worship.” Psalm 104 summons us to summon ourselves to worship God because of his wonders all around us.
So that provokes the question: What wonders? I’m so glad you asked.
First, we see in verses 1-9
God is praised as Lord and Creator of all. As verse 1 continues, “O LORD my God, you are very great! You are clothed with splendor and majesty.” As the hymn based on this psalm says, “pavilioned in splendor and girded with praise.” Verse two then begins a series of allusions to the creation account of Genesis 1. On Day 1 of that account, God created light. So the psalmist draws our attention first to light in verse 2: “covering yourself with light as with a garment.” Then we see in the remainder of verses 2-4 that God is Creator and Lord of the heavens, followed by the declaration in verses 5-9 that he is Creator and Lord of the earth.
After God created light on Day 1, he separated the waters below from the waters above on Day 2, thereby creating the expanse known as the heavens. With regard to the heavens, the psalmist says in verse 2b, “stretching out the heavens like a tent.” The image prompts us to imagine God setting up the sky the same way a man sets up a tent. But the massive sky above us dwarfs us, causing us to realize that anyone capable of stretching it out like a tent must have power that is unlimited. Verse 3 reads, “He lays the beams of his chambers on the waters.” That sounds quite strange. God built his house on the waters? What does this mean? When people in the ancient world saw rain falling from the sky, they assumed (rightly) that there was water up there. They didn’t understand everything that we understand now about the water cycle, but they had a mental picture of waters below and waters above, with the sky in between. And so the psalmist pictures God building his house “upon the waters” above the sky, or at the very top. God’s dwelling place is high above everything else. And from his dwelling place above the heavens, God exercises lordship over the heavens: “he makes the clouds his chariot; he rides on the wings of the wind,” says verse 3. Verse 4 then affirms, “he makes his messengers winds, his ministers a flaming fire” (likely a reference to lightning). Although some English translations reverse the word order here by saying, “he makes winds his messengers, a flaming fire his ministers,” I think the ESV gets it right here. Not only does the Septuagint, an ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament, translate it the same way as the ESV does here, but the author of Hebrews (1:7) quotes this verse from the Septuagint and makes an important theological point about angels. In fact, that is what the word “messengers” means here. What the psalmist is apparently saying is that God employs angels in the governing of the natural world, so that they have roles to play in the blowing of wind and the flashing of lightning. The overall impression we gather from verses 2-4 is that God, as Creator of the heavens, is Lord of the heavens, of all heavenly bodies, and of all heavenly disturbances. The sky is a vast canvas upon which we are invited to behold the wonders of God, whether they appear to us in the form of gentle sunshine or in the terrifying power of a storm.
But the wonders of creation are not limited to the heavens. Verses 5-9 go on to show us that God is Creator and Lord of the earth as well. When we hear the word “earth,” we normally think of a sphere made of about 2/3 water and 1/3 land orbiting a star in the Milky Way galaxy. That is not what the psalmist means when he says “earth.” The Bible was written in a pre-scientific world in pre-scientific language, because God wanted to communicate his truth to all people at all times. Modern scientific descriptions of the earth would have been unintelligible to most people in human history, so God gave us the Bible in language that we can all understand, language that describes creation as it appears to the human eye. So when the psalmist speaks of “the earth,” he means land as opposed to water, the ground upon which we stand. Verses 5-6 tells us, “He set the earth [i.e., land] on its foundations, so that it should never be moved. You covered it with the deep as with a garment; the waters stood above the mountains.” Is the psalmist describing the flood of Noah’s day here? No, I don’t think so. Remember, his focus throughout verses 1-9 is on creation. I think he is simply reading the creation account carefully. Genesis 1:1 says, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Then verse 2 goes on to say, “The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.” The psalmist recognizes that God created the earth in verse 1, and yet the earth (“land”) is covered by water in verse 2. So what does he conclude? In the primal event of creation, God covered the land with water.
But of course, land covered by water is not a hospitable territory for man to dwell on. So what did God do? Verses 7-9 tell us: “At your rebuke they [the waters] fled; at the sound of your thunder they took to flight. The mountains rose, the valleys sank down to the place that you appointed for them. You set a boundary that they may not pass, so that they might not again cover the earth.” The psalmist has now taken us from Day 1 (the creation of light), through Day 2 (the separation of the heavens from the waters below and above), to Day 3: the separation of the waters from the land. In his power, God spoke, rebuking the waters, and they immediately retreated from the dry land, which took its appointed shape as creation became ordered by God’s design. Not only did he remove the waters from the land, he also set a boundary for the waters that they cannot cross, lest they undo his creation by erasing again the distinction between land and sea.
God is Creator and Lord of heaven and earth. The wonders of creation summon us to praise him. In 1980 a television series known as Cosmos aired on public television. It was created and narrated by the atheist astronomer Carl Sagan. In the first episode of that series, Sagan began with these words: “The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be. Our contemplations of the cosmos stir us. There is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory of falling from a great height. We know we are approaching the grandest of mysteries.” This is the language of worship. Sagan denied the existence of God, but he couldn’t help but be caught up in the wonder of creation, so the cosmos itself became his god. This is exactly what Paul wrote about in Romans 1:18-23: “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plan to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.” The very existence of creation is a wonder to behold. But it is a wonder that should prompt us, not to worship creation, but to worship the Creator whose eternal power and divine nature are clearly perceived in it. The wonders of creation summon us to worship. But what other wonders are there all around us?
Second, we see in verses 10-23
“Providence” is not just a city in Rhode Island. It is a theological term that tells us something important about God. On the seventh day in Genesis 2, God rested from his work of creation. He rested because he was finished. On days 1-6 of that account, we read every time “there was evening, and there was morning,” but the seventh day contains no such formula. This has led many theologians to conclude that the seventh day is presented as ongoing. In other words, once God had finished creating, he entered into rest, and that divine rest continues on forever, for God, having finished the work of creating, will not take it up again.
However, does that mean that God is not working in any sense at all? Did he wind up creation like a clock and then let it run on its own? No, for what entering into rest really means for God is that he has transitioned from his work of creating to his work of upholding, providing for, and governing what he has created. This work of upholding, providing for, and governing his creation is what we call providence. The psalmist sees reason to praise God, not only for bringing the world into existence, but for sustaining and upholding what he has made.
So what do these verses say about God’s work of providence? We can subdivide them into sections that address various aspects of God’s providential work. In verses 10-13, we see that God supplies water: “You make springs gush forth in the valleys; they flow between the hills; they give drink to every beast of the field; the wild donkeys quench their thirst. Beside them the birds of the heavens dwell; they sing among the branches. From your lofty abode you water the mountains; the earth is satisfied with the fruit of your work.” It is interesting that in the verses that immediately precede, God is presented as the one who rebuked the waters and caused them to flee from land, setting a boundary that they could not cross. And yet we know that water is essential for life. So God, having tamed the waters, so to speak, now gives water to beasts, birds, and the earth itself, as a divine gift that sustains life.
Verses 14-15 then speak of his providential work in the supply of food: “You cause the grass to grow for the livestock and plants for man to cultivate, that he may bring forth food from the earth and wine to gladden the heart of man, oil to make his face shine and bread to strengthen man’s heart.” Have you ever stopped to think about why, of all times, we pray regularly before eating? It is because the very act of eating represents an implicit acknowledgement of dependence. We eat because we cannot survive without taking in nutrients and energy from outside ourselves. Our very life depends on living things other than ourselves. Prayer represents, then, our grateful acknowledgement of our limits and God’s bountiful provision. It is a way of pausing to acknowledge openly and regularly that he is God, that we are not, and thus he is the source of our life.
Verses 16-18 speak of God’s providential work in the supply of habitation: “The trees of the LORD are watered abundantly, the cedars of Lebanon that he planted. In them the birds build their nests; the stork has her home in the fir trees. The high mountains are for the wild goats; the rocks are a refuge for the rock badgers.” Here the psalmist has now covered all of the basic necessities of life: water, food, and shelter. God is the source of them all.
But then there are five more verses in this section that tell of God’s providential work. Verses 19-23 speak of God as Lord of time: “He made the moon to mark the seasons; the sun knows its time for setting. You make darkness, and it is night, when all the beasts of the forest creep about. The young lions roar for their prey, seeking their food from God. When the sun rises, they steal away and lie down in their dens. Man goes out to his work and to his labor until the evening.” The rhythms of day and night and of the seasons, which regulate the activities of man and beast, are in the hand of the Lord.
This psalm invites us to see the wonders of providence all around us and to marvel at the God whose glory is on display through them. In his book Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton writes about the difference between the laws of reason and the laws of nature. The laws of reason are things that are true by definition because there is no way to conceive of them not being true. They are things we must take for granted. For example: two plus two equals four; a square has four sides; a bachelor is an unmarried man. These things are true by necessity, or by definition. But so-called “natural laws” are not really laws in the same sense. They are things that occur regularly in the world, but that does not mean we couldn’t imagine them being otherwise. For example, the fact that trees produce fruit is a law of nature, but we could imagine it being otherwise. We could imagine instead golden candlesticks growing on trees. Chesterton argues that fairy tales about wonderful worlds, where the “laws of nature” are different from our own laws, are there to remind us of the wonder of the world in which we actually live. We should stop taking providential wonders for granted and wake up to the fact that the things that we observe all around us do not occur because they have to, but because God has freely chosen to make them this way. Chesterton writes, “we all like astonishing tales because they touch the nerve of the ancient instinct of astonishment. This is proved by the fact that when we are very young children we do not need fairy tales: we only need tales. Mere life is interesting enough. A child of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. But a child of three is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door. Boys like romantic tales; but babies like realistic tales—because they find them romantic. In fact, a baby is about the only person, I should think, to whom a modern realistic novel could be read without boring him. This proves that even nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal leap of interest and amazement. These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.” Do you think Narnia or Middle Earth or a galaxy far, far away are places to which you can escape from this ordinary, boring world? Then open your eyes and look again! This world, sustained and upheld by the providential hand of God, is full of wonders.
But there are yet more wonders to stir us to praise God in addition to the wonders of creation and providence. In verses 24-30 we see
Life itself is a wonder. There are two different ways of understanding its origin. You will either believe that matter existed first and gave rise to life, or that life existed first and gave rise to matter. On naturalistic assumptions, matter existed first. And as that matter became organized in a certain way, eventually, through processes most naturalistic scientists admit they cannot explain, life spontaneously emerged from non-living matter. Life came from non-living matter and will be reduced to non-living matter again, given enough time. But from a Christian perspective, life existed first—the very life of God himself. And God, this living, personal being, created matter by the power of his word, and then organized matter and imparted to it the gift of life. The psalmist celebrates the power of God on display in the wonder of life itself.
Verses 24-25 span the whole spectrum of land and sea: “O LORD, how manifold are your works! In wisdom have you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures. Here is the sea, great and wide, which teems with creatures innumerable, living things both small and great.” In Scripture, the sea is normally considered a scary place. The Israelites were not seafaring people, so the sea often represents in Scripture the forces of chaos that terrify man. That is why, in the new heaven and the new earth vision of Revelation 21, there is no more sea. But here the psalmist departs from the usual mode of speaking about the sea, because he speaks of it here, not as a force that terrifies man, but as a created reality subject to the lordship of God. In fact, verse 26 reads, “There go the ships, and Leviathan, which you formed to play in it.” The psalmist pictures the great sea monster, Leviathan, not as the terrifying creature that it is portrayed as in Job 41, but as God’s pet, which he formed to play in the sea. We know far more about what lives in the sea today than the psalmist would have known, so we can appreciate all the more how the untamed sea creatures—great white sharks and killer whales and deadly jellyfish and countless others—give testimony to the wild, untamed God that we worship. They give us cause to wonder.
Verses 27-30 then celebrate the sovereignty of God over life and death: “These all look to you, to give them their food in due season. When you give it to them, they gather it up; when you open your hand, they are filled with good things. When you hide your face, they are dismayed; when you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust. When you send forth your Spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the ground.” The Spirit (or “breath”) of God is presented here as the divine power that sustains all life, just as in the beginning God breathed into the nostrils of Adam and brought him to life. Life not like an engine that God starts up once with the power of his Spirit and then let run on its own. God continually upholds and sustains life by the power of his Spirit, and the moment he withdraws his life-giving Spirit, life gives way to death. For God is sovereign over life, and therefore he is likewise sovereign over death.
We live in a world teeming with life. When God decided to create life, he wasn’t stingy with it. He flooded the market. Scientists estimate that there are some 920,000 species of insects that have been named. Just to give you a reference point, that compares to about 4,000 species of mammals. Insects account for around 85% of all known species, but most scientists agree that there are more insect species out there yet to be identified than have already been identified. Not only do bugs outnumber all other forms of life, but if you gathered up all the bugs in the world onto one side of a scale, and gathered up all other forms of life into the other side, guess which one would weigh more. The bugs would. Researchers in an oak forest in Pennsylvania estimated that one square foot of soil three inches deep in that forest contains just short of 10,000 bugs. So keep in mind, next time you walk outdoors, that with every step you take, you are stepping over and on thousands upon thousands of living beings. The vast majority of them you will never see, but all of them are a living testimony to the power and creativity of God. All of them are wonders that should cause us to marvel.
And so we have seen the wonders of creation, the wonders of providence, and the wonders of life. Verses 31-35 then provide a concluding word of praise. Unlike Carl Sagan, the psalmist does not behold the wonders of creation and praise creation. He gives glory to God: “May the glory of the LORD endure forever; may the LORD rejoice in his works, who looks on the earth and it trembles, who touches the mountains and they smoke!” The psalmist pictures God delighting in the world he made, including its dangerous and untamed aspects.
I mentioned in verses 1-9 that the psalmist appeared to be alluding to the days of creation, at least days 1-3. While he does not follow a strict chronology in the rest of the psalm, he does continue making allusions. We saw references to the heavenly bodies, the sun and the moon, which God created on Day 4. We saw references to birds and sea creatures, which God created on Day 5. We saw references to beasts and man, which God created on Day 6. It is fitting that the psalmist should bring this psalm to a climax with a reference to his own act of worship, showing that the pinnacle of God’s creation—man—has been given the capacity to respond to God as a worshiper. Verses 33-34 read, “I will sing to the LORD as long as I live; I will sing praise to my God while I have being. May my meditation be pleasing to him, for I rejoice in the LORD.”
But what about those who refuse to respond in worship? What about those who, in spite of the wondrous revelation of God’s eternal power and divine nature, suppress the truth about God’s power, majesty, and lordship, and choose instead to worship false gods of their own making? The psalmist’s prayer regarding them comes in verse 35: “Let sinners be consumed from the earth, and let the wicked be no more!” Commentator Leslie C. Allen writes of this verse, “His final prayer is that man-made flaws in Yahweh’s beautiful handiwork may be removed. Those who by flouting his moral order deliberately spoil the harmony of creation forfeit their God-given privilege of sharing in it.” And the rest of the Bible demonstrates that the psalmist’s prayer will be answered. The book of Revelation pictures a new creation that only comes about after evildoers have been removed by the final judgment and cast into the lake of fire. Revelation 21:27 says of the New Jerusalem, “But nothing unclean will ever enter it, nor anyone who does what is detestable or false, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life.” That raises a question for you: have you, by your rebellion against God, become a blight on his creation? Are you destined for removal from this theater of God’s glory for permanent relocation in Hell? The Bible tells us, though we may not realize it, that sin has corrupted us to our very core. We may think of ourselves as basically good people, but we do not realize how selfish and God-defying we are. The very air we breathe is God-defying air. And that means, for us who are children of Adam, that unless something changes for us, the psalmist’s prayer in verse 35 is our doom. We all deserve to be swept away in the judgment that is to come.
But this is where the good news comes in. By pronouncing judgment upon sinners and the wicked, this psalm points us to look at what the rest of the Bible teaches about how sinners are made right with God, forgiven of all sins, and made fit to inherit a new creation. And this is what it says: God, who will not allow rebellion against himself to persist forever, lest he become complicit in evil, nevertheless loved this rebellious world. Out of his love, he sent his Son Jesus Christ to become incarnate as a man—the God-man—and this man Jesus lived a sinless life. He who deserved no condemnation nevertheless voluntarily submitted himself to condemnation before men, and as he hung on the cross darkness fell over the land, showing that he hung there under the condemnation of God, not for his own sins, but for the sins of his people. And there he died, and he was buried in a rich man’s tomb. Nevertheless, God did not leave him under the curse of death, but on the third day, in fulfillment of his plan foretold in the Scriptures, God raised him from the dead, justifying his Son before the world. And now King Jesus has been exalted as the crucified and risen Lord over creation, where he sends forth the urgent message that anyone who turns away from sin and rests in him by faith will be forgiven of all sin and will receive eternal life. Are you a sinner? Are you wicked? The answer is yes. Must you be consumed from the earth, as verse 35 says? The answer is no. On God’s authority, I declare to you that you will escape the wrath to come if you will turn away from sin now and go to Christ in faith. The way Jesus has commanded you to proclaim your faith publicly is to submit to baptism. If that is your desire, please let us know. It would be our delight to baptize you and welcome you into this body.
Baptism is one ordinance that we observe. But there is also another, the ordinance of the Lord’s Supper. For those of us who have already been baptized, who are believers in Jesus Christ in good standing with a local church, we will now to come to the table, to eat and drink, as a testimony to our ongoing faith. The psalmist concludes at the same place where he started: “Bless the LORD, O my soul! Praise the LORD!” Let us come to the table with the same self-exhortation. Perhaps you are inching your way through the land of shadow this morning. Take this moment to look outside of yourself and beyond the shadow, to the God of wonders who has made himself yours in Jesus Christ. Amen.