Biblical Devotions 2

One thing have I desired of the LORD, that will I seek after;

that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life,

to behold the beauty of the LORD, and to enquire in his temple.

Psalm 27:4

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Part I — The Beauty of Creation: God the Maker

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I. From the Backyard to the Throne: Creation Declares Its Creator

There is a moment, known to every soul that has not yet been wholly hardened by the vanity of this world, when the eye passes over some simple scene of the natural order and is struck by wonder. Standing in a garden during the morning, the senses are arrested by things that are “understood by things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead” (Romans 1:20); the flowering trees adorned as for a coronation, grass green and living beneath the foot, the great cathedral arch of a walnut tree whose branches have been spreading since before the memory of any living man, and above it all a sky of deep and faultless blue, with the sun ascending from the east as though the heavens themselves were proclaiming a resurrection. These are not accidents. These are sermons showing the beauty of the Lord in his creation.

I even consider the homes of men that sit in orderly rows long the streets, built by hands of flesh and bone that do testify, however dimly, to something of the spirit of God in man (Romans 1:18-19); for man creates because he was made by a Creator. Yet the creature's handiwork is as a child's drawing compared to the masterwork it attempts to imitate. It is, then, a travesty without measure, a rebellion of the most contemptible kind, that a man endowed with eyes to see, ears to hear, and a mind to reason should survey all this and, in his arrogance, declare that there is no God, or that God may be safely set aside.

Psalm 19:1 The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.

Psalm 19:2 Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.

Romans 1:20 For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse.

Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

The Scripture is without ambiguity: God created. Not the blind forces of a purposeless cosmos, not the grinding accumulation of chance upon chance across immeasurable eons, but God who is the living, personal, holy God that in the beginning created the heaven and the earth. The man who stands in the beauty of creation and denies the Creator does not do so because the evidence is insufficient. He does so because his heart, fallen and proud, is at war with the truth that is written in every leaf and every star. He does not suppress the knowledge; he twists it, bending what he knows into the shape of a lie he has chosen to love.

O that the church of the living God might preach this! O that from her pulpits the glory of the Creator might ring as clearly as it rang in the days when men feared God and nations trembled at His Word! The beauty of the Lord God begins here — in the raw, magnificent, inexhaustible beauty of a world He spoke into existence and called good.

Psalm 104:24 O LORD, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them all: the earth is full of thy riches.

Isaiah 40:26 Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things, that bringeth out their host by number: he calleth them all by names by the greatness of his might, for that he is strong in power; not one faileth.

Job 38:4,7 Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? ... When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?