Sunday Morning Med--God's language

“There is no speech or language 

where their voice is not heard” Psalm 19 

“Israel’s singer of songs”—that’s what old King David called himself just a chapter or two before he died. If it wouldn’t be for the medley of great tunes rising from every Bible printed on earth, we might think the old monarch a bit forward about his abilities. But the Psalms speak for themselves. As do the heavens, the triumphant subject of Psalm 19.

You can feel David’s poetic soul here in Psalm 19, the gift which made him Israel’s greatest singer. It’s not enough for him to say that the heavens preach God’s glory. For David’s rhapsodic sensibility, it’s not enough to sing out the joy of knowing that heavenly sermon is aired, literally, day after day. He’s on to a truly divine idea here, and the poet in him is not about to let go. He’s thrilled. He’s awed.

What he might have said in verse three is that there is no nation or tribe where the voice of the heavens is not heard. He might have said there is no city or town, no country or habitation where the sky can’t sing God’s praise. But Israel’s best singer lovingly tweaks that savored metaphor one more time and says that there is no speech or language where God’s heavenly word isn’t there just for the listening. God’s awesome heavens speak his glory in every last human tongue.

There’s no Babel of languages here, no multi-culturalism, no quilt of ethnics. The sky creates a divine melting pot all over the world because everyday, on every square inch of the globe, people can hear God’s glory preached in a language that has no verbs or nouns or retained objects. That’s what’s astounding. That’s what makes him sing out the glor again and again.

What Psalm 19 offers is truly radical theology. God speaks by way of Orion, the Big Dipper, and a harvest moon. His sermon is the dawn, the dusk, and searing heat of midday. He’s speaks, every minute of our lives, in a language we might simply call azure.

What is at once most amazing and most triumphant is God’s true democratic disposition, the fact that his word surrounds all of us every day. Out here beneath the open skies of the prairie he preaches divinely, let me tell you; but the grace of his word is accessible absolutely anywhere, to all tribes and all nations—even to our enemies.

Not long ago I listened to a woman from Laos tell a frightening story of her escape across the Mekong River. Five adults swam alongside a boat barely bigger than my desk, a leaky little skiff that filled with river water just about as fast as the children inside could bale it out. She prayed and prayed and prayed for deliverance, she said.

Only recently had she become a Christian. When I asked her who she was praying to in those years before she knew the Lord, she told me that she didn’t really know—not even then, up to her neck in the waters of Mekong. She says she didn’t know who was listening.

Now she does, she told me. Now she knows Jesus Christ.

On that scary night on the river, I’m guessing that she was praying to whoever it was she’d heard in the sermons preached by the sky. And I’m thinking—and I certainly want to believe—that preacher, the Lord God almighty, was listening.