The Greatness of God                                                                      7/8/45

 

Texts:   Psalm 19: 1;  “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handywork.”

 

               Psalm 8: 3,4; “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man that thou art mindful of him?”

 

I shall speak, today, on the Greatness of God, taking the thought from two texts.  I shall not preach an expository sermon on the texts but shall try to develop some of the ideas which they seem to me to suggest for our own spiritual understanding.

 

It was a man of deep spiritual insight who wrote that great 19th Psalm.  He had a wide acquaintance with life and a genuine appreciation of it.  He had sensed, and expressed, beauty in song and nature.  He had done many good and wise deeds and had been blessed.  He had made some awful mistakes and had committed some grievous sins and had been dreadfully punished.  He knew the friendship and the enmity of men.  But above all, he knew the majestic presence of God.

 

When we read the first verse of the 19th Psalm and hear bursting from the soul of a great man “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showteh his handywork,” one of the finest conceptions of God’s greatness is presented to our understanding.  No attempted logical proof of God’s existence, or greatness, appeals to the mind as the actual consciousness of His presence in the universe, and in the heart, appeals to the soul.  Happy is the relifious life of a man whose heart knows the habitat and the works of God.

 

But as men differ in physique, in mentality, and in spiritual capacity, so their conceptions of God differ.  God, to the great scientist of today, is not the same as God to the men whose concept of Him is represented by the God of the first chapter of Genesis.  He himself is the same, yesterday, today, and forever -

but our understanding of Him changes and grows.  Man has always sensed the presence of God, but his conception of Him has greatly changed.  It is interesting to note some of these changes.

 

The God of the Garden of Eden was a sort of super man.  The writer thought of Him much as a ruler whose wishes and commands were automatically heeded and obeyed.  God wanted light to be separated from darkness, and it was so.  He wanted the land brought together in a great dry place, and it was so.  God’s mere wish resulted in the appearance of trees and grass and shrubbery.  Then the animals appeared, according to his command.  And when he wanted man to step into the picture, all he had to do was to form the man out of common clay and will life into him.

 

Now of course the writer believed that man did not fully understand God.  But he knew Him and expected to obey, implicitly, his commands.  And the commands were very directly, simply, and concisely given.  Adam was told that he could eat any fruit in the Garden of Eden except that of one tree.  That was plain enough and simple enough.

 

The little world in which Adam lived was small enough so that he knew it and was given the task, or privilege, of naming everything in it.  And the creator of this man and this world, God, seemed almost as well understood as an overseer or king.  But it is not so very much farther along in the Biblical account of the history of man, that man has conceived the impression of a greater world and the thought of a greater God.  The impression of a world bounded by a garden wall with God as planner and chief gardener, gives way to a larger concept.

 

The later concept of the universe still has its limits, however.  The earth is believed to be a huge flat creation.  It is bounded on all sides by water, the seas.  The seas themselves have a limit beyond which one can not go without falling off.  Over this huge flat earth is set the great blue firmament.  It is roughly analogous to a huge inverted kettle.  Through holes in this imaginary kettle the light comes in as stars, or the waters of the great outside deep pour in as rain.

 

Beneath the flat earth is a fiery place called Sheol, the early idea of hell.  This whole limited universe was surrounded by a great deep.  (No one knew what that was.)  Now the creator and ruler of such a universe must be greater than the mightiest conceivable man.  So God becomes, in the understanding of man, more spiritual and less mundanely human than the God of Adam and the Garden of Eden.  In man’s mind, God became one who is pleased with sacrifices for the sake of their odor and the spirit in which they are offered.  He is a powerful God.  He more certainly holds the destiny of man and the world in his hands than did the God of Adam.  Adam had to experiment with forbidden fruit before he discovered any thing at all about God’s power.

 

But though powerful and superhuman, men believed that God could be conjured or persuaded by people, who found favor in His sight, to do what they wished.  A really righteous man could call on God for aid in a bloody battle and be sure of victory.  Many people today still feel that way.

 

Now the early ideas of God and the world had much of spiritual value in them.  That is why they are preserved in our Biblical literature.  It is not for their scientific value, but for their record of the experience of God’s justice and power, that the early chapters of Genesis, and even subsequent writings, are wisely and carefully preserved as sacred literature.

 

What, then, is our more modern conception of the world and of God?  The world is of course quite different from the physical world of the Old Testament understanding.  It is not flat, but round.  It does not have any fiery Sheol beneath it.  And though it probably does have a hot molten center, people are not consigned to that center because of their conduct in life, as far as we know.  The world is not covered by an inverted kettle-shaped firmament, through holes in which starlight comes.  The world is instead itself a very small and humble rock, orbiting a very small and humble star [the sun], whirling in a universe so vast that it may be limitless, so far as man can know.  Our Great Deep turns out to be not water, but vast etherial space through which many worlds and their satellites move according to the natural laws of God.  Many of these natural laws, man has discovered.  And with each new discovery, his concept of God’s greatness is magnified.  [Eclipse tomorrow morning.]

 

A few years ago, the Associated Press reported the astronomic phenomenon of flames that surge one million miles at a speed of more than 4,000 miles a minute.  These flames are found on a star seen in the sky near the north star.  Not only are these flames found there, but the star itself, a giant among suns, also pulsates in such a way that its 10 or 12 million mile diameter may vary as much as one million miles within four hours of time.

 

These are two of the characteristics of one of the myriads of stars in the universe of which our world is a tiny part.  What kind of God is to be inferred from such a universe and the laws which run it?  Should we not understand God as an infinitely greater being than the God of Adam or of Abraham or of David?

And yet how uncanny was the spiritual insight of some of those early men.  “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handywork.”  This inspiring song of David is as full of spiritual meaning for us as it was for David with his inaccurately conceived physical world.  After all, the true appreciation of God’s greatness is found in the human heart.  No matter what a man’s inference concerning the God of the universe may be, his real appreciation of God’s greatness springs from his spiritual acquaintance with God.

 

I think the psalmist reaches a conclusion something like this when he exclaims in another song, “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained; what is man, that thou art mindful of him?”  And then he goes on to observe the greatness of man’s place in this world and the power with which God has endowed man.

 

After all, man is probably the most highly perfected and complex of God’s creations that we know anything about.  He is a creature who thinks his way ahead of all other creatures of the world.  He dominates the animated and the inanimate world.  His understanding is constantly unfolding.  The place to look for God’s greatness is perhaps in the reflection of his greatest creation, man.  How has he created him?  How does He control him?  How does man act toward his fellows and toward God?

 

As we see the development of man from a primitive being up to his present complex estate we get a new conception of man’s creator and a new appreciation of His greatness.  And we look eagerly for further manifestations of that greatness in the continued development of man.

 

Has God created a man that is great enough to overcome, with God’s help, the unhappiness and tension of modern life?  I believe He has, for I have faith in His greatness, the more especially when I think of the spirit of Christ in a man - Jesus of Nazareth.

 

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Dates and places delivered:

 

            Makawao Union Church, August 11, 1929

            Wailuku Union Church, October 28, 1929

            Puunene Japanese Church, November 10, 1929

            Wailuku Japanese Church, November 10, 1929

            Paia Japanese Church, November 17, 1929

            Kahului Union Church, February 16, 1930

            Kahului Union Church, September 18, 1932

            Maui Association, Hana, September 23, 1932

            Puunene Hawaiian Church, July 23, 1934

            Kahului Union Church, September 2, 1934

            Pilgrim Church, Honolulu, October 17, 1936 AM

            Wisconsin Rapids, July 8, 1945