The Display of God's Glory in Creation Prompts Us to Delight in Him

When the LORD created the heavens and the earth and all that was in it, He authored and brought into being a majestic and marvelous world.

Our hearts grasp this more fully as we are being renewed in Christ. Our minds bring our thoughts more often to exalt God’s name as we conformed to the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Our wills move us to eager service of our Creator and Redeemer God as we are put to death our old nature and put on our new nature. Through it all, the display of God’s glory in His creation continues to stun us and move us to wonder.

“Praise the LORD! I will give thanks to the LORD with my whole heart, in the company of the upright, in the congregation. Great are the works of the LORD, studied by all who delight in them. Full of splendor and majesty is his work, and his righteousness endures forever. He has caused his wondrous works to be remembered; the LORD is gracious and merciful.”

In humility, we therefore strive to study the works of the Lord and delight in them. We ask questions and seek answers from God’s Word. We observe His creation and seek to give an account for what we see. We strive, with creaturely restraint, to teach truly and persuasively about the world as it was, the world as it is now, and the world as it one day shall be!

And with uplifted hearts, we await the Lion of Judah and the Lamb of God. We long for the advent of the One who declared to a world of rebellious image-bearers, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.” We cherish the kind and merciful Master who assures us, “I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.”

So let us cry “Come Lord Jesus” to the One who declares, “Behold, I am making all things new” so that “death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” Allelulia! Maranatha!

God Has Made Billions of Creatures to Populate His Creation!

The predator-prey relationships we see in the world provide a remarkably creative display of different forms of animal death. Some are trapped by predators, others are poisoned, still others are scavenged, and countless other creative ways of consuming creatures can be found in the natural world.

Some 72,000,000,000 animals and fish were killed and consumed by humans in the last year for food and animal products.

Amazingly, that number pales in comparison with the number of animals that die as food for their predators or as food for scavengers in any given year. Yet the world continues to see an abundance of living creatures living in ecosystems that allow for life and replenishment on a grand scale.

Do we ever take this abundance for granted?

The Elaborate and Wonderful Buffet Which God Provides the Creatures He Has Made

God sustains His creatures – the ravens, sparrows, lilies, and cattle on a thousand hills – by providing for them according to their needs through the elaborate and wonderful buffet found in the natural world. He does this in accordance with His good and perfect will.

The natural world extols the glory of the immortal God when it receives food in the wilderness or the scraps which fall from a master’s table.

God's Husbandry of the Natural World Should Amaze Us!

“Consider the ravens,” Jesus told His disciples, “they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds!”

With its powerful beak, the raven stabs its prey of mice, fish, insects, and other smaller birds. They also work together with other ravens to take down larger prey that would be too large for a single bird. These magnificent living creatures are remarkable examples of God’s husbandry of the natural world.

The natural world is full of amazing food chains that are woven together by an artistry that is breathtaking the more that you study it. Intelligent design is not hard to demonstrate when you look for examples in the natural world.

God created the mechanisms that sustain life on the earth and He superintends them in His sovereign providence and power so that the vole is fed from the ground in order to be food for the aforementioned ravens who latterly become food for the beetles and other recyclers that clean up dead carcasses in the forests of North America.

Just as God provided a habitation fit for all the living creatures, He has provided sources of food in abundance that are a suitable for their daily sustenance and flourishing. The food which sustains each creature is well-suited to its digestive systems. The stunningly unique attributes God has given to living creatures all around us demonstrate how wondrously God has equipped them for their respective functions and role in the theatre of natural life (ex. anteater snouts, giraffe necks, and hawk eyes).

Surely we must worship Him!

God has provided for His creation

There was harmony, beauty, and order in creation and among the living creatures God designed and equipped for life in the world.

The amazing systems of balancing needs and the widespread provision of prey for predators in cycles of abundance and greater scarcity all evidence a remarkable fine-tuning in spite of the growing impact of human activity in the world on these natural systems.

For example, the carbon cycle, a recycling system extraordinaire, is inclusive of animal life and death and our earth would collapse without the vitality it brings to all created things.

Surely the LORD’s wisdom is revealed in what He has made!

God Has Numbered the Days of Bugs and Elephants

In Genesis 8, the LORD assured Noah that “while the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease." This promise has a direct bearing on the lives and fortunes of the creatures which God made to populate and flourish upon the earth. Some creatures live for long lifespans while others live for days.

Their days are numbered.

The calculation of population statistics in the natural world reveals that the earth would struggle to accommodate the voracious appetites of many bugs and ocean creatures if they lived any longer lives than they currently do. Yet the African elephant, with its slow maturation and lengthy gestation periods, would be extinct and vast swathes of African habitat would suffer environmental collapse were it not for the LORD’s provision of long life to these magnificent keystone species.

Praise the Lord!

A Significant Phrase: "Each According to Its Kind"

One highlight of the creation narrative in Genesis 1-2 is the repetition of the phrase “each according to its kind.” Each part of God’s creation was marked by an ordered diversity of creatures and every one of them was made ‘according’ to its kind. This testifies that each creature had a purpose and a function.

We continue to see this in the world around us – creatures of greater size playing a more prominent role in stabilizing ecosystems while creatures of lesser size are seen playing a more supportive role in food chains and ecosystems. These functional creatures serve one another – for example, the African rhinoceros provides the African ox-pecker with a ready food source of ticks (and a ride) while the ox-pecker rids the rhinoceros of parasitic pests and alerts the shortsighted rhinoceros to the approach of enemies.

Why is preaching a part of our worship service?

As we go through a study of the book of Romans led by Dr. Michael Kruger, we have been learning about so many crucial aspects of the life of the church. This week we heard why preaching is so important. If you have time, please give this a listen - it’s excellent.

We are Psalm-singers

We sing the Psalms in our worship services! Are you familiar with this practice?

Of course, more explanation is probably required of our practice of singing the Psalms in worship. During our corporate worship services, we sing only the Psalms as they are inspired by God the Holy Spirit and fitted for worship of the Living God! The very God who inspired the Psalmists has entrusted these wonderful texts to the Church for edification and worship. We refrain from singing hymns and contemporary songs which are uninspired compositions of human authors for a host of reasons. 

This practice of a capella Psalm singing was much more widespread in past generations (many Reformed and Presbyterian denominations have added hymns only in the last 100 years) and it is only recently that it has become a rarity in Protestant denominations.  We continue to sing the Psalms every worship service! We find in them an incredible array of emotions. The Psalms capture, provoke, and comfort you in equal measure as you lift up your voice in song to the LORD God!

If this tradition is unfamiliar to you, we would encourage you to learn more about it by visiting our services and experiencing this practice for yourself - you may be surprised by what you discover about the psalms through singing them with us!