The sting in the tail
Psalm 104 – why that nasty verse at the end?
Psalm 104:35
Download the pdf file here, brew a coffee and read at leisure!
Take in the huge sweep of Psalm 104 – for my money it is the finest song in existence about the world of nature and its creator. Here are the goodies we reflected upon last time:
God is the Lord of heaven (verses 1-4)
God is the Lord of earth (verses 5-9)
God is the Lord of creation (verses 10-18)
God is the Lord of time (verses 19-26)
God is the Lord of life (verses 27-30)
God wants to be the Lord of my heart (verses 31-35)
This is not just a great song, it is a deeply personal love song; its writer has a personal connection with the God who made and who continues to sustain the universe.
As he sings, three themes twist around each other; the majesty of God, the harmony of the natural world, and the place of humanity at the heart of nature. Whatever else we are, humans are made to be part of the systems God has put in place to nurture life and make the earth a fruitful and glorious place.
But this beautiful song ends on a nasty note, in verse 35; “Let all sinners vanish from the face of the earth, let the wicked disappear forever”. This is the sting in an otherwise very harmonious tale. Why this apparently self righteous outburst?
The blue jewel
In 1962 a US government scientist called Rachel Carson published a book called Silent Spring. She had been studying the effects of pesticides on wildlife and had discovered something terrifying; if you spray bugs in a wheat field in Nebraska the poison did not disappear, it was passed along the food chain. These insecticides were turning up in the fat of penguins in the Arctic [1] .
Later that decade, in 1968, three US astronauts flew the first mission to the moon. They did not land but flew around it before returning to earth. It was Christmas eve and they made a live broadcast from lunar orbit. Frank Borman, the mission commander, and his friends read from the book of Genesis:
"And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called the Seas: and God saw that it was good."
Borman then added, "And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you - all of you on the good Earth." [2] As the Apollo 8 spacecraft swung around the moon, the crew took the first photographs of the earth rising over the lunar horizon. They didn’t know it but they had changed the world. Those images of that little green and blue and white jewel hanging in space changed the way most people see our world.
Carson ’s book and those photographs were highly significant in creating the environmentalist movement we know today. We have at last realized that we live on a finite earth and we are poisoning it. Almost forty years later the global temperature is rising – no serious scientist doubts this – and we can see the effects of this all around us. Everything we do is poisoning the earth and there are no easy answers.
Human beings are part of nature, but we are more than that, God put us on this earth to ‘work it and take care of it’ [3] , we have the ability and the responsibility to care for it. And we have failed. Imagine an aircraft driven by a complex engine that runs like clockwork, everything is fine until the little computer at the heart of the machine develops a mind of its own and refuses to obey the instructions of the pilot. At this moment everything is in danger, the computer, the engine, the pilot and all the passengers. This is what has happened to the world, we have rejected God as our creator and Lord, the result is disaster. We live in an abnormal world, it is not meant to be like this.
Go back to Psalm 104 and it strikes me that nothing could be more appropriate than, having looked at the vast panorama of God’s creation and the mutual dependence of everything in the natural world; the poet accepts the painful duty of naming nature’s biggest threat – human beings. In fact, if you edit this verse out of the song, what you have is not a majestic poem about the natural world; what you have is Disneyland; cute little animals running ‘round in the sunshine. The sting in the tale (verse 35) is makes Psalm 104 real. It is not a self-righteous outburst, it is a cry of rage against those who would poison the world that God made and that we inhabit.
It was not meant to be like this. In the beginning God made human beings to work the earth and to take care of it. The Bible describes the first humans choosing to live according to their own rules and pushing God to the margins of their lives. The result was anarchy – the natural world was meant to be a garden but it became a dangerous wilderness.
Psalm 104:35 quite simply points out that, in a world where everything works harmoniously according to the will of God, human beings choose not to. In a sense we do not belong here as long as we reject God and maintain our independence. Richard Attenborough, in an interview following the success of his documentary series Planet Earth put it bluntly when he said, “In many ways the earth would be better off without humans”.
So why doesn’t God wipe the human race off the face of this blue jewel?
God’s patience
One of Jesus’ closest friends was Simon Peter. He was a fisherman until Jesus recruited him into his close group of apprentices (disciples) over a period of three years this practical working man became convinced that Jesus was more than a great prophet, that he was the Son of God. He saw his friend crucified and was one of the first to encounter Jesus after the resurrection. He was there when Jesus playfully tried to convince his friends that he was not a ghost by eating breakfast with them. He was one of the leaders of the Jesus movement as it spread out from Jerusalem across the Roman Empire. Peter was himself crucified by the Romans for his fearless proclamation of the death and resurrection of Jesus.
I mention all this because it shows us that Peter is very well placed to answer our question, why doesn’t God wipe us off the face of his earth?
You will find his answer in a letter he wrote: 2 Peter 3:3-10 – God will, one day, judge the human race but he is waiting for us, for you and me, to repent. That is why we are still here – to give you time to think and time to return to the God who loves you and who sent his Son to die for you. The day of the Lord is coming, but not yet… not yet.
Right now, god is waiting patiently for us to take a good hard look at reality, we all have some serious thinking to do. Take a look at that verse again, “Let all sinners vanish from the face of the earth…” What do you think a sinner is?
What is he waiting for?
The tabloid newspapers think that a sinner is someone who is sexually naughty. I often wonder how many tabloid editors and journalists are doing exactly the same things… they delight in exposing the weaknesses of others while secretly cheating on their partners, or worse. That makes the tabloid people hypocrites. Maybe you would agree with me that hypocrisy is an even bigger sin than adultery – I mean it is adultery plus being two-faced about it, right? So a hypocrite is guilty of two sins, you get two for the price of one!
But hang on, if hypocrisy is a sin doesn’t that make us all sinners? I know that I am. I hope that you never find out how tight-fisted I am; I hope you never discover how proud I can be or how quick I am to judge others. I hope you never find out about that book I nicked from the library back in 1967. I don’t want you to know… so I hide it all you see. I hide it behind this nice façade and I hope that you will never discover the truth. That makes me a hypocrite, too, just like the tabloid people.
So here is the terrible reality; sin is like a disease and we are all infected with it… in some people the symptoms are greed, of spitefulness, or bitterness. In others it’s sexual promiscuity or cheating on your partner, but these are only symptoms of the disease; all of us are infected.
All of us are sinners because, whatever the symptoms of sin in your life, we are living as though God did not exist. That is the heart of sin. Now if you keep doing this long enough, telling God to get out of his own universe, how long do you think it will be before he tells you to get out of his? Eventually, he will; but not yet… not yet
Do you remember how Peter says that God is waiting for something to happen; he is patiently waiting for you to repent. What could that mean?
Well if sin is living as though God did not exist, to repent is to begin to live as though he did; that is not too hard to grasp is it! Psalm 104 shows us what this looks like in verses 33-34; the songwriter is quite excited about who God is, he wants to live to please him. More than that, he is enjoying living for God and pleasing him. He has a personal connection with God and it is a pleasure to know him – this whole song is a song of enjoyment of God and his world.
Enjoyment , it is not a word you often see in the same sentence as the word God is it? Here’s the secret of life (by the way!) you will only enjoy life in its fullest sense when you learn to enjoy the God who created life. You begin to enjoy God when you begin to live as though he exists – that is what he is waiting for you to do.
Now if this sounds too easy to you, a little too cheap perhaps, you are right. I have left out the cost – the price you must pay if you want to escape judgment and live a new kind of life.
What we have done is outrageous. We have offended the creator of the universe and that kind of behavior has consequences. The Bible is clear about this… a little too clear for some… sinners must die. You and I owe God a death.
Lets ask our expert, Jesus’ friend Simon Peter, “How do we pay God the death we owe him?” As you would expect, Peter wrote about this too:
Jesus committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth. When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly. He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed. For you were like sheep going astray, but now you have returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls.
1 Peter 2:22-26
“He bore our sins” – Jesus paid the death we owe. What he achieved on the cross enables us to re-connect with the God we have rejected. Peter continues, “… now you have returned to the Shepherd and overseer of your souls”. Jesus died so that you could return and enjoy this personal connection with the God who made the universe.
Fixing the machine
Let’s go a little deeper. Christians love to reflect on the cross as the place where our sins were paid for. This is natural and it is right, but it is too parochial, too limiting. The New Testament says some extravagant things about Jesus’ death on the cross. Try this for size:
[Jesus] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him… God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.
Colossians 1:15-20
Jesus was the one through whom all things were created. This is his world we are destroying. Somehow the cross makes the restoration of this disintegrating world possible, all things will be reconciled and harmony will be restored.
Think of that analogy I used earlier – the world is a machine with one component which will not obey the pilot’s instructions. Christ died to rescue us, the willful and disobedient component. But that is not enough he must repair the broken engine too. The cross is bigger than you and it is bigger than me – it is big enough and powerful enough to heal a broken universe!
The end of history is a new human race living in a new heaven and a new earth. All of it restored by the power of the cross!
So you live in a world that was created by Christ, and which he died to fix. What does that mean for your behavior towards the world he made?
Let me read you something. These are the words of a Christian from the sixteenth century, a man called John Calvin. Think about this as you respond to global warming, the extinction of animal species and how you live your life. He is writing about God’s command, in Genesis 2:15, that we take care of this earth:
The custody of the garden was given in charge to Adam, to show that we possess the things which God has committed to our hands, on the condition, that being content with a frugal and moderate use of them, we should take care of what shall remain. Let him who possesses a field, so partake of its yearly fruits, that he may not suffer the ground to be injured by his negligence; but let him endeavor to hand it down to posterity as he received it, or even better cultivated. Let him so feed on its fruits that he neither dissipates it by luxury, nor permits to be marred or ruined by neglect. Moreover, that this economy, and this diligence, with respect to those good things which God has given us to enjoy, may flourish among us; let every one regard himself as the steward of God in all things which he possesses. Then he will neither conduct himself dissolutely, nor corrupt by abuse those things which God requires to be preserved.
John Calvin , Commentary on Genesis
I am talking to those who regard themselves as Christians, people who follow Jesus, what does it mean for you to live as though God exists? How do you live this out more deeply than you have before? Why not start obeying Genesis 2:15; live in such a way that you neither dissipate the world’s resources by luxury nor allow this world to be marred or ruined by neglect. This is God’s earth, we are his stewards and this is what we are created to do.
Find some way of doing this and live it.
[1] Silent Spring, Houghton Mifflin, 1962, Mariner Books, 2002, ISBN 0-618-24906-0
[2] http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/apollo8_xmas.html
[3] This is Genesis 1:15