The Song of Revelation

C.S. Lewis famously wrote that Psalm 19 was “the greatest poem in the Psalter and one of the greatest lyrics in the world,” in large part due to the beautiful balance of its two halves. In the first half of the psalm, we are invited to hear the eloquent song of nature. “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.” Using vocabulary from the creation story in Genesis 1, the psalmist looks up at the skies and the heavenly bodies in them, and he sees that their light is just a flicker and reflection of a greater light, God’s glorious power and wisdom and worthiness of worship. There’s an anthropomorphic quality in the sun, moon, and stars that declare, proclaim, and speak — and never stop speaking. “Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge.” There’s a continual song being sung in the skies to the Creator, like David sees new insights about God in every sunrise, every noonday sun, every sunset, and every phase of the moon with the constellations swirling around it. The riddle, though, is that nature doesn’t actually speak. Verse 3: “There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard. Their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.” So the voice of nature is a wordless word, and yet because it’s accessible to everyone, it’s a message that can be heard in every continent, in every nation, in every people group. The apostle Paul picks up this idea in Romans 1, where he argues that creation gives a real testimony to God’s divinity and power, and even if sinful human beings close their ears to it, we are without excuse if we look at the skies and think, like the fool of Psalm 14, “There is no God.” There is, and everything he has made is a witness to him. Finally, David caps off this section by speaking of the greatest light in the skies: the sun. “In them he has set a tent for the sun, which comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber, and, like a strong man, runs its course with joy.” In the ancient world, there were many cultures that worshiped the sun, but in Psalm 19, the sun is subservient and obedient, running the course that its Creator has set for it and doing so with an infectious joy.  David paints a picture of the sun with the vivid, virile image of a groom in his best wedding clothes running to the house of the bride to be united with her. Even the tone of this first half matches the song of nature: it’s broad and sweeping, exuberant and festive. Whenever we step outside, breathe fresh air, and stare steadily at the painting of the heavens above us, we are entering an art gallery and a concert hall where everything shouts without a sound: “The Creator is glorious!”

The second half of Psalm 19 is no less beautiful, but it has a different tone: a quieter, reflective kind of concise summary. David turns his attention to another kind of speech, the written words of the LORD, and he’ll use six consecutive nouns, adjectives, and verbs to describe them. The law, testimony, precepts, commandment, fear, and rules of the LORD are perfect, sure, right, pure, clean, and true, and they revive, make wise, rejoice, enlighten, endure, and are righteous. Most of these words comes from the Torah, the books of Moses, and each has a particular nuance to describe the supreme revelation that the whole Bible offers to those who read it. In fact, there are a lot of connections between this psalm and the other two psalms that reflect on the Torah: Psalm 1 (which invites us to meditate and plant our roots in the Bible’s life-giving streams) and Psalm 119 (which strains every thesaurus to praise the treasury of God’s Word). In Psalm 19, the focus is on the practical purpose of God’s revelation, which is to transform hearers into the revenant, trusting, wise, obedient, and joyful people that we were always meant to be. But just in case we aren’t convinced that the Torah is all that valuable, David compares it to gold and honey, which were at the time the richest material and the sweetest taste. To read God’s Word is to shop at a jewelry store with unlimited credit and to enjoy the highest cuisine prepared by a superb chef. But there is an edge to God’s revelation, a bit of danger involved. David concludes in verse 11: “Moreover, by them is your servant warned; in keeping them there is great reward.” It sounds an awful lot like the way he ended the first section, where nothing was hidden from the heat of the sun. First we’re talking about how the revelation of nature exposes us to the sun’s gaze, and then suddenly we’re talking about the revelation of God’s Word exposing our inner being. C.S. Lewis puts it this way: “[The sun] pierces everywhere with its strong, clean ardour. Then at once, in verse 7 he is talking of something else, which hardly seems to him something else because it is so like the all-piercing, all-detecting sunshine. As he has felt the sun, perhaps in the desert, searching him out in every nook of shade where he attempted to hide from it, so he feels the Law searching out all the hiding-places of his soul.” This is the tension of Psalm 19 and the problem that confronts us as we approach the final verses: God has spoken through the skies and the Scripture, so now how should I, a lowly sinner, respond to his Word?”

Warned by the divine Word of the LORD, David ends the psalm with a humble cry: “Who can discern his errors? Declare me innocent from hidden faults. Keep back your servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me! Then I shall be blameless, and innocent of great transgression.” Just like David used words from Genesis 1 earlier and then alludes to the power of God’s spoken words from Genesis 2, here he focuses on the power of sin as a meditation on Genesis 3 and 4. He’s aware that he has hidden faults, hidden even to him. These are the unintentional ways that we stray from God’s commandments. But there are also presumptuous or defiant sins that threaten to overpower us like they had dominion over murderous Cain. So David offers himself up to the most intense scrutiny and heart-searching, to the deep surgery of God’s transforming work in our souls. In response to revelation, David prays for himself to be revealed. This leads him to the last verse, which is perhaps one of the most popular prayers from the whole book of Psalms: “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O LORD, my rock and my redeemer.” It’s a prayer for God to know us deeply, utterly, completely and for him to transform that which is unacceptable to pleasing. His eyes, his esteem, and his favor are all that matter to us, because he is our Rock (security, safety, protection) and our Redeemer (deliverer, savior). He is not just the Creator God about whom the heavens declare his glory; he is Yahweh, our covenant LORD who interested in saving human beings from the sins they know about and the sins they don’t, who is invested in the wellbeing of his people, who has given his Word to guide them into life and goodness and beauty. To have this kind of relationship with God requires total submission and complete trust.