Daily Meditations

Psalm 148:9 Mountains and hills and trees  The psalmist is growing in excitement as He surveys the earth and embraces the notion that the created world praises the Lord. We’ve already looked at some of the aspects of the created world whose function is to represent the Lord and in so doing to gain Him glory and praise. We’ve visited the ocean depths and pondered the weather! Now we are to lift up our eyes to the mountains and hills, and then to survey the trees that cover the earth from the mighty cedars to orchards and fruit plantations planted by men. All of these gloriously beautiful and dramatic additions to creation have one primary objective and that is to  “Praise the Lord. ” We, as a human race have taken all of the natural wonders and turned them to our benefit and forced them to serve us. It would be a crazy world where we were unable to use wood for construction or to pick apples, pears, oranges and the rest, from our fruit trees. But, in so doing we should learn fi...

Psalm 148:8 The elements do His bidding! This verse gives us a clue as to the nature of the praise that is offered to the Lord by elemental forces and the inanimate objects that are the fundamental building blocks for the created world. The writer lists a number of weather features and then explains that “They  do His bidding .” Literally this means that they obey His Word. In Psalm 147:15 we read,  “He sends His command to the earth; His Word runs swiftly.”  We need to realise that what gives God the greatest glory, what please Him above all else is that we “ do His bidding.” It’s time to forget about climate change and focus on the One who guides and administers the weather, in this instance – lightning and hail, snow and clouds and stormy winds. If we take the Word of God literally, and I see no reason why we should not, then it clearly declares that all of these forces are controlled from above, that nothing is left to chance, the weather patterns across the world are...

Psalm 148:7 Looking beneath the surface! Well, we’ve enjoyed eavesdropping on the praises of the angels and the heavenly bodies, the waters and all inanimate objects in creation, now it’s time to take a dip into the oceans! The sphere of life that is explored here is the ocean depths and the psalmist calls out songs of praise from the creatures that inhabit these dark, secret places. In Genesis 1:21 we read, “ So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems and that moves about in it, according to their kinds  …” In Psalm 74:13-14 we saw that the primeval, chaotic waters were depicted as a many-headed monster that the creator God overcame, He is the same Lord who parted the Red Sea to make a path through for the Israelites as they fled from Egypt. The Bible suggests that these waters were all part of God’s creative purposes and that it was He who placed living creatures within them. What cannot be argued is that the oceans and seas al...

Psalm 148:6 Established forever Listen to these words from Jeremiah 31:35-36. “ This is what the Lord says, He who appoints the sun to shine by day, who decrees the moons and stars to shine by night, who stirs up the sea so that its waves roar – the Lord Almighty is His name: “Only if these decrees vanish from my sight,” declares the Lord, “will Israel ever cease being a nation before me.””  Comments on previous verses in this Psalm suggest that maybe the inanimate objects that inhabit the heavens are able to respond in some way to the Lord. At the very least, the fact that they studiously fulfil their functions causes them to give glory to His Name. They clearly announce that God is alive and well and keeping His promises to us all. As Paul succinctly puts it in Romans when he talks about the wickedness of people,   “Since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.  For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualiti...

Psalm 148:5 He is our Creator! This verse gives us the reason why even inanimate objects are prompted to praise the Lord. It’s because He created them! The same principle applies to us, we may find 10,000 reasons why we should praise the Lord, but the first reason is simply that we exist! We can add up the events and circumstances, the moments and the experiences that we have enjoyed when the Lord has revealed Himself to us, but the first cause for celebration is that we have been granted life! He could have ignored us or left us out of his plans for planet earth but, no, He decided that we should be allowed to live in His world and He chose the parents that would make that possible. I am here, because God wanted me here. I live and breathe and enjoy the beauty of the planet because God enabled it to happen. We are incredibly privileged, to be born human and to be planted on the earth for our time. Not only that, but the Lord has organised our future as well, the fact that He made us f...

Psalm 148:4 Even the clouds praise Him! God is so carefully maintaining and managing our planet that even the depths of the great oceans and the moisture held by the clouds are under His command! The great masses of rain-filled clouds that journey around the earth are not just random phenomenon that can be rationally explained, they have a purpose, they work to a divinely conceived plan. They are the waters that fill God’s storehouses or cisterns, that are emptied and filled above the earth’s crust as He commands and calculates what, where and when they should operate. So, the clouds are the “deep” above us and they pour out their contents to fill our rivers and streams that eventually flow to the oceans which are the “deep” below. It’s only as I read these verses that I realise afresh just how fundamental to our existence the divine management of the planet really is. Again, it throws doubts over the claims that climate change is caused solely by man’s abuse of the earth and its resou...