Brown's Daily Word: Brown's Daily Word 7/10/15

Friday, July 10, 2015

Brown's Daily Word 7/10/15

Praise the Lord for this Friday. We drove down to Abington, PA, near Philadelphia to visit our newest granddaughter Rosalind. She is the daughter of of our youngest daughter, Jessica, and her husband,Tom. She was born exactly on her due date. Our grandson Simeon was also born on the 8th of July, but 8 years ago. Jessica was born on the first of July. There is so much to celebrate. Rosalind is beautiful and precious. We praise the Lord for this tiny child, a most precious one. Both mommy and Rosalind are fine. They will be going home today. Tom, the young daddy, is excited and beyond thrilled. Tom's parents and his grandparents, who live close to Jess and Tom, are celebrating and praising the Lord.
We drove back to Marathon yesterday evening. We drove across the majestic mountains of Northeastern Pennsylvania. The highway runs through the mountains, valleys, and a tunnel, all the time surrounded by enormous beauty. As we were driving I came into some Monsoon-like rains. I was contemplating on the vastness of our Lord's creation, the way He surrounds us with so much beauty. The enormity and the beauty of God’s creation is one of the ways that he displays his glory.

Francis Collins is a scientist who headed up the Human Genome project and has all kinds of credentials. He’s a world famous scientist, but he was also an atheist. After a long period of searching, which included grilling a pastor and reading CS Lewis, Collins finally came to Christ after watching the beauty of creation. This is Collin's description of that life-changing encounter:

I had to make a choice. A full year had passed since I decided to believe in some sort of God, and now I was being called to account. On a beautiful fall day, as I was hiking in the Cascade Mountains during my first trip west of the Mississippi, the majesty and beauty of God's creation overwhelmed my resistance. As I rounded a corner and saw a beautiful and unexpected frozen waterfall, hundreds of feet high, I knew the search was over. The next morning, I knelt in the dewy grass as the sun rose and surrendered to Jesus Christ. (The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief)

    King David, who spent much of his younger days in the glorious outdoors of Israel, composed Psalm 8.  During these summer days let us take a walk outside in some remote place, look up, and worship the God who created all of this. Let us look at the beauty of what He has created all around us, and then bow down and surrender our lives to Him.   Then may we realize that the praise of the weakest person is stronger than the most powerful of God’s enemies. Let us Praise him for the staggering enormity of creation. According to David, despite our size in the universe there is something utterly unique about us. If we created a continuum of every creature that’s ever been created, from bacteria all the way up to angels, we would be right next to angels. We are not even far below them, the psalmist says. Out of all that God has created, it is men and women alone who have been made in His image and crowned with glory and honor. We have a unique role within the universe. We have been given dominion over all that He has made.

    When we consider all of this together, it leads us to worship. When we realize that the praise of the weakest Christian is more powerful than the strength of God's most powerful enemies, it leads us to worship. When we see the vastness of what God has created - the beauty of the Milky Way, the knowledge of the vastness of the universe - it makes us want to worship. When we think that out of all that God has made, that He has zeroed in on us, it makes us want to worship.

    Moreover, hundreds of years after David wrote this psalm, God Himself became a man and lived on this speck of dust which we call planet Earth. Not only was He mindful of us, not only did He care for us, but He became one of us. In His infinite love for us He offered up his life for us so that we could be made right with God. Psalm 8 is often quoted in reference to Jesus. Verse 6 says that God has put all things under our feet. When Jesus became one of us, He became our forerunner, and everything is already at His feet. He has already been crowned with glory and honor. Hebrews 2 quotes Psalm 8 when it says:

"But we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone." (Hebrews 2:9)

We have not fulfilled God’s plan to put everything under our feet, but there is one who is single-handedly fulfilling God’s plan on our behalf, and that is Jesus. I love how Dale Ralph Davis puts it:

"That is the point of Hebrews 2. It says: Psalm 8 is not a pipe dream. We don’t yet see it full-blown. But we see Jesus — one man is already reigning! And that is the assurance that redeemed man, his brothers and sisters, will one day rule as well. “He has made them a kingdom, priests, to our God, and they shall reign on earth” (Rev. 5:10). How can you doubt your royal future when the Man Jesus has already begun enjoying it? The Way of the Righteous in the Muck of Life: Psalms 1-12

When we have surrendered our lives to our great God and put our trust in Jesus who has done this for us, then we will be able to say with David: