Princeton Presbyterian Church (EPC) Sermon # 1614
November 19, 2023
Psalm 104 Click here for audio worship.
Dr. Ed Pettus
“Gratitude”
1Bless the Lord, O my soul! O Lord my God, you are very great! You are clothed with splendor and majesty, 2covering yourself with light as with a garment, stretching out the heavens like a tent. 3He lays the beams of his chambers on the waters; he makes the clouds his chariot; he rides on the wings of the wind; 4he makes his messengers winds, his ministers a flaming fire. 5He set the earth on its foundations, so that it should never be moved. 6You covered it with the deep as with a garment; the waters stood above the mountains. 7At your rebuke they fled; at the sound of your thunder they took to flight. 8The mountains rose, the valleys sank down to the place that you appointed for them. 9You set a boundary that they may not pass, so that they might not again cover the earth.
10You make springs gush forth in the valleys; they flow between the hills; 11they give drink to every beast of the field; the wild donkeys quench their thirst. 12Beside them the birds of the heavens dwell; they sing among the branches. 13From your lofty abode you water the mountains; the earth is satisfied with the fruit of your work. 14You cause the grass to grow for the livestock and plants for man to cultivate, that he may bring forth food from the earth 15and wine to gladden the heart of man, oil to make his face shine and bread to strengthen man's heart. 16The trees of the Lord are watered abundantly, the cedars of Lebanon that he planted. 17In them the birds build their nests; the stork has her home in the fir trees. 18The high mountains are for the wild goats; the rocks are a refuge for the rock badgers. 19He made the moon to mark the seasons; the sun knows its time for setting. 20You make darkness, and it is night, when all the beasts of the forest creep about. 21The young lions roar for their prey, seeking their food from God. 22When the sun rises, they steal away and lie down in their dens. 23Man goes out to his work and to his labor until the evening.
24O Lord, how manifold are your works! In wisdom have you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures. 25Here is the sea, great and wide, which teems with creatures innumerable, living things both small and great. 26There go the ships, and Leviathan, which you formed to play in it. 27These all look to you, to give them their food in due season. 28When you give it to them, they gather it up; when you open your hand, they are filled with good things. 29When you hide your face, they are dismayed; when you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust. 30When you send forth your Spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the ground. 31May the glory of the Lord endure forever; may the Lord rejoice in his works, 32who looks on the earth and it trembles, who touches the mountains and they smoke! 33I will sing to the Lord as long as I live; I will sing praise to my God while I have being. 34May my meditation be pleasing to him, for I rejoice in the Lord. 35Let sinners be consumed from the earth, and let the wicked be no more! Bless the Lord, O my soul! Praise the Lord!
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The Created Order
This Psalm begins like several portions of the Bible, with “Bless the Lord”. To bless the Lord is to give thanks to the Lord. Psalm 104 gives us reason after reason to bless the Lord, to express our gratitude. Blessing and thanksgiving expressed to the Lord is the destination of our lives, the culmination of discipleship, the ultimate expression of gratitude is in this blessing to the Lord! It is the final expression of a pilgrimage of discipleship whether at the end of the day, the end of worship, or the end of the journey. Now, when we hear the word “bless”, we tend to think in terms of the good things the Lord does for us. We talk about how we have been blessed by God. We count our blessings one by one. It seems strange to us that we would ever bless the Lord. But what we need to understand is that the term “bless” means more than just what we receive from God. Like many words, it depends on the context of its use. In Jewish thought it also means to give thanks and praise to God. “Bless the Lord” in the Hebrew understanding means thanking and praising God. One of the ways we know this is the way Jesus uses the word bless in stories from the gospels. In the feeding of the 5000 after Jesus has them organized in groups and they bring him the loaves and fish, He takes them in Luke 9:16, 16And taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven and said a blessing over them. Then he broke the loaves and gave them to the disciples to set before the crowd. What we do when we say a blessing over the meal is to give thanks to the Lord. Same meaning here in Psalm 104, to bless the Lord is to thank the Lord.
When the Psalmist blesses the Lord he is also thanking the Lord for all that God has done, and in this beginning of Psalm 104 the thanks is for all that God has created. It begins with the blessing and praise of God’s greatness.
1Bless the Lord, O my soul! O Lord my God, you are very great! You are clothed with splendor and majesty, 2covering yourself with light as with a garment, stretching out the heavens like a tent.
Then he lays out all that God has done, all for which we are thankful:
3He lays the beams of his chambers on the waters;
he makes the clouds his chariot;
he rides on the wings of the wind;
4he makes his messengers winds, his ministers a flaming fire.
5He set the earth on its foundations, so that it should never be moved.
Notice the change of grammar from He to You, speaking directly to God in the prayer… 6You covered it with the deep as with a garment; the waters stood above the mountains. 7At your rebuke they fled; at the sound of your thunder they took to flight. 8The mountains rose, the valleys sank down to the place that you appointed for them. 9You set a boundary that they may not pass, so that they might not again cover the earth.
Give thanks – bless the Lord!
We certainly have many reasons to offer thanks to God. Do we ever consider beginning with creation?!? It is usually for whatever we have at the moment. Turkey and family and time off from work. Thanksgiving day reminds us to offer thanks, reminds us that gratitude is a primary attitude and action of Christians. First and foremost, we thank God. One of the reasons I chose Psalm 104 for today is because it has so many things listed that God has done. Often we take for granted the everyday things God has created. These first nine verses are all about what God has done…and at the conclusion of verse 13, we see, the earth is satisfied with the fruit of your work. The earth is content. The earth is filled. All that is in the earth blesses God by doing what they were created to do. We too give thanks for the fruit of God’s work!
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The Sustained Order
Then the Psalm takes what God has done and shows us how God takes care and sustains all that He has created (verses 10-23).
10You make springs gush forth in the valleys...they give drink to every beast of the field...the wild donkeys quench their thirst. 12Beside them the birds of the heavens dwell; they sing among the branches. 13From your lofty abode you water the mountains; the earth is satisfied with the fruit of your work.
14You cause the grass to grow...16The trees of the Lord are watered abundantly...21The young lions roar for their prey, seeking their food from God... 23Man goes out to his work and to his labor until the evening.
God causes the grass to grow, plants to grow, makes wine, and oil and bread. God waters the trees, he made the moon, and when it is dark all the nocturnal animals come out to find their food from God. The Psalmist knows and acknowledges that all of it, everything is from God. There is nothing in all of creation that does not have God’s care and provision. He sustains what He has made, and I also trust that means He will sustain it beyond humanity’s neglect or inability to care for creation. When God gave Adam dominion over creation that does not mean that God gave up sustaining creation! Yes, we need to care for creation and the created order of things, but we also do not need to go around screaming the sky is falling over the climate hysteria. God still holds the reigns over all things. God gives us dominion, but alone God sustains.
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The Praise – Doxology
The next section, as I have divided it, begins at verse 24, 24O Lord, how manifold are your works! In wisdom have you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures. This is doxology, praise, reverence and awe expressed over what God has done. It is something like a pause in the Psalm to just take notice. Look at it all! Everything is so wonderful.
25Here is the sea, great and wide, which teems with creatures innumerable, living things both small and great. 26There go the ships, and Leviathan, which you formed to play in it. 27These all look to you, to give them their food in due season.
Creation itself is in awe, the earth is filled, and the creatures have everything they need. Every creature looks to God for their food in due season and they are filled. They do not look to us, they look to God, for God is the one who feeds them. Even if we are tossing out the feed for the chickens, they are looking to God!
28When you give it to them, they gather it up; when you open your hand, they are filled with good things. 29When you hide your face, they are dismayed; when you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust. 30When you send forth your Spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the ground.
This is how we know God is in ultimate control. When He hides his face, creation is dismayed, they are afraid and lost. They do not know what to do without God’s face, that is, God’s care and sustenance. It is God who gives breath and God who takes it away. Everything in all of God’s creation is under the provision of God alone.
The Psalm concludes with singing, praising, blessing – that is, gratitude. (There is also that little stab at the wicked which you sometimes find in the Psalms. Let the wicked be no more!)
31May the glory of the Lord endure forever; may the Lord rejoice in his works, 32who looks on the earth and it trembles, who touches the mountains and they smoke! 33I will sing to the Lord as long as I live; I will sing praise to my God while I have being. 34May my meditation be pleasing to him, for I rejoice in the Lord. 35Let sinners be consumed from the earth, and let the wicked be no more! Bless the Lord, O my soul! Praise the Lord!
When we read and hear this Psalm and others like it, we cannot help but be amazed at what God has done. The response that is appropriate is blessing, thanksgiving for all that God has done, to sing doxology. To fail to give thanks is a disclosure that we have forgotten what God has done. Israel did that in the Old Testament. They were warned in Deuteronomy 8 to never forget what God has done, in Deuteronomy that is about the exodus. In Psalm 104 it is about God’s creation and His rule over all. Praise and thanks is the appropriate response.
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Our Response - Gratitude
Our response actually comes at the beginning and at the end of this Psalm. Our response is that of the Psalm – Bless the Lord! Praise the Lord! Psalm 104 invites us to imagine a world where everything we need is provided, and out of that imagination, to live…to live in the abundance of Christ! The Psalm invites us to imagine the world with God’s plentiful food and beauty and boundaries and springs of water and life is filled with good things and good news! Psalm 104 bids us to stop and see creation, to see God’s work as God sees it.
Gratitude reminds us that we have done nothing to get what we have but it is all a gift from God. Gratitude is a conviction that we are not without need, not autonomous, and not able to provide on our own. It is a conviction that we depend upon God for his vast provisions. We acknowledge God in gratitude as creator, provider, sustainer, and actively involved in our daily lives. Jesus taught us to pray this way… “Give us this day our daily bread.” Gratitude reminds us every day that God provides, that God is worthy of blessing and thanks and praise. Giving thanks is not a once a year celebration, but an action and mindset of every day life. Each Sabbath day we should count our blessings in what God has done and given and created.
The world bids us to focus on what we do not have while gratitude bids us to give thanks for all God has already provided. We need the words of Psalm 104 precisely because we are told just the opposite every day. We are told we need more stuff. We need to get what you can when we can. We need this car and that house and these steak knives and that new version of whatever technology is the next great gizmo that will allow us to hear the world’s message even more. You need to get all this because the world believes there is not enough, or at least wants us to believe that way. There is not enough money, not enough food, not enough for the day, so you better get more stuff.
Psalm 104 confesses the perspective that no matter what the government may say, no matter what the naysayers present, no matter what the world uses as its liturgy of scarcity, our trust is that God provides enough. 27These all look to you, to give them their food in due season. 28When you give it to them, they gather it up; when you open your hand, they are filled with good things.
Why, in a world where we have so much anxiety about tomorrow, do we gather here today to sing doxology, to offer our praise, to give thanks? Because deep in our hearts we know this truth: God provides, and everything counter to this confession is a lie. We know it is God who stretched out the heavens, set the beams, made the clouds, rides the wind, set the earth on its foundation. It is God who makes the springs gush forth so that the animals will have something to drink. It is God to whom we look for food and clothing and shelter and all that we need or desire for life.
We also recognize that there are people in the world who thirst, children die every day from starvation, natural disasters quake or blow upon the earth and people are killed and injured. We acknowledge that all of this exists and it saddens our hearts and even may cause anger if we are hit more personally by such tragedy. But the confession goes on; the confession must go on, because without it there is no hope. We pray for those who suffer from any lack and we take action to do all we can so that all might know the fullness of God’s provisions. Gratitude to God is one of the expressions of faith that reminds us that God gives and it is a witness to the world that God gives. Gratitude for God’s provision is an expression of hope that all might be fed and clothed and sheltered.
In the creation story God took time after each day to stop and recognize the goodness of what He had made. God saw that it was good, everything had its proper order, everything provided for, everything was so good that God could take the last day off! Psalm 104 reaffirms this goodness. The world wants to tell us every day that we always need more. The affirmation of the Psalm and of the Bible is:
God is good.
God provides order.
God gives in abundance.
The Psalm begins with: “Bless the Lord, O my soul” and ends with the same – “Bless the Lord, O my soul”. Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Lord! The Psalm resets our perspective that has been distorted by all the bad news we hear every day. We need the good news, not just around the calendar of Thanksgiving Day, but today and tomorrow, every time we fail to give thanks to God. The truth is this: In God’s kingdom, there is enough, there is even more than enough because in God’s world…
10You make springs gush forth in the valleys; they flow between the hills; 11they give drink to every beast of the field; the wild donkeys quench their thirst...14You cause the grass to grow for the livestock and plants for man to cultivate, that he may bring forth food from the earth 15and wine to gladden the heart of man, oil to make his face shine and bread to strengthen man's heart...27These all look to you, to give them their food in due season. 28When you give it to them, they gather it up; when you open your hand, they are filled with good things.
For this we offer our gratitude and our songs of praise and blessing. Amen.
