Wednesday after the Seventh Sunday after Trinity, 8/9/00

Psalm 19: 1-6 The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world. In the heavens he has pitched a tent for the sun, which is like a bridegroom coming forth from his pavilion, like a champion rejoicing to run his course. It rises at one end of the heavens and makes its circuit to the other; nothing is hidden from its heat. --NIV

In the name of the One Whose glory the heaven declare, amen.

Man is the crown of material creation, and yet man is most likely of all of God's creation not to glorify God. Creation is constantly glorifying God. If we just consider water for a moment we see how it speaks of the glory of God. Water comes to us as a solid, a liquid, and a gas. As a liquid it flows and it keeps all living things alive. As a gas it is given off by living things. As a solid, living things cannot make use of it to sustain life. Cold water is heavier than warm water, but water expands when it freezes causing ice to float. This means that there are strong currents in the ocean caused by water that changes temperature. It cools at the poles of the earth and drops to the bottom of the ocean where it generally flows toward the equator. There it warms and rises flowing generally toward the poles. This process purifies the water and spreads nutrients throughout the oceans. The ice at the poles forms a thermal layer keeping the water below it from freezing. But what if ice didn't float? The oceans would freeze, and there would be little flow and little life in them.

The passage that we look at today speaks not of water, but of the heavens. There is much that can be said of the heavens, but let's consider just the sun for a moment. Every evening it dies, and every morning it rises again. It then proudly makes its way across the sky. It does this to remind us of the glory of God in Christ Jesus. Even though we face death every day because of our sins, we know that we will rise again like the sun, because Christ Jesus gave his life for us. The heavens indeed declare the glory of God, and they are preserved as a witness to us. Amen.

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