God’s Word for You
1 Chronicles 16:30-33 The Psalm of the Ark Part 5
by Pastor Timothy Smith on Thursday, January 18, 2024
30 Writhe before him, all the earth.
The world is firmly established;
it can never be moved.
31 Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice,
and let them say among the nations, “The LORD reigns!”
These two verses appear as verse 10 and the beginning of verse 11 in Psalm 96. Here the world itself is addressed: Writhe and twist, O earth that is so firmly established that it cannot be moved. Move, O earth, for fear and submission to God your Maker!
From the earth, David turns his eyes to the heavens, and commands both heavens and earth to be glad and rejoice, for God, the Lord, reigns. But more than this, let the heavens and earth “say” among the nations that the Lord reigns.
How can this be? The text has already given an example. If the earth indeed “can never be moved,” and yet it will “writhe before him,” then the Creator is supreme over his creation. For the earth might move from so-called natural means, an earthquake, for instance (Amos 1:1; Zechariah 14:5), or the underground movements of rivers that cause changes and subsidence, when holes open up where there was “a firm place to stand” not long before. But we also know that God himself is in command of the earth beyond nature or physics. If he commands, the solid ground obeys. “He shakes the earth from its place and makes its pillars tremble” (Job 9:6). His voice shakes the desert (Psalm 29:8), and when he commanded, the ground split apart and swallowed the Levites who rebelled against Moses, along with their families, so that they went alive down to their graves (Numbers 16:31-33).
In the same way, the Lord commands the sky to do whatever he wills. “The sky trembles” (Joel 2:10, 3:16), “Do not be terrified by signs in the sky” (Jeremiah 10:2). And the Lord shut the sky in the days of Elijah so that it did not rain, purely out of the Lord’s command (Luke 4:25). Mankind is not safe from such things by reaching into outer space. The Lord’s hand is not so short that he cannot bring down judgment even there. “‘Even if Babylon could reach the sky and fortify the very heights of her stronghold, I would still send destroyers against her,’ declares the Lord” (Jeremiah 51:53). All of nature is subject to the Lord. “The gospel has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven” (Colossians 1:23), “The heavens proclaim his righteousness.” Augustine says: “The clouds of heaven thunder out throughout the world that God’s house is being built; and the frogs cry from the marsh.”
32 Let the sea roar, and everything that fills it;
let the field exult, and everything in it.
33 Then the trees of the forest will sing,
they will sing for joy before the LORD—
for he comes to judge the earth.
Just as the earth and sky sing out God’s praise, so also David calls on the sea and the field to join in, and the trees of the forest as well. The sea is both useful and dangerous to man (Ezekiel 27:34), but it obeys the Lord at all times, for he can call up a storm with his word (Jonah 1:4) and quiet a violent storm into sudden silence with his word (Mark 4:39). Likewise, the fields that cover the world are the Lord’s own craftsmanship (Proverbs 8:26); if he chooses to give them away for the use of this people or that, it is his own doing (Obadiah 1:19). The fields usually produce a good crop, but he can command them to produce nothing at all if he wishes (Malachi 3:11). The trees and plants obey him, springing to life at his command (Jonah 4:6) and dying at his command (Mark 11:21), and a tree even held his divine body as he died for our sins (Acts 5:30; Galatians 3:13). Yes, the Lord “does whatever pleases him, in the heavens and on the earth, in the sea and all their depths” (Psalm 135:6).
All of creation is called upon to proclaim the Lord through obedience to his commands. Nature is no goddess; nature is one means by which God blesses his creation and mankind. We really should not refer to it as “Mother Nature,” which elevates the creation to a status approaching that of the Creator. There are those who want to elevate an observed phenomenon such as evolution to a similar plateau by spelling it Evolution with a capital letter and claiming that its ways cannot be broken. But God can do whatever he wishes, and just as he condemned the idols of the ancient pagans, so also he condemns the idols of modern pagans. Away with your Mother Nature and your Evolution! They are nothing before the face of the Almighty God. Moses proclaimed: “They sacrificed to demons, which are not God—gods they had not known, gods that recently appeared, gods your fathers did not fear” (Deuteronomy 32:17). And Jeremiah rocked back on his heels and laughed: “The rituals of the peoples are worthless. They cut down a tree in the forest. Then the hands of a craftsman work it with an ax. They decorate it with silver and gold, but they have to nail it down with hammers, so that it will not tip over” (Jeremiah 10:3-4). To worship an idol is worthless; to deny that there is a god at all is useless; the act of an ostrich in the sand. But to pay attention to what even the mindless things of the world proclaim—the earth, the heavens, the sea, the trees of the forest—and to listen to his holy Word, the message of salvation through his Son, who won the victory over our sins on the tree of the cross while the skies were darkened and the ground shook, this is an act of faith. And even faith is a gift given to us by God, who is generous, who is gracious, who is loving, and who rules and works out all things for our eternal good.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in New Ulm, Minnesota. To receive God’s Word for You via e-mail, please visit the St. Paul’s Lutheran Church website.