While I was in seminary, I began to read heavily of the theological works of Karl Barth. While his magnum opus, Church Dogmatics,
is a massive set of texts, he wrote a shorter work to summarize as much of his viewpoint as possible, entitled Dogmatics in Outline. In the midst of the pages of that book is a line that has stuck with me deeply: “Creation is grace: a statement at which we should like best to pause in reverence, fear, and gratitude.” As I’ve reflected on these words many times over the twenty years since I first read them, my understanding of the depths of the majesty and the power of God has deepened. Whenever I read through the Psalm that we are examining this week, I cannot help but think to Barth’s words.
How often do you simply stop and think about the why of praising God? So many of us come to church on Sunday (or watch the service online) without thinking about why we worship our Lord. At the root of the “theological answer” is that God is our Creator, our Redeemer, and our Sustainer. He is the one who not only ensured that we were each fearfully and wonderfully made in His own Image, but also the one who walked the road to Golgotha to die upon a cross for our sins, and who continues to lead us by the power of the Holy Spirit. All of which is a long and winding path to say that God is Sovereign; He is our one true King.
All that we have, all that we know, all that we count as our myriad blessings come from the grace of our Lord—even the simple fact that God chose to create something outside of Himself. When we consider the fact that God, who exists in perfection and in relationship within Himself to this strange thing we describe by using the word Trinity (and it is much easier to describe what the Trinity is not than it is to explain what the Trinity is), decided to speak the words of Creation itself, which allowed for each of us to be born and even to read these humble words, what does your heart want to do? Do you want to stand in awe and praise Him? Do you want to seek Him out with every fiber of your being? But even more importantly does it change the way that you think about God?
The praises that are offered to the Lord are not simply those that we experience in our lifetime, but they extended through all of the generations, and they will continue until all eternity, even beyond the time when God makes all things new. We, in our snapshot of history, are simply joining our voices as we lift our hearts and souls to praise, to adore, to worship our one true King.