Very Good

when I'm up here asking everybody to return to their seats, I feel a little bad because I love that you guys are deep in conversation with each other.
But we should start making our way back.
Mark always has a problem with this.
I do too.
I guess when Blake's not here, it's tough.
See, you can turn with me in your Bibles to Psalm 100 4, Psalm 104.
We are continuing in our series in the book of the Psalms with this one likely written by David.
Though the text does not specifically reveal an author, this Psalm is all about praising God's sovereignty over all of creation and his sustaining of all things.
It is on the longer side, but we are going to read all of it this morning because I believe that God's word is far more impactful, far more nourishing and beneficial for all of you than anything that I could tell you this morning.
So if you hear anything in this sermon, hear these words from Psalm 104.
Now, please stand with me for the reading of God's word.
Bless the Lord, oh my soul.
Oh Lord, my God, you are very great.
You are clothed with splendor and majesty, covering yourself with light as with the garment.
Stretching out the heavens like a tent.
He lays the beams of his chambers on the waters.
He makes the clouds his chariot.
He rides on the wings of the wind.
He makes his messengers winds, his ministers of flaming fire.
He set the earth on its foundations so that it should never be moved.
You covered it with a deep as with a garment.
The water stood above the mountain At your rebuke, they fled.
At the sound of your thunder, they took to flight.
The mountains rose, the valleys sank down to the place that you appointed for them.
You set a boundary that they may not pass.
So that they might not again cover the earth.
You make springs gush forth in the valleys, they flow between the hills, they give drink to every beast of the field.
The wild donkeys quench their thirst.
Beside them, the birds of the heavens dwell, they sing among the branches.
From your lofty abode, you water the mountains.
The earth is satisfied with the fruit of your work.
You cause the grass to grow for the livestock and plants for man to cultivate, that he may bring forth food from the earth and wine to gladden the heart of man.
Oil to make his face shine and bread to strengthen man's heart.
The trees of the Lord are watered abundantly, the cedars of Lebanon that he planted.
And then the birds build their nests, the stork has her home in the fir trees.
The high mountains are for the wild goats.
The rocks are a refuge for the rock badgers.
He made the moon to mark the seasons.
The sun knows it's time for setting.
You make darkness and it is night when all the beasts of the forest creep about.
The young lions roar for their prey, seeking their food from God.
When the sun rises, they steal away and lie down in their dens.
Man goes about his work and to his labor until the evening.
Oh Lord, how manifold are your works, in wisdom you've made them all.
The earth is full of your creatures.
Here is the sea, great and wide, which teems with creatures innumerable, living things both small and great.
There go the ships and Leviathan, which you formed to play in it.
These all look to you to give them their food and due season.
When you give it to them, they gather it up.
When you open your hands, they are filled with good things.
When you hide your face, they are dismayed.
When you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust.
When you send forth your spirit, they are created and you renew the face of the ground.
May the glory of the Lord endure forever.
May the Lord rejoice in his works who looks on the earth and it trembles, who touches the mountains and they smoke.
I will sing to the Lord as long as I live.
I will sing praise to my God while I have being.
May my meditation be pleasing to him, for I rejoice in the Lord.
Let sinners be consumed from the earth and let the wicked be no more.
Bless the Lord, oh my soul.
Praise the Lord.
The prophet Isaiah tells us that people are like grass and beauty, like the flowers of the field while the grass withers and the flowers fade, but this, the word of our God, will stand forever.
This is the word of the Lord.
You may be seated.
This morning, we are going to work our way through this psalm using these three points.
You can find it in your bulletin.
One, God the creator.
Two, his best creation.
And three, what we've done.
So that is one, God the creator.
Two, his best creation.
And three, what we've done.
However, before we jump into that first point, there is one word heard in this Psalm that some of you heard when I read it or you read it yourself and you are very interested to hear what I have to say about it.
Leviathan.
If you're like me, it's probably going to be like something stuck in your teeth and you would not be able to concentrate and still I talked about it.
So, let's let's address it now at the front of the sermon.
This word or name Leviathan has sparked quite a bit of con conversation among Christian theologians and it's used quite often in the old Testament in a few different ways.
Sometimes, like here in Psalm 104, is a passing reference to some notable sea creature.
In other places, it's described as a kind of massive dragon-like, even fire-breathing creature that God alone is strong enough to defeat.
Now, in seminary, I was quite curious about this myself, and so I got to do a research project on it.
And so, you know how thankful I was this morning that I get to actually use that essay and all that work and time I spent So, there are three main theories about Leviathan.
First, that Leviathan or the Leviathan was some literal sea snake or sea dragon that either does not exist anymore or has gone into hiding and we do not see it now.
Second, that the Leviathan was the term for something like an alligator or a large whale that sailors saw out in the waters and it terrified them and it became a common term for something large and terrifying in the water.
Finally, in the theory that I tend to accept is that the term Leviathan is used as an analogy for a dragon, which in almost every culture is imagery to describe some kind of powerful enemy that threatens the safety of a people.
In the In the Bible, Leviathan is often described as serpent-like, or it is used directly as a name for Babylon or Egypt or even Satan himself, who, of course, in Genesis appears as a snake, and in Revelation appears as a dragon.
In all these cases, Leviathan is shown to be too powerful for God's people, but not too powerful for God himself.
And so you may hold to any three of those theories or you may have some mix of them, but regardless of what you hold, the point stands true that God is more powerful and greater than anything that we might confront.
And so when you see that term Leviathan, think that.
God is greater and more powerful.
Okay, if you want to talk about it more, come find me after the sermon.
But let's go ahead and get to our first points.
God the creator.
God the creator.
Our psalm this morning is one of extreme praise and honor for God as the creator and sustainer of the natural world.
And in Genesis 1:2, we read how God created all things.
Light and darkness, sun and and moon, the Earth, and all that is in it, and all waters, all living things, both plants and animals, all of these things were made out of nothing by the power of his word.
And this Psalm talks about the parts of creation that God has dominion over in almost the exact same order as the days of creation in Genesis.
And it reminds us as readers that the same God who made all things is still involved in creation.
And It's far from the deist view that God created all things and then walked away from his creation.
Psalm 104 tells us that God actively sustains all things, all things.
His sovereignty reaches even into the mundane acts of plants and animals and there is nothing in this physical world that does not depend on God for existence and sustenance.
Our Psalm tells us that God even sets the mountains into place.
He commands the waters of the heavens and of the deep.
He gives water for the animals to drink, and he grows grass that they may eat.
He makes trees for the birds to nest in and even sends darkness for the creatures of the forest to dwell in.
And the point is that there is no corner of creation which God does not claim ownership and have dominion.
And while we might be able to recognize this cognitively or understand this when we read passages like this one about nature, actively believing this to be true true and living with such a faith is actually a different thing.
In this time in history in which we live, you and I are presented with far more of the world's problems and new stories than any human being in the past up until this point has been presented with.
We are over-informed and under-equipped to deal with it.
We are over-informed and under-equipped to deal with it.
Just this past week, whether it was the rising price of gas from wars on the other side of the planet or the threat of a diarrhea parasite and the lettuce that we're eating, or the well-being of a deformed raccoon named Jim Othy from Seattle, which I was told about multiple times this week, I was presenting with a number of problems so far out of my control or ability to do anything about them.
And that was just this week.
And I know for all of us, whether it comes from an outside source or even our own desire through business or anxiety or desire from control and stability in our lives, we all bear more weight on our shoulders than I think we were ever supposed to.
The mounting problems in our lives or in the world at large drive us toward anxiety and apathy and ask us to control problems that instead make us feel powerless.
Everything seems out of control when you try to control everything.
We cannot make the grass grow.
We cannot make rivers flow.
We cannot cause the sun to rise or to set and we cannot keep the Earth spinning on its axis.
And maybe we already inherently trust God to do all of these things because they are so far out of our control.
But for some reason, if you're like me, we tend to cease that level of trust when it comes to the struggles of our own lives.
And when I think the Psalm like this, a Psalm like this which instructs us how to pray, asks of us is to relinquish our desire for control and our attempts to carry the weight of the world, to give that over to the one who already carries the weight of the world and cannot tire from it like we do.
Now, that's easy to say.
It's quite easy to say.
Especially when we talk about the easier things in life, but it's quite another thing in practice.
Especially when we are in the midst of suffering.
And let me draw your attention to verses 27 through 30 of our passage.
Says this, "These all look to you to give them their food in due season.
When you give it to them, they gather it up.
When you open your hand, they are filled with good things.
When you hide your face, they are made.
When you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust.
When you send forth your spirit, they are created and you renew the face of the ground.
For the psalmist, even in the face of life or death, the question of hunger or of sustenance, all of God's created beings turn to God and rely on him to provide or to withhold, to give or to take.
And the question for the psalmist again is not whether God can change things or be in control, but rather because God is already sovereign and already in control over all things, our faith must rest on him.
There's no other option.
In both the good and the bad and both the large problems and the small, we must rest on him.
In other words, we have to admit that just as we cannot cause the sun to rise, so too we cannot brute force our way through solutions.
to the brokenness and sin that we experience in our lives.
That requires humility.
Humility to admit that we need God.
We need God.
And what is true about God and what we see in this Psalm is that he already has been at work long before we were born.
God currently is at work and God is sure to always be at work in the future.
Even in our worst case scenario, I don't know what that is for you, even amidst death and tears and pain and loss that God is still in control.
Exercising his sovereignty, working all things together for good even if we cannot see it and if we cannot understand it.
God reminds us in the Psalm that he is sure to care for the creation of birds and animals and streams and oceans.
If he's sure to care for those then how much more is he going to care for you and all that you do.
It's this idea in this Psalm that I think Jesus is referencing in Matthew 6 when he says listen to God's words, look at the birds of the air, they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns and yet your heavenly father feeds them.
Are you not of more value than they?
And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?
And why are you anxious about clothing?
Consider the lilies of the field how they grow.
They neither toil nor spin.
Yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
But if God so close the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, oh you of little faith.
Point one, God the creator, God creates and sustains all things even that which you and I foolishly try to control.
God creates and sustains all things even that which you and I foolishly try to control.
Which leads us to our second point, God's best creation.
God's best creation.
In Genesis, when God creates light and dark and the sun and the moon and the stars and all the creatures of the air and the land and the sea, God calls them what?
Good.
And then God creates man and woman and what does he call us?
Very good.
We, you and I, are God's greatest creation.
God's greatest creation.
We are the only beings whom God calls very good.
The only thing.
The only creation who God fully took the form of in Jesus Christ and the only creation that God made in his own image.
That's us.
And in our Psalm today, the psalmist tells us near the end how we as God's best creation respond to him as our creator.
In verses 33 and 34, you can look with me.
It says, "I will sing to the Lord as long as I live.
I will sing praise to my God while I have being.
May my meditation be pleasing to him for I rejoice in the Lord.
For I rejoice in the Lord.
In short, we respond to God as our creator and sustainer with praise and with worship.
Our song even begins in ends with the same call of bless the Lord oh my soul.
Begins and ends in that same way.
And now I I think a big part of that is our prayer.
How we pray to God.
And then our worship of him together here on Sunday morning, we respond to God with worship.
I think even another part of what the song calls us to do is worship and praise God in our adoration of his creation.
Seeing God's handiwork in the midst of the mountains and the trees, his beauty in the sunrise, his creativity in the creatures that he created.
But for us, God's greatest creation, those who are made in his image, one of the ways in which we reflect our creator most, and one of the unique things I think about humans that is true about no other creatures is that God created us, right?
As is as a very good creation, but we too create like God does.
We also create.
Music and artwork, movies and television shows and books and poems and statues and buildings and inventions we create.
Not necessarily out of necessity, but simply to create.
And it's said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and I truly believe that we bear God's image and we worship him when we reflect that which he we which we create.
When we create, we reflect God as creator.
And as I read this Psalm over and over and over again in my preparation for the sermon, one thing kept popping into my mind.
So, I felt I needed to talk about it.
It was a thought of how incredible God's creation is and how we are called to create, but also the ever-present threat of AI and how it seems to try to steal this image bearing from us.
It's probably the topic of many of your conversations.
So I figured we talk about it here.
Well, I went last week and I saw the new Odyssey movie recently that came out.
It was directed by Christopher Nolan.
And if it's appropriate for you to see it or you if you have already seen it, then you might know that this movie is an absolute spectacle.
It is a absolute spectacle.
But one cool aspect about that movie and all Christopher Nolan films is that he's known for being against computer-generated images and using too much video effects in his movies and editing, and he relies mostly on practical effects.
Like for this movie, it's a lot of puppetry and forced perspective or even filming on a replica of a Viking long ship for the scenes on the water.
He had the actors and the crew hike up a large hill every single day to film at a castle.
And he even used jet skis to create a whirlpool for the film.
It's pretty amazing.
And in an interview published this past week where he's talking about AI and movies and the reliance on artificially generated art, Nolan said this, "AI is a Trojan horse that everybody knows the Greeks are inside." Now, I don't want to make it sound like AI is all bad.
It can be helpful and a productive tool, but I do agree with Nolan that the of the dangers that AI contains.
Especially as it pertains to us as creators and those who are image bearing.
And those dangers are terrifying to me.
They are.
And the more I see the world flooded with AI-generated advertisements and AI art and AI videos and fake entertainment and AI-generated music, the more I tend to agree with the term that younger generations have started to attribute to it as slop.
As slop.
When God made man God gave Adam and Eve work to do.
Working and keeping a garden, naming the animals God made men and women with a purpose to enjoy his creation and to produce and to create themselves.
And what I mean when I say that is that there is a deep rooted purpose and a joy and a reason for us to produce and to create and to work.
And I worry that at some point when we turn ourselves over to the ease of AI and pressing a few buttons That we have shortcut is something that God gave us as a good gift and something that God has called us to do.
The promise of AI is that it makes our work easy and free and quick and it capitalizes on the fact that we idolize slothfulness and money and our time.
And at some point, at some point along the way, we all have to agree that we value creativity for the sake of creativity, that we value work even when it comes out of cost or it isn't perfect or it isn't easy.
AI is easy, but it robs us of one of the chief ways in which we bear God's image.
The Psalm reminds us that God creates and sustains and that we too are called to share in that joy as his image bears as his greatest creation.
It was our first ever purpose and the way in which we glorify and enjoy God.
At camp last month, as we were hiking down from Emerald Lake at the top of Rocky Mountain Mountain National Park.
One of my students let me listen to some music that he wrote and produced and played all the instruments in and sang in.
And that experience of being surrounded by God's incredible creation and listening to one of his image bearers create something driven from the soul, it was incredibly moving to me.
Incredibly moving to me, not just because it sounded good, which it did, but just as when we see the beauty of God and his creation, we see the image of God, we see God and the works of his greatest creation of you and I.
People reflect their creator.
We reflect our creator and we have to value that as God's people.
We have to value that as God's people.
We have to support it in others.
We have to support it in ourselves and if we lose that, if you were to ever lose that, we lose in part what makes us God's best creation.
Point two, God's best creation, we bear God's image in that we we create to.
We bear God's image and that we create to.
And that leads us to our last point, point three, what we've done.
What we've done.
Our passage this morning ends in a somewhat unexpected way.
In verse 35, we read this, "Let sinners be consumed from the earth and let the wicked be no more." And after this whole psalm that details the magnitude of God's creation, and rejoicing in him and his sustaining of that creation of praising God and moving all of us to worship him and our air image bearing, the author ends this Psalm by calling out sin and by cursing the wicked.
Seems unusual, but if if you would ask me to preach this Psalm maybe 2 months ago, I would have struggled with this point quite a bit.
But I had an experience in June which actually helped me I think understand why the psalmist ends here in such a way.
It's another camp story, but it needs some some background.
Um, one thing that some of you may know about me, but maybe not all of you, um but our students definitely know this about me is that I am a crier.
I cry easily.
I cry very easily and I cry a lot.
Um, I wept the last day of high school when the bell rang.
I wept my last day of college and now the most consistent time that you will find me crying in front of people is during senior speeches on the last night of camp.
This year was absolutely no exception, as I said goodbye to the first class of rising sixth graders that I took to camp back in 2019.
On Saturday morning, the next day after speeches, we were driving down the mountain and leaving camp.
And that entire 45 minutes of a drive, Steph Rupman can attest to this cuz she was sitting next to me the whole time, but I was crying the whole time, 45 minutes down the mountain.
It was it was a strange 45 minutes though because as I drove, I found myself going from crying to getting really really angry and then going back to crying.
And the reason for that also takes a little bit of explaining.
Throughout my life, the reason that I cry easily is I hate when good things come to I've never liked big change.
High school ending, college ending, my time with these students ending.
And camp is truly a wonderful week that I love.
We are surrounded by natural beauty at high school camp.
The week is full of laughter and learning about God and praising God together and going on hikes and making these great memories.
I love it.
And and weeks like this feel like some microscopic glimpse of what life should be like.
And I don't know what those moments have been for you.
Maybe a certain vacation that you can think of or a dinner party with friends or weddings or the birth of a child or even worship together here on Sunday mornings.
We get these brief hints of paradise.
Brief glimpses at the fullness of what life could be like without the wound of sin on this world.
And so when I was driving down the mountain I kept getting angry at my own sin.
Angry at all of our sin.
Angry at what we have lost because of our disobedience.
How every time that I fall in temptation and I fall to sin against God, I am just as guilty as Adam and Eve were when they ate that fruit of bringing this upon the world.
I was angry because of what sin has robbed us of.
I'm still angry about it.
And I think in the Psalm we glimpse something similar.
The psalmist spends the entirety of the passage detailing the wonders of God's creation, the immensity of God's goodness, as he provides for his creation, as he holds it all in his hands.
He explains that he gives us reason to worship God and reflect him in our very being.
And then the psalmist ends here wishing for an end to sin and the final destruction of it.
I hope you do too.
And so the realization that I came to as I left those mountains in my rearview mirror a month ago, and the conclusion that I think the Psalm gives us is that in the midst of anger about what we've lost and about what we have done to creation, the only thing I am left with is hope.
Hope for a day when there is a new creation and new creation has no end.
And those glimpses that we get a paradise are actually the only thing that we see.
And friends, that hope is found in only one place.
It is truly found in only one place and it's in a man nailed to a cross, suffocating, starving, bleeding out as payment for the sins that we commit.
As payment for the brokenness that we brought into the world.
That man, our God, who by the power of his word made all things and currently sustains all things that God gave himself up out of love for you.
So that one day we will see new creation and there will be no sin to cause rust and ruin and endings.
It will be a forever spent creating and worshiping God who poured out everything so that we might live for and with him.
And in the meantime, between now and then, we are called to be angry about our own sin.
To hate it.
to hate what it's done to this world and to us to ask for forgiveness and to repent, to love God and out of that love to love others.
Amidst the chaos of our sinful world and amidst the anxiety that comes with it, amidst temptations to abandon creativity and to abandon our image bearing, amidst the loss in the end of even beautiful and good things, we have a God who continues to sustain.
A God He continues to create image bearers.
A God who continues to keep his promise that if we confess with our mouth and believe with our hearts that Jesus Christ is Lord, that one day we will see this new creation with him.
And I cannot wait to experience that with you forever.
Let's pray.
Lord God, as I even now am reminding of the anger I have for sin.
Lord, I pray for all of us that that anger does not cause us to abandon hope, but rather rest in it.
Lord, that that anger causes us to repent every day, Lord, that we might be an example to the world of what it looks like, to acknowledge our brokenness and our woundedness, Lord, but to acknowledge your goodness and what you've done for us on the cross.
Lord, let us be that church as a light to the world.
And I pray all these things in your name.
Amen.

Sermon transcript is computer generated.