Turning of Days: Lessons From Nature, Season, and SpiritSample

Day 1: Singing Skies

Do you hear something? Listen. There, just now. It’s quiet, but it’s there—like someone humming a faint melody or a song that you know but can’t quite remember the words to. If you listen closely, you can just make it out. It’s a birdsong. It’s the radiance of a red rose. It’s the glow of a sunset. It’s the song of nature declaring the glory of God.

In Psalm 19, David sings that “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 reveal knowledge.” But then, just a few verses later and without missing a beat, he shifts focus:  “The law of the Lord is perfect” (vs.7), and “the precepts of the Lord are right” (vs.8). And in with these few lines, David establishes one of the most important truths in the Bible: God reveals Himself both through His Creation and through the Scripture. Both His word and His world tell of His greatness.  

The difficulty for us is that we tend to be comfortable with discovering God in one way or the other. So we’ll ask, “What can nature teach me about God that Scripture cannot?” or “If I can meet God on a mountain top, why should I worry about the Bible?” But let me suggest different questions: “What will you miss if you don’t encounter God in all the ways He has revealed Himself? What will you miss if you don’t listen for Him everywhere?”

Like your left and right eyes, the natural world and the Bible are meant to work together to reveal a fuller, more complete picture of God than we could get from either alone. While the heavens will tell you of the power and majesty of the God who made the world, the Scripture will tell you how that same God loves you and seeks you for His own. So that ultimately, we must learn from nature what it must tell us and learn from Scripture what it must tell us. 

But if God is the God of both nature and Scripture, do not be surprised when they say the same thing. Do not be surprised when they sing in harmony. 

So are you listening? Do you hear what the heavens are saying? Do you hear them declaring the glory of God?