Whale Sung

“Praise him, sun and moon, praise him, all you shining stars.
Praise him, you highest heavensand you waters above the skies.
Let them praise the name of the Lord,
for he commanded and they were created.
Praise the Lord from the earth,
you great sea creatures and all ocean depths.”
(Psalm 148:3-5, 7)

Perhaps it was with Psalm 148 in mind, that Daniel Migliore comments that “while the stars, the trees, and the animals do not speak or sing of the glory of God in the same way that humans do, in their own way they too lift up their praises to God, and for all we know, they do this with a spontaneity and consistency far greater than our own.”[i]

Humpback whales, for example, sing underwater arias; when they’ve finished, they often breach, soaring into an explosive half-twist back-flop with their “wings” flung wide.[ii] One researcher who studies female humpbacks and their offspring reported seeing a juvenile “leap from the water a hundred times in a row.”[iii] Maybe singing and breaching is the language these great beasts of the deep use to talk to God, “to cajole him, plead with him, play with him, and make covenants with him.”[iv]

“God leads a very interesting life and is full of joy.
Undoubtedly he is the most joyous being in the universe…
We pay a lot of money to get a tank with a few tropical fish in it…
but God has seas full of them, which he constantly enjoys.” [v]
DALLAS WILLARD

Ponder...

Have you ever pondered something like the humpback whale singing and breaching in praises to God?



How many more places in the universe might this type of praise be continually and spontaneously erupting?




Meditate on the following verses, what might they literally mean?

“You will go out in joy and be led forth in peace;
the mountains and hills will burst into song before you,
and all the trees of the field will clap their hands.”
(Isaiah 55:12)

“The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.” (Romans 8:19-22)

[i] Daniel Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding: An Introduction to Christian Theology, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991, 83.
[ii] Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Engaging God’s World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning, and Living, Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002, 25.
[iii] Douglas Chadwick, “Listening to Humpbacks,” The National Geographic, July 1999, 21.
[iv] Eleonore Stump, “Faith and the Problem of Evil,” in Seeking Understanding: The Stob Lectures, 1986-1998, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001, 519.
[v] Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God, San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998, 62, 63.

In Creation…

“To whom then will you liken Me, Or to whom shall I be equal?" says the Holy One. Lift up your eyes on high, And see who has created these things, Who brings out their host by number; He calls them all by name, By the greatness of His might And the strength of His power; Not one is missing… Have you not known? Have you not heard? The everlasting God, the LORD, The Creator of the ends of the earth, Neither faints nor is weary. His understanding is unsearchable.”

(Isaiah 40:25-28)

“Creation is neither a necessity nor an accident,” writes Cornelius Plantinga Jr. in his book Engaging God’s World.[i] He continues,

Instead, given God’s interior life that overflows with regard for others, we might say creation is an act that was fitting for God. It was so much like God to create, to imagine possible worlds and then to actualize one of them. Creation is an act of imaginative love. In fact, as the British author G. K. Chesterton once wrote, “The whole difference between construction and creation is… that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.”[ii]

In creation God graciously made room in the universe for other kinds of beings. And then, out of His limitless and self-sustaining resources, God began to work. Expending vast resources of ingenuity, power, and love, God expanded the realm of being, generating ten to one hundred billion galaxies, each galaxy a stupendous bonfire of as many as one hundred billion stars, and many of the stars loaded with their own orbital systems. Over some suitable length of time, God generated great galactic wealth, and He is still generating it inside certain nebulae that are, in effect, nurseries for young stars. On our own planet, God devised processes of His own imagination to make salamanders and sandhill cranes and fringed gentians. As zoologists and botanists show us (often with a kind of wonder if they are good scientists), God’s creation, as we now observe it, includes more than 750,000 species of insects and 250,000 species of plants. It includes grasshoppers that look like leaves and beetles that hitchhike on the backs of bees. Perhaps revealing a whimsical side of God’s nature, creation includes the duckbilled platypus, and also “gooney” birds, a member of the albatross family found around Midway Island in the South Pacific. With their great wingspan and set-back leg placement, gooneys are champion fliers, but they visit land so seldom that, when they do, they come in for some truly foolish landings.

For Christians, the study of creation is a classic opportunity to read Scripture and the natural world together. Scripture tells us who created the wonders of the world, and why. Study of these wonders tells us, at least in part, how God did His wonders. In creation we find not only unimaginable variety but also deep orders and interdependencies. For example, plants and human beings (and many animals) need each other’s exhalations. You take in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide, the very thing needed by a tree to live and to produce a little more oxygen for your next breath. (Is it any wonder that being in the presence of budding trees and blooming azaleas makes us feel fresher than acre upon acre of asphalt and concrete?) In this way, the world has been admirable arranged.

In creation we find creatures of wondrous particularity – each of them , and all of them, a display of God’s inventiveness and love. In some marvelous chapters of the book of Job (38-41) we read that God revels in His creation. God walks in the depths of the sea, cuts water channels through deserts, and leads bear cubs out of their dens. God fathers the rain and mothers the ice. He makes a pet of the mysterious Leviathan, perhaps a sea creature (41:5). When the sea bursts from the womb, God wraps it in swaddling clothes. He also speaks to the sea, as if it were His own “rambunctious and exuberant child.”[iii] “This far you may come, and no farther,” says God (38:11). And nature talks back to God. Leviathan speaks to God “with soft words” (42:3). Lightning bolts say to God, “Here we are” (38:35). And at the dawn of creation, angels and stars form into an audience and then a choir as they watch God go to work. In one spine-tingling verse, the book of Job says that God laid the foundation of the earth “while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy” (38:7).

These highly poetic chapters do not teach us zoology, but they do teach us something important. The chapters teach us that God loves creation. God celebrates creation. God even plays with His creation. Responding in kind, an unspoiled creature turns to God with praise generated by being or acting “in character,” by expressing its nature as God’s creature.

“The Universe begins to look more like a great thought,
than a great machine.”
SIR JAMES JEANS

Ponder...

How do all these elements of creation inspire awe and wonder and worship inside of you?

“I did not ask for success; I asked for wonder.
And You gave it to me.”
RABBI ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL

“As you do not know how the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child, so you do not know the work of God who makes everything.”
(ECCLESIASTES 11:5)

[i] Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Engaging God’s World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning, and Living, Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002, 23-24.
[ii] G. K. Chesterton, Appreciation and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens, Port Washington, MY: Kennikat, 1966, 14.
[iii] Eleonore Stump, “Faith and the Problem of Evil,” in Seeking Understanding: The Stob Lectures, 1986-1998, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001, 519.

In the Light

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend (overcome) it…the true Light which gives light to every man coming into the world.” (John 1:1-5, 9)

I asked a man what made his life so radiant and bright.
He answered: "Looking, looking toward the Light."
Anonymous


There is not darkness enough in all the world
to put out the light of one little candle.
Epitaph

There is no illness which may not be dissipated, like the dark, if you let in a stronger light upon it.
Henry David Thoreau

Reflection

Reflect on the following description about Christ. What does the following verse mean?

“But to you who fear My name The Sun of Righteousness
shall arise With healing in His wing.”
(Malachi 4:2)

Jesus is the Light. After looking at various elements of light – its speed, power, etc., how might that relate to us as followers of the true Light? Reflect on that and the following passage from Ephesians.

“Therefore I also, after I heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints, do not cease to give thanks for you, making mention of you in my prayers: that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him, the eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that you may know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and what is the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe, according to the working of His mighty power which He worked in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places.”
(Ephesians 1:15-20)



“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak.
We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”[i]
C. S. LEWIS







[i] C. S. Lewis, Weight of Glory, 3-4.

All in One

“For of Him and through Him and to Him are all things,
to whom be glory forever. Amen.”
(Romans 11:36)

For 300 years, there have been fierce arguments in the scientific community whether light was a particle or a wave. Presently, scientific dogma says that it is both - even though scientists readily admit that this is "impossible." They shrug their shoulders and call it a "wave" when it does what a wave is expected to do, and they call it a "particle" when it does what a particle is expected to do. According to all the present evidence, light is not part particle and part wave (or a particle moving in a wave like pattern, as many falsely imagine), but it is all wave and all particle, all at the same time.[i]

Science tells us that light is constituted of three rays, or groups of wavelengths, distinct from each other, no one of which without the others would be light. Each ray has its own separate function. The first originates, the second formulates, illuminates or manifests, and the third consummates. The first ray, often called invisible light, is neither seen nor felt. The second is both seen and felt. The third is not seen but is felt as heat.[ii]

“God does not think; he creates.
He does not exist; he is eternal.”
SOREN KIERKEGAARD

Grab a Bible and look up the following references. Ponder what they’re saying about Jesus Christ.


Jesus Christ is all God and all man. He is proclaimed to be God (Isaiah 9:6; John 1:1; 1 Timothy 3:16; Tit. 1:3; Hebrews 1:8), and yet we know that He is all man (I Timothy 2:4). He tired (John 4:6), He wept (John 11:35), He thirsted (John 19:28), and He was "in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin" (Heb. 4:15).






[i] http://www.thebiblestudypage.com/light.shtml
[ii] Tan, P. L. 1996, c1979.

Faster than a Speeding Bullet

“Faster than a speeding bullet.” This was the infamous description for the notable superhero Superman. Leap tall buildings in a single bound, faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, were all said to be traits of this awesome being. But how fast does a speeding bullet travel? Speeds fluctuate and depend upon several factors. Gravity makes a projectile fall toward the earth while in flight. The projectile's size, shape, and the air density affect the speed by which it travels. Air resistance slows the speed of a bullet and reduces the distance by which it travels. The World Book Encyclopedia tells us that "with modern propulsion techniques, the projectile's initial velocity may be as high as 4000 feet (1200 meters) per second for some rifles and 5000 feet (1500 meters) per second for some large guns."[i] As impressive as this might seem, it doesn’t exactly hold water to the speed of light or Light Himself.

Light travels at approximately 186,282 miles per second. Nothing in our experience can move faster. It is the universal, absolute standard of speed. Einstein, in fact, postulated that everything - even time itself - is relative to only one existing constant: the speed of light.

Einstein said that the reason he could construct the theory of relativity was because there is one thing in the world that is unchangeable. That one thing—the speed of light—is the only constant in this physical, material universe.



Ponder...

Grab a Bible and look up the following references. Ponder what they’re saying about the Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ is the absolute standard by which all other things are measured (Acts 17:31). He never changes His character (Heb. 13:8). It is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for anything that comes from His mouth to be annulled, changed, or altered (Matt. 5:18, 24:35) - and even time itself is subject to Jesus Christ, He was alive before there was time (John 1:1), and He will be alive when the new heavens and new earth are made (Rev. 21:6).

When Jesus wants something done,
nothing can slow Him down;
nothing can hinder Him from the execution of His plan
(Matt. 28:18).





“Science conducts us, step by step,
through the whole range of creation,
until we arrive, at length, at God.”
MARGUERITE DE VALOIS Memoirs

[i] Ballistics. The World Book Encyclopedia. New York: World Book, 1998.

Consuming Fire

“But to you who fear My name
The Sun of Righteousness
shall arise With healing in His wings.”
(Malachi 4:2)

In June 1946, the Sun sent out an arch of flame that soared above the Sun over ONE MILLION MILES, which is more than the diameter of the Sun! The power of the sun! The sun is a fantastically hot cosmic radiation powerhouse similar to the countless stars out in the vast unfathomable distances of space. Its surface temperature is 11,000°F and its interior temperature is estimated as high as 18,000,000°F. Imagine, if you can, a cake of ice one-and-one-half miles square and 93 million miles high. It would reach from earth to sun. Scientists tell us that this gigantic cake of ice would be completely melted in 30 seconds if the full power of the sun could be focused upon it![i]

Is it any wonder the Psalmist describes God by saying,

“A fire goes before Him, And burns up His enemies round about.
His lightnings light the world; The earth sees and trembles.
The mountains melt like wax at the presence of the LORD,
At the presence of the Lord of the whole earth.”
(Psalm 97:4)

Ponder...

What are some aspects of fire that speak of the all powerful character of the Christ?



The interior temperature of the sun gets as high as 18,000,000°F. Is there anything on earth that would not be instantly obliterated under the flames of such heat?



It’s only logical to assume that the Creator of the sun has more power and than the sun itself. Therefore, if nothing could withstand the fire of the sun, how much more so the one Whom we honor with holy fear?



Is there something you’re facing right now in your life that seems unconquerable? Write it down on a piece of paper. Describe in some detail the struggle, the situation, the circumstance, and you seemingly powerless ability to overcome it. Once you have done this, light a candle, hold the paper over the small flame and watch it begin to burn. (Be sure to use ansmoke friendly place, and you may want to position yourself near a sink or outside J). As you do this, be reminded that there is nothing to big or difficult for our God. He is a consuming fire. With Him we can do all things and overcome any obstacle or bondage.



[i] Tan, P. L. 1996, c1979.

General Electric

Jesus said,
"I am the light of the world.”
(John 8:12)

Light is energy-pure energy. The greatest natural source of light is the sun. The sun radiates more energy in one second than man has used since the beginning of civilization. In one second, a typical quasar throws out enough energy to supply all the earth’s electrical needs for billions of years[i]

When God said, “Let there be light,” there was light. There was no pause, there was no delay, there was only a universal response. The Apostle John said that “in Him was life, and the life was the Light of men” (John 1:4). Life and light work together intimately. The sun's light ultimately provides energy for everything we have on earth. Green plants, through photosynthesis, convert light energy into stored energy. When we eat the plant, we are consuming energy that was once light. We cannot escape the power and energy of light.

Interestingly, the New Testament proclaims that all power and authority belong to Jesus. One of the translations for the word power is energy. Just as the sun's light is the physical source of our energy, Jesus Christ is the true source of our spiritual life and energy.


Meditate on the following passage:

“God, after He spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the world. And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power. When He had made purification of sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much better than the angels, as He has inherited a more excellent name than they.” (Hebrews 1:1-4 NASB)


Ponder...
What are some things this passage tells us about Jesus?




How could it be that Jesus is a better reflection of God's glory than all the stars in the universe?

“The question from agnosticism is,
Who turned on the lights?
The question from faith is,Whatever for?
ANNIE DILLARD
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

[i] Tan, P. L. 1996, c1979.