About this sermon
Psalm 104 closes with God’s works of providence: every creature looks to him for food, and when he takes away their breath, they return to dust. God made the world, and he never stepped back from it. He upholds and governs every creature and every event by his power, from the rain to the stars. When God sends forth his Spirit, he renews the face of the ground, and his people bless the Lord with all their souls.
Sermon transcript
Psalm 104. I gave an overview of this psalm on the last Lord’s Day. This evening, we’re going to focus on verses 27 through 35. Psalm 104, verses 27 through 35. I’m going to start at verse 24 to kind of fill out the context a little bit. So let us hear God’s holy word. Psalm 104, beginning at verse 24. O Lord, How many are your works? In wisdom, you have made them all. The earth is full of your possessions. There is the sea, great and broad, in which are swarms without number, animals both small and great. There the ships move along and leviathan, which you have formed to sport in it. They all wait for you to give them their food in due season. You give to them, they gather it up. You open your hand.
They are satisfied with good. You hide your face. They are dismayed. You take away their spirit. They expire and return to their dust. You send forth your spirit. They are created and you renew the face of the ground. Let the glory of the Lord endure forever. Let the Lord be glad in his works. He looks at the earth and it trembles. He 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 my being. Let my meditation be pleasing to Him. As for me, I shall be glad in the Lord. Let sinners be consumed from the earth and let the wicked be no more. Bless the Lord, O my soul. Praise the Lord.” The grass withers and the flower fades, but the Word of our God endures forever.
Let’s ask for the Lord’s blessing upon the preaching of His Word. Heavenly Father, we thank you that you have spoken to us, that you’ve given us your holy word. We pray now that by your spirit you would illuminate the word to us as we consider this portion of holy scripture. We ask that you would bless the proclamation of your word this evening to our edification and salvation and to your glory and honor and praise. We ask these things in Jesus name and all of God’s people said, amen. You may be seated. Well, friends, the title of my sermon this evening is God’s Glorious Works of Providence. And as you’ll see, if you’re following along in your sermon outline, there’s five key words to be listening for tonight. One of those words, of course, being the word providence, but also creation, life, praise and joy.
Now, dear friends, I want you to consider that word providence. Let me ask you, how often do you hear that word used these days in ordinary day-to-day conversation? How often does that word get used in your ordinary conversations? Well, unless you’re a seminary student, my suspicion is that you rarely, if ever, hear that word in ordinary day-to-day conversations. The whole concept and idea of providence is something that is almost off of the radar screen of most folks today in our culture and in our time. And while that may be sad, indeed I do believe it is sad, it really isn’t surprising, is it? After all, we find ourselves living today in a highly secularized, man-centered, humanistic age. We find ourselves living in an age which has discarded belief. in the personal sovereign triune God of providence who has revealed himself in the Bible and an age which has replaced this God with a so-called God who is basically uninvolved and disengaged from his creation and whose highest aspiration, at least insofar as he chooses to get involved in his creation, whose highest aspiration is the personal happiness and fulfillment of us, his creatures.
But the word providence and the concept that lies behind that word, it’s an important theological word. It’s a word that carries with it the conviction that the universe and all of reality are God-centered, theocentric to the core. In contrast to the prevailing worldview of our current secular age, the Word of God teaches that the world and all of reality are deeply God-centered, precisely because the true and living God, the God who created all things at the very beginning, that this God continues to uphold, to sustain, and to govern all things and all creatures, by His omnipotent power, all for His glory and for the good of His elect Church. The God who is the creator of heaven and earth is also the providential Lord who sovereignly, moment by moment, governs all things in heaven and on earth.
If God were to remove his sustaining hand from creation for even a moment, all things would disappear out of existence. For God sustains us and all things and all creatures moment by moment. The section of Psalm 104, which we are considering on this Lord’s Day evening, affirms this truth of divine providence as it highlights God’s glorious works of providence. Now, in terms of an overview and setting of this particular psalm, as I mentioned on the last Lord’s Day, I sought to offer a broad overview of this psalm. And as we saw on the last Lord’s Day evening, Psalm 104 is a psalm of praise which highlights God’s glory, God’s wisdom and God’s majesty as displayed in both his mighty works of creation and providence. As I pointed out then, this psalm appears to be a poetic reflection upon the creation account recorded in Genesis chapter 1.
This psalm contains many poetic echoes of the Genesis creation account. As one Bible commentator puts it, this hymn of praise celebrates the way the created order reveals God’s glory by providing so abundantly for all living creatures. Although it does not use many specific words from Genesis chapter one, verse one through chapter two, verse three, it is generally agreed that the creation account ideas, the creation accounts ideas lie behind the psalm. And I tried to show that on the last Lord’s Day. But for this Lord’s Day evening, let’s dive in beginning at verse twenty eight, twenty seven and twenty eight. And the first thing I want us to consider from our psalm this evening, We find in this psalm that God is revealed as the great provider for all of his creatures. This is the first main point on your outline.
If you’re following along, God is the great provider for all of his creatures. Look at verse 27. The psalmist writes, they all, all of the creatures that have been mentioned up to this point, they all wait for you to give them their food in due season. So God is the one who gives nourishment, sustenance. Our food ultimately comes from God. Verse 28, you give to them, they gather it up. You open your hand. What a picture. God opening his hand. They are satisfied with good. Now, of course, these two verses focus particularly on God’s provision of food for all of his creatures. Food is absolutely essential for life, of course. Without food, there is no sustenance. There’s no nourishment. Without food, sooner or later, you will You will die. We need food. And God is the one who provides us and all of his creatures with the food that we need in his divine providence.
Now, in the previous sections of this psalm, the author had focused on God’s provision for the land animals, including man, as well as the birds of the air. We read about those provisions in verses 11 through 24. And verses 25 through 26 also highlight how our sovereign God has provided for all of the vast array of sea creatures, both small and great. We see that again in verses 25 and 26. So the they all mentioned in verse 27 would include all of the creatures mentioned in these previous sections. Their food is said to be a gift from their Creator. In verse 28, God’s provision of food for His creatures is depicted as a result of God opening His hand. It says, you open your hand, they are satisfied with good. Oh, what a fearful thing it would be for God to close up His hands, to withhold from us and food and nourishment and the things that we need for life and sustenance.
But no, God in his goodness and kindness opens his hand and he provides us each day with our daily bread. Children, where does our food ultimately come from? A lot of people think that our food comes from the grocery store or from the farmers or from, quote, nature. Friends, from a biblical point of view, our food does not ultimately come from the grocery store, though, obviously, in our setting, we shop for our food at the grocery store. At least most of us do. Some of us grow a portion of our of our food from the land. But you can we get this food from the grocery store. And our food doesn’t ultimately come from the dedicated farmers who grow our food, though again, in God’s providence, God uses those farmers and he uses these natural processes to bring us our food.
We can’t even say that our food ultimately comes from nature abstractly considered. Instead, beloved, we are ultimately fed by the very hand of God himself. And that’s why it is our it is a biblical custom, a good custom to give thanks for your food at the meal. This is why it is legitimate to pray as we pray in the Lord’s Prayer. Give us this day our daily bread, even though in God’s providence we ordinarily work for our food. After all, it is God who gives us the strength to work and who providentially controls all of the pieces of the process that take place to produce food from the ground or the animal products from the animals that we eat and turns them into sustenance and nourishment for our bodies, which sustains our natural biological life.
Again, the psalmist writes, you open your hands, they are satisfied. I hope you had a satisfying meal after church this morning. What a blessing to enjoy a meal with your family. What a blessing to be so well provided for as we are in our nation. And we should, of course, think of those whose food is less secure than what we have. And we should pray for them, for God’s provision for them. But God is the great provider. And so in terms of some takeaways and applications from this first observation, beloved, remember that the providential creator God who provides for his creature, the God who is revealed and spoken of in this portion of Holy Scripture. Remember, as I mentioned on the last Lord’s Day, that this God is Yahweh. The predominant name for God in the Hebrew that is used in Psalm 104 is the covenant name for God, Yahweh.
And as I’ve mentioned many times, and as you folks very likely know, the name Yahweh refers to God or has God in view as the one who is the faithful covenant keeping Lord, the redeeming God of Israel. And yet, this redeeming covenant God is also revealed to be our creator and provider. The God who is our Redeemer is the God who is also our Creator and Provider. And as we bear witness to this true and living God to unbelievers, and we point them to the reality of God as the Creator and as the providential Lord, we need to remind them that not only did God create you, not only does He provide you with your daily bread, He is the only God who is able to save you from your sins and provide you with that spiritual food that nourishes your soul unto life eternal.
So let us remember that this God of providence is Yahweh the Lord. And of course, I know that today that’s nothing new to us. But this was a theological truth that that is frequently pushed forth and presented to God’s people in the Old Testament scriptures. They needed to be reminded constantly that that their God was not just a national deity, He was not just a deity who did limited things for them, like redeem them from slavery and give them their own promised land. He’s also the great creator of all peoples, all the nations, all creation. And He sustains all things by His divine providence. But again, another truth that we glean from these verses is that these verses illustrate well the theological truth of God’s providence. Now, you may have noticed, at least in the English language, the term providence is very closely related to the term provide, right?
And that is intentional. For God, by His divine providence, provides for His creatures, and He disposes and governs all things to His glory and for the good of His creatures. Our shorter catechism in question 11 asks, what are God’s works of providence? And I know some of you know the answer to that question. The Bible based answer to that question, of course, is God’s works of providence are his most holy, wise and powerful, preserving and governing all his creatures and all their actions. The preserving of His creatures is especially highlighted in passages like the one that we are considering this Lord’s Day evening. And I also love what our Confession of Faith in chapter 5, section 1 says about providence. This is the chapter on providence. That section reads as follows. It says, God, the great creator of all things, doth uphold, direct, dispose, and govern all creatures, actions, and things from the greatest even to the least. by his most wise and holy providence, according to his infallible foreknowledge and the free and immutable counsel of his own will, to the praise of the glory of his wisdom, power, justice, goodness and mercy.
Praise be to God. He is a God of glorious, awesome providence. Another truth we glean here, beloved, is that the biblical truth of God’s providence, which we see revealed in passages of scripture like this one, refutes all deistic notions of a distant, uninvolved God. Now, I’m not going to give you a lecture this evening on false theologies or the false theology of deism in particular. But basically, deism is the idea that, yes, there is a creator God, a God who kind of got things started. But after getting things started, he kind of stepped back and let things run on their own. And the comparison has been made to a clockmaker. You know, let’s say you’ve got a clockmaker and he gets all of the pieces and parts of the clock and he constructs the clock.
He puts all the pieces in place and everything’s put together and then he winds up the clock. Does he have to constantly attend to it? Does he have to constantly oversee it? No. Once the clock is put together, once it’s created, and once all of the pieces are in place and he winds it up, it runs on its own. It only needs occasional attending to maintain it. And a lot of people have that idea about God. They think, well, yes, God created the universe and he gave the universe natural laws, but things kind of run on their own. And God is kind of up there and he’s not really interested or involved. He’s just kind of sitting back and not really involved in our lives. Well, I’m here to tell you, my friends, that the God of deism is an idol.
It is not the true and living God, the true and living God, not only created all things, but the Bible says, as we read from Acts chapter 17, that in Him we live and move and have our being. God, moment by moment, sustains His creation. And yes, God has created the natural laws. God uses those natural laws. He oversees them. He is behind all of those natural laws so that it can be said that he is the ultimate one who gives us all of the things in creation. And so, for example, we often talk, if you’re watching the Weather Channel, for example, and the meteorologist says, well, tomorrow it’s going to rain. Well, friends, from a biblical worldview point of view, it doesn’t rain. God causes it to rain. God uses the natural laws and the scientific realities that are involved in the sending of rain.
But it isn’t just that rain happens on its own. God, in his ordinary providence, is involved in all of these natural processes. He is not a deistic distant God. He is a God who is working out his plan and purpose in history. Everything that occurs at the most microscopic level, even to the largest cosmic level, whether it’s happening under a microscope or happening in a distant galaxy, It is a playing out of God’s decree, God’s sovereign plan. And the reason I bring this up and stress this is that I think we Christians can sometimes fall into this deistic thinking. We think that unless something miraculous happens, that God’s not involved. No, God is involved in every beat of your heart, every breath that you draw. God is involved in it. He is involved in it by his divine providence.
So let us let us avoid deistic thinking. Let us realize that in him we live and move and have our being. Yes, he is transcendent over his creation, but he is always also present within his creation and he’s working out his plan. Most of the time he works it out. according to his secret counsel, behind the scenes, if you will, but he is actively involved. God is actively involved by his providence in every sunrise, in every sunset, every beat of our hearts, every meal that we enjoy. God is involved in it all. So let us remember that, beloved, and let us praise him, recognizing that he is the one who provides for us. But not only is God the great provider for all of His creatures, God is also revealed here as the great sovereign over life and death.
This is my second point in your outline. Notice, beloved, that God is the great sovereign over life and death. As it says in verse 29, you hide your face, they are dismayed. You take away their spirit, or breath as it could be translated, They expire and return to their dust. You send forth your spirit. They are created and you renew the face of the ground. Now, let’s focus on verse 29. The psalmist writes, you hide your face. They are dismayed. Now, that language of God hiding his face, what is this language pointing to? Well, in the scriptures, when God causes his face to shine upon you, what does that indicate? the shining of God’s face. When we when we pray for God to shine the light of his countenance upon someone, we think of someone in our life who is suffering or struggling and we say, Lord, shine the light of your countenance upon that person.
What are we praying? We’re praying that God would show favor, that God would give blessing to that person. So to have God’s face shine upon you means life and blessing. But on the other hand, for God to hide his face indicates curse and abandonment, or at the very least, the removal of that providential power by which life is sustained. You take away their spirit, the psalmist writes. The God who is responsible for breathing life into us. The God who is responsible for giving us life is also the one who ultimately takes it away. When we breathe our last breath, it’s because God is taking our breath from us and we return to Him. And if you’re a believer in Christ, that means coming into His presence. It’s a good thing, a good transition for the believer in the Lord Jesus Christ.
You see, again, there’s a lot of wrong thinking about death and about the language that we use to refer to death. We often speak about those who have died as those who, quote, pass away. And, you know, if you use that language, I’m not going to make a stink about that. I use that language sometimes, too. So-and-so has passed away. But when you think about it, that’s not really accurate. We don’t just pass away in some kind of passive manner where God is not involved. Instead, God actively takes away our spirit or our breath. And then what happens? It says they return to their dust. Now, this seems to reflect the language of Genesis 3, verse 19, where God says to Adam after his fall into sin, for you are dust and to dust you shall return.
I’m sure many of you have been to funerals before and at a graveside service, you might hear the minister or officiant say the words ashes to ashes and dust to dust. We are dust. God formed mankind from the dust of the earth, breathed life into us. But the same God who breathed life into us can take that breath back to himself according to his sovereign will and plan. But then there’s a note of hope in verse 30. It says, you send forth your spirit, they are created and you renew the face of the ground. Now, I don’t believe the psalmist is in this context speaking here about the resurrection. Instead, he’s speaking about how God in his providence raises up new generations of creatures. to replace those who have passed away, who have died, whose breath has been removed by God.
And thus God renews the face of the ground. He continues in his divine providence to maintain and sustain life from generation to generation. One Bible commentator puts it this way. He says, God is the great householder. Both land and sea animals seek their meat from him, verses 27 and 28. God gives life as well as food, verse 29. Day by day, he gives them breath. And when he withdraws his sustaining influence, they die and return to dust. When the present generation of animals die, God’s spirit creates others to take their place, verse 30. So what do we learn from this, beloved? Well, let us realize that our lives are ultimately in the hands of our creator. Life is fragile. Life is a blessing. It’s a wonderful thing. It’s a gift from God, but it is fragile.
May we realize this. May this truth move us to seek wisdom from God that we may number our days and be good stewards of our lives and live our lives for his glory and not for our pleasures. Let us also remember that just as God is the only one who has the power to grant us the natural biological life that we all enjoy, He is also the only one who can grant to us sinners that spiritual, eternal, eschatological life that saves our souls. That gift of eternal life, of course, is found in the Lord Jesus Christ and in Him alone. As our Lord Jesus said to His Father in the high priestly prayer recorded in John 17, verse 3, Jesus says, This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom You have sent.
When God causes a sinner to be born again, God, the Holy Spirit, breathes new life into the souls of that sinner, bringing them, raising them from spiritual death unto newness of life in union with the Lord Jesus Christ. Again, both natural biological life and spiritual eternal life are gifts from our God and Creator. Dear listener, do you know Jesus Christ as your very own Savior and Lord? Have you received the gift of eternal life? Turn to Christ today. Believe upon him for the salvation of your soul. And finally, beloved, notice that God’s mighty works of creation and providence should fuel our praises and fill us with joy. God’s mighty works of creation and providence should fuel our praises and fill us with joy. In this closing section of Psalm 104, the psalmist says, let the glory of the Lord endure forever.
Let the Lord be glad in his works. He looks at the earth and it trembles. He touches the mountains and they smoke. This language depicts the power of God and the awesomeness of God and the fearfulness of God as he touches the mountains and they smoke. Perhaps there’s also a thought of volcanoes erupting in the background here. He says in verse 33, I will sing to the Lord as long as I live here, the psalmist having reflected upon God’s mighty works of creation and providence, he resolves in his heart that he is going to respond to these mighty works by singing to the Lord, by worshiping God all his life long. I will sing to the Lord. I will sing to Yahweh, the Lord, my faithful covenant God, as long as I live, I will sing praise to my God while I have my being.
And again, remember that our being is given to us from the hand of God and sustained from the hand of God. He gives us breath. He gives us life and he gives us that life for us a specific time. And as long as we live, let us worship and serve him. And then he says, let my meditation be pleasing to him. As for me, I shall be glad in the Lord. The Lord is glad when his people are glad in him. And then, verse 35, he says, let sinners be consumed from the earth and let the wicked be no more. The sinners and the wicked of the earth are a blight upon God’s godly order and the wonderful works of God. And yet God will take care of the sinners in his due time. This powerful psalm highlighting God’s mighty works of creation and providence comes here to an appropriate close on a high note of praise.
As Yahweh Himself in creation declared all things to be very good, so may He continue, the psalmist writes, to be glad in His works. Do you desire for your God and Savior to be glad in the works of His hands? We should desire God’s happiness, God’s pleasure above all. Let the Lord glory. Let the Lord be glad in His works. But verse 35, I want to focus on this verse just for a few more moments before we wrap things up. According to one commentator, In one of my study Bible study notes, it says this about verse 35. It says, the psalmist would like to see the removal of everything that opposes the godly order he has so eloquently described. God has given us a beautiful creation, and He’s given us a godly order of creation.
And when we align our lives by His grace with that godly order, there is blessing, there is life, there is wholeness, there is peace, But when sinners distort the ways of the Lord, rebel against God, rebel against his created order, chaos and disorder and corruption ensue. And so the psalmist is expressing that eschatological longing, that longing for the time when God will bring in the new heavens and the new earth, wherein righteousness dwells. Right now, wickedness dwells and seems to prevail. Indeed, it does prevail among the fallen of mankind. But there will come a time when God will reverse that. And in terms of the terminology that is used here, the term sinners and wicked, As another commentator puts it, sinners and wicked are, as generally in the Psalms, those who reject God’s gracious rule and dwell in their rebellion.
In other words, those who are hardened and impenitent in their sin and rebellion against the Lord. Such a moral condition of hardness against God is a blemish on God’s good world. The prayer that they may be consumed from the earth will be answered in God’s good time. So in a sense, this is an imprecation. calling for God to deal with the wicked. But let us remember brothers and sisters that in this time between the times in this period of redemptive history one of the ways that God deals with the wicked of the earth is by bringing them the gospel and bringing them to repentance. So God will deal with the wicked in his time, either by bringing judgment upon them or by bringing them to repentance. Let us pray that in this age of this time of grace that he might bring them to repentance lest they perish.
But then again, the psalm closes as it opens with this praise to God. Bless the Lord, O my soul. Does your soul say that to the Lord? Can you say from your heart? Bless the Lord, O my soul. In closing, as John Calvin writes, since then, the wicked, by their perverse abuse of God’s gifts, caused the world in a manner to degenerate and fall away from its first original. The prophet justly desires that they may be exterminated until the race of them entirely fail. Let us then take care so to weigh the providence of God as that being wholly devoted to obeying him. We may rightly and purely use the benefits which he sanctifies for our enjoying them. Amen. Let us pray. Our gracious Lord God and Heavenly Father, we thank you for your gracious and kind providence to us and especially for your saving providence in bringing us into contact with the gospel and drawing us by your grace and through the Holy Spirit to faith in Christ.
Lord, we ask that you would deepen our sense of the God-centered reality of all of creation. Help us to live our lives Coram Deo before your face, knowing that in you we live and move and have our being and confident that you will indeed lead us on and carry us to that destiny that you have drawn us to. We thank you, Lord, that you who have begun a good work in us will indeed carry it through to completion until the day of Christ Jesus. For it is in his name that we pray and all of God’s people said, Amen. As we close our time together, let’s rise and sing. Hymn 256, God Moves in a Mysterious Way, 256.
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