Several years ago there was a very popular book on becoming successful in business. It is now out of print and I cannot even remember the title. However, I do remember the essential principle stressed by the author to pay very close attention to details and to treat the customers as visiting royalty. A while back I wrote a recommendation for a waitress I barely knew so that she could find a better job. Her talent was in remembering names and details. She always seemed to know what I wanted to order before I did. Isn't this attention to detail and preparation for our needs what we appreciate most? Then let us consider One who knows our deepest needs, One who has prepared all of creation and ordered our lives to bring us to know His Son and in knowing Him, taught us to return our praise to our heavenly Father: "O Lord my God, You are very great:". Our psalmist, which the Septuagint credits to David, acknowledges the greatness of our God. In verses two through four, the joy of the Creator in His creation is noted.

Certainly we understand our God to be separate and above His created order, but the images in these verses certainly celebrate the real enjoyment of God with the goodness of His creation. God's splendor and majesty are heightened in the celebration of light in verse two. Light is sensed to be a reflection of His glory here as well as in the images of Revelation. Not content with the glories of His own raiment, He stretches out the firmament of the heavens like the curtains of a tent. From here our psalmist goes on to poetically describe the Creation order. The nature of the poetic license here may in fact encourage those Christians who argue for a concordist view of Creation. By that, I mean the verses here overlap in their descriptions of daily activities. Even though Christians may honestly read this view into the psalm, we would do well to remember that the purpose of this particular psalm is to worship and praise the Creator for the goodness of His creation. This view is supported by the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew which is different from the NKJ translation. In that translation in our language would read: "who makes his messengers winds, and his ministers a flaming fire." It is in this sense that the writer to the Hebrews quotes this verse in Chapter 1, verse 7.

So, just as God is sensed as being present in the midst of His creation, so are His servants the ministering angels going before Him to serve His constant purpose. These, His servants reflect God's greater glory, so that nothing that is created takes attention away from God Himself. God Himself has "laid the foundations of the earth" our psalmist tells us. That creative fact makes the foundation of the earth firm so that it cannot be moved.

However, the early earth we see here was covered with water, even the mountains were under the global ocean's surface. At God's command the mountains rose as one of our hymns celebrates. At His word, the waters flowed into Seas. God assigns the waters their appointed place. A boundary between land and sea was established. Then in the last phrase of this psalm portion, the psalmist repeats the promise of God to Noah: "that they may not return to cover the earth." The waters have served their purpose, God's creative purpose and providence are carried out according to His eternal will. Here in this passage we see poetically affirmed the ordering of Creation on third day. The world that perished in the flood as one author described it, was very different from our own. Creationist scientists are speculating that the early atmosphere was filled with water vapor. This assumption would fit in well with the image of an earthly paradise. As an earthly land mass arose from the sea at God's command and the earth brought forth vegetation beyond present imagination, the combination of warm temperature and adequate humidity served as the grandest greenhouse ever designed. Such a vapor canopy would have also had beneficial health benefits for man and animals. World wide there would have been tropical temperatures and plants, animals and Adam and Eve would have known paradise as we never can.

However, as our psalmist hints, that world perished when the fountains of the deep and the heavens were opened and once again the waters rose over the highest of the pre-deluge mountains. A couple of years ago I read that a continental size cavern had been found about two miles deep in the earth's crust. In addition, there is the unusual formation of Lake Baikal in western Siberia, whose shallow end is 8,000 feet deep and the deeper end has not been recorded. Fully one fifth of the world's fresh water may lie within the bounds of that one lake! In the dramatic events of the Great Flood, not only did the earth and the heavens give up their waters, but the continents as we know them were forged anew, the depths of the seas were rearranged and the boundaries re-established which God promises us will never be violated in such a way again.

From our psalm today, let us learn from our psalmist that indeed God did in fact fashion the heavens and design the geography of the planet. One fact about our present Geography that has always fascinated me is the idea that when our present continents arose, vast shallow inland seas were trapped in low spots on every continent. In this respect, the gradual shrinking of the Dead Sea, the Great Salt Lake and the Caspian and Arial Seas can be better understood. When I first wrote this psalm meditation, I reported that scientists thought that the Arial Sea in the Soviet Union would eventually disappear as the water gradually evaporated. That sadly has come true in the last decade or so, since the waters draining into that sea have been used to irrigate thousands of acres of fields. This environmental happening would also explain a few other areas of land that now are dry but show evidence of being under water in recent eras. Another geographic study of continental plates and drifting may also be understood as continuing effects of the Great Flood.

The evidence that we are collecting more and more supports the Biblical view described here in this poetic psalm and in the prose report of Genesis One. Just recently, the news magazines reported evidence for a large flood in and around the Black Sea. It is not too far from the Black Sea to the mountains of Ararat! What will be our reaction to these biblical truths. Will we affirm that God's revelation tells us the truth about the beginnings of His creation? Will we affirm that we ought also to take His spiritual revelations equally at face value?

Too often in our time, people are content to accept the spiritual but reject the cosmogony or beginnings as described in the Old Testament. I doubt that we can live successfully with a divided mind on the matter. The problem that I am getting at is like little children who are raised believing in a Santa Clause, an Easter Bunny and a Tooth Fairy. When we get around to telling them about baby Jesus, eventually the myths become so mixed up with the facts and they throw the baby out with the bath water so to speak! If we would want to increase our spirituality we would do well to consider the biblical revelation of what God has been doing since the beginning! If we are more willing to accept the cosmogony of Scripture, we might find our spirituality increased as a consequence. May this be our goal and our hope as we continue to consider the themes in this psalm. Amen.