Today I feel drained of all that I could rely on, not God,
but most everything else. Sometimes this happens when life hands me lemons;
sometimes it is the working of the Spirit to test me. Will I go on? Will I
still praise Him?
The psalmist does. While he (likely David) may not feel as
I do when he wrote this, there were many times in his life when he was
abandoned and felt helpless. Nevertheless, he turned to the Lord and began praising
Him — starting with recognizing His majestic power in creation . . .
“Bless the Lord, O my soul! O Lord my God, you are very great! You are clothed with splendor and majesty, covering yourself with light as with a 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 a flaming fire. He set the earth on its foundations, so that it should never be moved. You covered it with the deep as with a garment; the waters stood above the mountains. 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.” (Psalm 104:1–9)
No wonder a walk in the woods is restorative. No wonder
the battle over creation vs. evolution is so fierce! Creation is the beginning
point of acknowledging God. The heavens declare His glory and all the universe declares
His power.
Psalm 104 is filled with praise for what God has made. Near
the end, the writer 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.” (Psalm 104:33–34) Praise and his faith brought assurance
to the psalmist.
Tozer says no preacher or teacher can tell us all about
God. He reminds his readers that God told Moses and Israel that God said there
would always be a cloud about Him, a veil covering His person. No one can fully
comprehend who He is; our day of seeing Him face to face is yet to come.
However, the cloud lifts at least a little when God’s
people look at Jesus in faith. This happens because . . .
“ . . . in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high . . .” (Hebrews 1:2–3)
There will always be a sense of mystery — for God is God —
yet He came and died for me. He speaks to me. He makes His power known to me.
He begins with creation yet His self-revealing did not end there. The radiance
of His glory can be seen in Jesus Christ and in the Cross where God exposed His
loving heart to the world.
Tozer also says that “Innate
within us is the need to kneel in reverence before something. When God appears
to us, and, stunned and overcome, we are bumped to our knees.” Only then do
we realize that the God in the cloud is the same one who was born in a manger,
the God who said:
“I am the LORD, and there is no other, besides me there is no God; I equip you, though you do not know me, that people may know, from the rising of the sun and from the west, that there is none besides me; I am the LORD, and there is no other. I form light and create darkness; I make well-being and create calamity; I am the LORD, who does all these things.” (Isaiah 45:5–7)
^^^^^^^^^^^
Jesus, You are the express image of His glory, revealing
the One hidden, removing much of the cloud but not the mystery of who God is,
the total fullness of what He is like. I realize that much of the cloud that
remains is not Your hiding place. It is hidden because mere human eyes cannot
behold You. We haven’t that ability (yet) and not only that, sin blinds my eyes
from fully grasping the greatness of Your majesty.
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