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Commentary on "In the Beginning"
Day 4: Tuesday, January 10, 2012 - The Heavens Declare
Overview
Today’s lesson discusses how the cosmos and creation reveal the Creator. The author uses Psalm 19 and Psalm 92 as examples of Scriptures explaining that creation declares God’s praise.
The lesson ends with a paragraph noting that “our world has also been devastated by sin, by the scars and disruption caused by the great controversy.” The author uses the example of a cherry tree smitten with blight to demonstrate that while the blight is dreadful, the cherry tree still reveals “the love and goodness” that “points to the character of the Creator.”
Observations
The author uses Psalm 19 to make the connection that God’s law is “linked with the grandeur of God’s creative actions”.
This typical Adventist teaching is based on the assumption that when David speaks of “law”, he is referring to the Ten Commandments. In context, this is not true. The Hebrew word underlying “law” is torah, the word for the law of Moses, the first five books of the Bible. This word could be understood as “God’s instruction”, and it contextually refers to His word which reveals His covenant with them.
To take Psalm 19 and wrest the words to say that the Ten Commandments are connected to the glory of creation, that the two things are the revelation of God’s grandeur, is to miss the point. The psalmist is stating what is NOT obvious to rebellious men and women. He is saying that the heavens reveal the glory of God, but he is then saying that God’s word, His instructions to them, revive the sinful human heart. They warn men and women of sin; God’s word and righteous instruction are eternal. Fear of God is eternal. And the psalmist ends with the prayer that his words and meditations will be acceptable in God’s sight.
Adventists explain that this psalm endorses the Ten Commandments as God’s eternal holy word to men, and they use this idea to say the seventh-day Sabbath is eternal. Yet this conclusion is not implicit nor explicit in the text.
We can conclude from this psalm is that God has revealed His invisible attributes, as Paul says in Romans 1:18-20, that creation reveals His eternal power and divine nature. He is how Paul says it:
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse (Romans 1:18-20 ESV).
We can further conclude from this psalm that God’s word, His Torah and instructions, were the source of wisdom, life, and of knowing God. To say that God’s law and the objects of creation reveal grandeur and glory is to diminish both. Adventism endorses nature as “God’s second book”; never does Scripture refer to nature in this sense. God has given us only one book: the Bible. Nature clearly states that there is a sovereign, eternal, invisible God, but it does not tell us anything more personal about God. Creation is “general revelation”; it is the evidence to a fallen world that God IS. To learn about salvation, however, God gave us “special revelation” through His word and His Son.
The law gave the shadows that foretold how Jesus would save us. It had no power whatsoever to effect salvation for people. It could only reveal God’s promises of salvation, and it gave evidence that one could believe God to be counted righteous. Hebrews 10:1 says,
For since the law has but a shadow of the good things to come instead of the true form of these realities, it can never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered every year, make perfect those who draw near (Hebrews 10:1 ESV).
Psalm 92 is a paean praising God for the faithfulness, power, strength, and faithfulness of God to His people. Even though it uses metaphors from creation, the point is not “praise for the created world”. It is, rather, superlative thanksgiving to the almighty Yahweh, the God who destroys His enemies and exalts and flourishes His people. This psalm does not draw our attention to the glorious wonder of creation. Rather, it praises our God whose power and works are so great we have no adequate words to describe Him.
This lesson obscures the sovereign power of God as revealed in His word, and it reduces the metaphors David used to praise Him to mere sentimental images of “grandeur”. God’s glory is David’s focus, not the glories of creation and the way creation shows “God’s creative actions”. God is personal; this lesson depersonalizes the holiness of God and reduces it to mere beauty that MUST have a Creator.
All creation subjected to decay
The lesson states that our world has been devastated by the sin and disruption caused by the great controversy.
Time out!! First, the “great controversy” involves an entire paradigm that includes a Jesus who could have sinned and failed, a devil who fought with Jesus because He wanted to be exalted instead of Jesus, an end-time test of seventh-day Sabbath keeping, a judgment of professed believers that started in 1844, and a devil who will ultimately bear the final load of the sins of the saved out of heaven. Moreover, this whole scenario was written and developed by an extra-biblical prophet.
The Bible teaches something very different. Jesus is eternal sovereign Yahweh. He was eternally spiritually alive and thus without any sin at all. He finished the atonement at the cross. He is seated NOW at the right hand of God. We can KNOW we are saved; we pass out of death into life the moment we believe (Jn. 5:24). Jesus, not Satan, carried every bit of sin to the cross, outside the camp (Heb. 13:13), as far as east is from the west.
It was not satan nor sin that caused the disruption in creation. It was God Himself. When Adam sinned, God cursed the ground and declared it would bring forth thorns and thistles (Gen. 3:17). Paul tells us,
For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies (Romans 8:20-23 ESV).
Notice that Paul states that “creation was subjected to futility…because of him who subjected it,” that “the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.”
It is not sin nor satan that caused the decay and disarray in creation. And notice also that Romans tells us that it’s not just the earth but “the whole creation” that is in bondage to decay and is groaning. “The whole creation” includes the universe and beyond. This fact makes sense of the texts that tell us the old heaven and earth will be destroyed one day:
Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and the heavenly bodies will melt as they burn! But according to his promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells (2 Peter 3:11-13 ESV).
God is the One who subjected creation to decay. Blights and diseases are not from the devil; they are the result of God binding creation over to decay. Nevertheless, He will one day destroy the spoiled creation and re-create it.
The heavens do, indeed, declare the glory of God, but not as “God’s second book”. Rather, they are created by God for specific reasons:
And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth.” And it was so (Genesis 1:14-15 ESV).
God created the heavenly bodies for “signs and seasons,” for “days and years,” and to be lights for the earth. They were never intended to be windows into God’s character. They are, rather, intended to evoke worship of God, not sentimental aesthetic emotion.
Summary
- Psalm 19 explains that creation literally declares God’s invisible qualities of divinity and eternal power.
- God’s law is not the Ten Commandments. In context it is “Torah”, the “law of Moses”, the first five books of the Bible: God’s revealed word. It was not the Decalogue characterized by the Sabbath.
- Psalm 92 is not a psalm revealing the glories and grandeur of nature. It is a psalm eliciting praise to Almighty God.
- Sin and the Great Controversy did not scar the earth.
- There is no great controversy as articulated by Adventists. The Bible is clear that Jesus’ atonement is finished; there is no investigative judgment; Sabbath is not the final test—Jesus is; Satan is not the scapegoat; Jesus is.
- God bound creation over to decay. God cursed the earth and decreed thorns and thistles.
- Heaven and earth will be destroyed and recreated. The decay decreed by God extends to “the whole creation”, not just to our planet.
- Nature is not “God’s second book”. God gave us one book: the Bible, and He gave us God the Son.
- It diminishes God as well as creation to say creation is His second book, to say we can learn of Him by observing nature. We can only observer the invisible, eternal, divine reality of God by observing nature.
- We cannot learn anything about salvation apart from His special revelation through His word and His Son.
- God is sovereign over all creation. Our response to creation is not to become maudlin and preoccupied with God’s love and glory; it is, rather, to be brought to our knees in a realistic awareness of our helplessness before an almighty God and to acknowledge our need to know Him.
Copyright 2012 BibleStudiesForAdventists.com. All rights reserved. Revised January 9, 2012. This website is published by Life Assurance Ministries, Glendale, Arizona, USA, the publisher of Proclamation! Magazine. Contact email: BibleStudiesForAdventists@gmail.com.
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