November 7, 2005

Reading through the Bible in one Year: Jeremiah 23:1-25:11; 2 Timothy 2:8-26

Good Evening Brothers and Sisters,

This will be a short study today, the kids passed off a bug to me, I'm hoping I can defeat it before going back to work tomorrow, otherwise, oh well, it'll be a sick day.  At the end of this month we will be moving to Temecula because of respiratory problems in our family, there may be a few days when the study will not go out.  Bear with me on this.

Psalm 29

1     Ascribe to the Lord, O sons of the mighty,

Ascribe to the Lord glory and strength.

     2     Ascribe to the Lord the glory due to His name;

Worship the Lord in holy array.

     3     The voice of the Lord is upon the waters;

The God of glory thunders,

The Lord is over many waters.

     4     The voice of the Lord is powerful,

The voice of the Lord is majestic.

     5     The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars;

Yes, the Lord breaks in pieces the cedars of Lebanon.

     6     He makes Lebanon skip like a calf,

And Sirion like a young wild ox.

     7     The voice of the Lord hews out flames of fire.

     8     The voice of the Lord shakes the wilderness;

The Lord shakes the wilderness of Kadesh.

     9     The voice of the Lord makes the deer to calve

And strips the forests bare;

And in His temple everything says, “Glory!”

     10     The Lord sat as King at the flood;

Yes, the Lord sits as King forever.

     11     The Lord will give strength to His people;

The Lord will bless His people with peace. NASB95^[1]

On reading through this passage today, I was taken by the way that David described the power of our God.  Look particularly at verses 1-2 and 10-11, compare them line by line.  The voice of the Lord is sandwiched between "Ascribe", and "Amen", layman’s terms, "Come to the Lord" and "This is the Lord".  

Look at the power of the word of the Lord.  We don't think about God's word as being powerful, especially in our society today.  Our society wants to attribute the creation of man to some kind of hocus pocus evolution that has been proven to fall short.  They want to strip God of all of His glory and all of His power by explaining away all the natural disasters and natural wonders as just happenstance.  What they fail to recognize is that nothing happens in creation without God allowing it to happen, or without God being the power behind the happening.  Funny, insurance companies refer to floods and earthquakes as "acts of God" and not acts of mother nature. 

Matthew 8:23-27

23     When He got into the boat, His disciples followed Him.

     24     And behold, there arose a great storm on the sea, so that the boat was being covered with the waves; but Jesus Himself was asleep.

     25     And they came to Him and woke Him, saying, “Save us, Lord; we are perishing!”

     26     He said to them, “Why are you afraid, you men of little faith?” Then He got up and rebuked the winds and the sea, and it became perfectly calm.

     27     The men were amazed, and said, “What kind of a man is this, that even the winds and the sea obey Him?”

Mark 4:37-39

37     And there arose a fierce gale of wind, and the waves were breaking over the boat so much that the boat was already filling up.

     38     Jesus Himself was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke Him and said to Him, “Teacher, do You not care that we are perishing?”

     39     And He got up and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, “Hush, be still.” And the wind died down and it became perfectly calm.

Luke 5:4-8

4     When He had finished speaking, He said to Simon, “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.”

     5     Simon answered and said, “Master, we worked hard all night and caught nothing, but I will do as You say and let down the nets.”

     6     When they had done this, they enclosed a great quantity of fish, and their nets began to break;

     7     so they signaled to their partners in the other boat for them to come and help them. And they came and filled both of the boats, so that they began to sink.

     8     But when Simon Peter saw that, he fell down at Jesus’ feet, saying, “Go away from me Lord, for I am a sinful man, O Lord!”

John 2:3-10

3     When the wine ran out, the mother of Jesus said to Him, “They have no wine.”

     4     And Jesus said to her, “Woman, what does that have to do with us? My hour has not yet come.”

     5     His mother said to the servants, “Whatever He says to you, do it.”

     6     Now there were six stone waterpots set there for the Jewish custom of purification, containing twenty or thirty gallons each.

     7     Jesus said to them, “Fill the waterpots with water.” So they filled them up to the brim.

     8     And He said to them, “Draw some out now and take it to the headwaiter.” So they took it to him.

     9     When the headwaiter tasted the water which had become wine, and did not know where it came from (but the servants who had drawn the water knew), the headwaiter called the bridegroom,

     10     and said to him, “Every man serves the good wine first, and when the people have drunk freely, then he serves the poorer wine; but you have kept the good wine until now.”

John 16:19

19     Jesus knew that they wished to question Him, and He said to them, “Are you deliberating together about this, that I said, ‘A little while, and you will not see Me, and again a little while, and you will see Me’? NASB95^[2]

When Jesus calmed the seas, turned the water into wine, and filled the nets of the fishermen with fish, He was demonstrating that He is the God of the Old Testament.  Jesus is the God that created the earth, and has power over it.  This thought is further developed in John 1 and the Epistles of John.  Compare that to the parting of the Red sea, and parting of the Jordan river on three separate occasions.  Not to mention the flood, the ten plagues in Egypt, and stopping the earth's rotation twice.  Nothing is impossible with God because He is the God of all nature, and He controls all aspects of nature.

In this psalm we are driven to worship.  God deserves worship, the more that we study and understand nature, everything points to a creator God who created all of heaven and earth and is the life that moves it.  It is time to worship, we serve an awesome God.

Father, as we consider Your word today, move each of us to stand back and consider Your awesome power. 

In Him,

Joe Turner.