I’ve been thinking this week, “How far do I go in exploring God’s greatness?”
I think I knew the answer to that question already, but as soon as I penned those words it kind of fell out of the sky – just in case I’d missed it, I guess. You talk of God’s greatness as long as His greatness shall last – which, of course, is forever.
Heaven will do the same, singing His praises and the Lamb’s through all of eternity.
The psalmist sat in a similar place as I’ve sat lately, pen in hand. Our design is the same: to describe God’s greatness in the best words we can reach down and retrieve and to paint the picture as well as our human tongue can tell or pen can write.
Because God is like a prism, he zeros on the different aspects of God’s glory one by one in this, his one-hundredth and thirty-nine psalm: He consider the Lord’s omniscience. God, he declares, knows all things, without exception or qualification.
But a prism – as best I remember from grammar school – bends light to a specific point. David does the same. Of all the things the Lord knows, one thing I know He knows especially well, says the psalmist: me – “You have searched me, Lord, and you know me.”
I can’t help but want to italicize the me in that opening line. I know you know everything and everybody, but one thing that I want to focus on here, Lord, is how you know me.
Talk about a moment when you need to say, “Let me sit down a minute.” That’s it.
We know ourselves, at least to some degree. The Lord knows us better. That’s hard to fathom.
We search ourselves sometimes (not nearly enough, I’m sure), but the Lord Himself has searched us; and when He searches, unlike us, He leaves no corner unexamined.
David continues with his prism of words designed to explore the depth of God’s knowledge. The light he sheds is earthshattering.
From his opening anthem of praise, he lays one thought upon another, so that, one by one, each building on the previous, he builds his words into a majestic crescendo.
It reminds me of how we sing the song that serves here as our great theme. We begin from the depths of our hearts declaring how impactful the signs around us are on our lives:
“O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder, consider all the worlds thy hands have made. We see the stars, we hear the rolling thunder, Thy power throughout the universe displayed.”
Those reflections triumph into a rare anthem of praise in the chorus, building and building until the last words are a thundering of voices raised as high as the sky singing, “How Great Thou Art.”
It’s amazing how words fail to describe such a song. Fortunately, all of you can hear the song in your mind right now, and you understand the tremendous crescendo in the chorus.
Then we press a little further: Our hope is that we can build just such a crescendo of praise in our own lives, day by day and hour by hour, that demonstrates the Lord’s glory.
Our song, you see, is our life.
Coach Steven Ray Bowen served as a teacher and basketball coach at Red Oak High from 1998-2012 and recently came out of retirement twice for teaching tours at Ferris and Waxahachie High Schools. He and his wife Marilyn (the “amazin’ blonde”) have slowed down some of their travels and reconvened in their evangelistic work with the Church of Christ of Red Oak at Uhl/Ovilla Roads, in addition to Coach’s work as a writer and author, including the working to publish “Crossing The Georgia Line” that ran in the Ellis County Press. Call or text (972) 824-5197, email coachbowen1984@gmail.com, and see frontporchgospel.com.