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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Randy Roberts

A Song For The Seeker

And it came to pass that your neighbor came to see you.

And your neighbor said to you, I notice that you spend a lot of time in church-related activities.

I noticed that you believe in God, that God is a very important part of your life.

And you say, what is it about that that is difficult?

The thing that's difficult, says your neighbor, is that I just don't understand how you can believe in a God you can't see.

Well, you say, I believe God reveals Himself.

God reveals Himself to human beings even though you may not be able to see God with the naked human eye.

And then your neighbor asks you a question.

It would have been a lot easier if your neighbor had not asked this question, but it's asked.

If you've ever found yourself in that position, I'd like to point you to a song, a song that I would call a song for the seeker.

It's a song that's a very old song, it's been around a very long time, and yet it is surprisingly contemporary in its application.

Take your Bibles and turn to the hymn book of ancient Israel, the Psalms, and turn to the 19th Psalm.

Psalm 19, I would suggest to you, is a song for the seeker.

In fact, it is a song that you can recommend to your neighbor who says, how?

How does God reveal himself to us as human beings?

I think this particular Psalm gives us 3 answers to that question.

We'll look for those answers as we begin reading in verse 1 with very familiar words.

The skies proclaim the work of His hands.

Night after night they display knowledge.

There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard.

Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.

In the heavens he has pitched a tent for the Sun which is like a bridegroom coming forth from his pavilion, like a champion rejoicing to run his course.

It rises at 1 end of the heavens and makes its circuit to the other.

That psalm begins with those well-known words, the heavens declare the glory of God, the skies proclaim the work of his hands.

How does God reveal himself to human beings?

Theologians have wrestled with that question maybe from time immemorial, but theologians have come to some fairly good answers, 1 of which is something they call general revelation.

General revelation, according to theologians, is that act of God in which he generally makes himself known.

The psalmist would say that general revelation very clearly includes nature.

A walk into a walk through nature says the psalmist gives you evidence of the fingerprints of God.

I've been to those places No doubt you have been as well.

I remember standing on a platform, a wooden platform over a river.

This platform, as we stood close to 1 side, gave us reason for our hearts to beat faster, our blood pressure to go up.

There was a roar in the background, a roar the likes of which made it almost impossible to talk.

The platform under our feet constantly shook and trembled.

We were standing very close, too close to be honest for my comfort.

We were standing very close to the throat of Iguazu Falls.

There is that place where you can walk out on the ramp all the way almost to the very lip of the falls And there you can feel the sheer power of that volume of water cascading over the rocks.

You look up and the mists makes rainbows around you.

You look down and the frothing, rushing water threatens you with its strength but as you look around you there is something that says this didn't just appear Maybe it's the fingerprints of God.

I remember standing in the early morning hours, crisp and cold.

The altitude was somewhere between 8 and 9, 000 feet.

The place was the Sierra Madre Mountains of Mexico, the Huichol Indian Reservation where my dad had a ministry.

We had gone up, my brother and I, up to that high mountain village to check out an airstrip that had been built to make sure that it could be landed on with safety.

I don't think I'll ever forget emerging from the hut in which we stayed that night, emerging into the crisp clean mountain air.

I looked up and my breath was almost taken away.

I mean, we go out here in Southern California and we look up and we see stars, a couple of them.

I have thought it's a good thing that God and Abraham didn't hold their discussion in Radleins.

God would have said, Abraham count the stars, he would have said, 123, what else do you want?

But I emerged that night to a panoply of beauty.

I thought I knew where a few stars were located in the heavens, but I was lost, lost in the sheer wonder of space.

I couldn't be sure, was that the Big Dipper, was that Orion?

I couldn't be sure, but of 1 thing I was sure.

That night I saw the fingerprints of God.

The psalmist says it's that experience of looking around you and seeing the fingerprints of God.

He says there's no voice, there's no language and yet you hear the voice, you hear the language.

Or is he trying to describe the indescribable?

Saying you can't hear clearly all of the specific attributes of God but you can clearly know something about God.

It is a theme which Paul will pick up on later in Romans the first chapter when he talks about the fact that there are certain attributes of God, his eternal power, his might, his creative genius that can be seen in nature.

As marvelous and as magnificent as it is, it is not always clearly heard.

A believer and an atheist can stand side by side and hear different things.

The psalmist recognizes that, as did Paul.

There may be, in fact, a couple of specific reasons why it's difficult to know all we need to know about God through nature, through general revelation.

1 is the very thing I mentioned, the language.

It's language goes out into all the earth, says the psalmist, but sometimes there is perplexity.

And maybe the most important thing is, it doesn't tell us specifically who God is.

But there's a second challenge with nature and with general revelation.

The second challenge is with the fall, with humankind's descent into the darkness of sin, when that occurred nature was affected.

So that now beneath every rose is a thorn, Beneath every sign of beauty can lurk tragedy.

We stood, I forget now was it Vernal Falls or Nevada Falls, we stood by 1 of the falls there in Yosemite National Park.

The water was clean and clear and cool, but the sign there was very clear.

Those of you who have hiked that trail have read the sign.

It might have lodged itself into your mind as clearly as it did into mine.

It makes a statement about the beauty of the place, but the danger of swimming.

It says, Beneath this beautiful water lies a current, a current that will sweep you toward and over the falls.

And then at the very bottom of the sign are some ominous words, ominous.

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A Song For The Seeker

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