Sermon
delivered on April 19th, 2015
By: Pastor Greg Hocson
Text: Psalm 8
Introduction
What is your passion in life? What is
your most powerful and compelling motivation in life. The question is not
"Do you have a passion?" but rather "What is your passion in
life?" Because everyone has a passion. Really, the problem is not that
people do not have a passion, the problem is many times our passion is
misplaced.
But listen to Moses' song ...
Deuteronomy 32:1 Give
ear, O ye heavens, and I will speak; and hear, O earth, the words of my mouth.
2: My doctrine shall drop as the rain, my speech
shall distil as the dew, as the small rain upon the tender herb, and as the
showers upon the grass:
Moses begins by calling heaven and
earth to listen. Moses calls others to listen, not because he will be speaking
but because of what is about to say.
3: Because I will publish the name of the LORD: ascribe ye
greatness unto our God. 4: He is the Rock, his work is perfect: for all
his ways are judgment: a God of truth and without iniquity, just and right is
he.
Moses has a consuming desire to
publish the name of the LORD and to ascribe greatness unto our God. That is
what I want to accomplish this morning. Actually, that is what I want to
accomplish in my calling as a pastor and a preacher, to publish the name of the
LORD and to ascribe greatness to our God! As I, in my own personal life behold
my God, I will by the grace of God, "say unto the cities of Judah, Behold
your God!"
I - Behold the greatness
of God
The Bible is filled with statements
about the greatness of God. In the book of Psalms alone, there are multiple
verses where the greatness of God is celebrated.
Psalm 83:18 That men
may know that thou, whose name alone is JEHOVAH, art the most high over all the
earth.
God is described as the Most High
over all the earth. There is no one higher than God.
The opening verses of Psalm 96 exhort
us to praise Him in our worship and proclamation.
Psalm 96:1 O sing unto
the LORD a new song: sing unto the LORD, all the earth. 2: Sing unto the LORD,
bless his name; shew forth (proclaim) his salvation from day to day. :3 Declare
his glory among the heathen, his wonders among all people.
Why?
4: For the LORD is
great, and greatly to be praised: he is to be feared above all gods. 5: For all
the gods of the nations are idols: but the LORD made the heavens. 6: Honour and
majesty are before him: strength and beauty are in his sanctuary.
We find the same theme in ...
Psalm 145:1 I will
extol thee, my God, O king; and I will bless thy name for ever and ever. 2:
Every day will I bless thee; and I will praise thy name for ever and ever.
Why?
3: Great is the LORD,
and greatly to be praised; and his greatness is unsearchable.
His greatness no one
can fathom.
In the last culminating psalm of this
beautiful worship and praise book of the nation of Israel and of all of God's
people, there is a symphony of praise to the Lord.
Psalm 150:1 Praise ye
the LORD. Praise God in his sanctuary: praise him in the firmament of his
power. 2: Praise him for his mighty acts: praise him according to his excellent
greatness.
II - The Heavens
Declare the Glory and Greatness of God
1: O LORD our Lord, how
excellent is thy name in all the earth! who hast set thy glory above the heavens.
2: Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because
of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger. 3: When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the
moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;
In this Psalm, David started by
celebrating the greatness of God.
1: O LORD our Lord, how
excellent (majestic) is thy name in all the earth! who hast set thy glory above
the heavens.
How did David come to the realization
that God is great? By looking up into the heavens.
1: O LORD our Lord, how
excellent is thy name in all the earth! who hast set (revealed, displayed) thy
glory above the heavens. 3: When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy
fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;
If you want to get an idea how great
our God is, all you need to do is to behold the heavens ....
1. The number of the stars
Year 150 B.C. Hipparchus, an
Astronomer, who studied the stars, claimed that the number of stars are 1,022
stars. Ptolemy, counted the stars, and counted it to be 1026. He found four
more stars. Then a young medical students named Galileo invented his first
crude telescope and turn it up to the heavens and when he did he was amazed at
what he discovered. He found millions and millions of stars.
Hubble Space
Telescopes
Today with our great Hubble Space
Telescopes we keep discovering new stars. Billions and billions of stars are
being discovered.
Our Milky Way Galaxy is estimated, to
be inhabited by about 300 billion stars. One Astronomer said, “If you were to count the billions of stars in our galaxy,
one star per second, it will take 2500 years to count them all." That's just in our galaxy alone and there are estimated
100 billion galaxies in the observable universe.
A modern astrologer says there are 12
octillion stars. He said octillion is more than the grain of sand on all the
seashore of all the earth. The Heavens are great but God is infinitely greater.
What the size of the universe tells us is, how awesome God is!
Psalms 147:4 He telleth
the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names. 5: Great is our
Lord, and of great power: his understanding is infinite.
Jeremiah 33:22 As the
(starry) host of heaven cannot be numbered, neither the sand of the sea measured:
so will I multiply the seed of David my servant, and the Levites that minister
unto me.
No man can ever count the stars.
Who created these starry host?
Jeremiah 32:17 Ah Lord
GOD! behold, thou hast made the heaven and the earth by thy great power and
stretched out arm, and there is nothing too hard for thee:
Genesis 1:1 In the
beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
How did God create these?
Psalm 33:6 By the word
of the LORD were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his
mouth. 7: He gathereth the waters of the sea together as an heap: he layeth up
the depth in storehouses. 8: Let all the earth fear the LORD: let all the inhabitants
of the world stand in awe of him. 9: For he spake, and it was done; he
commanded, and it stood fast.
Hebrews 11:3 Through
faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that
things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.
"The universe is one of God's
thoughts."
Only a great God can create a great universe
like ours from nothing.
2. The size of the stars
Stars come in different sizes. Our
sun is a medium size star. There are stars much bigger than our Sun. To help us
understand how big the stars are let us first consider the size of the earth
relative to the size of the known universe.
The size of the Earth
The earth's
diameter is 7,926 miles across. If you travel by car through the earth at 70
mph non-stop, it would take you about 5 days to cut across the earth.
The size of the Sun
Our sun, the closest star to our
planet, is about 860,000 miles across, that is 100 times the diameter of the
earth.
If we imagine our Sun is the size of
a basketball (roughly 10 inches in diameter) then the Earth would barely be the
size of a pin head. In fact you could fit million earths inside the Sun. The
Sun is extremely large!
The size of the biggest known star
The largest known star is VY Canis
Majoris, is 1.7 billion miles in diameter and about 2100 times the size of the
Sun. That's huge!
If the Earth is the size of a pin
head, quadrillion earths could fit inside VY Canis Majoris. If you are
traveling 900mph it would take 1100 years to go around it.
That's
the biggest star that we know of, but the Milky Way probably has dozens of
stars that are even larger, obscured by gas and dust so we cannot see them.
The size of our Solar System
How many miles long is the solar
system from end to end?
The distances in space are so vast,
we cannot use rulers and tape measures. Regular meters and miles don't cut it. Astronomers use a much larger measurement, called
the A.U. (astronomical unit). This is the average distance from the Earth to
the Sun, or approximately 93 million miles. So the earth is 1 A.U. away from
the Sun.
But how big is our Solar System?
If we say that the end of the solar
system is the cloud of comets that surrounds our solar system, then the
diameter is roughly 60,000 A.U., which is 5,580,000,000,000 (over five trillion)
miles. It's a big universe!
Size of our galaxy
Now, how big is our galaxy? If we are
talking about galaxies, A.U. doesn't cut it anymore. If we are measuring distances in our
galaxy the unit of measurement used is light years.
What is a light year?
Light Year is not a measure of time
but a measure of distance. It is the distance that light can travel in one
year. Light moves at a speed of about 186,000 miles/sec. Now in one year, light
can travel about 6 trillion miles.
We live in a galaxy called the Milky
Way Galaxy and it is about 150,000 light-years (900,000 trillion miles) across.
If you decide to travel from edge to edge of the Milky Way via airplane
traveling at 560miles/hr, it would take you, 0.1 trillion years.
And you thought our Solar System is
big. But understand, as big as our Solar System is, compared to our galaxy, it
would be the size of a quarter. How many galaxies are out there? According to
scientists billions.
The heavens are awesome. The heavens
give us a clue who God is. It gives new meaning to the song "It's
a Small World After All." Actually this song is an understatement!
1 Kings 8:27 But will
God indeed dwell on the earth? behold, the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot
contain thee; how much less this house that I have builded?
Note the fact that even the heavens
cannot contain His glory, it is set above the heavens, since it is and ever
must be too great for the creature to express.
Psalm 19:1 The heavens
declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. 2: Day unto
day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.
This psalm sings of the grandeur of
God as seen in creation. Who has not been impressed or overwhelm or felt their
insignificance at the sight of the great sky above us.
Who can stand at night and gaze
upward to yonder distant worlds without saying, "O Lord our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the
earth! who hast set thy glory above the heavens."
Do you want to know who God is?
Remove all limits from your mind,
that is God. Look into the heavens.
The heavens are awesome only God is
way more awesome. Most of us Christians have a wrong idea of who God is. We
think God is our cosmic bell boy. And we treat God like a butler, a domestic
helper, a medic, a maid, etc.
Isaiah 40:25 To whom
then will ye liken me, or shall I be equal? saith the Holy One. 26: Lift up
your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things, that bringeth out
their host by number: he calleth them all by names by the greatness of his
might, for that he is strong in power; not one faileth.
The same God who created the stars is
holding all those stars together and running the entire universe.
III - A Feeling of
Insignificance
3: When I consider thy
heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast
ordained; 4: What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man,
that thou visitest him?
As David looks and thinks upon the
heavens, as he looks at the moon and the stars he is overwhelmed. He thinks to
himself how great God is to have made the vast heavens. He saw the greatness of
God. But not only that, as He saw the greatness of God, he also saw his
smallness. He felt so small.
But I don't think David had a real idea of the vastness of space or
of the immense number of stars that there are out there since he did not have
the Hubble Space Telescope back then. If those were David's
thoughts how should we feel today? Even today we have little real concept of
the distances and numbers involved.
Listen to what scientists have said
after realizing the vastness of the Universe:
"The
massive bulk of the earth does indeed shrink to insignificance in comparison
with the size of the heavens." - Nicolaus Copernicus
"There
are more stars than there are people. Ever since I can remember, I've felt too big. But now I felt small. Too small. Too small
to count. Every star is massive, but there are so many of them. How could
anyone care about one star when there were so many spare? And what if stars
were small? What if all the stars were just pixels? And earth was less than a
pixel? What does that make us? And what does that make me? Not even dust. I
felt tiny. For the first time in my life I felt too small." - Frank Cottrell Boyce, Cosmic
Job 7:17 What is man,
that thou shouldest magnify him? and that thou shouldest set thine heart upon
him? 18: And that thou shouldest visit him every morning, and try him every
moment?
IV - Two things that
amazes me
1. God is great yet thinks upon us
2. Man is small yet greatly valued by
God
You could combine these truths in one
statement, namely, God is great and yet mindful of insignificant man.
This is an amazing thing, that God
thinks upon men, and remembers them continually.
When we talk about the insignificance
of man we are not saying that men are worthless or valueless. No! A thousand
times no! Man's insignificance doesn't
mean that man is worthless or valueless or of no value. But we are talking
about man's smallness, littleness, tininess, puniness. We are puny
little speck of dust; worm of the dust.
O Worship the King
Frail children of dust, and feeble as frail,
In Thee do we trust, nor find Thee to fail;
Thy mercies how tender, how firm to the end,
Our Maker, Defender, Redeemer,
What is man?
We are greatly valued! True you are
small. I want you to see that, but listen to this
you may be a speck of dust in the
Universe but look how greatly honored and privileged you are! Honored above all
creation!
4: What is man, that
thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? 5: For
thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with
glory and honour. 6: Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy
hands; thou hast put all things under his feet: 7: All sheep and oxen, yea, and
the beasts of the field; 8: The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and
whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas.
Above angels - because when angels fell into sin God left them in their
fallen estate. But when men fell into sin God graciously provided salvation. He
provided salvation to men while the angels were left in their fallen estate.
Above animals - What separates us
from animals? We were created in the image of God. We were created intelligent
moral beings, gifted with a will to choose, given the capacity to love, to
know, to communicate, to feel, think and to enter into intimate relationship with
the great God.
Psalm 115:15 Ye are
blessed of the LORD which made heaven and earth. 16: The heaven, even the
heavens, are the LORD's: but the earth hath he given to the children of men.
We are insignificant not in the sense
that we are worthless or valueless. We are God's image and therefore more
valuable and more important than all the rest of the physical universe, a
person, moreover, whom God loves so much that He took on flesh and bled and
died to save you.
In this message I want you to see
your smallness, your puniness, your littleness. You are a tiny little speck of
dust.
But I also want you to realize your
importance.
Luke 12:7 But even the
very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not therefore: ye are of more
value than many sparrows.
Matthew 16:26 For what
is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or
what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?
God loves us not because we are
valuable, we are valuable because God loves us.
1 John 4:10 Herein is
love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent his Son to be the
propitiation for our sins.
Jeremiah 31:3 The LORD
hath appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an
everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.
At the Cross
Alas! and did my Savior bleed
And did my Sovereign die?
Would He devote that sacred head
For such a worm as I
What should this cause us to do?
This is amazing, I feel smaller and
smaller as much as a learn about space. This is the earth, that all fights, all
blood had been shed for it! Is it really worth for it? The sun and other stars,
their sizes makes earth such tiny, not worthwhile to spend everything for it!
Spend your time, energy for something more valuable, bigger...
Deuteronomy
4:19 And lest thou lift up thine
eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the stars,
even all the host of heaven, shouldest be driven to worship them, and serve
them, which the LORD thy God hath divided unto all nations under the whole
heaven.
Do not worship the heavens but to
listen to what the heavens says and look at what heavens display.
Amos
5:8 Seek him that maketh
the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the morning,
and maketh the day dark with night: that calleth for the waters of the sea, and
poureth them out upon the face of the earth: The LORD is his name:
What kind of God is He that He who
can do this. I want to know Him. I want to know and understand who He is. I
will seek Him with all my heart and He promises that every one who genuinely
seeks Him shall be rewarded.
Jeremiah 29:13 And ye
shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart.
I want other people to know Him! He
is worthy to be known and to be made known!
We need to understand how small and
weak we are but, more importantly, how great and powerful our God is. David
didn't stop at feeling small, he also cried out: O LORD our Lord, how excellent is thy name in
all the earth! Amen!
Psalm 145:1 I will
extol thee, my God, O king; and I will bless thy name for ever and ever. 2:
Every day will I bless thee; and I will praise thy name for ever and ever. 3:
Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised; and his greatness is
unsearchable.