Therefore, I want the men in every place to pray, lifting up holy hands...  1 Timothy 2:8

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July 2024

Meditations on Psalm 139, Part 5

Psalm 139—Afterward

MORE THAN JUST THE LOVE OF CHRIST

Back to the Question of Origins
As we conclude this meditation on Psalm 139, I want to go back to the question of origins that I wrote about earlier. In Part 3, I mentioned a guest speaker at the seminary where I studied. He told his audience that when the subject of evolution emerges during our evangelism—and it almost always does—our best approach is to is to avoid argumentation by saying, “Let me tell you about the love of Jesus.”
He could not have been more wrong. For the Christian to yield on the question of origins is to surrender the gospel itself. The gospel is far more than telling someone, “Believe on Jesus and get a free ride to heaven at the end of your life.”
The biblical gospel is both deep and broad. It includes all the critical life issues—God, history, meaning, morality, sin, judgment, righteousness, redemption, salvation, reconciliation, sanctification, fellowship, hope, glorification. For the Christian, these issues give our lives meaning. In a universe interpreted under evolutionary assumptions, the words themselves lose their meaning. To be more specific, in a universe that consists of only matter, time, and chance, there is nothing to save. Supernatural notions like the ones above cannot exist.

The Embarrassing Reality of Unbelief
In his 1969 book, Death in the City, the Christian thinker Francis A. Schaeffer used an illustration of two chairs to illustrate the two different ways of understanding the world. Imagine a room with two chairs. One chair represents the Christian view, the view that recognizes the existence of a supernatural God who acts in history. The man who sits in this chair exercises faith to believe in a created, meaningful world. The other chair represents an evolutionary understanding of the world. The man in this chair denies both God’s presence and the supernatural wonder that emerges from God’s creative work in the world. His universe consists only of what he can see. Obviously, the chairs cannot share common moral ground, although many well-meaning Christians try to do just that. Schaeffer explains the situation this way:

[W]hat one must realize is that seeing the world as a Christian does not mean just saying, “I am a Christian. I believe in the supernatural world,” and then stopping. It is possible to be saved through faith in Christ and then spend much of our lives in the materialist’s chair. [In this context, materialism is the belief that only physical reality exists.] We can say that we believe in a supernatural world, and yet live as though there were no supernatural in the universe at all. It is not enough merely to say, “I believe in a supernatural world.” We must ask, “Which char am I sitting in at this given existential moment?”[1]

He goes on to say that the man who sits in the first chair understands that he lacks all the answers. He trusts in the God who knows all things. By contrast, the second chair denies any reality behind what we can see. Unlike the Christian, who interprets truth through his eyes of faith, the materialist insists that he can explain all things by resorting to natural processes. The non-Christian believes that faith in the unseen is only a crutch that must be thrown away. The rub comes when we realize that the one who denies the reality of the supernatural in the world uses the very crutch that he despises. For instance, he insists that Christians ought to believe the same way that he does. Think about what the word ought means in the first place. It stands for the notion of rightness and wrongness. For the materialist to insists that the Christian is intellectually wrong is one thing. But evolutionary intellectuals continue to churn out books that lament the fact that so few people have come to their viewpoint. Further, evolutionists often talk about the universe in moral terms. For example, I often hear them decry how human beings wreak havoc on the environment. Or they will condemn mass murder. When someone asks what makes these things wrong, they answer with the argument for consensus. Most people agree that they are wrong. That, however, is only an opinion. What happens when the opinion sways the other way?

Psalm 139, Beauty, and Rightness
In the final analysis, the man in the second chair has no way to claim value or worth in the world. In a world as defined by the evolutionist, what is, is right. “Ought-ness” and beauty are fictions. We end up in a world opposed to Psalm 139.

  • If no God exists, no one is there to care what happens to us.
  • Violence and cruelty, fundamental tools for the evolutionary machine, remain a fact of life. No one can say with authority, “This must stop.”
  • If the cosmos is all there is, then concepts like beauty, wonder, and awe are figments of our imagination. Sunsets are only light frequencies scattering on dust particles in the atmosphere. Mountain ranges are nothing more than tectonic upheavals. Paintings are pigments smeared on a surface. Music amounts to nothing more than tonal vibrations in the air. Love is a sensation that occurs when my brain produces endorphins.
  • And if God is nowhere to be found, then history is only a propaganda tool to fool people into taking one or another ideological side. “History” is only a continuation of what has been taking place from prehistory until now. No one will judge and set things right.

In contrast, Psalm 139 shines like a beacon. Everything in it affirms the gospel. Here are four questions whose answers the psalm affirms:

  • Does anyone care?
    God is real. He knows me and has set bounds for me, (verses 1-6).
  • Is there more to the world than what we can see?
    God’s limitless is undeniable. His presence is inescapable. Wherever I go, he upholds me and continues to see me, (verses 7-12).
  • Where does my worth come from?
    I am created by God, according to his design and purpose. I possess infinite value because he has made me the way I am, (verses 13-16).
  • Are my actions important?
    God has made values and morality real. What we do also matters. I can come to him in confidence to ask for justice in the world and for God to examine my heart.

The Question of History
Let me close with an observation on history. David’s prayer in verse 19, “Oh that you would slay the wicked, O God,” is deeper than a wish for personal vengeance. He prays with the understanding that God must fulfill his self-appointed plan for history. The Bible is full of great moments in God’s redemptive plan for the ages. David’s prayer in this psalm hands on God’s covenant with David in 2 Samuel 7. There, the LORD promises him, “Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me. Your throne shall be established forever.” David’s prayer is not limited to immediate history. It is a plea for God’s ultimate and universal peace at the end of the age, and it rests in the personal peace that he experiences in his meditation.

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[1] Francis A. Schaeffer, Death in the City, (Switzerland: L’Abri Fellowship, 1969; Wheaton Illinois: Crossway Books, 2001), 132.

 

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