Psalm 104
I can still hear the intro music in my head – triumphant, heroic, clarion, unabashedly American! Marty Stouffer’s Wild America aired on KERA TV at 6:30 every weeknight, right after dinner and before prime time. The opening panned in from the vast curve of space above the spinning Earth, rotating to focus on North America before cutting to a bald eagle flying nobly over azure water. Then came an aerial shot zooming through Utah’s Monument Valley, it’s mesas and Martian-esque spires resplendent in oxidized technicolor before finally igniting my 9 year old heart with a quad split screen montage of a grizzly catching a salmon, a mountain lion slumbering with her cubs, a grey wolf carrying her young, and Marty Stouffer himself explaining the wonders of the wild to his flannel clad family of four. I would sit in awestruck wonder as Marty’s voiceover opened the windows into the untamed splendor of North American wildlife. Every episode ended with Marty in the cozy cabiny studio, his flaxen bearded face smiling as he brought the story full circle, reminding me to, “Until next time, enjoy our Wild America!” It is not an exaggeration to say that it filled my heart with wonder. Find it on YouTube. It’s worth it.
I don’t know if Marty Stouffer loves Jesus. I don’t actually know anything about him. But I do know that the Lord used that man’s creative endeavor to plant seeds in me that grew into a love for God’s created order, for the natural world, the part of my soul that loves to wander through the woods, the part that learned the names of the trees on my walk to Holden Hall while I was in college. I think every human has those seeds in their soul. Seeds that, when watered, when warmed by the sun in the spring, sprout through the soil to glory in the God who made this beautiful world.
Psalm 104 waters those seeds.
It radiates the kind of warmth that penetrates even the part of my soul that gets jaded and cold, hardened with cynicism, wearied with exhaustion, where the piercing bright wonder of God is tarnished by the slog of life.
It opens with an almost defiant proclamation:
“Bless the LORD, o my soul!
O LORD my God, You are very great,
You are clothed with splendor and majesty,
Covering Yourself with light as with a cloak.”
The boldness of the Psalmist chops through the crusty cynicism of my heart like a sharpened spade through sunbaked soil. Amidst all the turmoil of life on this stunningly elegant, breathtakingly broken world, the Psalmist chooses praise. It’s almost as if he is commanding his soul to bless the Lord. Bless the Lord, o my soul! I don’t care if you want to – you have to, and I’m going to write a whole Psalm explaining why.
Then he describes God cloaked in light, God who can take the photons of light particles and weave them into a royal robe to place about His shoulders. Photons have no mass. They are fundamental particles, not matter, they are pure energy in particle form. The Lord can make them do whatever He wants. He controls the universe. All of the universe. And He can take something as complex as photons to make a cool cape. Because photons have no mass, size or physical boundary, we cannot measure them in the classical sense. I can’t tell you how much it weighs or how wide it is because it doesn’t exist in the realm of measure. They are like little points of particles that act like a wave because they move around in space and time in predictable patterns, but I can’t tell you exactly what it is. They are so incredible that some of our super brilliant humans like Albert Einstein came up with whole new fields of physics, Quantum Physics, to describe something that is quite literally all around us all the time. And our God weaves with them.
I think that is beautiful.
For a whole Psalm we get to know the God who orders this astounding creation. We get to zoom through the cedars of Lebanon and the nocturnal lion hunt and the bountiful sea and end enraptured on the infinite split screen of the Glory of God in His Creation.
The Psalmist ends the hymn in praise: Hallelujah! He does that because when we actually stop and think, when we look at a sunrise, or take time to pick up a crimson-copper leaf and think about how I see those colors because photons bounce off the surface and hit the cone cells in my retina, a retina that God made, in part so I could see the invisible God in the visible world, it should ignite wonder in our hearts even greater than old Marty talking to me through our 19 inch tube TV. We should begin and end every day with awestruck wonder because God is wonderful. And when I feel cold and wonderless, discouraged and defeated, perplexed and pointless, I can open my Bible to the Psalms and let the Spirit of the Living God warm and soften my soul and tune my heart to sing to the Lord as long as I live.
