He Summons the Water

“But there is one who made the constellations Pleiades and Orion; he can turn the darkness into morning and daylight into night. He summons the water of the seas and pours it out on the earth’s surface. The Lord is his name!” (Amos 5:8, NET) 

Leave it to Amos, a blue-collar shepherd from Tekoa to capture the beauty and majesty of God’s character in ways that resonate strongly down through 3000 years.

I am struck by Amos’ words: He summons [calls] the water of the seas and pours it out on the earth’s surface. Now, we know that the process of evaporation and condensation and weather systems is what accomplishes the water cycle, but Amos is going deeper than the secondary cause of rain, to the ultimate cause, which is the God who made all things. It rains on the earth because God spoke the earth into existence and set into motion the laws by which it operates.

Amos, rather than praise nature which operates within and according to the limits which God set for it, praises the God who created earth, rain, wind, and sun, and rightly so.

The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins captures this same truth this way:

Glory be to God for dappled things – 
   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; 
      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; 
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; 
   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough; 
      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. 

All things counter, original, spare, strange; 
   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) 
      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; 
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: 
                                Praise him.

He Commanded; They/We Were Created

“Praise him, sun and moon; praise him, all stars of light. Praise him, highest heavens, and waters above the heavens. Let them praise the name of Yahweh, because he commanded and they were created.” (Psalm 148:3–5, LEB)

The source of the sun, moon, stars, highest heavens and waters above the heavens is here stated as our Lord.  He commanded and they were created. Simple.  Direct. Clear.  All that we see in the universe came about by the command of God.  He spoke.  They came into existence.  This is the unified witness of all the Scriptures.

Only God is ever the subject of the Hebrew word which is translated “created” here (and in Gen. 1.1).  Man cannot create like God can create and so the word is never used of anything that man “creates.”

If the sun and moon should praise the name of our Lord because they were created by him, how much more ought we to praise the name of God because he created us, he gave us life, and he saved us in spite of ourselves.  Jonathan Edwards points out the humbling truth implicit in this truth: “You contribute nothing to your salvation except the sin that made it necessary.”

To our knees then, dear reader, God commanded and we were created.  Let us praise him along with the sun, the moon, and the stars.

Or as Gerard Manley Hopkins put it:

Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise Him.