Pentecost Season Devotion, July 19

You visit the earth and water it;

    you greatly enrich it;

the river of God is full of water;

    you provide their grain,

    for so you have prepared it.

You water its furrows abundantly,

    settling its ridges,

softening it with showers,

    and blessing its growth.

You crown the year with your bounty;

    your wagon tracks overflow with abundance.

The pastures of the wilderness overflow,

    the hills gird themselves with joy,

the meadows clothe themselves with flocks,

    the valleys deck themselves with grain,

    they shout and sing together for joy.

Psalm 65:9-13 

It is in our human nature to look for reasons. We all have a little bit of Isaac Newton in us. Finding the cause of things occupies our time from infancy to old age.

Have you ever watched a two year old investigate her world? She will pick things up. Throw them to see what happens.  Look behind and under things to see what is there.  Early on she learns that her mom and dad cause breakfast to happen, nap time to be observed and baths to be fun.

As we get older we learn that swinging hard isn’t as important as striking the ball well. Working smarter is better than working harder. We long to understand ups and downs in the stock market and economy.

At some point illness strikes and we investigate diet and exercise. We wonder about the causes of diabetes and cancer.

Examples abound in the human quest to understand the reality behind what we observe. While Newton's Principia formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation, few in our modern age realize he understood that the laws of nature were established by the God of nature.

He wrote extensively on religious topics. If someone would have told him that science and religion are incompatible, he would have stared at them with incredulously.

The Psalm for this week has been Psalm 65:9-13. In these words we learn nature knows that God is the original source of all that is good. Pastures, meadows, and valleys shout and sing together in joy for the goodness of God.

We, too, enjoy the beauty and bounty of nature. Yet we have so much more to thank and praise God for. He has given us His Only-begotten Son. He has given us new life in Christ and grants to us the promise of the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.

Tomorrow on the Lord’s Day, let us come together with the pastures and meadows and valleys and shout and sing together in joy for the goodness of God in our lives.

Prayer: O good and gracious God, thank you for the beauty of nature that surrounds me. Grant that I may never tire of singing your praise for the gift of salvation that is mine in Christ. Amen.

God’s richest blessings in Christ,

Pastor Philip Quardokus