glory – Page 2 – Soli Deo Gloria

From my blog

Thou art good, and doest good…Ps 119:68

Colors converge toward copper here, passing red, not quite gold. Our chickens are deep golden-buff and scarlet-combed. Crimson-leaved blueberries and cayenne-orange mountain ash berries, saturated in mid-autumn sun, hang on, closer to life than dormancy.

Even in my pleasant garden, I am never unaware of perturbation. Intermittent sirens and helicopters herald the presence of sin and pain and need.

This week a small Amish community in Pennsylvania buried five schoolgirls, murdered despite the girls’ likely compliance with their killer’s demand that they pray for him to protect him from carrying out his horrific crime.

Today, as are all days, is a good day to be a Calvinist.

Only a Calvinist sees events like this in a light that comports with God’s own testimony: the absolute sovereignty of his perfect will. God’s sovereignty prevails over peace and over perturbation.

Does this make Calvinists callous? That is a testy and ignorant misconception. We grieve the grievous. We know the grievous could always be more grievous. We see restraint present in the world, despite sin. We understand the end of all things, including ourselves, is the glory of God. To God alone the glory.

Is God implacable? No; he is merciful. His law and his judgments are perfect and righteous (Ps 19:7; Ps 119:7). Our God is in the heavens, and he hath done whatsoever he pleased (Ps 115:3).

Did it please God to have a crazed reprobate kill five children? Behold the evidence. Yes, it did. It pleased him to have crazed reprobates kill his own son. Had it not, our sin would be unredeemed, and we would justly suffer in hell, just as surely as crazed reprobate killers of little girls.

A hard thing. But sin is sin, and death is death, and death does not always come packaged neatly wrapped in human poetic justice.

Our faith rests in him whose righteous judgments are perfect.

God is a righteous judge,
Yea, a God that hath indignation every day Ps 7:11.

I will give thanks unto Jehovah according to his righteousness,
And will sing praise to the name of Jehovah Most High Ps 7:17.

This is from my blog, Board Housewife & The Cat

“And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” Ge 1:31

“And Jehovah God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.” Ge 2:16

God put man in the garden when he gave him dominion over the very good world he had made. “But,” touts this month’s cover of Smithsonian, “the real action is beyond our solar system.”

University of California-Berkeley astronomer Geoff Marcy evidently is unimpressed with God’s creation that took him seven days, at the end of which he set an example of rest. “I just don’t see how making an Earth could be hard,” posits Dr. Marcy.

“My intuitive sense is that our solar system is not uncommon at all,” Dr. Marcy continues. Keep sensing, Geoff. “Ultimately, we need to go, with robotic spacecraft…” Go, Geoff, go.

Dr. Marcy represents a team with a virtuous motive: finding planets with robots and digital cameras is “a wonderful goal for our species, and it is within our grasp.” A lot of programs pitch “for our children,” but this one is “for our species.” Very, very big stuff.

Furthermore, Dr. Marcy describes this goal as “a glorious reconnaissance to spot the first oases in the cosmic desert.” People-friendly science is very confusing.

God put man in the garden on the earth, and man just can’t stay put.

“And night unto night showeth knowledge.” Ps 19:2

Surely the glorious night sky breathes awe and wonder into the soul of man; the heavens, in declaring the glory of God, declare sovereign government and common grace; they declare beauty and rainfall to all. But a man who aspires to depart from the world in which God put him–even to depart only in his mind and soul–perhaps hopes in vain to escape his destiny. Perhaps his hope is that, beyond the earth, saving grace will not be required. Perhaps he seeks an alternative in the great “cosmic desert.” Nature does not give evidence of saving grace, but word gets around.

Man is given the wisdom to discover many things, and perhaps he will verify new worlds and terran topographies elsewhere in the universe, but he will not discover saving grace outside of Jesus Christ. And he will only hear the Gospel of Jesus Christ here on Earth.

John Owen spoke to this in the 17th century, “…that there is that manifestation made of the glorious properties of God in and by the Scripture, as it is a divine revelation, which incomparably excels in evidence all that [men’s] reason receives concerning his power from the works of creation” (Works of John Owen, Banner of Truth, Vol. 4, p. 92).

Men who seek to appropriate the things of God–including other planets–not acknowledging his absolute dominion over them, are not seeking God. Perhaps they aspire to be gods themselves, and plan their own worlds, settling, in the end, for computer-modeled conjectures of worlds to manipulate with their intuitive senses.

I enjoy astronomy. My husband built a telescope and ground the mirror. I am thrilled at the sight of Saturn and its rings and a few of its moons. It is a thing too wonderful for me, and I know it is in God’s perfect purpose and design that it is there, in all its beauty, and all for God’s glory, and all for the good pleasure of his perfect sovereign will. I believe God made the heavens to be spectacular in order to declare his glory, just like he says (Ps 19:1).

I feel dreadfully sorry for anyone who would dedicate his life to speculative gas clouds and settle for a computer model of a world he has to infer from a wobble, and never investigate “the glorious properties of God in and by the Scripture, as it is a divine revelation….”

“He hath made the earth by his power, he hath established the world by his wisdom, and by his understanding hath he stretched out the heavens.” Je 10:12