The Voice Of The Lord

"The Voice Of The Lord"
Psalm 29


In 1992 I went with a tour group on a trip to the Holy Land and Egypt.  I’ve used one of my holy moment experiences in a previous sermon.

We spent a couple of days in Jerusalem, which were not enough.  I could have spent a whole month, just in Jerusalem.  I still probably wouldn’t have seen everything there is to see.

One night my best friend and I were trying to find an English speaking TV channel in our hotel room so we could catch some news.  While on a tour like that, we fell into an information void, unaware of anything that was happening in the world.

We finally got a fuzzy, English speaking channel with a guy doing the weather report.  We were used to TV weather reporters standing in front of a blue screen, showing maps of the jet stream, clever rain cloud graphics, and high and low pressure systems screaming or stalling across our nation.  Not this guy.  He was standing in front of a chalk board with the word Weather written across it.  His report looked like it was being filmed in his basement.

He said, “Well, we have some weather coming.  Big storm coming across the Mediterranean Sea.  Lots of clouds and whirly stuff.”  Then he made a swirling motion like he was stirring a big pot stew.  “Nasty stuff,” he continued.  The word “stuff” was used a lot; I had never heard that word used technically in a weather report like this guy was.  “Clouds, and rain, and whoosh; stuff like that,” he said.  “Could be some snow.  But not to worry!  It’s only weather!”  My friend Jay and I looked at each other and burst out laughing.  “It’s only weather!” we said in unison.

“It’s only weather” turned out to be the worst snow storm Jerusalem had seen in 50 years.  About a foot of very wet snow shut down the city.  Over laden tree branches broke off pulling down power lines.  The sound of the popping branches was scary, since we had seen teenagers in Israeli army uniforms driving around all over the city in military jeeps with automatic rifles strapped to their shoulders.  The breaking branches sounded like gunfire.

The city was immobilized for the day.  What the PLO had tried to do on several occasions to Jerusalem, God did in a one night storm.  Brought all the mighty powers to their knees.  simply through moving air, and frozen water crystals.  “It’s only weather” became our catch phrase for that trip whenever anything bad or upsetting happened.

David, the writer of Psalm 29, must have seen a few of these kinds of storms blow through the country.  In the imagery of this Psalm, it isn’t a winter snow storm.  It’s a summer thunder storm.  A tornado kind of thunder storm.  A Greensburg kind of storm.  A storm like a gigantic vacuum cleaner that knocks everything down, then sucks it up, leaving a clean strip behind it.  Not even things tied down, anchored or rooted withstand that kind of storm.

What’s unsettling about David’s storm imagery is not just the imagery.  But what the imagery is describing:  God’s Voice.  God’s Voice is like that storm.  An F5 kind of Voice that is scary and pummeling, and that people get into shelters to hide from.  “It’s only weather,” becomes, “It’s only God’s Voice.”  And suddenly that which we laugh off becomes scary devastation.  We say we want to hear God’s Voice, but we have no idea that what we’re desiring will utterly blow us away if we were to hear it.

The book of Psalms has been called the church’s prayer book.  If these Psalms teach us to pray, we need to pay attention to what they teach us about the God to whom we pray.  We need to pay attention to what these Psalms teach us about prayer and worship.

What we learn about God from Psalm 29, the God to whom we pray, may be too much for most people.

First, we learn that God is a revealing God.  As opposed to the mystery religions and the fertility cults that other tribal people were involved with outside of Israel, the God of Israel wanted to be known.  God wants to be understood.  God wants relationship with the world and the people of the world.  God doesn’t want to stand aloof and apart, like the Greek gods up on Mount Olympus.  Our God reveals himself in direct ways.

Usually, God does that in the march of history.  When people needed a sense of connection with God in the present moment, they would first look back to times in history, when God revealed himself in some act of salvation.  “We remember when you did this, and this and this, O God...Do that again, now!” the people would pray.

In Psalm 29, God reveals himself, reveals his Voice, in acts of nature.  One of the characteristics of God that I’ve tried to emphasize in my messages is that God’s speaking is His main activity.  When God speaks, when God uses His Voice, things happen.  When we speak, a bunch of words come out, but not much happens.  Adlai Stevenson once said that the media are the people who separate the wheat from the chaff and then report the chaff.  That seems to be what happens most when we speak--a lot of chaff comes out.

Or there’s the story of Thomas Jefferson, who submitted his draft of the Declaration of Independence to some friends for editorial review.  Jefferson quickly was getting anxious about all the red marks they were making all over his draft.  Benjamin Franklin noticed Jefferson’s anxiety and told him a story.

When he was a young man, Franklin had a friend who had completed an apprenticeship as a hatter.  He was ready to open his own business.  He wanted a great signboard in front of the shop.  He had a design drawn up that showed a picture of a hat, and over the picture it read, “John Thompson, hatter, makes and sells hats for ready money.”  He showed some of his friends the design and asked them what they thought.

The first one remarked that “hatter” was unnecessary, since “makes and sells hats” already showed the nature of the business.  The second person pointed out that “makes” could be left off the sign, since customers were unlikely to be interested in who made the hats.  The third friend said that since it was not the custom to sell on credit, the words “for ready money” were unnecessary.  Finally, one of the friends said it seemed unnecessary to have the word “hats” on the sign, since there was the picture of a hat.  So the signboard eventually read, “John Thompson” with a picture of a hat under his name.

When Thomas Jefferson heard Franklin’s story, he smiled and let the editors continue their work on his draft of the Declaration of Independence.

As I mentioned in my message a couple of weeks ago, that’s what we do as human beings.  We spew out a lot of words, most of which are truly unnecessary and effect nothing.  But what we find out about God and God’s Voice is that God’s revelation of himself, through His Voice, always has an effect.  God is a God who reveals himself through a Voice, that every time that Voice sounds there is a startling impact.

What is amazing about God’s Voice in this Psalm, though, is that God speaks no words.  God’s Voice is just pure sound, like music, or a musical note.  God doesn’t utter any commands like in the creation story in Genesis.  There is just Voice.  Just sound.  And look at the results of that Voice:  echoes over the ocean roar, destruction of cedar trees, mountains skip and jump, lightning flashes, deserts tremble, forests are stripped bare of their leaves.

This revealing Voice of God, the sound of God, is pure, raw power, like a clear perfect note from a trumpet.  Our God is a God with a Voice--a voice of threatening, overwhelming power.

David tells how God’s Voice shatters the cedars.  Let’s get a proper picture of what David is saying.  You may have seen bunches of those pesky cedar trees growing in pastures as you drive along.  Most are Christmas tree sized.  If you are thinking that is the kind of cedar tree God is blowing over, you’d be wrong.  The cedars of Lebanon David is picturing are up to 130 feet tall.  They are 8 feet in diameter.  We are talking about mammoth trees that were used to build ships, palaces, and temples.  That is the unbelievable power of God’s revealing Voice that David is describing.

In the book, Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe, one of the children asks Mr. Beaver about Aslan the Lion, who is the Christ-figure in the book.  One of the children asks if Aslan is safe. The reply (p. 75-76) is well worth considering:
Mr. Beaver replied, “If there's anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they're either braver than me or else just silly.”
“Then he isn't safe?” asked Lucy.
“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver. “Don't you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you.”

That’s what David is telling us about our God in Psalm 29.  Our God, and God’s Voice are not safe.  God is the King.  And as our King, who has a Voice that can shatter mammoth cedar trees, demands our ultimate respect.

That leads to the other thing we learn from this Psalm: authentic worship.  As the opening verses of the Psalm say, the best thing we can do is “Honor” and “Acclaim” the glory, power, and the name of the LORD.

God’s name is spoken in this Psalm 18 times in eleven verses.  That should tell us something about who this Psalm is about.  More importantly, it should give us a clue about what our relationship to the name of God is to be about.

To honor and acclaim someone else is to approach them as the superior.  It is to come before them in humility, recognizing there is a gulf between you and them.  That gulf in the psalm is called holiness and glory.  There is so much holiness emanating from God that our only response is to fall on our face and not look.

God told a number of people in the Old Testament that they could not look at Him and live.  The reason is that there is so much holiness and glory about God, that if we looked at God we would see how far from God we are, how tainted we are, how utterly human and unholy we really are.  Finally and utterly seeing the difference between ourselves and God would be too much for us.  It would kill us.  That’s the level of humility with which we need to enter the presence of God in worship.  Worship is a humbling experience.

Also, in this Psalm, notice all the energy that is generated by the presence of God.  That’s a huge part of what worship is about--putting ourselves in God’s overpowering presence, which then infects us in a positive way with an unbelievable passion and zeal for God.

Worship is not something we do on a horizontal level, from people to people.  It’s from God downward, and from us Godward.  It is coming into worship expecting something awesome to happen.  But not something that is superficial, or that we manufacture.  It is the scary tiptoeing into the presence of God who just might, with His Voice, blow…...you…...away.

In her book, Teaching a Stone To Talk, Annie Dillard wrote:
Why do people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Almighty?… Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke?… It is madness to wear ladies straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets.  Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. (page 40)

Worship is about tiptoeing into the presence of God, trembling for dear life, requesting to hear the Voice of God, while all the time realizing that if that request were granted, and a sound came out of the Voice of God there is the chance we would be shattered, moved like a mountain, or stripped bare of everything that we thought we were, all that we surrounded ourselves with for protection.

Worship is the act of falling on our faces, realizing our God is an awesome God, a fearful God, with a powerful sounding Voice.  And the best way to worship that God is to honor Him as God, and give God glory with everything we do and say.