God and the heavens (3)
Forever, O LORD, your word is firmly fixed in the heavens. Your faithfulness endures to all generations; you have established the earth, and it stands fast. By your appointment they stand this day, for all things are your servants.
- Psalm 119:89-91
Since God made the heavens for a purpose, and He continues to uphold and sustain them for a purpose, it's not a stretch to conclude that the heavens and everything in them must in some sense be servants of God.
Not a stretch to conclude that perhaps, but understanding it can be a little challenging.
The heavens serve the Lord. They do His bidding and accomplish His pleasure.
The heavens serve the Lord by declaring His glory to human beings. The glory of God is just the presence of God, realized. The glory of God pervades and contains the cosmos at the same time. God is everywhere present throughout the heavens, and the heavens exist within Him. So the heavens bear witness to the reality of God. They teach us that He exists and they tell us something about what He is like.
This is what all God's servants do. Think of a minister, for example. His job is to declare that God exists and to tell us what He's like so that we might know, fear, love, serve, and obey Him. The heavens do the same thing. Only without words.
Which is a real drawback, for unless someone employs words to describe the nature, purpose, and functioning of the heavens as God's servants, God's glory is not likely to be known. Human beings know that God is speaking through the things He has made. Most of them simply choose not to pay attention (Rom. 1.18-21). Worse, refusing to see God in the heavens, as the heavens faithfully bear witness to Him, they apply their own words to the heavenly bodies and describe them as being something other than what they are and existing for some purpose other than to glorify God.
So rather than ponder the mystery of how the heavens serve the good purposes of God, science actually uses the heavens against the idea of God and on behalf of merely human projects.
The heavens still serve God, and God still sustains and upholds them. But we short-circuit our ability to know and enjoy the heavens - as God intends - when we try to wrest them from His ownership, purposes, and control and treat them as if they are some kind of self-existing entity to be studied, used, and perhaps even adored in their own right.
This is a wrong path for scientific study, but the scientists who are on the path will not see the bridge out until it's too late. Some of us need to join them in their misguided journey of misunderstanding and gradually, lovingly, but uncompromisingly help them to see that our study and use of the heavens can only bear maximum fruit when we pursue them for the knowledge of God and the purposes of His glory.
That's how the heavens are meant to serve God. And that's how we're meant to serve Him as well.
