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Printer Friendly VersionPerhaps you’ve heard the phrase, “Give credit where
credit is due.” I read a lot and I write a fair amount. It is really
a matter of survival when you stand up here a few times a week and preach
for half an hour. All that output requires some input. One of the ways I know
what to read is this: When I’m reading a good book that really speaks
to me, if I see a little number at the end of a sentence, I go to the bottom
of the page where the notes are. I discover who gave the author this great
idea, and I put that book on my list of books to find and read, and I go and
buy that book. Such is the life of a nerd like me.
Don’t laugh! You do it too. If you hate reading and would
rather wait for the movie, then you know you can’t see one without noticing
those words on the screen at the beginning and end. If you see one you really
like, you may just make a mental note of the director or the main actor. Then
the next time you are in the video store, or deciding what to see, when that
name pops up again, that is what you choose. That’s why it is so important
to give credit where credit is due. If you’ve had to do any kind of
research writing, it was probably drilled into your head as it was into mine,
“Give credit where credit is due.”
That’s sort of what the psalmist is doing here. In one
way he is a little like a high-school composition teacher who is telling students,
“You’ve got to give credit where credit is due.” Only the
students he is talking to really aren’t his students; they are angels,
heavenly beings. What he says, in essence, is “give credit where credit
is due.” “Properly footnote the strength and glory that belongs
to God.” So he isn’t really like a composition teacher. He is
more like a worship leader, only he is calling the angels to worship. He doesn’t
want them to footnote anything. What he wants them to do is worship. “Give
credit and glory and honor to God you heavenly beings. Stand at attention
and dress yourself in holiness and splendor. Give credit to God because strength
and glory are his!” (vv. 1-2, author’s paraphrase). Where this
subject is concerned, even if you are an angel, you’ve got to give credit
where credit it due.
I’ve always found it very helpful to make a practice of
giving credit where credit is due. When I have turned in academic papers,
giving credit where credit is due has prevented me from failing and being
expelled for stealing other peoples ideas. It has also helped me to be able
to sleep at night. But there has been another kind of instance where giving
credit has been helpful. You see not all sermon material comes from books.
While I was in Memphis, I served with an associate pastor who was very fond
of telling corny jokes. I would always moan and try my best to forget the
joke, but occasionally, while I was studying a passage and trying to decide
just how best to preach it, something in a passage of scripture would remind
me of one of those ridiculous jokes he told. So I had a decision to make.
I could tell the joke in the sermon, it would help us get into the passage,
and we would be better for it. The only problem was, if I did that I would
have to hear the whole congregation groan at me.
We served together for almost five years, and this happened
once or twice. I realized just what I needed to do. I needed to give credit
where credit was due. So, while preaching, I would walk over to where the
associate was sitting and say, “Pastor Tim told me this the other day
. . .” then tell the joke. They would all groan at him, and then I would
make the connection to the passage. I’m telling you, it is always wise
to give credit where credit is due. Because sometimes there are some things
you just don’t want credit for.
Take for example the rest of the psalm. Did you catch what it
was talking about? The voice of the Lord is over waters, it thunders over
the waters. Have you been in an Oklahoma thunderstorm lately? Do you really
think that God wants credit for that? Are we really supposed to give credit
to God for that? One of the young ladies that lives at my house thinks so.
At some point during the past year, we were weathering a particularly strong
thunderstorm, and she came running into the living room, hands over her ears,
and yelling through her tears, “Daddy, we need to tell God that’s
too loud!” You’ve been in storms like that, where the thunder
is so loud you can’t talk over it and the wind seems strong enough to
make a brick house creak. Does God really want credit for storms that scare
tears out of little girls and make big people nervous too?
Later on, it says God “sits enthroned above the flood.”
It was a while back, but the pictures are still fresh in our minds. Shacks
along the beach around the Indian Ocean were reduced to rubble. Rich tourist
and poor peasant alike were in shock and searching for loved ones. Or even
more recent and closer to home, the carnage caused by hurricanes in the Gulf.
Streets turned into rivers and families living for days on a can of tuna in
an attic while mourning those who didn’t make it. Does God really want
credit for that?
When I was about 8 years old a tornado came through our small
town. It touched down, damaged a farm at the city limits, lifted up and passed
over our end of town. It set back down on the other end of our block where
there were about eight vacant lots, all wooded, that together made up a small
forest that we used to play. The next day, it looked like giant hands had
taken the trees I liked to climb and twisted them into gnarly licorice ropes.
I’ll never forget the sight of the mangled trees, and I’ll never
forget the sound. I heard the roar as we were heading into the house to get
to the basement. “The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars of Lebanon.
The voice of the Lord causes the oaks to whirl.” Is that train sound
God’s voice? Does God really want credit for that?
The voice of the Lord flashes forth flames of fire. One summer
our family visited a place called Mesa Verde. While making the drive to the
cliff dwellings there, we drove through some beautiful scenery. We came around
one bend and were shocked to see a stand of charred trunks of trees covering
most of a valley. We later heard at the ranger station that a single bolt
of lightning probably caused the blaze that took out a large chunk of forest,
and if I remember right, more than one park service building. The voice of
the Lord? Flashes of lightning that produce wildfires charring farms and forests
and prairies and suburban houses? Does God really want credit for that?
Several years before I moved here, I saw some news coverage
after some particularly devastating tornado activity. One of our former presidents
had flown to Oklahoma and was on the steps of one of the storm research center
buildings at Oklahoma University. During his address, he declared some disaster
areas, and then he praised the people who worked in the building behind him.
He said something like, “These folks are working hard to try to find
ways to prevent and control this kind of thing in the future.” It seemed
as though he and this crack team behind him were going to prevent a tornado.
I stand before people and talk, and I know you can slip and say things you
don’t mean. I’m sure that was what happened there, because every
one of us knows that’s the rub about the storms. You can’t control
them.
Ever been through a storm, something you just can’t control?
Last week Christina told us that her uncle was stung by a bee and died in
5 minutes. Earla has a friend who had a baby just a few weeks ago, and when
the baby was 10 days old she started having trouble breathing. They rushed
the little one to the hospital and she never came home. For some families
storms strike quickly. After 15 years of what seemed to be a good marriage,
a husband finds out there is another man his wife is seeing while she is away
on business. Your family was healthy one day, and then the waters of sickness
were unleashed, and the flow of appointments is only surpassed by the flow
of bills in which you and your family now try to tread water.
Sometimes the storms are rapid like tornadoes, with very little
warning. Sometimes there are not so rapid. Earla and I have a friend whose
father spent the last years of his life on dialysis and died very slowly,
very young. Just a couple of weeks later, when she was barely 30, his daughter
was diagnosed with the very same problem her father had. She grew up watching
the slow destruction of his body, and now like coastal dwellers watching a
slow moving killer hurricane approach on the radar, she and her husband wait
for the devastation to begin.
The truth is, whether they develop slowly, with days and weeks
of warning, or they are upon us in a moment, when the storm comes every one
of us, from the biggest burly man to the skinniest little girl, can’t
do much but cover our ears and cry out to God. We tell Him that it is too
loud and too dangerous and too scary. Does God really want credit for all
those storms?
When big storms have happened, where oaks twist and cedars break
and houses fall, when lightening strikes and burns off acres of forest or
prairie, when lives are completely devastated, two questions usually emerge.
Frankly, the first makes me much more comfortable. The first question is “how”
does this happen? A seismologist can credit an earthquake for a tsunami, and
a meteorologist can credit changes in moisture level and tropical air pressure,
for the storms and the lightning. A medical professional can show us x-rays
and CAT scans, and track the progress of the cancer. The expert may be a psychologist,
and the explanation may include a timeline; problems in her family that created
a weakness toward temptation. An opportunity arises and then comes adultery.
There is guilt and a cover-up. Finally, there is a storm of confrontation,
anger, separation and divorce. The experts can usually tell us a lot about
how it happens.
But that explanation is never good enough. We hear that explanation,
and if the experts happen to use small enough words, we get it. But once all
of the “how” questions are answered, we then turn to the “why?”
And, for those of us who go around the rest of the time talking about God
(I’ll just be honest) we can get very nervous here. If the voice of
God is over the water, and flashes forth flames of fire, breaks cedars, causes
oaks to whirl; if He sits enthroned on the flood, do we give Him credit for
all those things? “Why did my house get blown away? Why did my spouse
leave me? Why did my baby die? Because God wanted it that way?” Is that
really the right answer? Is that what this psalm is about? Some ask that question.
How much do we blame and assign to God?
It could be that He wanted credit for those things . . . if
it was a Psalm written in praise to a pagan concept of deity. Chances are
there were some psalms just like this written to Baal, who was said by his
followers to be the god of the thunderstorm. Baal was the deity who, according
to the pagans, rode on the clouds and controlled the storms. Baal followers
could make it rain at just the right time (No lightning, please. That’s
dangerous). If the people could just figure out how to manipulate Baal, they
could figure out how to control the storm themselves. You see, no matter what
you call god, whether it is Allah, or the Great Spirit, or science . . . even
God, if your God is a control freak, all you have to do is get the right words,
right incantation, right body posture and you can control the world by manipulating
the “control freak” god.
Would it surprise you if I told you that nowhere in the Bible
does it say that God is in control? Oh, it does say in Philippians 2 that
God has made all things subject to himself. That means that He is King of
all things. Let me ask you a question: How many kings do you suppose could,
or cared to, control every detail of every subject? Kings set processes in
motion to transform and maintain kingdoms, and then let those processes work.
Kings rule by their relationship with the governing bodies they set up. The
word says that God is enthroned as King over the waters.
“The voice of the Lord thunders over the water.”
In Genesis 1 it says that in the beginning the earth was formless and void,
and darkness covered the face of deep, and the breath (or the Spirit) hovered
over the water, and God spoke. He brought the atmosphere into existence with
His voice. He created the land. It was the voice of God that drew boundaries
for the water. It could only go so far. So, because of the way creation happened,
lightning strikes and forests burn off, because I’m told by a scientist,
that if they don’t the forests will die from too much underbrush. The
pagan culture said that Baal rode in the clouds and controlled them, so if
you could manipulate Baal, you could control the storms. But the worship leader
of Israel said, “Give credit where credit is due. It’s Yahweh,
the Creator that sits enthroned on the storms and speaks to us in the storms.”
Why do you suppose that God wants us to hear His voice when we are in the
storms?
I’ve asked it a couple of times this morning: Have you
been through a storm? And you’ve said to yourself, “Yes.”
In fact all of us probably said, “Yes.” Nearly everyone here remembers
a situation over which we had no control. You just had to wait it out. Why
would God want us to hear His voice right in the middle of the storm? Could
it be possibly because we all have them?
In Mark chapter 4, Jesus tells His disciples, “Let’s
go to the other side.” Leaving the crowd behind, they got into a boat.
A great storm arose, and the boat was being swamped. There was Jesus. He was
incognito, but He is God the King, riding out the storm in the boat with the
disciples literally, in the same boat as them. As the psalm says, the King
is riding on the waters, and His throne is described as a cushion in the hold
of the boat. As Kings are wont to do, He takes a nap! How could He take a
nap with the thunder and lightning, and the wind and the waves? Could it be
because He knew that all those sounds together were the voice of his Father?
Could it be that the storm was like a lullaby for Him?
The disciples wake Him up, “Don’t you care we are
perishing!” He woke up, and His voice spoke (who knows, maybe there
was some thunder along with it). His voice said, “Peace,” and
the winds and the waves stopped. Do you think maybe the disciples got out
a note pad to write down, “how to stop a storm . . . next time there
is a big storm, pray the exact words: ‘Don’t you care that we
are perishing?’ We got it. No more need for fear now.” That’s
not what happened. No, the disciples were filled with awe, saying, “Even
the wind and the water obey Him.”
We just have to admit, some things are out of our control. I
don’t know about you, but I’ve got some family members that are
going through some stuff I’d give anything to fix. The voice of the
Lord thunders over the water, breaks the cedars, causes oaks to whirl, flashes
forth flames of fire and all in the temple say “Glory.” But because
of the awesome power and the mighty strength of God’s majestic voice
in creation, we say something else too.
I think another little girl who lives at my house has that figured
out. She was only six weeks old when we moved here. She has a large window
in her room and knows nothing but loud storms. When one comes, through the
whole thing, she sleeps quietly and wakes up strong for the day (strong enough
to wear us out). She is a little like our friend who discovered her kidney
problem. By the time she told me about it, she said, “I have to tell
you that I know there are some stormy days in the future, God has just given
me a peace about it. He’ll be with me through all of it.” The
voice of the Lord thunders in the storm and we say, “Glory.” And
we also say may the Lord give strength to His people. May the Lord bless His
people with peace!
You see, I think God wants us to know that His voice speaks
in the storms because it means He doesn’t just sit back and manipulate
them. He is in them with us. Our God allows the storms so we can remember
all that power is His, and we can ask Him to give us strength and peace. And
when He does you are able to walk through the storm in peace.
When all those people are saying, “My, how strong she is.” Or, “Wow, he is a person of peace.” Remember . . . give credit where credit is due.