The Earth Belongs to God: A Meditation on Psalm 24 for the 4th Sunday in Advent

The earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof;

 the world, and they that dwell therein.

For he hath founded it upon the seas,

 and established it upon the floods.

 

Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord?

or who shall stand in his holy place?

He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart;

who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity,

 nor sworn deceitfully.

 He shall receive the blessing from the Lord,

and righteousness from the God of his salvation.

This is the generation of them that seek him,

that seek thy face, O Jacob. Selah.

 

Lift up your heads, O ye gates;

and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors;

and the King of glory shall come in.

Who is this King of glory?

The Lord strong and mighty,

the Lord mighty in battle.

Lift up your heads, O ye gates;

even lift them up, ye everlasting doors;

and the King of glory shall come in.

 Who is this King of glory?

The Lord of hosts,

 he is the King of glory. Selah.

 

 

David made a bold and prophetic claim as he penned the 24^th Psalm, declaring that all creation belongs to God.  Unlike many of the pagan religions of his time (or those now), the God of Israel was not just a local potentate for the Jews with rules and ceremonies exclusively for them.  Rather, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, was and continues to be the only One with authority over the whole world, because He alone brought forth and established the whole world.  The God of Israel was not vying with some pantheon of contestants for a celestial throne, or somehow stuck between the river gods of the Nile and the Euphrates, or the desert gods of Egypt and Babylon.  The God of Israel, the One whose Name revealed in ancient Hebrew reflects the bedrock ground of eternal existence, is the rightful possessor of all things which He alone created, and which He alone preserves until the Last Day.  For the people of Israel this was a declaration that made certain their salvation in their God, for His Word would endure forever by virtue of His perfect goodness and omnipotent power.  As the King of Glory, the Lord of Hosts who is strong and mighty in battle, there is no power on earth below or heaven above that contest His divine will.  When the God of Israel saves, as Jesus would later explain in further detail, no one can take that soul out of His hand.

 

Today’s world doesn’t look much different now than the world of David’s day, even though his reign over Israel was roughly 3000 years ago. There are certainly advances in technology, industry, communication, and travel gleaned from countless experiments and lessons learned about the elements of our world, but the nature of the world remains much the same.  There are political leaders and pawns, armies and economies, heroes and villains, entertainers and craftsmen, parents and children, and a huge variety of every vocational occupation under the sun.  The strong still sometimes seek to oppress the weak, self-interest still motivates broad swathes of humanity, even as the self-sacrifice of others provides a vision of something higher to pursue than money, food, power, and pleasure.  That city in the Midwest might look more wholesome than that city over on the coast, and some people in some places may seem more God-fearing than others.  The mistake easily made is that only the parts of the world that strive to follow God’s Word belong to Him, while the others all belong to someone or something else.  And while it’s true that the devil and his minions hold great sway over this world through the manipulation of corrupt men, the reality is that the whole world and everything in it—the fullness thereof—belong inextricably to the Lord God Almighty.

 

So, no matter how dark or evil the world may look in one place or another, that part of the world and everyone in it belongs solely to God.  Whether it is the horrors which took place in Moscow, Idaho, or the moral insanity of San Francisco, California; the oppression of tyrants in Rwanda or Afghanistan or China or Venezuela; there is nowhere in this world that does not belong to God, be it is a cathedral in Rome or a meth plant in Mexico.  And what is so tremendously hopeful about this ancient, Biblical truth, is that not only does the whole world belong to God, it is entirely His, and His alone, to save.  Just as there is no place in all creation that is excepted from the rightful possession of God, from the furthest flung star in the heavens to the farthest flung hamlet on this globe, there is also no creature, no person so far flung that they can escape His domain.  No person in the Outback of Australia is any further removed from God’s reign than any person on the steppes of Mongolia, or the urban jungles of London, Amsterdam, and New York.  The soul living under a bridge in Los Angeles is just as much a possession of the God of Israel, as is the bureaucrat working under the Department of Health and Human Services, or the plumber striving under the architecture of a skyscraper, or the student laboring under a university’s library stacks.  Every soul, in every place, at every time, belongs to God, and it is God alone who can save them all.

 

This is why the mystery of Christmas is so glorious, that the ancient Prophets and the New Testament Apostles can speak of it as the greatest of lights which pierces so deep a darkness.  No matter how hard and lost and confused any soul may be, that soul is precious to the God who made it, who sustains it, and who has done all things necessary to save it.  There is no soul anywhere on this orb, at any time or in any place, which is beyond the jealous possession of the God of Israel.  When Jesus declared that God so loved the world that He sent His Son to save it, He left no caveats or exceptions to that divine will.  Jesus, God-With-Us, is with us precisely because He so jealously loves us. In His very person, Jesus united our humanity with His divinity, so that the bond between God and Man could never be undone—then took that unity to the Cross, where His sacrifice of unfathomable love might be poured out upon the whole world.  And before His Ascension to the Father, His instructions to His Disciples were to preach this Gospel of love, forgiveness, and life in His Name to all creatures, to make disciples of all nations, baptizing and teaching them to observe every Word He has given them.  The joy of Christmas is not that God has come to save some peculiar people in one remote corner of the world, or only to save those seem to be the most conspicuously pious, but that He has come to save every single soul, no matter how soiled or sullied.

 

The blessings of Christmas are not just for Christians, anymore than the Gospel of Jesus Christ is merely for people inside a certain type of building.  The blessings of Christmas are for all people, that the Lord of Hosts, strong and mighty, has come to seek and to save all people, calling every soul to return to Him in faith and repentance that grace upon grace may abound.  Hope has dawned upon the whole human race, upon all creation, for the King of Glory has come!  Throw open the gates of your mind, fling wide the doors of your heart, that the Lord of Glory might come in to commune with you, to forgive you and heal you, to set you free from the prison of lies by which the devil has befuddled you, that you may sing the triumph of your Saving, Incarnate Creator unto ages of ages.  Soli Deo Gloria!  Amen.