"It's Not the Harrow" Psalm 104:10-18

When it comes to God's creation and what it means to me as a follower of Jesus, many passages are available and more direct to the subject at hand. But above the other passages, this Psalm elevates God's purpose to create for the benefit of humankind. Some may find that fact hard to swallow, but look carefully and see that to redeem and glorify God's creation means that humans must be at the head of God's redemptive story.

Objections to this have burrowed into peoples' minds. Digesting those theses are difficult. Galileo proved that the human dwelling place was not the center of God's created universe. Paul told us that we are wretched and needy souls. Scripture records our depravity. Nonetheless, these passages stand clear that between our sicknesses and the glory of God is the story of God yet to culminate.

As a foundation for theological reasoning, I have, in the past, used the efficacious work of Christ, and the offices of Christ as the litmus test of doctrine. Whatever detracts from the person and work of Christ is blasphemy. Whatever elevates is truth. Without crossing the line between orthodoxy and heresy, one must ask the question, "What would glorify Jesus more than the universal redemption of all of creation?"

Although, I have set the seemingly logical question outside the boundary beyond orthodoxy, one must seriously admit that God, though working for all things to glorify himself, volitionally, has put mankind before himself. It is the nature of love which provides patience in the heart of God. "He causes the grass to grow for the cattle, and vegetation for the service of man. That he may bring forth food from the earth and makes glad the heart of man, oil to make his face shine, and bread which strengthens man's heart."

Obvious to most is the fact that God, herein, is setting the foundation for gratitude, not the superiority of humans. With a lost heart, it does us well to remember the hand from which we receive our sustenance.

To that point, then, I speak. God has prepared the world for you. But do not think of that preparation in terms of your benefit alone. Think of that preparation for the benefit of the world through you. God has prepared the world for the blessing which we offer through Jesus for the benefit of others.

That means that when you go about your routine, people are present who are prepared for your offering of blessing. With passages like this and others, we consider a non-random array of events and possibilities. You, sitting where you are today, doing what you do, going where you go, walk on fields which God has prepared. You journey about on prepared fields.

Two years ago I was visiting a friend. We were at the kitchen table when he dismissed himself and brought to me a book, over 50 years old. He said, "Look what I found. This is the book where my dad recorded the life of his greenhouse." Every plant he had planted, what he had fed them, all the details, right up through the final production were in this book. His father was the proprietor of a large green-house operation in Illinois.

Our minds are convinced that every difference we make in life is of our own creation. In our heads are records of all our toil to make ourselves what we are today. What God desires for us to learn is that it is not our harrowing which prepared the soil for the world to be blessed by us. Rather, God has done all that for us. As we are to be grateful stewards, we are also to be alive to what work God has finished so that we might go about our business of blessing others.

God's story is being written. Our story is part of it. How does your life intersect? Where have you given up the work of blessing others with the gospel of Jesus? It's God, not the harrow.