The Voice of God

Psalm 19, which will be our passage this morning, our text. But before we read it, I wanna ask you a question. It's a simple question. Does God still speak to us today? Does God still speak to us today?

Now before you answer too quickly, Matthew, be careful because it is a loaded question. Many people have made lots of mistakes in trying to answer that question. Some people can claim, some people do claim today that God speaks continuously to them, directly to their minds, to their hearts, sometimes even in an audible fashion. God tells them all the time what to wear when they wake up in the morning. God apparently tells them who to speak to at dinner parties.

God tells them which car to buy, which house to rent. Some claim that they hear God's audible voice speaking directly into their minds. Others, on the other end of the spectrum perhaps, claim that God never speaks, that He has left us with so little information about Him in the created world that we cannot know anything about Him, that God is at the most a God who has distanced Himself from creation, that He may have created at one point, but He sits so far beyond it, above it, that we cannot and will never know Him. Does God still speak to us? I grew up in the nineties.

I'm an eighties child, but the nineties really was where I really grew up. And there was a particular TV series which I dare say defined the sensitive, self-aware, conscientious mind of the nineties. The nineties was all about the sensitive new age guy, the snags. Remember that? We loved the TV shows like Friends where there were all these very metro sort of guys who just understood life, and they treated their women really well, much better than the seventies and the eighties with that macho bravado that we saw.

And in this sensitive new age world of the nineties, there was a show, not Friends, not as big, not as popular, but a lesser known show, still popular, by the name of Touched by an Angel. See a few heads. A few of us have watched that show. Now the premise, if you don't know, of the show was that there was this particular angel, the main hero of the story named Monica, who was tasked with bringing guidance from God to various people every week at a certain crossroad in their life. And we in the nineties loved the show.

It was soppy, it was emotional, and it was spiritual. It made you feel good at the end, but it also represented the shallow moralistic spirituality that marked American evangelical faith and I dare say most of the Western world's Christianity. These so-called angels in the shows never spoke about sin. They never mentioned the word Christ. They spoke about God, and so whether you're a Jew, a Muslim, or a Christian, you could relate to this.

I mean, all three of the biggest world religions of the world believe in angels, believe in God, so they got a big audience. They made very careful plans to never offend their faithful viewers. But I think what made the show so popular in its time wasn't that it was soppy or emotional or cliche, but that it carried with it a unique offering that we could hear from God directly, that God, every week, could speak to some poor husband who had lost his wife, or a teenager wrestling with addiction, who could hear a tailor-made message to them from God about their struggle, about something that would encourage them and cause them to wake up and to be strong enough to get out of whatever the struggle was, to change their ways. Through these interactions, we, the audience, in turn would hear about God's love. We would hear about God's forgiveness.

We would hear about God's acceptance and so on. And so at the end of the show, we felt really good. We were really moved. We were touched by an angel. What the show does is it puts its finger on a need that every viewer feels, the need of wanting to hear God speak.

And so to the question, does God still speak to us today? I wanna pose to you the answer that yes, He does. Perhaps not so much in the way that Touched by an Angel will put it to us, but God does and will and continues to personally and directly speak to us. So for all the problems I have with the show, there is one thing that it gets right. It identifies a need within us to hear from God. It identifies a restlessness we have with simply holding on to vague notions of religion, which is what the American evangelical religion had grown up with, I dare say, in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, this vague idea of God.

And in the nineties, they started sensing that God is real and God does speak. They were tired of old cliches. They wanted God to speak directly. So does God still speak to us today? What you will be interested in hearing, the answer from the Bible is yes, He does.

He still speaks to us today, and we're gonna find out how He does that from Psalm 19. Let's read that together. Psalm 19:1, "The heavens declare the glory of God. The sky above proclaims His handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, night to night reveals knowledge.

There is no speech, nor are there words whose voice is not heard. Their voice goes out through all the earth and their words to the end of the world. In them He has set a tent for the sun, which comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber, and like a strong man runs its course with joy. Its rising is from the end of the heavens and its circuit to the end of them, and there is nothing hidden from its heat. The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul.

The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. The precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart. The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes. The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever. The rules of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.

More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold, sweeter also than honey, and drippings of the honeycomb. Moreover, by them is Your servant warned. In keeping them, there is great reward. Who can discern his errors? Declare me innocent from hidden faults.

Keep back Your servant also from presumptuous sins. Let them not have dominion over me, then I shall be blameless and innocent of great transgression. Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in Your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer. This is the word of the Lord. So like I said, we do find in Scripture that God still speaks to us today, but how does He speak to us? That is the question we need to unpack.

What we find in Psalm 19 is a wonderful text, a wonderful explanation of three different ways in which God continues to speak to us right now, today. It affirms that God does communicate to us. The first way, the first method we see that God communicates to us is to speak to us through the creation, the created world or the universe. The heavens speak to us. The sky above us, it says in verse one, speaks to us of God and His glory.

Now the heavens, the sky above as it's used here in verse one, represents arguably the pinnacle of the created universe. For millennia, it was the sun, the moon, and the stars that have caused us to marvel at the Creator. It's why so many false religions worship the sun or the moon or the various planets. They cause us to be in awe. Something of the heavens cause us to not only feel insignificant on the one hand, but to marvel at the transcendence of a Creator above us.

The heavens spoken of here in verse one can be understood, therefore, as the representative leader of all of creation. On behalf of the entire universe, it is the heaven's great pleasure to have this function, the psalm writer says, to glorify God. To declare, from the Hebrew word, which has this meaning of recounting, testifying. It testifies to the glory of God. Creation, in other words, led by the stars, led by the galaxies above us, speak to us, and what they say is that God is magnificent.

God is majestic. Their voice is heard everywhere. There is no language group. There is no remote tribe in the Amazon Forest that does not hear His voice. Instead, says verse four, the voice of the heavens goes out through all the earth so that the apostle Paul can conclude in Romans 1:20 that all of humanity is without excuse.

We all know God from what has been created. Every one of us, whether you call yourself a Christian or an atheist or an agnostic, we all have an awareness of God. And so that image of the sun that verses four, five, and six talks about, this idea of the sun sort of moving across the sky is this idea of nothing is hidden from the sun's heat. It moves across the whole globe. Every part of the world touches the sun or the sun touches it.

And as visible as the sun is to all the earth, so visible is God to the whole earth. Creation, the entire universe, in other words, speaks to us about God. We know this intrinsically, don't we? Why do we love camping? Why do we like going for hikes?

Why do we take our four-wheel drives to the beach if we don't like walking? Why do we enjoy the stillness of fishing or golfing? Why do we pay to go and look at animals in zoos? Why do we go to game reserves? Even if you consider yourself not the outdoorsy type, ask yourself, why do we all enjoy a beautiful view from our veranda?

Because it's in those moments where we look at creation, God says something to us. God through creation has spoken, and we taste, Psalm 19 says, something of His glory. Now we don't always see this, it's true, but often we do hear, we do sense creation's praise. It's in moments when we are quiet, it's in moments where we stop to listen, when we pause to contemplate, where we actually can hear its worship. Put aside the whinging of your teenagers in the back of the car, put that aside, and you see the beautiful mountain pass that you're driving through, and you just go, wow.

Spray enough mozzie repellent on you so that you don't get annoyed by them, and you see the starry sky above you, and you think that is impressive. Be quiet and contemplative for long enough and creation speaks, and it says this: someone glorious is behind all of that. The sun, the moon, the stars, all the other impressive things in all creation declares the hand that created me is divine. But creation is not enough. It speaks and it says things about power.

It speaks of significance. It speaks of transcendence and wonder. It asks a lot of questions. Who is big enough to have created all of this? What sort of mind could have thought up the complexities of the human body?

Creation speaks, but it only asks a lot of questions and gives very few answers. And that's why we need a more direct speech. We need a voice to speak to our hearts, to tell us more clearly about who this Creator is and who we are in relation to Him. And that's why we needed the second voice. We need Scripture, the clearest revelation of God. On the one hand, as awesome as the creation is, as awe-inspiring as that voice is, it is only the word of God which speaks penetratingly to the heart.

In verses seven to eleven, we move from the heavens into the very personal part of us, the heart, and this revelation expressed through various genres, we're told of laws, if you have a look, of teachings, of testimonies, of narratives, we find an explanation of God's purpose in creation. It's true. Many forgeries have attempted to speak with the same authority as the Bible. Many world religions claim to have their own holy scriptures, or they might even call it the word of God, but here we see that it is the Bible that speaks to the soul. It is the Bible that speaks to the heart in a way that nothing else in all creation can.

God's word is therefore unique. It's only across His laws, the very law that we read in Exodus 20 that summed up the law of God, the character of God. It's only across His law. It's only across God's teachings. It's only across the testimony He's given about Himself that He gives us understanding.

And there's not many understandings that He's given us of Himself. There's not many ways to understand. There's only one: His word, what He has revealed about Himself by His will. So how do we know the truth of this voice? How do we know when we hear this word that it is true?

Well, we know it because God has revealed Himself truly through it. As verse seven says, only His word has the power to revive the soul. So to the question, how do we know it's true? We know it's true because we actually feel it. It does something to us.

We know our soul. It's within us that this ephemeral spiritual thing inside of us, we know that we have one, and we know the condition of it sometimes, and we know that only God is able to cause it to be restored. Verse seven says the word revives the soul. The second thing is it makes wise the simple. Did you see that word?

Now the reformers, the theologians of the sixteenth century and so on spoke of the perspicuity of God's word. It's a theological term to talk about the translucency of God's word, the transparency of God's word, that we can look at it and understand what's going on. It's not hard to grasp. We can read, every one of us, the Bible, and we can understand the gospel. That was the big difference in the Reformation, right, breaking away from the old church, is that every one of us can read the Bible and should read the Bible.

We don't need trained leaders to teach us. We don't have a heavenly language, i.e., Latin, that holds only the words of life. The word of God can be translated into everyday language, and we can understand God's will from it, so that even simple people like you and me can be made wise. This word is also perfect, which means it is complete. There's nothing in it that we need to add to.

There's nothing in it that will not help us in any way. The word of God, says the psalm writer, is perfect. It causes the heart therefore to rejoice in its perfection. It gives revelation, it gives sight to eyes, light to us. And so where creation speaks on the one hand to amaze us, to give us questions to ask about who can have created all this, it is only the voice of Scripture that truly moves us.

Where the heavens might speak generally of God to tell us that He is powerful and wonderful, that everything in the universe recognises His glory, it is only in the voice of His written word where withered souls are restored, where fools are made wise, where troubled, saddened, oppressed hearts are made to rejoice. The written and the recorded words of Scripture containing the things like laws and narratives, poetry like the Psalms, letters like Paul's letters, testimonies, prophecies, across them all, there's a singular voice speaking. So that, friends, believe it or not, when we hear the word read, when we hear the word preached, it is the very word of God speaking to us. It is not an ancient understanding of the universe that needs to be reinterpreted into modern times. It is the word of God.

This word is perfect. There is nothing more nor nothing less that we need to know from it. It is sure. It is right. It is pure, the psalm writer says.

It is clean. It is true. It is righteous. Take all of these attributes collectively, and we are being described the completeness of this word. We cannot be failed by it.

It lacks nothing. For this reason, our Bibles are therefore the most precious things we own. Think about it in this way. We have a direct communication from God that has been passed to us from generation to generation. It gives us an understanding of the purpose of life.

Whoever had those philosophical debates at school, it's like, what is the purpose of life, and everyone sort of just sat back and said, woah, don't ask me. That's too hard a question to answer. The Bible says we know the purpose of life. It's to know God and to enjoy Him forever. The Bible tells us why God made the sun and the stars, to declare His glory.

The Bible tells us about our very nature. It explains to us why we love. It explains to us why we laugh. It explains to us why we lie. So there is no more precious a thing to us than the Bible.

It is therefore, verse ten says, more desirable than the finest gold. It is sweeter than the freshest, most juicy honey from the honeycomb. We lock away expensive cars in garages, or some of us do unless they get stolen from the street. We store thousands of dollars in bank vaults. We pay just about anything to protect our dear children, but the most precious thing you have is the thing lying on your bedside table.

It's the thing that is wedged between a few other books on the bookshelf. Most precious thing you have is the word of God. Do you believe that? Is this word really that special to you, or is it lying on that bedside table collecting dust? Is it to you sweeter than honey, more precious than the finest gold?

Now this incredible value is explained, is further impressed upon our hearts in verse eleven, when it says that by the Scripture, we are warned. That's its function. It's part of its function. We are warned that by keeping God's word, there can be great reward. And so that transitions us to the third and the final voice described here in Psalm 19, the conscience. God rather speaks to the conscience.

Throughout the Psalm, we see this layering of God's communicative sources. It begins firstly, very broadly in creation. Right? Creation declares the glory of God. Next, the law, the word of God, the testimonies of God speaks to us as well.

It speaks to our heart to restore and revive our souls, but then it narrows all the way down into each person's conscience, and it does it for this very reason. It is saying that you can stare at the night sky every night of your life. You can enjoy the warmth of the sun running its joyful course across the globe your entire life, but being out in nature will not soften your heart to bring you delight in God. This very moment, as we sit under God's word, there are people playing golf, I can tell you that if they're on hole number eighteen in the bottom of a bunker, they are not praising God right now. And we hear people say this all the time: I don't need God.

The world is my church. I don't need to be here right now, because that is not true. That world, that creation does not bring us closer to God. It speaks of God, but God has to work His way to our deepest parts. God needs to speak to our conscience.

Most brilliant scientific minds of our age have fascinating theories of how the universe has been formed and how it all works together, but few, if any of them, have any idea what it all means. They explain how, perhaps, but they don't explain why. They cannot know. They will not know unless God writes the revelation of Himself in their hearts. So where Psalm 19 has given us some beautiful words to describe Scripture in verses seven through to eleven, here in verses twelve and thirteen, it begins to describe the other reality, which is the ugliness of sin.

We read the words errors here. We're told about hidden faults. We're told about presumptuous sins, and these are all things which will have dominion, David says, over his life. King David, the famous King David says that he will not even know some of the sins that he is committing, even as he writes this beautiful Psalm. He cannot know all his sins.

By definition, if his faults are hidden, he doesn't know them, and he begs God to cleanse him from his crimes, to cleanse him from sin that he doesn't even know he has committed so that he can be considered blameless and innocent of transgressions. And yet his conscience is the thing that is begging for it, and he testifies that only his conscience will be soothed when the voice of God speaks this third and final time. He says, Lord, please declare me innocent. Hebrew word, nachar, used here, means to acquit, to make clean, to wipe your slate. The third and the final way in which God declares or communicates to us through the Holy Spirit is actually the distinguishing point between why people are Christians and others are not. This is the distinguishing mark, not the voice from the heavens, not the voice from Scripture itself.

The third and the final voice is the thing that marks us as Christian or not. You see friends, if people say they have never heard God's voice, which gives them, therefore, the reason not to believe in God, the problem is not that God hasn't spoken. The problem is not in the glory-giving heavens above us. The problem is not in the restorative power of Scripture to revive hurt and troubled souls. The problem is in a blinded heart that refuses to see its own sin.

The sins of thought, word, and deed performed by us every moment while the sun runs its course above us by day, and the stars sing glory to God at night. David has to plead with God to keep him back from sin, because it will have dominion over him. Sin will rule over his life without God's intervention. Sin will dominate his existence and the desire to be freed by God from that sin comes from this place of humility. But that is the single reason why some of us sitting here, hopefully, all of us sitting here will know that God speaks to us. It is the very thing each person has discovered when they finally hear God's voice.

It is only humility that knows I'm weak. I'm corrupted. I need a power outside of myself, and I need to be cleansed. It is the very thing each person discovers when they hear God's voice. Today, through His second voice, the Bible, we are being told that God is speaking to us all the time, and He is speaking in a way that penetrates to our conscience.

And so what is our conscience asking for? It is to be declared innocent, to be cleansed from sin. In order to do that, God uses His word to speak restoration to the soul, but our soul can only be restored when it has peace with God, when it is cleansed from sin. Our consciences need God's declaration of innocence, and so God now again uses His word, the Bible to tell us this so that we can read in places like Romans 8:1 this incredible summary: "There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus."

Or as Hebrews 10 tells us beautifully, having summed up the thrust of the Old Testament in which Psalm is placed, He says, "Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places, to enter God's throne room by the blood of Jesus, by the new and the living way that He opened for us through the curtain, that is through His flesh. And since we have a great Priest over the house of God, let us draw near to God with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water." The question, does God speak to us today? Comes the answer: God is speaking continually. Day by day in His creation, He expresses His power and His magnificence.

He speaks to all of humanity through the word, the Bible, a thing that anyone in just about every part of the world can pick up and read. But all of that is ultimately to speak to us a third and a final time, right into our hearts. So I wanna ask you, are you listening? Is your life set up in such a way that you can and will clearly hear His voice? The way that you know you are listening is given to us as well.

It's a little test in verse 14, just the final summary of the Psalm. The way you know that you are listening is by you speaking back to God, so that David finishes with his Psalm saying, "Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer." Throughout Psalm 19, God has been speaking, but here right at the end, it is David that speaks back to God. It's the words of his mouth and the meditations, the thoughts of his heart, which are speaking to God, and he prays that they are good words. He prays that they are pleasing words, words of thanks and praise to God for what He has done.

And what is it David recognises God has done? He is David's rock and redeemer. He is the one that David will stand on in the storms of life. He is the one who has redeemed him, who has purchased him from the dominion of sin. So to all of us who grew up in the nineties with Touched by an Angel messages of God, here is your message today.

God is speaking to you all the time. In creation, He speaks, through His word, He speaks, and into your conscience, He speaks, so that you may know the restoration of your souls that clears your guilty conscience, so that you may marvel at His glory. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you and we praise you for the clarity by which you have expressed your communicative purposes, that you stretch towards us, that you lean in and you, as the book of Ephesians tells us, that you condescend towards us so that we may know, so that we won't be left without understanding. Would you speak to us simple people so that we may be wise about the purpose of life, about the joy of life, about our eternal destination.

Help us, Lord, to enjoy every part of those ways in which you communicate. Help us to see, Lord, when we are out and about, the wonder, the majesty of creation around us. Help us to marvel at how big You are, to feel the joyful thought of our insignificance in a God who is stable and consistent and powerful, who rules over all physical forces, the God who created every element that is in existence, the God who holds it all together. Help us to sense Your glory in all of that, and then Lord, help us to push even further into the mind of this incredible God in knowing Your word, knowing Your special revelation to us as humans, a word that is everywhere that can be picked up at any time. And Lord, help us to read it and treasure it like it is fine gold, like it is pure honey, to treasure it, to glean from it words of life that restores and revives our souls. And then Lord, let that word do its work in our hearts so that it may declare us innocent, so that we may hear of the good news of Jesus Christ, God who stooped so low He became one of us.

The God who condescended into flesh. The God who in His flesh died for our flesh, so that we may now live not by the law of the flesh, but by the law of the Spirit who gives life. We thank you, Lord, for these truths. We pray that we will not forget them. We pray that we may order our lives with a priority that measures up to these truths.

In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.