Sermon Tone Analysis

BY PASTOR GLENN PEASE

Off the coast of the Italian Riviera a large bronze statue of Christ has been installed down in the depths of the sea as a symbol that Christ is Lord of the deep.

Jesus is the only man in history who demonstrated He was also God by controlling this great force in creation-the sea.

The disciples were amazed that He could say, "Peace be still," and the raging waves were calmed.

He controlled the fish so that when He told the disciples to cast their nets on the other side, they were filled to over-flowing.

He sent Peter to catch a fish, and in it was found a coin by which to pay the temple tax.

Jesus could even walk on the top the water demonstrating again that He was Lord of the sea.

Not Neptune, not Posidon, the Greek and Roman gods of the sea, but the Lord Jesus Christ is Lord of all, including the sea.

God made a big deal of Lordship over the sea when He spoke to Job.

In Job 38:8-11 God makes it clear He had to set limits to this great force, and say to the sea, "This far you may come and no further."

We cannot imagine the awesome power involved in establishing the seas of the world, but we have the testimony of one who was there as an eye witness.

Wisdom is personified in Prov.

8 and says in verse 24, "When there were no oceans, I was given birth, when there were no springs abounding with water."

Then in verse 29 she adds, "When He gave the sea its boundary so the waters would not over step His command and when He marked out the foundations of the earth."

What must it have been like to be there watching God hand-crafting the world as we know it?

Maybe God videoed the whole thing and one of the wonders of heaven will be to watch this marvel of marvels.

But wisdom was there, and she tells us her reaction as she labored at God's side in creation.

In verses 30-31, she says, " Then I was the craftsman at His side.

I was filled with delight day after day, rejoicing always in His presence, rejoicing in His whole world and delighting in mankind."

Here is the Biblical basis for enjoying all that God has made.

Wisdom was there when God made it, and she emphasizes that her primary emotion was that of rejoicing and delight.

The Bible would support the judgment that something is spiritually wrong with the person who cannot see in God's works that which leads to joy and the worship of God as Creator.

Not only does wisdom rejoice in all that God created, but all God created rejoices in God as its Creator.

Psalm 96:11-12 makes it all inclusive.

"Let the heavens rejoice, let the earth be glad; let the sea resound, and all that is in it.

Let the fields be jubilant, and everything in them, then all the trees of the forest will sing for joy."

In Psalm 98:7-8 we read, "Let the sea resound, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it.

Let the rivers clap their hands, let the mountains sing together for joy."

Does the sea really sing, and does everything in it join the song?

Obviously we are into poetic language here, and we cannot take it literally that the seas sing or that rivers have hands to clap, or that mountains form a choir.

Yet we must not dismiss poetry as if it has no relationship to reality.

Every child has held a sea shell to its ear to hear the song of the sea.

The sounds of the sea have inspired a lot of music.

Anton Rubenstein called his second symphony, "The Ocean."

An English composer wrote a series, "Sea Slumber Song" "Sabbath Morning At Sea" "Where Corals Lie" "The Swimmer."

Ralph Vaughn's "Sea Symphony" first performed in 1910.

But the most famous of all is "La Mer" by Claude Debussy, who spent three years writing it.

He grew up with deep impressions of the Mediterranean, and in his music you could hear the crash of the waves and the gurgling of the backwash.

Jacqus Cousteau wrote that it "is surely the greatest calling forth of nature in a work for orchestra."

The fact is, the sea does sing and everything in it.

We may prefer the songs of birds, but God loves to be praised with any voice.

Marie Poland Fish is appropriately named, for she is the director of the world's largest under water bioacustic library.

In other words, she is the world's authority on the sounds of fish.

The U.S. Navy requested that she keep a file of biological sounds.

Since 1954 she has accumulated hundreds of miles of audio tape of sounds from all over the world.

Her conclusion is, every fish makes a noise.

With hydrophones in the sea they pick up clicks, moans, squeaks, whistles, hissing, grunts, and other sounds from the sea.

One fish makes a sound like running fingers along the teeth of a comb.

Mrs. Fish is convinced that fish talk.

If they talk, then they may also sing, and thus, literally join the universal praise to the Creator.

Is is only poetry, or was Emerson seeing reality when he wrote,

Tis not in the high stars alone,

Nor in cups of budding flowers,

Nor in the redbreasts mellow tone,

Nor in the bow that smiles in showers.

But in the mud and scum of things

There always, always, something sings.

According to Mrs. Fish, the shrimp and the crabs also make sounds.

The point is, science does support the poetic and spiritual view of nature.

There is more truth to it than we realize when we sing, "This is my father's world and to my listening ears all nature sings and round me rings the music of the spheres."

There is music everywhere in God's creation if we listen.

The Psalmist did listen, and that is why he commits himself to be a part of the universal choir and says in verse 33, "I will sing to the Lord all my life, I will sing praise to my God as long as I live."

This song is a part of heavenly music, for we read in Rev. 5:13, "Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and on the sea and all that is in them singing: To Him that sits on the throne and to the Lamb be praise and honor and glory and power, for ever and ever!"

The Mediterranean sea gave us the great drama of Jonah and the whale, and all of the adventures of Paul and the sea, including his great shipwreck on the way to Rome.

When the Psalmist in verse 25 raves about the sea being so vast and spacious, teeming with life, he was likely referring to this sea, and did not know that his words would be even more meaningful to those of us who live between the Atlantic and Pacific.

All of the oceans are connected, and so in a sense it is all one vast body of water that covers almost three fourths of the earth surface.

No wonder some call this the ocean planet.

If the Psalmist was amazed at the vastness of what he saw, how much more should we praise God for the massive work He has done with water?

The Pacific is almost twice the size of the Atlantic, and has almost half the water of the world in it.

It covers 63 million square miles, and goes from one pole to the other, and is larger than all the land of the world combined.

It has the deepest place on earth.

It goes down almost seven miles in the Mariana trench near the Philippines.

This is one mile deeper than the tallest mountain, Mt.

Everest is high.

The ocean is a wonder of the world that is to lead us to worship, for as the Psalmist says in verse 25, it is teeming with creatures both large and small.

And the point is, these creatures, by their very being witness to a Creator that deserves our praise.

Every cubic foot of sea water has twenty thousand plants and one hundred and twenty animals.

I don't know how many of these creatures the Psalmist saw, but he says they are without number, and modern man is still saying this.

The creatures of the sea are uncountable, and some that man has counted out are still there.

The Coelacauth is a fish about five foot long with two tails, and the experts said it has been extinct for 70 million years.

That was until 1938 when two fishermen off South Africa caught a live one.

It is embarrassing trying to be an expert on the infinite works of God.

Your chances of being wrong are excellent.

The Neopilina snail was said to be extinct for 300 million years, but in 1958 four were found three miles down off of Peru.

The Psalmist is impressed both by the large and small creatures of the sea.

He was, no doubt, thinking of the whale in the large category, for the blue whale is the largest living thing God ever made to live on this planet.

All of the estimates of the largest dinosaurs that ever existed are around 50 tons.

But the blue whale makes this a light weight contender, for they weigh in at 150 tons.

The sea is the biggest place in the world, and is the home of the biggest creatures of the world.

These biggest whales only eat small creatures like krill, for they have small throats, but they eat a ton at a time.

They have tongues that weigh 4 ton, and one thousand pound hearts that pump eight tons of blood through their vast system.

This whale could not swallow Jonah, but other types of whales could easily do so.

Jonah would have only been an appetizer for the whale caught in the Azores that had a giant squid in its stomach that measured 35 feet five inches long.

Jonah could have taken Goliath along for the ride in this kind of whale and had room left over.

But you may say, why horse around with all this whale blubber.

Who cares about whales?

Why don't we get more spiritual and deal with what is relevant to the Christian life?

The answer is in verse 26 which is a surprising revelation that makes whales one of the marvels of life, and very relevant to our understanding of God's nature.

The Psalmist says the ships go to and fro on the sea, but also that leviathan goes there, which God formed to frolic there.

The Bible teaches here that God made whales for the fun of it.