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But you’re thinking (I hope) that those aren’t our greatest needs. They’re just the temporal ones. We have greater needs: forgiveness, relationship, grace, mercy, peace. Love. 

What do you know? They’re all free, too. 

Everything you need is free. 

God is so, so good. 

Yes, bad things do happen. Yes, the world is broken. Suffering is real, and injustice is real, and hate is real. 

But God has assured us, and the experience of millions of his people has taught us, that these evil things are not senseless or purposeless or permanent. Paul tells us that 

tribulation worketh patience; ⁴And patience, experience; and experience, hope: ⁵And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us (Ro 5.3-5). 

Every athlete knows that the workouts—the suffering, if you will—are what strengthens you so that you can win. The coach is not a sadist; he is wise, and he is good. Any of the athletes on BJU’s national championship teams can tell us that. 

God is good. 

Another poet, the American e e cummings, captured that thought artfully, though surprisingly: 

i thank You God for most this amazing 
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees 
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything 
which is natural which is infinite which is yes 

(i who have died am alive again today, 
and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth 
day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay 
great happening illimitably earth) 

how should tasting touching hearing seeing 
breathing any—lifted from the no 
of all nothing—human merely being 
doubt unimaginable You? 

(now the ears of my ears awake and 
now the eyes of my eyes are opened) 

God is indeed good. 

So where do we go from here? What’s around the corner at this pivotal point in our graduates’ lives? 

Back to the child’s simple prayer: 

God is great. 
God is good. 
Let us thank him. 

And, I might add, let us trust him, even in a chaotic and, for some, frightful world. 

The British lyricist Michael Perry captured this spirit perfectly, I think, in just one stanza in his great hymn “O God Beyond All Praising”: 

Then hear, O gracious Savior, 
     accept the love we bring, 
that we who know your favor 
     may serve you as our king; 
and whether our tomorrows 
     be filled with good or ill, 
we’ll triumph through our sorrows 
     and rise to bless you still: 
to marvel at your beauty 
     and glory in your ways, 
and make a joyful duty 
     our sacrifice of praise. 

May it be so for all of us. Let’s pray. 

²⁴The Lord bless thee, and keep thee: 
²⁵The Lord make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee: 
²⁶The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace (Numbers 6.24-26). 

Amen. 

The evening before I retired, I was privileged to be asked to deliver BJU’s Baccalaureate Sermon. I’ll publish the text here, in several parts.

__________

Theological students like to debate the complexities of theology: election and human will; theories and extent of the atonement; Trinity issues; the hypostatic union; the problem of evil.

These are consequential matters, and they should be debated. Such discussions and explorations are an important part of preparing the Christian student for whatever his divine calling may be.

But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve found my appreciation increasing for the simple things, the basic things—the central things.

And it has occurred to me that these central things are perhaps best summed up in the simple child’s prayer:

God is great;
God is good;
Let us thank him.

The Apostle Paul began his magisterial epistle to the Romans by observing,

The invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and godhead; so that they are without excuse (Ro 1.20).

As you graduating students learned in your Bible Doctrines class, this concept is what theologians call “general revelation.” It’s most famously expressed in the opening to Psalm 19:

1 The heavens declare the glory of God;
And the firmament sheweth his handywork.
2 Day unto day uttereth speech,
And night unto night sheweth knowledge.
3 There is no speech nor language,
Where their voice is not heard.
4 Their line is gone out through all the earth,
And their words to the end of the world.
In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun,
5 Which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber,
And rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race.
6 His going forth is from the end of the heaven,
And his circuit unto the ends of it:
And there is nothing hid from the heat thereof.

This is the concept that Paul used on Mars Hill, in presenting to the Athenians the basic things—the central things.

I’d like to attempt that here this evening.

God Is Great

Hast thou not known? hast thou not heard, [that] the everlasting God, the LORD, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? [there is] no searching of his understanding (Isaiah 40:28).

Evidences of God’s limitless greatness lie all around us in His creation.

The fastest any human has ever traveled is 25,000 mph (Apollo 10’s return from the moon, being accelerated by the earth’s gravity). Now suppose we start at the surface of the sun—some of you are thinking, we shouldn’t do that; it’s way too hot. Well, I’ve solved that problem; we’ll go at night :-)—and we head out toward the planets at that fastest-ever speed. How long will our journey take us?

• Mercury: 60 days
• Venus: 56 (more) days
• Earth: 39 days
• Mars: 78 days
• Jupiter (assuming we safely navigate the asteroid belt): 567 days
• Saturn: 700 days
• Uranus: 1500 days
• Neptune: 1650 days

We’ve been traveling for a total of 12 years and 9 months, and we’ve just reached the edge of the solar system.

Now, to Boomers like me, we don’t believe that, because we still think Pluto is the outermost planet, because our first-grade teacher, Mrs. Devlin, wouldn’t have lied to us about that.

But at any rate, we find that now we’re headed toward the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, visible from the Southern Hemisphere, just to the left of the Southern Cross. That’ll take us 155,333 years.

Once we get there, we find that we’re on one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy, pretty far out toward the edge. So we head for the nearest edge of the galaxy.

670 million years.

And we find that there are other galaxies. The closest, Andromeda, will take us 53 billion more years.

I hope you brought a book to read.

The astronomers tell us that there are clusters of galaxies out there. I have no idea how they know that, but we’ll take them at their word. Let’s head for the nearest edge of our galaxy cluster.

2.67 trillion years.

How about the edge of the observed universe?

131 trillion years.

After a while these numbers just become meaningless, don’t they? Fee, fi, fo-fillion, trillion.

And it’s not over; I suspect that when we reach the “edge” of the observed universe, we’ll just see more universe. How much farther? No one knows.

Now, these numbers are actually unrealistically low, for a couple of reasons:

• They assume that the planets are all lined up perfectly on one side of the sun, which has never happened and is never likely to happen.
• They also ignore a basic tactic of interplanetary travel, which involves the physics of sling-shotting the spacecraft around the heavenly bodies so you don’t have to keep the rocket engines firing constantly. In our example, you couldn’t possibly carry enough fuel to make the journey even to the nearest planet.

But the numbers speak for themselves.

God is great.

Now, I’ve said all that to say this.

Do you know how the Bible recounts God’s creation of what we’ve just described?

Genesis 1.16—“He made the stars also.” Five English words; two in Hebrew.

That’s just a side remark, almost a throwaway line: “Oh, yeah, he did that too.”

God is indeed great.

To be continued.