Psalm 104 is best known as the Creation Psalm par excellence. It’s an exquisite review of the Lord’s creating and sustaining hand at work among the arable, animal and aquatic spheres of life.
But the Psalm also expresses (and develops) an idea very distinctive to the Old Testament worldview, which ripples out way beyond Creation, through Redemption, all the way to the New Creation. Let’s have a look at the first three stanzas of the Psalm:
Psalm 104
1 Praise the Lord, my soul.
Lord my God, you are very great;
you are clothed with splendor and majesty.
2 The Lord wraps himself in light as with a garment;
he stretches out the heavens like a tent
3 and lays the beams of his upper chambers on their waters.
He makes the clouds his chariot
and rides on the wings of the wind.
4 He makes winds his messengers,
flames of fire his servants.
5 He set the earth on its foundations;
it can never be moved.
6 You covered it with the watery depths as with a garment;
the waters stood above the mountains.
7 But at your rebuke the waters fled,
at the sound of your thunder they took to flight;
8 they flowed over the mountains,
they went down into the valleys,
to the place you assigned for them.
9 You set a boundary they cannot cross;
never again will they cover the earth.
10 He makes springs pour water into the ravines;
it flows between the mountains.
11 They give water to all the beasts of the field;
the wild donkeys quench their thirst.
12 The birds of the sky nest by the waters;
they sing among the branches.
13 He waters the mountains from his upper chambers;
the land is satisfied by the fruit of his work.
The Psalm starts by gazing (though we have to shield our eyes) at the Lord of Heaven. Promptly, though, in stanza two (vv. 5-9), the focus shifts to His opera ad extra in Creation. The rhythm of verse five reminds me of hammer on anvil, as the Lord beats down the foundations of the comos to make them firm:
YÁsad Érets ÁL-mkhonÉHA, BÁL-timMÓT ‘oLÁM va‘ÉD!
The rest of stanza two, though, promptly endangers that firmly-founded creation. The chaotic flood waters threaten to up-end it all.
As is well-known, the idea of the ‘chaos-waters’ is a very key element of the OT worldview. It its story-form, the Lord defeated and restrained (but didn’t fully destroy) the chaos waters at the very inception of Creation, and thereby was able to create a securely-founded universe, over which He sits, enthroned. The chaos waters are currently imprisoned: permitted some movement, but not permitted to rampage wildly through the Lord’s well-ordered, well-founded cosmos. Which isn’t to say they aren’t always trying, always straining against their bonds. Wreaking chaos and havoc where they can, but always ultimately restrained.
This idea lurks behind A LOT of Psalms, wisdom and prophetic literature. It’s there in Psalm 29 ‘The Lord sits enthroned over the flood’, 89 ‘You rule over the surging sea; when its waves mount up, you still them’, 93 ‘the rivers, Lord, lift up, the rivers lift up their voice’ and in dozens of other places.
(Here, and elsewhere - not least Genesis 6-9! - you sometimes find a distinctive twist on this worldview plot. In this twist, the Lord is SO in charge of the flood that He Himself sometimes uses it as his tool, unleashing it temporarily for His own purposes. But that’s not the focus of this post.)
In our Evangelical circles, we are typically quite analytical in how we approach the effects of the the Fall. We categorise. Culpable sin, versus non-culpable post-fall weakness. Human evil (personal, societal, international); natural evil consequent on the curse. etc etc. I’m thinking, for example, of Don Carson’s How Long, O Lord. I find this sort of approach partially helpful, at least cerebrally.
But it seems to me that this OT picture of the savage chaos waters, restrained yet straining to free themselves, has a huge amount to offer at the emotional level (which, as DC himself points out, is very often where the rubber really hits the road). The picture is decidedly non-analytic. It’s all bundled up in those churning, roiling depths.
To take one quintessentially messy situation as an example: relationship break down, where there’s sin everywhere on both sides, but also non-sinful human weakness, and mis-understandings, and inherited patterns of behaviour where the analytical knife can scarcely divide between the sin of the previous generation versus the sin of the current generation. In this scenario I find a lot of emotional mileage in simply viewing the whole situation through the lens of this OT picture. The encroachment of chaos, with all its attendant pain, misery, sin and suffering. The reversal of the Good, well-ordered world the Lord created.
In particular, the chaos-water idea helps me with one element that the more analytical approch struggles to touch: the randomness of so much suffering, sin and pain.
One of the members of our church died just over a year ago from motor-neurone disease. Why him? Why then? Another is currently undergoing painful treatment for a cancer that has come back. Why her? Why now? My half-brother is heading downhill with bone cancer. Why him? Why now? My poor wife has struggled with insomnia on and off (but mostly on) for the past 20 years. Why her? When she has SO much to give, why limit her like this?
But nobody asks a tsunami why that bit of it crashes right there, while that bit crashes over there. We expect randomness. The unpredictable churning, roiling, seething, crashing is all part of the picture. Somehow, that helps. Perhaps because it helps draw the sting from the ‘why’, so it can’t add so much insult to injury at the very point where suffering is worst.
But we haven’t yet reached the genius point of the Psalm. That comes in stanza three (vv. 10-13).
Look at what the Lord has done to those chaotic flood waters! They have been tamed, and made to serve the Lord’s good purposes.
The Hebrew of verse 10 has got a lot of nasal and liquid sounds (m, n and r, l). You can really hear the smooth, gliding, orderly flow of those life-sustaining rivers:
hamashalléah ma‘yaním ban-nahalím, bein harím yahallekhún
https://www.loveexploring.com/galleries/82914/stunning-images-of-the-worlds-most-beautiful-rivers?page=1
In this Psalm, at least, the Lord makes a fruitful, peaceful, orderly, blessed creation not in spite of the chaos waters, but by means of those waters, once chaotic and destructive, now tamed and life-giving.
Which is one of those thoughts with Ramifications…
…at the personal level, as the chaos waters encroach
…as we look at the Cross
…all the way up to the huge questions of ‘why the Fall?’
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