Guest Post: Rejoice and Depend on Your Creator

1. All Creatures by Necessity Utterly Depend on God’s Provision

“These all look to you, to give them their food in due season… When you send forth your Spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the ground.” –Psalm 104:27,30

Before the passage above, we see that all creatures utterly depend on God. Here are some of the passages: 

Psa 104:23  Man goes out to his work… 

Psa 104:25  Here is the sea, great and wide…

Psa 104:26  There go the ships and Leviathan…

Here, whether small “young lions” or large “Leviathan,” animals or humans utterly depend on God for His daily sustenance. All of these look to Him for their food in due season.

As creatures, by necessity, we depend on God. This is proven by the doctrine of providence. According to the Baptist Catechism question # 14: 

Q. What is God’s work of providence?

A. God’s works of providence are His most holy, wise, and powerful preserving and governing all His creatures and all their actions. 

He sustains, governs, and preserves everything in the cosmos. Without His mighty hand over every detail of our lives, we will cease to exist! If He takes away our breath, we will die and return to the dust (v.29)! All creatures gather what the LORD gives. All creatures are filled with good things when the LORD opens His hand (v.28).

He sends forth the Spirit of life that He may animate all living creatures. Therefore, everything in the cosmos, the moon, the stars, the sun, the planets, the animals, and humans move and live and have their being from God alone. Our entire existence depends on Him whether we acknowledge it or not. That’s the truth! So the atheist denies the One who created them and daily sustains their breath!

Unbelieving rebel sinners benefit from God’s common grace and mock Him with their lives but the believers rejoice and live joyfully for God.

2. All of God’s People Joyfully Live for God’s Glory

I will sing to the LORD as long as I live; I will sing praise to my God while I have being. May my meditation be pleasing to him, for I rejoice in the LORD. –Psalm 104:33,34

After stating the universal truth that everything depends on God for their existence as their Creator, the Psalmist rejoices! 

His response is one that is full of praise, and rejoicing. This is a personal response to seeing and knowing the humbling truth that His life entirely depends on His Maker, that without the LORD, he is nothing. He cannot respond in arrogance because He knows God’s majesty and glory are revealed through the creation. John Calvin famously writes, 

“…it is evident that man never attains to a true self-knowledge until he have previously contemplated the face of God, and come down after such contemplation to look into himself. For (such is our innate pride) we always seem to ourselves just, and upright, and wise, and holy, until we are convinced, by clear evidence, of our injustice, vileness, folly, and impurity.” (Institutes of the Christian Religion. Book 1. Chapter 1. Section 2)

A true believer, redeemed by the grace of God in Christ rejoices in Him. He has no other conclusion than to sing the praises of the LORD as long as he lives and that He may live a life that is pleasing to His sight.

Living for God is impossible without Christ

But living for God with joy and adoration is impossible apart from Christ. Christ is the Son of God, who is the Creator of all things, and apart from Him, we cannot truly live for the glory of God. 

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men.”   –John 1:1-4

Christ is the source of life for He is the Life! Many people who may be “living” today, are in great danger because they fail to acknowledge the very source of their being. We do not believe in a generic God. We worship the One True God, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit! Christ, who is the expressed and exact imprint of God’s image made the Father known to us so that we can truly know Him. 

Apart from knowing, believing, and embracing the fact that Christ live the life that we cannot live, and died the death that is ours, it is impossible to say that we believe in God. Only those who were freed from the slavery of sin, covered by His blood from the wrath of God, declared right before God’s court by His righteousness, and sanctified by the Spirit can bless the LORD. Being one with Christ, we can give immortal praises in humble dependence on the One who gives us life as long as we live.

To God be the glory!