God's Creation: A Little Higher than Us

This summer, Stephen Hawking, the wheelchair-bound physicist, helped launch a major new effort to search for signs of intelligent alien life. “The new initiative is scheduled to operate for 10 years and will search for signs of non-naturally occurring communications in both radio frequencies and laser transmissions. The initiative will scan the 1 million stars closest to earth in the Milky Way, as well as the 100 closest galaxies.”  At a media event for this project, explaining why he thought it was important and why he was personally supporting it, Hawking said, “We are alive. We are intelligent. We must know.”

Well, we do know. We are not the only intelligent beings in Creation. Apart from God Himself, there are also angelic beings. And so today we are going to look at what Scripture tells us about these beings.  

There is a lot we don’t know about angels. We do know that they are spiritual beings, whose purposes include helping us:

Are not all angels ministering spirits sent to serve those who will inherit salvation? – Heb. 1:14

God's Creation: God's Works

Praise the Lord. I will extol the Lord with all my heart in the council of the upright and in the assembly. Great are the works of the Lord; they are pondered by all who delight in them. Glorious and majestic are His deeds, and His righteousness endures forever. He has caused His wonders to be remembered; the Lord is gracious and compassionate. He provides food for those who fear Him; He remembers His covenant forever. – Psalm 111:1-5

He has shown His people the power of His works, giving them the lands of other nations. The works of His hands are faithful and just; all His precepts are trustworthy. They are established for ever and ever, enacted in faithfulness and uprightness. He provided redemption for His people; he ordained His covenant forever—holy and awesome is His name. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; all who follow His precepts have good understanding. To Him belongs eternal praise. – Psalm 111:6-10

Welcome! Today we continue our series called Sound Doctrine and look at God’s works. Obviously this is quite a huge topic. I think we can broadly classify God’s works into three categories: God’s works of creation, God’s work of upholding His creation, and God’s works in dealing with man and creation, most notably His work of redemption accomplished through Jesus’ death and resurrection. We could spend forever on these topics, and we will talk about redemption in detail later in this series. For this reason, I am going to primarily focus on the first of these topics, God’s works of creation.  I will also touch on the second topic, God’s work of upholding His creation, although we will really deal with it more next week when we talk about God’s sovereignty.