For with thee is the fountain of life: in thy light shall we see light.

So wrote the psalmist a good many years ago (Psalm 36:9). His point is a powerful one: only as we view the world through the spectacles of God’s revelation–the 66 books of the Bible, being the Older and Newer Testamentts–do we see things as they really are. Here we view matters such as:

• 

  Detail from the New England Primer

  SPECIAL CREATION: God’s speaking the worlds into being by His powerful word in just six days

• HISTORIC FALL: The space-time fall of our first parents, Adam and Eve, from a relationship of uprightness before God to a state of separation and fallenness, disconnectedness from Him, and their subsequent generational line likewise separated from their Creator. Thus the words of Isaiah the prophet: Behold your sins have separated you from your God.

• DIRECT AND PERSONAL PROVIDENCE: Nevertheless, God remains in control of all things. Our first parents may have been ousted from paradise, but our God has never been ousted from Heaven. He is sovereign over all, doing all His holy will. Psalm 115 makes this clear. “Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but to thy name give glory… our God is in the heavens, and he does whatever he pleases.”

• INTENTIONAL REDEMPTION: Thus the words of the hymn, ‘Hail sovereign love that first began / the scheme to rescue fallen man / Hail matchless free, eternal grace / That found my soul a hiding place.” Later the hymnwriter could say of Christ, the Savior, “On Him almighty vengeance fell / thus must have borne a world to hell! / He bore it for a chosen race / And thus became their hiding place.”

• SECOND COMING / FINAL STATE: There are just two states after this life–Heaven and Hell. Leading up to that must be our own demise–we grow old and fail, or are taken in the prime of life or before old age–or as the old benediction said of Jesus, “Until You come for us or until You call us…”

 

All of life belongs to God. Abraham Kuyper once wrote: “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!”

 

Fill Thou my life, O Lord my God,
In every part with praise,
That my whole being may proclaim
Thy being and Thy ways.
2
Not for the lip of praise alone,
Nor e’en the praising heart,
I ask, but for a life made up
Of praise in every part:
3
Praise in the common things of life,
Its goings out and in;
Praise in each duty and each deed,
However small and mean.
4
Fill every part of me with praise;
Let all my being speak
Of Thee and of Thy love, O Lord,
Poor though I be and weak.
5
So shall no part of day or night
From sacredness be free,
But all my life, in every step,
Be fellowship with Thee.

Horatius Bonar

Notes:

(1) Detail from the New England Primer: “A is for Adam, and in Adam’s Fall, we sinned all.”  Would that our children today were as well-schooled as those of the Puritan settlers in New England!

(2) Abraham Kuyper was a Dutch politician, journalist, statesman and theologian.

(3) Horatius Bonar: Scottish pastor and hymn-writer par excellence. Sing to music by Thomas Haweis