The Creator's Majesty

Sometimes those of us who live here get spoiled by God’s beauty in the Driftless Area of Wisconsin. We never get tired of the majesty God has extended to our physical homes in this earthly realm. We think there’s nowhere as beautiful as this.

But there are places where God’s majesty through nature is even more powerfully expressed than in the Driftless Area. We spent a week in Utah with friends and were able to experience Zion National Park with its towering mountains and the Virgin River Gorge. And I’ve been blessed to experience two raft trips through the Grand Canyon on the Colorado River. When God’s majesty is “up close and personal,” we understand how important it is to Him to express His majesty for our benefit.

We usually run out of words to describe God’s natural creation. But the word “majesty” itself deserves special attention as we use it to describe God, his son Jesus, and the Holy Spirit.

Psalm 8 opens with a simple, but powerful and personal statement: “Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! We could call Psalm 8 the “Majesty Psalm” since it reflects on all the ways our Lord has expressed his majesty through creation. There is a paragraph in a book called The Christian Imagination which states: “Beauty is one of the few things that calls us back to God, which reminds us of his goodness, vitality and reality which embodies the beautiful.” The poet John Keats offers a line with a strong connection: “beauty is truth, and truth is beauty.” These lines connect God’s beauty and his creation with his very being.

What is majesty? We can define it as sovereign power, authority, and dignity. Is majesty something we can truly define, or experience and understand only through its physical presence? It is God’s creation that we recognize as something only an all-powerful God can do, and he creates these places to please his human creation. Only he could have created the beauty, complexity and diversity by connecting sky, land, and water. God’s creation physically sustains us, but it also spiritually sustains us. Psalm 8 connects God’s name and His majesty---they cannot be disconnected.

The name of God refers to the being of God and encompasses all of His attributes. Much of Psalm 8 talks about His natural creation. What’s more relevant is that it also talks about how God gave man dignity and responsibility for His creation. If the whole universe is small in the sight of the Divine Creator, how much less significant are we? Yet, these verses continually stress the significance of humans, who were created in the image and likeness of God to exercise dominion over the rest of creation.

1 Chronicles 29:11 says “Yours, Lord, is the kingdom and the glory and the splendor for everything is heaven and earth is yours.”

In Job 3 37:22 we read “Out of the north he comes in golden splendor, God comes in awesome majesty.”

In the Old Testament, God’s majesty is recognized and appreciated. There’s a momentous change, though, in the New Testament. God’s majesty is expressed though his son Jesus. Jude 1:24-25 states: “I present before you with great joy the only God our Savior be glory, majesty, power and authority through Jesus Christ our Lord, before all ages, now and forever more! Amen.”

It’s much easier to recognize physical majesty than to relate it to a name. But we have a God who calls Himself the “I AM,” and that covers any and all words we humans could use to describe Him. Our world may be flawed as a result of human failure, but the majesty of our Lord’s creation is still visible in His fingerprints on the natural world, the wilderness, and in human beings who reflect the Creator’s beauty. He did make us in his image, after all.

Reference Readings

Psalm 8:1-9

Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name?in all the earth!

Jude 1:25

?To the only God?our Savior be glory, majesty, power and authority, through Jesus Christ our Lord, before all ages, now and forevermore!