A Verse A Day (Day 13)

“The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims God’s handiwork.” Psalm 19:1 

 

Firmament. What a strangely familiar/unfamiliar term. I remember it chiefly from this snatch of the 19^th Psalm, and from a few measures of a song my college choir rehearsed and sang, when the tenors finally got to sing a high note in full voice. Even now when I read the word I hear it as an F with the dotted-eighth, sixteenth, and accented E quarter note rhythm. It feels much more majestic that way. 

 

The psalmist might be singing, but is also – literally and metaphorically – reaching for the stars. The great blue yonder, that dome above the earth, the heavens, the “there” that is “up there” but so far beyond our reach that we can only point to it and wonder. The real that is so unlike reality that we cannot describe it. Of course today we know that the firmament is not “up there” like a dome but “out there” from every perspective point of the globe. We have explored and probed and landed and fetched; we have sent moving telescopes out into the depths, only to be astounded anew at the abundance, the beginnings and endings, the constancy of change. 

 

The firmament. To those of us in the space age it seems like the final frontier, but the psalmist sees more. Even when we speak of the firmament as infinite, ever-expanding space, the psalmist has something to say: Beyond it all is something more, namely, God.  

 

I’m going to hold this claim, “the firmament proclaims God’s handiwork” all week long.