Behold Our God // God’s Grandeur

Each week I get an amazing opportunity.  I get to lead our congregation in song, declaring through music the greatness of God and beauty of the gospel.  There is one song in particular that we sing and each and every time it blows me away.  The song is “Behold Our God” put out by Sovereign Grace Ministries.  If you haven’t had an opportunity to hear the song or sing it with us I invite you to listen to it HERE.

This song at the heart of it is a song that captures God’s grandeur, genius, gospel, and glory.  If you think about it that’s a lot to fit into one song, and that is a lot for us to sing and then just move onto the next song.  So what I would like to do for my next few blogs is break down this song verse by verse and explore the truths packed into this song.

Verse 1: God’s Grandeur

“Who has held the oceans in His hands?  Who has numbered every grain of sand?  King’s and nations tremble at His voice, All creation rises to rejoice!”

Sometimes in our own little world we lose sight of just how big, and how grand God is.  The first verse of this song helps put things in perspective, “Who has held the oceans in His hands?  Who has numbered every grain of sand?”  Have I? No.  Have you?  I think not.  Our God is the one who created the mighty oceans we see, and he created all of those tiny little pieces of sand.  Have you ever ventured to the ocean on vacation?  In just the spot you put your towel down on there are thousands of little grains of sand underneath you.  As you gaze out to the ocean, what is the furthest thing you can see?  Ocean!  God created that, ponder that for a little bit.

The verse continues, “Kings and nations tremble at His voice, all creation rises to rejoice.”  What a perfect picture of the reality of the grandeur of God.  Psalm 104:31-32 says, “May the glory of the Lord endure forever; may the Lord rejoice in his works, who looks on the earth and it trembles…” Have we grown so comfortable in our own skin, and so comfortable with the small picture of God we created that we no longer tremble at the thought of Him?  When I say tremble, I don’t mean because God is angry  or  abusive, but because He is GRAND.  We should tremble because as giant as those oceans seem, God is bigger.  As space exploration continues and we see just how big the universe is…God is bigger.  It is not even possible for us to fully wrap our minds around just how huge God is.

Francis Chan says it well in his book Crazy Love, “Not being able to fully understand God is frustrating, but it is ridiculous for us to think we have the right to limit God to something we are capable of comprehending.  What a stunted, insignificant god that would be!  If my mind is the size of a soda can and God is the size of all the oceans, it would be stupid for me to say He is only the small amount of water I can scoop into my little can.” 

The verse doesn’t end on trembling, the verse ends with rejoicing.  God in grandeur could have sat in heaven and watched his fallen creation go down in flames.  But he didn’t, Paul tells us in Romans, “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.  For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”   The grand creator of the universe cared about you and me enough to sacrifice himself on our behalf.  That is cause for rejoicing!  Let us tremble at His grandeur, and let us rejoice in his grace and mercy.