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[Music] How to Know Heaven on Earth, a message by Dr. Bruce W. Thielman. Let us give reverent attention to the reading of God's word as it is recorded in the Psalm numbered eight. O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth, who has set thy glory above the heavens.

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Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger. When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained, what is man that thou art mindful of him, and the Son of Man that thou visitest him.

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For thou hast made him a little lower than the angel, and hast crowned him with glory and honor. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands. Thou hast put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field, the fowl of the air and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas.

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O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth. May God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his holy word. [Music] [Music]

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Let us pray. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Our generation will be remembered for many things,

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but surely one of these things is this, that our generation is the generation which has turned starward again. We will be remembered as the people who looked at the heavens once more. We have not looked to the heavens in prayer as the Muslim looks to the east. We have not looked starward in search of ethical guidance as the Hebrew lifts his eyes to the heights of Sinai.

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We cannot say that we look up in act of adoration or devotion. No, we look heavenward as an act of fear. For ours is the generation which first, amongst all the generations of men, was forced to contemplate the solemn truth that in any moment on any day,

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instruments of almost unimaginable destructive power may fall upon us from the sky. And so we never close our radar eyes that scan the heavens, and we never let the pilots and planes of our strategic air command come totally to rest. For we are afraid.

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It's ironic, isn't it? But ours, the generation that was going to make earth like heaven, that ours, the generation that saw itself as having within its capacity to make all things bright and beautiful, our generation, capable, proud in its ability,

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is the generation which looks towards the skies and is afraid of what man can do to man. We are, you see, the first generation able to create dust. I stood in the Dahlem Museum in Berlin, Germany, and looked through the glass top of a case upon an Egyptian sarcophagus and mummy.

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And other American tourists and travelers were gathered about, and a little boy said to his father, "Why don't they clean all of that dirt out of there?" And the boy's father answered, "Don't call that dirt. It took 5,000 years to make that dust." Or I go to a tiny room outside of Milan, a room once used as a stable and then as a barracks,

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that room on which da Vinci splashed the colors of his masterpiece, The Last Supper, and I stand and look at its faded beauty, and I see the dust upon the ground beneath it, and I know that that dust is nothing other than the pigments of that paint. And the picture is disintegrating before our very eyes.

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Across the centuries we are losing it. That's the way dust has always been made, across millennia, thousands of years, or across centuries, hundreds of years. We are the first generation that has it within its capacity to press a button

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and in moments after we have pressed that button, turn an entire city into a column of dust 40,000 feet high. And because we can do that, we scare starvation. Very much so, afraid.

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Like children lost in the woods at night. I've never been lost. Oh, I've made the wrong turn as you've made the wrong turn, but the map was always in the glove compartment or the friend or helpmate was on the corner

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ready to give the word of advice that was necessary to set me right again. I've never really been lost. I think perhaps empathically the moment when I best understood lostness was when as a little child I was taken to see Humperdinck's opera Hansel and Gretel

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and there comes that scene in the opera when the two children who've wandered deep into the Schwarzwald, into the black forest, suddenly realize that they are lost. And the music is ominous and forbidding. And as a little child when I saw that scene, I somehow empathized with it

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and knew then what lostness is. And I feel that same lostness in our generation today. We're walking through the woods, longing to hear a voice, the touch of a hand that will say, "Turn right or left.

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Watch out for that branch, that pit at your feet, the danger that waits for you about that corner." And we talk to ourselves like little children talk on the dark and the cellar stairs when we're trying to appear not afraid when we really are afraid.

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And we come together in places like this. We come together from all different cities and all different walks of life in places like this, kind of crying out like lost children in the dark, hoping we'll hear a voice.

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And we do hear a voice. And it comes to us like an echo from across 2,000 years of history. And it says, "Pray." And it says, "Pray like this.

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Our Father which art in heaven." In heaven? Well, that sets our eyes starward again. And we contemplate all the majesties of heaven

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from our lost and lonely place here in the woods. We look up at the stars. Abraham Lincoln said that he did not see how any man could study the majesty of the heavens and deny the reality of God.

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But Pascal, the great French philosopher and mathematician, in the days before his conversion said, "I look at the aching, agonizing vastnesses of space, and I am terrified." One man looks at the stars and sees God.

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Another man looks at the stars and sees terror. Let us then take the path of compromise. We see God, but we see a God so vast that he terrifies us. We see a God infinitely royal, who can with his fingers make all the objects of the heavens.

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But to see and experience that kind of God, say anything to us, lost and alone in the dark woods? We scramble out onto the edge of space with the toolkits of our intellects. And with plumb line and compass and measuring stick,

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we set ourselves to charting the topography of God. We fail. We can't put deity into a petri dish or put limitless paper around a limitless God. We discover ourselves confronted by a deity who is beyond our understanding,

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beyond our measurement, beyond our comprehension, no exercise of our mind large enough to capture all the vastness that is within him. He might be concerned about planets, but a God like that? Concerned about people, little people like us?

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Oh, we're not going to make the mistake of believing that just because God is large and vast, he cannot be personal. We're not going to launch into an absurdity like that of Edison, who wrote, "I do not accept the God of the theologians, but that there is a divine intelligence I do not doubt."

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How can there be intelligence if there is not someone to be intelligent? Vastness, immensity, the creator and everything that he has made, the very hugeness of God does not deny his person and his personableness. And we're not going to fall for the lines of those who say, "The God who made it all is dead."

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A God big enough to make that could not die. If he ever was, he still is, and if he is now, he always will be. So we'll not make the mistake of believing because this God is big he's not a person, or that he's dead. We'll not make that mistake, but contemplating that kind of God somehow doesn't say anything to the heart, does it?

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We're like the Greeks, who saw the gods as a sphere and a loop on Mount Olympus, totally unconcerned and uninvolved in the affairs of men. Or we're like Job, who goes to the only God he knows and is confronted by this God, and this God says to him, "Where were you when I laid the foundation to the earth?

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Where were you when I put a door before the sea? Where were you when the morning stars first sang together? Can you, with all your begetting, produce a drop of dew? Can you number the clouds or count the flashes of the lightning?

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Can you, Job, utter the word of command and see an eagle rise to the skies in obedience to what you have suggested?" And Job, in the face of all that majesty and might, can only say, "No." And in the face of all that majesty and might, what more can we say? I have a minister friend who watched his church burn to the ground. In fifty minutes it all was gone.

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And he walked amongst the ruins and tried to hang memories on twisted girders and mingled his tears with the ashes. And then he found amongst the ruins a book, and he turned the book over and he read the words, "I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth." And he says that in that sentence he found comfort.

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I will confess I do not understand that. It seems to me that a God who has made all of heaven and earth is perhaps too big to notice children who are lost in the woods at night. And so we listen again. And this voice which says to us, "Pray, pray our Father which art in heaven,"

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this voice has a Galilean accent. This voice is a human voice, a voice like unto our voices. This voice is testifying by its very existence, by the fact that we can hear it, that this God of ours whose fingerprints are seen in stardust reveals his footprints in earth dust.

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Does that mean then that we behold God in the world? I watch the cavalcade of cemeteries and gaudy carnivals that make up life. I behold man's inhumanity to man. I see someone cry out for help and be crushed down with cruelty.

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You contemplate nature red in tooth and claw. And in that kind of a world you see God. Maybe Jeremiah's God, a God who makes man like a potter makes pottery, and if he doesn't like the shape of the vase, smashes them to pieces on the boneyard of history and walks away.

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Perhaps that kind of God is seen in the world. But it's not the same. This voice still speaks. This voice with Galilean accent, this voice manufactured by the movement of muscles as our voices come forth by the movement of muscles. And this voice says to us, "Pray our Father."

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And the word the voice uses is the term of most intimate endearment, the word "Abba." Do not flush when I translate it, but most correctly it is translated, "Daddy." Is that true? Does the voice that comes to us in the lonely lostness of the woods speak the truth

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that it says that we can say to this God who is infinitely royal and made it all, "Daddy"? That kind of intimacy? If that is true, then that makes all the difference. If that is true, then we're talking with a God who understands. If that is true, we can agree with the German poet who wrote, "God is my neighbor."

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If that is true, then we're out of understanding with a little boy who was taken to camp by his mother and father and wrote home two weeks later, "I hope you've not forgotten where you put me." We realize if that is true, if it is told that we can call him "Daddy," that God has not forgotten where he put us. Is that true?

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This voice that speaks of God's being intimately real, we believe is the voice of God himself. And what reason does God have to lie? What reason does royalty have to ever speak anything that is not true? Can something that great become that small? The Greeks did not believe it could.

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The Greeks told the story of how the gods had fire on Olympus and man on earth was cold, and so Prometheus takes part of the fire and brings it to man, and Zeus, the king of the gods, discovers that this is so, and to punish Prometheus, he stripped him naked and chained him to a rock in the midst of the Adriatic,

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where the sun burns him by day and the wind freezes him at night, and each and every day a great bird comes and tears his liver from his living flesh, and every night it grows back again, only to see the torture renewed on the morrow. That's the way the Greeks painted the picture.

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God utterly unconcerned with man. Moses had the problem. God says, "Build for me a tabernacle that I may dwell therein," and Moses says, "How can I build anything that would contain you?"

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And God says, "Twenty boards south and twenty boards north, and eight boards east and west," and God, this great God, comes down in his Shekinah, in his glory, in the holiness of his presence, and occupies an area one yard square. I guess logically that must be true,

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that a God great enough to have made everything that is, could be great enough to make himself that small. The watch is this big, but if the spring in the watch that's that big breaks, the watch is worthless. The rocket is eighteen stories high, but if the valve no thicker than my wrist fails to function,

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the rocket does not fly. And these things are dependent upon small things, so maybe it is so that a God who is that infinitely royal could be so intimately real that I could say to him, "Daddy, Father."

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That's a wonderful word, isn't it? Father. When we think of Father and we think of fairness, we think of Father and we think of justice. Justice? If God is Father, if God is just, can we then still speak to him?

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How is it the psalmist writes the words, "Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? He that has clean hands and a pure heart." My hands are not clean and my heart is not pure. If God is Father and Father means justice, then before that kind of God I can only cry out,

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"Woe is me, for I am undone, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of the people of unclean lips." And is this the end of it? As we stand here lonely like children in the woods at night, crying out for some kind of a voice that says something of meaning to us,

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crying out for direction, contemplating a God so vast that he can mean nothing, or so intimate that he can mean everything, and then in the face of that last confrontation,

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the confrontation which gives us hope and heart, suddenly hear him say, "I'm Father and that means justice, and before justice we have to turn away again." A phrase?

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No, that's not what it means. For you see, this one who speaks to us is the only begotten of God. This one whose voice comes to us whispered across all the centuries is that one who was given by God.

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Real, so real that he was born not a theory, but a cuddly baby on a cold April night, cradled in the moist warmth of a cave stable. So real that he ministered and put his fingers in the running swords of lepers, and with his hand brushed away the scales of night from the eyes of the blind,

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and with a word took twisted hands and made them youthful again, and with a touch made the dead live. That real, so real that when they sprung into a cross, flesh was lacerated and blood flowed and flies,

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flies gathered all around that real, crucified, dead, buried in a tomb borrowed from another man, buried. That real, buried. And he rose again.

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And if there's anything real in all the world, that is real. And if this God you see, who says to us, "Call me Daddy," if this God could come and be born in the woods where we wander, could come and minister in the darkness we know,

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could suffer all the agonies of lostness which the cross was, so that he knows every hurt our hearts are called upon to endure, if this God could die as we die, and then rise again and with his rising again give us promise of rising again,

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if this same God who forgives us in that living and that dying and that rising, if this same God says to us, "Call me Father," then we don't have to be afraid of justice. The Roman Emperor returns home from the war,

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and the armies he's conquered are behind him, and the armies with which he's conquered are before him, and it's a great parade and triumph, and the streets of Rome are filled with the clamor and the celebration,

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and the Emperor's wife with the little boy on her lap are seated on the dais watching, and as the Emperor rides by in his chariot of gold, he waves, and the little boy jumps from his mother's lap and runs down the steps and through the crowd and pushes his way to the side of the street and starts out onto the street,

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and the Roman legionnaire grabs him and says, "Why, you can't go out there! That man's the Emperor!" And the little boy looks up at him and laughs and says, "He may be your Emperor, but he's my father." And in the darkness, you see, of the woods, we hear the voice and take the hand of one who says, "Yes."

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"He made everything that is, but he's my father, and if you'll take my hand, he's your father, too." Intimately real. So we say on occasion, "I'm not a theologian," or we've heard other people say the same thing. But is that true? Is it not instead true that the moment we pray the words, "Our Father who art in heaven,"

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we're making a remarkably profound theological proclamation. We are, as it were, looking at God out of both ends of a telescope at the same time, and seeing him as the maker of everything that is. And at the same time as the one who comes to us in the lonely dark

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and in the person of his Son, gives us his hand and says, "My son, my daughter." Three years ago on the seashore of the East Coast, there was a chubby little lady there who sat beside us every day in the sand, beneath her sunshade and a mammoth hat. She gave advice on how to build sandcastles, contemplated all the events of the day and commented thereon,

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and busied herself with knitting Barbie clothes for her granddaughter. And then one day, as we stretched out there upon the sand, watching the seagulls breaststroke the air and seeing the sunlight butter the beach, there came whispering on the wind the sound of a storm. And we looked out over the water and saw the thunderheads begin to mass.

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And something in the scene led me to say, "O Lord, my God, when I in awesome wonder consider all the worlds thy hands have made, I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder, thy power throughout the universe displayed." And then the group of us began to sing, "Then sings my soul, my Savior God, to thee,

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how great thou art, how great thou art, then sings my soul, my Savior God, to thee, how great thou art, how great thou art." And when we finished the singing, we found the chubby little lady underneath the umbrella was singing too. And she said, "Isn't it wonderful to think that the same God who now rides upon the wings of that storm

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is here upon this beach with us?" [silence] And I went home, and as the storm fell upon us, I wrote this line. "It is true to say that wherever heaven is, there is God.

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But it's equally true to say that wherever God is, there is heaven." "It is true to say that wherever heaven is, there is God. But it's equally true to say that wherever God is, there is heaven." And you know what that means, don't you?

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It means that here in the dark loneliness of the woods, if we have God, we have heaven. On earth. Now. You see, that is to say that though everything that is, is His, He is ours. That is to say, though eternity belongs to Him, His heart belongs to us.

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And that's what we mean when we pray, "Our Father, which art in heaven." Isn't it? [silence] And so, Father, we mumble in the darkness.

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Somehow stars don't reach us. Planets don't move us. But that voice, that voice with Galilean accent, that voice like our voice, comes to us and says,

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"Call Him Father, and do not be afraid." And so we pray. And as we pray, we feel the near. And when thou art near, the darkness becomes the daylight.

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And we are not lost anymore. We are found by our Father. And the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make His face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you.

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The Lord lift up the light of His countenance upon you. And give you and all those whom you love His peace. [silence]