Psalm 104 is a hymn oriented to nature. The Israelite Monarchy may be the time of writing for this psalm. However, Pannenberg refers to it as an exilic psalm. The poet combines profound religious thought with reflecting on nature in an intimate way. The creation focus of Psalm 104 is like that of Psalm 19:1-6 and Genesis 1, where the Lord created sun, moon and stars (which other people worshiped as gods/goddesses), and the creation praises the Creator. Also, in Psalms 96:9-13; 98:7-9; and 148 (all), creation itself does the praise-singing. Other passages that marvel at creation include Psalms 8 and 89; Proverbs 8:23-31. See Isaiah 40 passim and Isaiah 46:1 ff. for a prophetic emphasis on the Lord God as Creator, in mocking contrast to the inability of idols made by human beings to do anything. Isaiah 40:12 ff. parallels Job 38:1 ff. The reign of God is without beginning or end, not attained by a fight with chaos. Further, the sequence here of plants before the stars is like Genesis 1, largely because they belong closely to the earth and to depreciate the stars in comparison with the divine rank that the stars had in the religious world around Israel, especially Babylon.[1] One parallel to Psalm 104 in another culture is that of Ikhnaton, Pharaoh Amenophes IV (1375-1358 BC), Hymn to the Sun. it refers to the beauty of the sun, affirming it has the beginning of life. The sun blinds the earth with its love. The world is in silence and darkness until the sin rises. Animals, like cattle, birds, and sheep, as well as vegetation, offer praise to the sun. The sun gives life and breath. The sun (Aton) makes the Nile in the Netherworld in order to preserve the people of Egypt. Aton is in the heart of the poet and holds the earth in its hand.
In Psalm 104: 24-26, wonder fills the sea, to the point where Leviathan plays in it. In fact, one can sense the exuberance of the writer. James Herriot picks up on this exuberance in the title of his book, The Lord God Made Them All. We find such exuberance as well in the New Testament, for the Lord is worthy to receive glory, honor, and power, for the Lord created all things (Revelation 4:11). 24 O Lord, how manifold are your works! In wisdom (hokmah), you have made them all. Creation through wisdom appears elsewhere in Scripture (Proverbs 3:19, and the parallel Psalm 136:5, as well as Jeremiah 10:12 and 51:15). Indeed, in Proverbs 8:22 ff., God creates Wisdom first. A common observation among scholars today is that the Torah and the Prophets view the Lord primarily in terms of covenant, while the wisdom tradition views the Lord primarily through the Lord as creator. If one observes life, one can see the harmony in creation and live in right relation to it.[2] Such wisdom teaching is akin to the New Testament's understanding that God created and sustains everything through Christ; see such passages as John 1:1-5, 10, 14, where God explicitly has created everything through the logoV/Word. Also see Hebrews 1:2-3; 1 Corinthians 8:6; Colossians 1:13-17 ("firstborn," from prwtotokoV, can mean either first in order or highest in rank = supreme over). The carol/hymn "Of the Father's Love Begotten"[3] reflects this outlook.
Of the Father's love begotten
ere the worlds began to be,
he is Alpha and Omega,
he the Source, the Ending he,
of the things that are, that have been,
and that future years shall see,
evermore and evermore!
…
now he shines, the long-expected;
let creation praise its Lord,
evermore and evermore!
…
let no tongue on earth be silent,
ev'ry voice in concert ring,
evermore and evermore!
Further, the earth is full of your creatures. 25 Yonder is the sea, great and wide, creeping things innumerable are there, living things both small and great. 26 There go the ships, and Leviathan that you formed to sport in it. Leviathan is a serpentine or crocodilian sea monster. The LXX translates it as δράκων (dragon, serpent, sea monster), imagery picked up in the book of Revelation (as chapters 12-13). Take the blue whale, for example. They migrate farther than any other known animal, about 12,000 miles every year. The blue whale’s heart weighs 1,300 pounds and beats only about 10 times per minute. (By comparison, the human heart beats at least 70 times per minute.) The blue whale’s tail can generate 500 horsepower! Indeed, wonders fill the sea.
In Psalm 104: 27-35, the Lord is the preserver of life. The Lord cares for each individual creature, providing it with food and water at the right time, a sign of the Lord preserving creation.[4] 27 These all look to you to give them their food in due season; 28 when you give to them, they gather it up; when you open your hand, they are filled with good things. 29 When you hide your face, they are dismayed. The poetically expressed fear of all creatures is that the Lord might "hide his face," that is remove the divine presence, from them. They would experience dismay ("terror" or "panic") because if the Lord were to take away their breath (ruach), they would die. (The same Hebrew root words for "hide," "face" and "dismay" appears in Psalm 30:7.)[5] Theologically, this notion connects with the infinity of God as the source of the life-sustaining nearness of God. For God to turn away is to create fear because it would mean denial of life.[6]Thus, when you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust. 30 When you send forth your spirit, you create them; and you renew the face of the ground. The breath of the Lord preserves all life. This suggests that life presupposes life. Humanity had nothing to do with creating the conditions for its own life.[7] Ruach is a mysteriously invisible natural force that declares itself especially in the movement of the wind. This is the background of the statement in John 3:8. This passage says the Spirit is the incalculable force of the origin of all life. The breath of the Lord is a creative life force.[8]The analogy in human experience may be something like when we say that a person brings a certain energy wherever they go, are a very force of nature, the embodiment of creativity, the personification of energy. Whatever they do and wherever they go, they bring force, creative insight, change and something new to the table. People connected to this Spirit now bring to their narrow slice of the world this same creative force and energy. What changes might we expect? The Spirit is the source of life. The life of the creature is through the divine Spirit and the continued enjoyment of life is the result of a loan of life at creation. Without this connection with the Lord, creation could never reach its goal.[9] The sending forth of the spirit suggests movement within time and space. The Lord not only creates but also sustains creation. The creative activity continues as the Lord providentially gives ongoing breath and sustenance (daily food from the hand of the Lord to the creatures the Lord has made, as also in Psalm 145:15-16 and 147:7-9). The Spirit of the Lord is the life-giving principle, to which all creatures owe life, movement, and activity. This is particularly true of animals, plants, and humans.[10] This verse also connects with the notion of the Lord doing new things in creation, such as its evolution, as a creative act of the Lord.[11] Wind, breath and spirit are three often-interchangeable meanings of the Hebrew word ruach; similarly, pneuma in Greek (as in the play on words in John 3), from which we get our word pneumatic (air-filled). So, unless the Lord sustains their breath, all creatures return to the dust from which they are made (see Genesis 2:7; 3:19; Psalm 90:3; Ecclesiastes 12:7; Job 34:14-15: "If God should take back the spirit [ruach] to himself, and gather to himself his breath, all flesh would perish together, and all mortals return to dust."). In contrast, when God sends forth the spirit (the divine ruach, the "life-giving breath" - NET) God creates them (anew). The Old Testament uses 'bara' for God's creating (as Genesis 1:1, 21, 27 [three times]; 2:3, 4). 31 May the glory of the Lord endure forever; may the Lord rejoice in the works of the Lord—32 who looks on the earth and it trembles, who touches the mountains and they smoke. This reminds us that earth can be an enemy. 33 I will sing to the Lord as long as I live; I will sing praise to my God while I have being. See as well Psalm 96:12 and 98:7-8. There is joy within the world because of God's creating and sustaining majestic power. Passages with "sing to the Lord" are in association with praising God or thanking God; e.g., see Exodus 15:1, 21; 1 Chronicles 16:7-10, 23-26; 2 Chronicles 20:21; Psalms 13:6; 95:1-2; 98:1; 147:7; 149:1; Isaiah 42:10-12; Jeremiah 20:13. 34 May my meditation thoughts or musings of this psalm be pleasing to the Lord (see Psalm 19:14), for I rejoice in the Lord.
In verse 35b, the psalm concludes with Bless the Lord, offer praise to the God of Israel, O my soul. We find this summons in several places in the Psalter (e.g., Psalm 103:1, 2, 20, 21, 22; 115:18). Praise the Lord (Hallelujah)! In Hebrew, the phrase is Halelu-yah, from halal ("to praise"). Yah is simply a short form of Yahweh's name. Therefore, "Hallelujah" means "Praise Yah(weh)."
Where in nature do we see straight lines, exact triangles, perfect circles and other standardized shapes? Nowhere. As mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, a man I will tell you more about in a moment, put it, "Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line." Nature does not follow traditional Euclidian geometry.
Let us think for a moment about the lowly cauliflower, for example. If we want to get some sense of measurement of a cauliflower head, we can easily weigh it and produce a number. However, if we want to measure its surface, we have great difficulty arriving at a number, for the surface is neither flat nor smooth. To measure it, we would need some way to measure irregularity or roughness. What is more, if we cut off one of the florets and study it, we see that it, like the whole cauliflower head, is also rough. The same is true if we break a sprig off the floret - and is even true of smaller pieces of the sprig. In fact, each smaller part is like the whole cauliflower, only more diminutive.
It turns out that this principle applies to many things in nature, such as trees. If we look at a tree closely, we see that the individual branches look like small trees, and the same is true of the smaller branches off the larger ones.
Now let us return to the mathematician. Mandelbrot was not the first to notice that in natural formations, small parts often resemble the whole. However, before him, people regarded this feature as an isolated curiosity. In the 1970s, however, Mandelbrot took this phenomenon - which he calls "self-similarity" - and used it as a basis on which to build a new kind of geometry, a non-Euclidian geometry for applying science and measurement to non-smooth objects in the real world. Self-similarity is the property of having a substructure analogous or identical to an overall structure. For example, a part of a line segment is itself a line segment, and thus a line segment exhibits self-similarity. By contrast, no part of a circle is a circle, and thus a circle does not exhibit self-similarity. Many natural phenomena, such as clouds and plants, are self-similar to some degree. In the process, he coined the word fractals to refer to these irregular shapes. However, more importantly, he demonstrated that the irregularly shaped objects in nature do not have a random shape. Such shapes follow simple rules to generate seemingly complex and chaotic patterns. Mandelbrot said the roughness of shapes in nature is not a mess but something in which he found "very strong traces of order." (He developed the word fractals from the Latin fractus, which means broken.) Mandelbrot went on to write a book about his new geometry based on fractals, which he also described as the "science of roughness." He said he preferred the word roughness to irregularity because grammatically, "irregularity is the contrary of regularity," whereas in nature, the contrary of regularity is rough.
One more example sometimes used to explain fractals is a coastline, which, of course, is irregular or "rough." On a map, we might represent a small section of coastline as a straight line, but even small sections do not form straight lines. If we look at that section closely, we see that its composition is that of several small peninsulas and inlets. If we look even more closely, we see that each peninsula and inlet has its own bays and headlands. If we continue to look at even smaller sections, we will discover that the pattern is always present. Moreover, the recurring pattern of roughness is more or less the same, no matter how closely we look at the object in question.
Understanding fractals has made possible significant advances in fields as varied as physics, music, linguistics, weather forecasting, medicine, economics and even moviemaking. In the case of the latter, for example, a film director needing a shot with a mountain in the background can put into a computer a fractal algorithm of a pattern of peaks and crags, and the computer can generate the whole mountain, reproducing those basic shapes on varying scales. Granted, the result is not a real mountain, but it looks like a real one. In addition, if the director decides the mountain is not rugged enough for the scene, the special-effects people can simply bump up the roughness number and regenerate the mountain.
All of this suggests that nature does have an order, even if the order is not the smooth surface on which Euclidean geometry paints. Rather, the order of nature is more like the rough surface of fractal geometry. If you have followed me so far, we can think of this type of order in nature as a metaphor of the type of order we find in human life. Human beings are part of nature. What if we viewed what occurs in the human life as having an order something like that of fractal geometry? Human life is hardly smooth. It has all the twists and turns that we find in nature. In our limited experience of our personal lives or of human life on this planet, it may appear irregular. In reality, it may simply be rough; having an order that one might perceive if one could gain the proper perspective. It has a design, if you please, even if our limited perspective makes it look random.
[1] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, Volume II, 13, 117.
[2] Carole R. Fontaine says (in Women's Bible Commentary [Westminster John Knox Press], 153):
"Unlike the Torah and the Prophets, which view God primarily in terms of covenant and national history, for the wisdom tradition God is primarily Creator. God used Wisdom to create the world and placed Wisdom within creation, where people could observe its harmonies and live in right relation to it ... ."
[3] Aurelius Clemens Prudentius, 348-410
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