God Delights in His Wilderness
The NRSV suggests reading this psalm alongside Genesis 1 so what might God have felt and said to himself at the end of those first seven days. What might have given him most pleasure? What might have worried him? And what might he have said if he had known what he knows now?
Try reading this psalm aloud. Instead of stopping and pondering over every line read it quickly. Let it wash over you. If you are musical try to hear and feel the music rather than intellectualise the content. When you have more time, go back and focus on a few verses that have a special appeal for you.
Notice the different impressions of God on which the psalmist focuses. The invisible God: not the God you see but the God you know by what he does (vv 3-4). The creator God, whom all nature has learned to respect and whose boundaries to honour (vv 7-9). The caring God, as one part of nature readily gives a service to others (vv 10-16). The orderly God, where each part of nature has its own place (vv 18-23).
Even Leviathan, that Ugaritic monster of the deep who lost out in his battle with Baal and who features elsewhere in the psalms as one over whom God has total control (74: 13-14) appears here and in Job (41: 5) almost as God’s ‘plaything’ and certainly as one whom God formed (8: 26).
This is the God to whom the whole of creation, inanimate as well as animate, relates. All creation knows its master as it discovers the hand that feeds it.
As a boy Muir loved intricate machinery, with all the parts working together towards a desired end, so not surprisingly he saw the whole of creation as a collection of fragments each complete in itself, yet all the time revealing itself in different ways, shaping and re-shaping itself with the intricacy of complex machinery. This is perhaps what led him to say, ‘When we try to pick out anything by itself we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.’