Creation Sings: The Gospel in the Grain Text: Psalm 65:9-13
Introduction: The World as a Sermon
We live in a world that has gone deaf. Our secular, materialist age looks at a field of wheat and sees only potential bushels per acre, commodity prices, and agricultural science. It sees the mechanism but is blind to the meaning. It can explain the "how" of the rain cycle with meticulous, God-given reason, but it is utterly mute on the "why." It is like a man who can diagram a sentence perfectly but has no idea what the sentence means. The result is a world that is exhaustively explained and yet profoundly meaningless. The psalmist here offers the cure for this spiritual deafness. He teaches us to see the world not as a random collection of atoms in motion, but as a sermon preached by God Himself.
This psalm is a direct assault on two ancient and very modern errors. The first is the error of the pagan, who sees the forces of nature, the rain, the sun, the harvest, and worships them. He deifies the creation. He builds an altar to the river god or the sun goddess. The second is the error of the materialist, the sophisticated modern pagan, who sees the same forces and declares them to be nothing more than mindless, impersonal processes. He deifies nothing and so ends up deifying himself, imagining he is the master of it all. Both are idolaters. One worships the river, the other worships the scientist who explains the river. Both refuse to worship the God who made the river.
The psalmist will have none of it. He directs our gaze upward. The rain is not a mere meteorological event; it is a divine visitation. The harvest is not simply the result of good soil and fortunate weather; it is the goodness of God made edible. This passage is a lush, vibrant portrait of God's active, personal, and joyful providence. God is not a distant, deistic clockmaker who wound the world up and let it go. He is the constant, attentive farmer, watering His fields, enriching His soil, and crowning His year. What we are reading is a theology of dirt, water, and sunlight. And in this theology, we find the grammar of the gospel. The way God cares for His earth is a magnificent picture of the way He cares for His people.
The Text
You visit the earth and cause it to overflow; You greatly enrich it; The stream of God is full of water; You establish their grain, for thus You establish the earth. You water its furrows abundantly, You smooth its ridges, You soften it with showers, You bless its growth. You crown the year with Your goodness, And Your paths drip with richness. The pastures of the wilderness drip, And the hills gird themselves with rejoicing. The meadows are clothed with flocks And the valleys are covered with grain; They make a loud shout, indeed, they sing.
(Psalm 65:9-13 LSB)
Divine Visitation and Abundant Provision (v. 9)
We begin with God's direct and personal intervention:
"You visit the earth and cause it to overflow; You greatly enrich it; The stream of God is full of water; You establish their grain, for thus You establish the earth." (Psalm 65:9)
Notice the pronoun: "You." This is not "the rain falls" but "You visit." The Hebrew for "visit" here is not a casual drop-by. It means to attend to, to care for, to intervene with purpose. When God visits, things happen. He visited Sarah, and she conceived Isaac (Gen. 21:1). He visited His people in Egypt and brought them out (Ex. 4:31). Here, His visitation results in overflowing abundance. This is the opposite of a closed, mechanistic universe. History and meteorology are in the hands of a personal God who acts.
He doesn't just provide; He "greatly enriches" the earth. The language is one of lavish, overwhelming generosity. This is not bare subsistence. This is a portrait of a God who delights in giving good gifts. And where does this enrichment come from? "The stream of God is full of water." This is a beautiful poetic image. The pagans had their river gods, limited and local. The God of Israel has "the" stream, the heavenly source of all earthly rivers. He is not one deity among many; He owns the water main. All the rain that falls, all the rivers that flow, are but taps connected to His infinite reservoir.
And the purpose of this visit is clear: "You establish their grain." God's provision is not haphazard; it is purposeful. He intends to feed His people. But the final clause is crucial: "for thus You establish the earth." The stability of the entire planet, its settled order, is tied to God's covenantal provision of grain. A world where seedtime and harvest continue is a world held in place by the faithfulness of God (Gen. 8:22). This is common grace, yes, but it is a grace that preaches. It testifies that the God who keeps the planet spinning and the wheat growing is a God who keeps His promises.
The Meticulous Farmer (v. 10)
The psalmist then zooms in from the grand cosmic picture to the intimate details of God's agricultural work.
"You water its furrows abundantly, You smooth its ridges, You soften it with showers, You bless its growth." (Psalm 65:10)
This is not a distant, impersonal flood. This is careful, tender cultivation. God attends to the individual furrows. He breaks up the hard clods of earth. He softens the ground with gentle showers, not destructive torrents. And finally, He "blesses its growth." The growth is not an automatic biological process. It is a result of a divine blessing. A farmer can do everything right, plow the field, sow the seed, but unless God gives the growth, unless He blesses it, there will be no harvest. As Paul says of his ministry, "I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth" (1 Cor. 3:6). This is true in the fields and it is true in the church.
This verse is a death blow to all forms of nature worship. The earth is not a goddess, Gaia, with inherent life-giving power. The earth is passive. It is plowed, watered, softened, and blessed by a transcendent Creator. The power is not in the soil; the power is in the God who made the soil. He is the meticulous farmer, and the whole earth is His field.
The Crown of the Year (v. 11)
The result of this divine labor is a year crowned with glory.
"You crown the year with Your goodness, And Your paths drip with richness." (Psalm 65:11)
The harvest is the coronation of the year. It is the visible manifestation of God's goodness. The word "goodness" here is not a sentimental platitude. It refers to God's covenantal bounty, His tangible, material favor. When you eat a piece of bread, you are tasting the goodness of God that has crowned the year.
And then we have this stunning image: "Your paths drip with richness." The picture is of God's chariot driving across the heavens and over the land, and wherever His wheel tracks go, abundance and fertility spring up. The richness, the "fatness" in some translations, just drips from His presence. He is not a stingy God. His very presence brings overflowing blessing. This is a world saturated with the glory and generosity of God. You cannot walk anywhere without stumbling over evidence of it.
Creation's Joyful Response (v. 12-13)
The psalm concludes with the response of the creation itself to God's lavish goodness.
"The pastures of the wilderness drip, And the hills gird themselves with rejoicing. The meadows are clothed with flocks And the valleys are covered with grain; They make a loud shout, indeed, they sing." (Psalm 65:12-13)
The blessing is so abundant that it spills over into the "pastures of the wilderness." Even the places not directly cultivated by man receive the dripping richness of God's path. Nothing is outside the scope of His generous care. The result is that the creation erupts in worship. The hills are personified as girding themselves, like a man preparing for a festival, with rejoicing. The meadows are not just dotted with sheep; they are "clothed" with them. The valleys are not just growing grain; they are "covered" with it.
And what is the result of all this? "They make a loud shout, indeed, they sing." The created order, inanimate and animate, is pictured as a massive choir, roaring its praises to the Creator. The rustling of the grain in the wind is a hymn. The bleating of the flocks is a psalm. The rolling hills are shouting for joy. This is what the Apostle Paul meant when he said that God's invisible attributes are clearly perceived in the things that have been made (Rom. 1:20). Creation is not silent. It is singing, shouting, testifying to the goodness and power of its Maker. The problem is not that the creation is mute, but that fallen man is deaf.
The Gospel in the Furrows
This psalm is not just about agriculture; it is a parable of redemption. The condition of the unplowed, unwatered ground is a picture of the fallen human heart. It is hard, dry, and fruitless. Left to itself, it produces only thorns and thistles. It is a spiritual wilderness.
But then God "visits." In the incarnation, God the Son visited His earth. Jesus Christ walked the dusty paths of this world, and where He walked, blessing flowed. He is the ultimate expression of God's visitation.
And what does He do for the hard heart of a sinner? He does the work of a divine farmer. The preaching of the law is the plow that breaks up our hard-hearted pride, digging deep furrows of conviction. Then comes the "stream of God," the Holy Spirit, who is poured out because of Christ's work. He is the living water who softens the soil of our hearts. He is the gentle shower that prepares us to receive the seed of the Word.
God plants the seed of the gospel in that prepared soil, and He "blesses its growth." He causes faith to spring up. He cultivates the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience. He crowns our lives, not with grain, but with His goodness in salvation. His paths in our lives drip with the richness of His grace, mercy, and forgiveness.
And the result? The result is worship. The redeemed heart, once a silent wilderness, now learns to sing. We, who were dead, are clothed in the righteousness of Christ, like meadows clothed with flocks. We are filled with the fruit of righteousness, like valleys covered with grain. We join the cosmic choir. We learn the song of the hills and the shout of the valleys, the song of the redeemed, and we sing praises to the God who visited us, who cultivated our barren souls, and who crowned our lives with a harvest of salvation that will last for eternity.