The Owner's Rebuke Text: Psalm 104:5-9
Introduction: The World is Not Your Own
We are living in an age of cosmic vandalism. Our generation believes it has stumbled into a house with no owner, a machine with no mechanic, a story with no author. And so, finding the pantry full and the lights on, they have concluded that the house runs itself and that they are therefore free to do whatever they please. They scrawl graffiti on the walls, they knock over the furniture, and they teach their children that the very idea of a landlord is a tyrannical spook, invented to keep them from their fun. This is the central lie of materialism, of secularism, of every God-hating worldview. They all begin with the premise that we are autonomous, that the cosmos is a brute fact, and that we are ultimately accountable to no one.
Psalm 104 is a direct assault on this entire rebellious framework. It is a hymn of praise to the Landlord. It is a celebration of the Creator's absolute, meticulous, and ongoing sovereignty over every molecule of His creation. The psalmist does not see a random collection of atoms; he sees a world teeming with the genius and authority of God. He sees that the world is not just made, but managed. It is not just a product, but a project.
The portion of the psalm before us today is particularly potent because it deals with the most chaotic and untamable forces in the ancient imagination: the earth and the sea. To the pagan mind, the sea was a symbol of chaos, a monstrous, divine power that had to be appeased or battled. The stability of the earth was a fragile thing, always threatened by the turbulent deep. But the psalmist will have none of it. He shows us that the earth is not teetering on the back of a cosmic turtle; it is founded by God. The sea is not a rival deity; it is a creature that flees at God's rebuke. This passage is a glorious declaration of the Creator/creature distinction. There is God, and there is everything else. And everything else does exactly what it is told.
As we walk through these verses, we must see them not as quaint poetry but as foundational theology. This is the bedrock of our confidence. The God who set the boundaries for the ocean is the same God who sets the boundaries for evil. The God who founded the earth is the God who founded the Church. The God who rebuked the floodwaters is the same God who, through Christ, rebukes the chaos in our own souls. If He can command the geology of the planet, He can certainly handle the details of your life.
The Text
He founded the earth upon its place, So that it will not shake forever and ever. You covered it with the deep as with a garment; The waters were standing above the mountains. At Your rebuke they fled, At the sound of Your thunder they hurried away in alarm. The mountains went up; the valleys went down To the place which You founded for them. You set a boundary that they may not pass over, So that they will not return to cover the earth.
(Psalm 104:5-9 LSB)
Unshakeable Foundations (v. 5)
The psalmist begins with the stability and permanence of God's foundational work.
"He founded the earth upon its place, So that it will not shake forever and ever." (Psalm 104:5)
This is a statement of ultimate ownership and architectural genius. God did not just toss the world into the void; He "founded" it. The word implies the laying of a foundation for a building. It is a deliberate, stable, and permanent act. The modern mind, catechized in the religion of scientism, immediately objects, thinking of tectonic plates and earthquakes. But they are missing the point entirely. The psalmist is not making a technical claim about seismology; he is making a theological claim about sovereignty. The earth's stability is not found in its molten core or its geological composition, but in the ongoing, sustaining power of God's decree. It will not shake "forever and ever" because God has purposed it not to. Its existence is not contingent on the laws of physics; the laws of physics are contingent on the will of God.
This is a direct contradiction to the pagan worldview, which saw the world as fragile and subject to the whims of chaotic forces. For the believer, the ground beneath our feet is a constant sermon on the faithfulness of God. Hebrews 1:3 tells us that Christ is "upholding all things by the word of His power." The world doesn't just keep going; it is kept going. Every moment of stability, every sunrise, every predictable season is an act of divine preservation. The world remains because God commands it to remain. This is not deism, where God winds up the clock and walks away. This is active, moment-by-moment sovereignty. And if God is this faithful with the dirt under our feet, how much more will He be faithful to uphold His covenant people, whom He has founded upon the rock of Christ?
The World Submerged (v. 6)
Next, the psalmist recalls a time when the established order was, by God's own hand, undone. He is speaking of the global flood of Noah's day.
"You covered it with the deep as with a garment; The waters were standing above the mountains." (Psalm 104:6 LSB)
Here we see the other side of God's sovereignty. The same God who establishes the world can also deconstruct it. He covered the earth with the "deep" (the tehom) as easily as a man puts on a coat. This is a picture of total, effortless control. The flood was not an accident, nor was it nature running amok. It was a deliberate act of divine judgment, a return of the world to its pre-creation state of watery chaos described in Genesis 1:2. The waters stood "above the mountains," signifying the universality of the judgment. All the high places of man's pride and rebellion were submerged beneath the authority of God's decree.
This verse is a polemic against human autonomy. We think our civilizations are permanent, that our mountains of achievement are unshakeable. But God can cover them with water in the blink of an eye. The flood serves as a permanent, historical reminder that God is the one who sets the terms. He created the world, and He has the right to judge the world. This is not the act of a petulant deity, but the righteous judgment of a holy Creator against a world that had filled His creation with violence and corruption. The world was given a baptism of death, a washing away of the filth of sin, in order to prepare it for a new beginning with Noah and his family.
The Power of a Rebuke (v. 7-8)
Having described the judgment, the psalmist now describes the re-creation. And he shows us that it is accomplished by the very same power that accomplished the first creation: the spoken Word of God.
"At Your rebuke they fled, At the sound of Your thunder they hurried away in alarm. The mountains went up; the valleys went down To the place which You founded for them." (Psalm 104:7-8 LSB)
The waters of the flood did not recede according to some impersonal law of evaporation. They "fled." They "hurried away in alarm." The psalmist personifies the waters to emphasize their creaturely submission to the voice of their Master. God did not negotiate with the flood; He rebuked it. A rebuke is a sharp, authoritative word of correction. It is the word a king speaks to a disobedient servant, or a father to a rebellious child. The "sound of Your thunder" is the voice of God, majestic and terrifying in its power.
This is the same power we see in the Gospels. When Jesus was in the boat with His disciples, and a great storm arose, He did not perform a complex ritual. He stood up and "rebuked the wind and the sea" (Mark 4:39). And there was a great calm. The disciples were terrified, asking, "Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey Him?" The answer is right here in Psalm 104. He is the Creator, the one whose voice the waters have always obeyed.
And in response to this divine command, the very topography of the earth is rearranged. "The mountains went up; the valleys went down." This describes a violent, catastrophic reshaping of the earth's surface as the floodwaters receded. God is not just restoring the old world; He is making a new one, with new boundaries and new features, establishing a "place" for the waters to be contained. This is God's absolute mastery over His world. He is not bound by the landscape; the landscape is bound by His Word.
Inviolable Boundaries (v. 9)
Finally, God establishes a permanent ordinance, a covenant promise, that this kind of global de-creation will not happen again.
"You set a boundary that they may not pass over, So that they will not return to cover the earth." (Psalm 104:9 LSB)
This is a direct reference to the Noahic covenant in Genesis 9. After the flood, God promised, "I will never again curse the ground on account of man... and I will never again destroy every living thing, as I have done" (Genesis 8:21). The rainbow was the sign of this covenant, but the boundary set for the sea is the practical outworking of it. Every beach, every shoreline, every cliff face is a monument to the faithfulness of God. The ocean, in all its immense power, comes to its appointed place and stops. It stops because God told it to stop.
This is a profound comfort and a stark warning. The comfort is that God is a covenant-keeping God. He keeps His promises. The world we live in is a world sustained by His grace and His pledged word. The warning is that God is the one who sets all boundaries. He sets boundaries for the sea, and He sets boundaries for human behavior. Our modern world is in a state of frantic rebellion against every boundary God has established: the boundary between man and woman, the boundary between right and wrong, the boundary between the creature and the Creator. But just as the ocean rages against the shore and is thrown back, so too will all human rebellion against God's established order ultimately be broken and thrown back. God's boundaries hold.
The Gospel in the Flood
This entire passage is a picture of judgment and salvation, which is to say, it is a picture of the gospel. The world of Noah was corrupt and ripe for judgment. God, in His holiness, brought a flood of righteous wrath to cleanse the earth. But in His grace, He provided a way of escape. He commanded Noah to build an ark, a vessel of salvation that would pass safely through the waters of judgment.
The apostle Peter tells us to see this as a type of baptism (1 Peter 3:20-21). The ark is a picture of Jesus Christ. Just as Noah and his family were saved by entering the ark, we are saved by being found "in Christ." The floodwaters of God's wrath against sin, which drown the entire unbelieving world, are the very same waters that lift the believer to safety. When we are united to Christ by faith, we pass through the waters of judgment with Him in His death and are raised to new life with Him in His resurrection. The judgment that was due to us fell upon Him, and we are carried safely through.
And just as God rebuked the waters and established a new, post-flood world with firm boundaries, so too does He work in our salvation. When Christ speaks His word of grace into our chaotic, sinful hearts, He rebukes the flood of our rebellion. He commands the waters of our sin to recede. He raises up the mountains of His righteousness and carves out the valleys of our humility. He sets a new boundary in our lives, separating us from the dominion of sin and promising that it will never again have the final say. He takes us from the chaos of judgment and establishes us on the firm foundation of His grace, in a new creation where we will not be shaken, forever and ever.