View devo: https://bit.ly/4tOBbbd
24 O Lord, how manifold are your works! In wisdom you have made them all; 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. 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; when you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust. 30 When you send forth your spirit, they are created; and you renew the face of the ground. 31 May the glory of the Lord endure forever; may the Lord rejoice in his works— 32 who looks on the earth and it trembles, who touches the mountains and they smoke. 33 I will sing to the Lord as long as I live; I will sing praise to my God while I have being. 34 May my meditation be pleasing to him, for I rejoice in the Lord. Bless the Lord, O my soul. Praise the Lord! (Psalm 104:24-34, 35b NRSV))
One of my favorite prayers is the Walk to Emmaus' Holy Spirit prayer which reads, "Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in us the fire of your love. Send forth your Spirit and we shall be created. And you shall renew the face of the earth. O God, who by the light of the Holy Spirit did instruct the hearts of the faithful, grant that by the same Holy Spirit we may truly be wise and ever enjoy your consolations. Through Christ our Lord. Amen." When I learned it and every time that I repeated it, I was always blessed by the line that says, "Send forth your Spirit and we shall be created. And you shall renew the face of the earth." This is the psalm from where that prayer comes from.
Psalm 104 is one of the great creation psalms — a wide-angle, full-color meditation on the world God made and sustains. It moves from the heavens to the sea to the mountains to the smallest living thing, and through all of it runs a single, insistent thread: every creature, every living thing, every breath drawn anywhere in the created order comes from the same source.
It is a Pentecost psalm because at its center is one of the most quietly astonishing lines in all of Scripture: “When you send your Spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the ground.”
The Spirit who hovered over the waters in Genesis 1. The Spirit poured out in wind and fire in Acts 2. The Spirit who renews the face of the earth. Creation and Pentecost, it turns out, are the same story — told twice, deepened the second time, not finished yet.
The psalmist paints a picture of absolute, moment-by-moment dependence. Every creature — sea monster and sparrow, ship and whale, the vast and the small — looks to God for its food at the proper time. When he opens his hand, they are satisfied. When he hides his face, they are terrified. When he takes away their breath, they die.
This is not a picture of a clockmaker God who wound the world up and stepped back. This is the picture of a God who is actively, personally, continuously involved in the sustaining of every living thing. The breath in your lungs right now is not something you generate or own. It is something being given, moment by moment, by the one who formed you.
We rarely think about breathing. It happens below consciousness, below effort, below intention. But the psalmist invites us to let it rise to the surface for a moment — to notice the breath, to feel its dependence, and to recognize in it the signature of the God who gives and sustains all life.
On Pentecost Sunday, this image of God opening his hand takes on its fullest meaning. The Spirit poured out at Pentecost is the same generous, open-handed giving that sustains every creature. Only now it is not physical breath being given. It is the very life of God, poured into human lives without reservation, without limit, without the possibility of it running out. The open hand of God on Pentecost is the open hand of God at creation — giving life, giving breath, giving himself.
The hinge verse of the entire psalm is verse 30: “When you send your Spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the ground.”
The Hebrew word for Spirit here is ruach — the same word for breath, for wind, for the Spirit of God that hovered over the waters at the beginning. Creation was not a single event that happened once and was finished. It is an ongoing act, continuously sustained by the breath of God. Every spring that comes after winter. Every creature born. Every dry and barren place that receives rain and greens again. The renewal of the face of the earth is the Spirit’s work, perpetually, without ceasing.
When Peter stood in the streets of Jerusalem on Pentecost morning and announced that the Spirit had been poured out on all flesh, he was announcing something that Psalm 104 had been describing all along — only now applied to the inner landscape of human lives. The same Spirit who renews the face of the ground renews the face of the soul. The same breath that brings dead things back to life in the natural world brings dead things back to life in the human heart.
Pentecost is a creation event. A new creation event. The wind that blew through the upper room was the same wind that moved over the waters in the beginning, and it was doing the same thing it has always done: bringing life where there was none, bringing order where there was chaos, renewing the face of something that had grown dry.
The Spirit has not stopped doing this. He is still being sent. The face of the earth — and the face of the human soul — is still being renewed.
The psalm ends where it began — in praise. Not because all the questions are answered or all the hard things are resolved, but because the psalmist has seen clearly, for a moment, who holds everything together. And the only fitting response to that seeing is song.
“I will sing to the Lord all my life; I will sing praise to my God as long as I live.”
On Pentecost Sunday, we are invited into that same clarity. The Spirit who sustains every living thing is the Spirit who has been poured out on us. The breath in our lungs is a gift from the same open hand that opened over Jerusalem and filled the upper room. The renewal of the face of the ground is the same renewal available to the driest places in our interior lives.
We are not running on our own power. We never were. The God who opens his hand to satisfy every living creature has opened his hand over us — and what he has poured out is himself. Breathe it in. Praise him for it. And let the life he has given flow outward, the way spring always does, into the world that is waiting to be renewed.
PRAYER: Send your Spirit, Lord — into every dry and waiting place in us and in the world around us — and renew the face of the ground. Amen.
Have a great and blessed day in the Lord. OUR CALL TO ACTION: Take one slow, deliberate breath today — notice it as a gift from the open hand of God — and ask the Spirit who renews the face of the earth to renew one dry place in your life or someone else’s this week.
I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me. May Your Spirit create us for service and renew the face of the earth to know you and love you!
Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.
