very great

Week 24 Psalm 104

Psalm 104 starts exactly the same way that psalm 103 started yesterday: bless the Lord, O my soul.
From that point 103 goes in one direction: and forget not all his benefits.
104 goes in another: O Lord my God, you are very great!
Of course, there’re probably plenty of people who don’t think God is too great, maybe figure he isn’t great at all. But the psalm writer thinks the Lord is really great and the specific really-greatness he’s thinking about is the fact that God created the world and continues to track its progress.
I’ve read people who say Genesis has some responsibility for the environmental degradation of the planet. After all, God created everything and then told Adam and Eve: be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion… That subduing-and-having-dominion part must be a kind of biblical carte blanche to pollute, deforest, strip-mine, load up the air with industrial toxins and the oceans with plastic microbeads, pave agricultural land, dump raw sewage in the drinking water, overpopulate, burn the rain forests & clear cut the rest, gobble down fossil fuels, and not-to-worry about destroying species, the ozone layer, and all our natural life-support systems. Like that. The Genesis mandate in action.
Anyway, reading psalm 104 this morning I get the impression that the Lord’s approach runs along different lines.

Note: quotes from Psalm 103:1-2 & 104:1; Gen 1:28 (ESV version)