Audio Transcript

Welcome back on this Monday, the final day of July. Last time, on Thursday, we looked at God’s joy, and how his joy becomes our joy by the Holy Spirit. It’s a really key episode: APJ 1962. This week, we continue on the joy theme, but we add another theme to it: the theme of doubt. In fact, can we struggle with doubt and experience joy in God? That’s today. And next time we look at how to fight off the inner skeptic when we have doubts about what we read in the Bible. That’s on Thursday.

So today, can we struggle with doubt and delight in God at the same time? That’s Steve’s question. He lives in Nashville. “Hello, Pastor John. My question for you is about how much joy I can hope to experience in the Christian life as someone who struggles seasonally with doubt. Sometimes I struggle with doubts about whether God exists or whether God is good, based on all the evil that I see on the news. Or I doubt whether God has a plan and purpose for my life. These doubts come and go. They’re seasonal. None of them extinguishes the smoldering flax that is my faith. The doubts do not stay long, and they do not overwhelm me. So, my question for you is this: Can I ever hope to have deepening joy in God in seasons when I also struggle with doubts like these? Or is joy in God simply impossible when doubts are present?”

I think the answer to that last question is no, it is not impossible to experience joy in God when doubts are present. And I think the answer to the question just before it is yes, you can hope to have deepening joy in God in seasons when you are also struggling with doubt. Those are my two answers. Now, let’s try to think biblically about this.

Intruding Doubts, Embattled Faith

First, a definition. Doubt comes in all sizes and shapes and durations and levels of seriousness. So, I’m going to call doubt of a Christian variety (that is, doubts that real born-again Christians have from time to time) thoughts that enter our minds from who knows where — they could be Satan’s fiery darts, desires of the flesh, a skeptical associate at work who mocks your religion, some new scientific argument, lack of sleep, dalliance with sin. There are all kinds of sources for how doubts rise or thoughts rise in our minds.

“Doubting is not a sign of no faith; it’s a sign of embattled faith.”

These doubts are thoughts that enter the mind that make us wonder whether something the Bible teaches is really true or whether we ourselves are as real as we thought we were. Those are the two kinds of doubts that I think a Christian wrestles with: Christian truth claims may not be true, or we may not be true.

Now, for the Christian, these thoughts are not conclusions; these are intrusions. They break in like a thief. They start moving around the house of your mind and knocking things over and making threats. This really does happen to Jesus’s followers. When Peter started to sink after walking a few steps on the water, Jesus said, “Why did you doubt?” (Matthew 14:31). When Jesus appeared after the resurrection, it says, “They worshiped him, but some doubted” (Matthew 28:17). Jude 22 says, “Have mercy” — this is in the church — “on those who doubt.”

In other words, such doubting is not a sign of no faith; it’s a sign of embattled faith. When Paul says we should “fight the good fight of the faith” (1 Timothy 6:12), he included in his meaning, “When doubts intrude, fight them.”

Fight them with prayer. “I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24). That’s a prayer. Or fight them with the word. “Faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word” (Romans 10:17). That doesn’t just apply at the front end of the Christian life — that’s every day. We fight doubt by the word. Fight it by obedience. John 7:17 says, “If anyone’s will is to do God’s will, he will know whether the teaching is from God.” Obedient people have fewer doubts than disobedient people.

Kept in the Storm

My answer to Steve’s question is that during that battle, during that season of doubt, it is possible to experience, alongside the anxiety of doubt, deepening joy in God. Now, why would I say that?

Doubt as Sorrow

First, because the anxieties of doubt are a kind of sorrow. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 6:10 that Christians can have the experience of joy at the same time as experiencing sorrow: “as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, yet possessing everything.” If sorrow and joy can mysteriously coexist in the same heart at the same time — and they can — then doubt and joy in God can coexist at the same time. Picture doubt as the troubled waters on the surface of the sea, and picture the new creation reality of faith as the deep, still waters of the ocean depths beneath.

Doubt as Perplexity

Second, I think in Paul’s mind perplexity is another way of talking about some kinds of doubt. He says in 2 Corinthians 4:8, “We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair.” What is perplexity? Perplexity is a state of confusion or uncertainty. And what is uncertainty but a kind of doubt?

And yet, Paul admits to experiencing this kind of perplexity, doubt, but knowing full well he will not be destroyed by it: “perplexed, but not driven to despair.” That confidence beneath the perplexity can be experienced as a kind of deep joy in God’s keeping. Picture a child lost in the forest, but underneath that growing anxiety of the child and his growing doubts is deep confidence: “Daddy will find me. He said he would. He will find me. He promised to keep me.”

Doubt as Suffering

Third, consider Romans 5:3–4: “We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces [approvedness], and [approvedness] produces hope.” Now, what that text teaches is that the reason we can rejoice in times of misery — suffering hurts; it’s misery — is that we have learned that enduring through experiences of misery has the effect of giving us a sense of authenticity. We made it. We’re real. We have been tested by fire and found to be approved. That, he says, produces hope, and hope is why we can rejoice. That’s the argument.

“Every season of doubt with triumph on the other side can bring a deepening sense that God is faithful.”

I think the very same process of testing and enduring and hope and joy can be experienced when the kind of suffering is not physical pain but psychological doubt. “We rejoice in our seasons of doubt, knowing that the suffering of doubt produces endurance, and endurance produces approvedness, and approvedness produces hope.” That’s the ground of our joy.

I would answer Steve’s question, that’s the ground of deepening joy. Can I experience deepening joy in these seasons? My answer is yes.

Paradoxical Calm

In fact, he said, these kinds of doubts are recurrent, seasonal. When that’s true, every season of doubt with triumph on the other side can bring a deepening sense that God is faithful. God will hold me fast. I can, in a sense, laugh at these intrusions on my peace. I can scorn the foam and the waves on the surface because, in the deep waters of my soul, I enjoy paradoxical calm because of Christ’s keeping promises.

So yes, Steve, you can hope to have deepening joy in God in these recurring seasons of doubt.

The memories, on most days, seem better left forgotten. Never has remembering sweet Bible studies tasted so bitter. Flashbacks of late-night conversations and time spent in prayer press inconsiderately upon the wound. In that large group, I can still hear his profession of faith echo. I thought I heard angels sing at his surrender. So long we had prayed for his salvation. Now, he no longer walks with Jesus.

The grief of false conversions.

“They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us” (1 John 2:19). They. We knew them by another name: friend, spouse, mother, son. Each sang with us in church, confessed to be the Savior’s, renounced the world and Satan at baptism — but only for a time.

Our prayers, we thought, were finally answered. Their souls, we thought, were finally saved. Our joy, we thought, was finally complete. The prodigal son returned home — and left again. The difference between a comedy and a tragedy, some say, is where you place the period. Their faith, at best, led only to a semicolon; what a horrible independent clause came next: “They went out from us.”

How the Gospel Dies in a Soul

Jesus tells the tragedies of our daughters, our best friends, our parents, in his parable of the sower.

The parable is familiar. The sower scatters seed on four soils. Some falls on the path — where the hateful bird, Satan, steals it before it can be understood. Such are those who dismiss the gospel as foolishness and never pretend to believe. The fourth soil is the good soil, the true soil, the one who receives the Christ by faith and holds to him, the genuine Christian. But the second and third soils receive the seed, it germinates, and life sprouts from dead earth. Hallelujah! Professions are made; baptismal waters stir; they break bread with us. Our prayers, we believe, have been answered. But the gospel seed, over time, dies. Their faith returns to the dirt before our eyes.

Jesus depicts two ways the gospel dies in the soul.

Scorched by Trials

The first false soil is rocky.

Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and immediately they sprang up, since they had no depth of soil, but when the sun rose they were scorched. And since they had no root, they withered away. (Matthew 13:5–6)

The most confusing part about this soil is how wonderful the beginning seems. Upon hearing the gospel word, they do not argue with it or poke at it. Rather, these receive it “with joy” (Matthew 13:20). They smile at the news of Jesus, shed tears that he would die in their place. They raise their hands and sing of eternal life with what Jesus tells us is real joy.

But the plant shoots up quickly because the soil beneath is thin. Inhospitable rock prevents the roots from growing deep. When the sun eventually rises, tribulation or persecution beat down upon them on account of their new faith in Christ (verse 21). Through much of church history (and still in many places today), this entailed lives threatened, property plundered, friends arrested. In the modern Western context, girlfriends threaten to break up with them. They lose their job. They become the ridicule of family and friends.

A time of testing arrives, and they fall away. They received the word with joy, but when the weather changed, they headed back home, as did Bunyan’s Pliable. Happily, Pliable walked from the City of Destruction as Christian assured him of all the glories that awaited them at the Celestial City. But they soon fell into the Slough of Despond.

At that Pliable began to be offended, and angrily said to his fellow, “Is this the happiness you have told me all this while of? If we have such ill speed at our first setting out, what may we expect betwixt this and our journey’s end?”

He struggled out of the pit and returned home.

So with some loved ones. They explode like a firework only to fizzle in the night sky. Their initial joy, though real, proved shallow. The gospel gripped passing emotions but did not reach the heart. Their god was worth serving, but only in fair weather. Their faith was worth confessing, but only while it cost them little. Their Shepherd was good to follow, but only when he led to green pastures. The sun rises and scorches the gospel word buried in the shallows of their soul.

Choked by Pleasures

Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. (Matthew 13:7)

Here, we find that more than just the gospel grew in the heart. Alongside faith grew rival loves — thorns.

As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches choke the word, and it proves unfruitful. (Matthew 13:22)

They grew too busy. They began a new relationship. They found a way to make some extra money. Jesus and his service could wait a little longer after all. The love of this world and its shiny things, its comforts, its urgent business became preferred to the unseen world. These sharp loves wrapped themselves around the word of the cross, of forgiveness of sins, and of eternal life with God, and squeezed. Maybe we saw them put up some fight as faith lost its breath, but busyness, this career, that boyfriend proved too gripping.

We see these thorns grow even in the hearts of those who seemed most dedicated to Christ and his work in this world. Such was the tragedy of Demas. Paul writes to the Colossian church, “Luke the beloved physician greets you, as does Demas” (Colossians 4:14). Paul calls him his “fellow worker” in his letter to Philemon (verse 24). Yet thorny soil he proved to be in the end. “For Demas,” Paul writes to Timothy at the end of his life, “in love with this present world, has deserted me and gone to Thessalonica” (2 Timothy 4:10).

In love with this present world, they desert us, desert Christ — thorny soil.

Heart of the Matter

The soils represent different types of hearts. In some rocky hearts, the gospel seed dies due to a shallowness of reception. In thorny hearts, it dies in the grip of love for this world and its concerns. Yet read the description of the good soil in Luke’s account:

As for that in the good soil, they are those who, hearing the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patience. (Luke 8:15)

“Good soil fends off encroaching loves for a pure and beautiful devotion to Jesus.”

Good soil holds fast the gospel seed, refusing to relinquish it when persecution comes. Good soil fends off encroaching loves for a pure and beautiful devotion to Jesus. Good soil bears fruit with patience. Good soil is analogous to a good and beautiful heart, a heart promised long ago:

I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. (Ezekiel 36:26–27)

The new-covenant heart, one removed of its stone and cleansed of its competing loves — this heart endures trials and tribulation, and resists temptation and the world’s best, aided and empowered by God’s own indwelling Spirit. Good soil bears good fruit, yielding thirty, sixty, and a hundredfold (Matthew 13:23).

A Prayer

Father, tears well in our eyes as we consider those whose desertion our hearts cannot bear. What hope is left?

For some, you alone know it is too late to restore them to repentance. For them it is impossible to be restored, for they have been enlightened, tasted the heavenly gift, shared in the Holy Spirit, and tasted the goodness of your word (Hebrews 6:4–6). We love your Son, and would not have him “crucified again” or held up for contempt. And yet, you can permit restoration (Hebrews 6:3). Let us be hopeful of better things — namely, that you are not done with our loved ones just yet.

“Let us be hopeful of better things — namely, that you are not done with our loved ones just yet.”

Let us see those who have wandered from the truth be brought back. Use us to return them from their wandering. Use us to save their souls from death and cover a multitude of sins (James 5:19–20). Teach our lips the promise, “Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the Lord, that he may have compassion on him, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon” (Isaiah 55:7). Your grace is unlike our grace. You offer abundant pardon still, and in that, we hope.

And grant us each to keep eyes and prayers on one another, lest we too fall. Let us take heed, lest there be in any of us an evil, unbelieving heart, leading us to fall away from the living God. May we be diligent to exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “today,” that none of us may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin (Hebrews 3:12–13). Keep us in your love. Be pleased to place the period — over them and us — after the words, “Enter into the joy of your Master.”

Have you ever landed great seats at a concert, show, or sporting event — seats right down front, near the center of the action? That’s very much how I think about my position as an employee at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center over the past forty years (now retired), a career spent assisting in the development and testing of satellite control centers and directing the operation of various scientific missions.

As one who had joyfully studied physics and astronomy in college, I landed an enviable front-row seat to watch (and participate in) the technological advances in aerospace engineering and the growth of the scientific disciplines I so love. In fact, my last 25 years were spent helping to manage science operations on the celebrated Hubble Space Telescope program.

Astronomical Growth Spurt

During my tenure at Goddard, satellite-borne telescopes successfully peered above the filtering and blurring effects of earth’s atmosphere for the first time. Book publishers have frankly been busy ever since, rewriting and revising astronomy textbooks for all grade levels, as fresh discoveries now occur virtually every semester.

ESA/Hubble

The Hubble mission alone has contributed immensely to our understanding of the cosmos. Who knew, for instance, that the universe was not only expanding, but accelerating? Who foresaw the immense morphological variety and complexity of planetary nebulae (see embedded photos) — faint, disk-like objects named by William Herschel upon finding them in his telescope more than two hundred years ago? Who could fathom that true planets around other stars are so commonplace that many can be detected through the periodic dimming of their stars when these “transiting exoplanets” pass in front of them? Who also knew that supermassive black holes occupy the centers of nearly every sizeable galaxy?

All these insights and many more were brought to textbooks through solid observational evidence collected by Hubble. Follow-on investigations and even more discoveries are now being made by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.

Written Across the Sky

To those who have ears to hear, these wonders all marvelously confirm the truth given us in Psalm 19:1–2:

The heavens declare the glory of God,     and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.Day to day pours out speech,     and night to night reveals knowledge.

Indeed, many glorious attributes of God are now loudly and profoundly declared to us nightly from diverse space telescopes and ground observatories all around the world. Among the qualities demonstrably proclaimed are his intellectual genius, his endless creativity, his eternal power, his exquisite, beautiful, and purposeful craftsmanship, and his divine nature (see Romans 1:20).

“The deeper you look and the more you listen, his genius, creativity, power, and beauty only become clearer.”

Equally marvelous, it is undeniably the case that the deeper you look and the more you listen, his genius, creativity, power, and beauty only become clearer. Why is the universe expanding? We don’t know — but he does! Scientists attribute it to something they call “dark” energy — dark because it’s unknown.

Planetary nebulae are now understood to be stars in the death throes of existence — literally throwing off portions of their outer layers in response to collapsing and rebounding material at their cores. How do the size, mass, and spin of these dying stars dictate the location and shape of the layers expelled? We don’t know!

Why do exoplanet systems look so different from our solar system? We don’t know! Many have Jupiter-sized planets very close to their stars or Neptune-sized icy bodies farther away. Why don’t all sizeable galaxies have supermassive black holes at their centers? We don’t know! Our large and beautiful celestial neighbor, the Triangulum Galaxy, Messier 33, apparently does not.

Unimaginably Complex

Ah, but these are the simple questions. How our space-time, matter-energy universe actually works at its most basic level gets as infinitely deep and amazing as a graph of the Mandelbrot set. Why, even the lowly proton itself — the building block of every atom — has now been described as “the most complicated thing that you could possibly imagine. . . . In fact, you can’t even imagine how complicated it is.” The proton is apparently a quantum-mechanical object that exists as a haze of probabilities — a sea of transient gluons, quarks, and antiquarks — in some sense indeterminate until an interaction with it, or observing it, causes it to take a concrete form.

In addition to dark energy, there is evidence for the existence of an unknown type of matter that is gravitationally controlling the members of the (proton-based!) periodic table of elements that we at least recognize, if not understand. Like dark energy, it is simply called dark matter since we don’t know what it is either. Between the two — dark energy and dark matter — the standard model of the cosmos accepted by most astronomers today admittedly can’t account for about 95 percent of what it postulates is “out there.”

And just how quantum fields and particles interact at the most minute scale (if one can even define such) does have cosmic implications, like whether the universe will expand forever or ultimately collapse upon itself. This is why cosmologists and astrophysicists study phenomena like colliding neutron stars and black holes. Their velocities and energies reveal truths about the nature of matter and antimatter that are extremely difficult to discern — even using our most powerful particle colliders. Thus, no matter what corner of the universe you examine, the nature and operation of the processes involved are inevitably more exquisite and complex than first realized.

ESA/Hubble

Heavenly Calling Card

God actually appears to delight in this heavenly complexity. We find a number of places in his word where he uses the heavens to set forth the extent of his knowledge, power, and might.

Psalm 96:5: “All the gods of the peoples are worthless idols, but the Lord made the heavens.”
Psalm 147:4–5: “He determines the number of the stars; he gives to all of them their names. Great is our Lord, and abundant in power; his understanding is beyond measure.”
Isaiah 40:25–26: “To whom then will you compare me, that I should be like him? says the Holy One. Lift up your eyes on high and see: who created these? He who brings out their host by number, calling them all by name; by the greatness of his might and because he is strong in power, not one is missing.”
Isaiah 55:9: “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

“You might say that, in some sense, our Lord uses the heavens as his calling card.”

You might say that, in some sense, our Lord uses the heavens as his calling card.

YHWH

If so accepted, what might the name on his calling card be? Well, he revealed one to Moses at the burning bush (Exodus 3:14) — the great Jewish tetragrammaton, the four letters YHWH, variously translated as “I am what I am,” “I am that I am,” or most simply, “I am.” He is the ultimate reality, the one underlying all existence. Because he purposed to do so, he commanded the cosmos into existence from nothing (Psalm 33:6–9; 148:3–5; Hebrews 11:3).

What makes more sense than an infinite being designing a universe that’s both infinitely revealing and confounding? Indeed, the more intently you look at the universe, the more it looks unsearchably complex, mysterious, and exquisite (Psalm 145:3).

NUMBER 1/137

Even secular scientists wax theological when they discover aspects of the underlying mathematics of the universe that defy explanation. The great physicists Richard Feynman, Paul Dirac, and Wolfgang Pauli all felt this way about the strange, dimensionless number 1/137 that nearly perfectly defines something called the “fine-structure” or “electron-photon coupling constant.” Feynman wrote,

It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered . . . and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it. Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from. . . . Nobody knows. . . . You might say the “hand of God” wrote that number, and “we don’t know how He pushed his pencil.”

PRECISION TUNING

Indeed, for as much as we don’t know about how the universe actually works, astronomers now acknowledge (some reluctantly) that the fundamental values of things like the ratio of the electromagnetic force to gravity and the value of Einstein’s “cosmological constant” (which represents the energy density of space) could not be even minutely different from their measured values or the universe as we know it would not be able to function. The former value must be exact by one part in 1040, and the latter by at least one part in 1090 (Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis, 142, 152).

For context, the estimated number of subatomic particles in the whole universe is on the order of 1080. Imagine trying to be so exact that you could confidently count all the subatomic particles in the universe plus or minus one — and then somehow be ten billion times more accurate still! This is the level of precision in the physics that underpins reality.

ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE

Commenting on these constants and many similar ones that appear to be exquisitely fine-tuned to produce an orderly universe, the famous astrophysicist Stephen Hawking noted, “The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life” (Return of the God Hypothesis, 141).

Indeed, during the last several decades, there has been a demonstrable shift from the belief that life-bearing planets like ours must be commonplace in the cosmos, to the scientific realization that we’re more likely rare, or possibly even unique. This is not only because our atoms are fine-tuned to hold together properly, but because the unlikely circumstances of humanity’s placement in a spiral galaxy, around a relatively quiet star of the right color, at the right distance from it, held stable by a large moon, on a planet with sufficient mass to hold an atmosphere and water, having the right atmosphere, having a protective magnetic field, and so on, all multiply together as improbabilities to yield something nearly impossible.

Contemplating such facts, British physicist and author, Paul Davies, wrote: “The really amazing thing is not that life on Earth is balanced on a knife-edge, but that the entire universe is balanced on a knife-edge. You see, even if you dismiss mankind as just a mere hiccup in the great scheme of things, the fact remains that the entire universe seems unreasonably suited to the existence of life — almost contrived — you might say a ‘put-up job’” (Source).

This postulate actually has a scientific name, the Anthropic Principle, which basically states that the universe exists in a way that it allows observers to come into existence. While nuanced and still debated, one version of the principle, espoused by the man who coined the term “black hole” (John Wheeler), suggests on the basis of quantum mechanics that the universe — as a condition of its existence — must be observed. Coupled with the new understanding that each proton in the universe somehow requires the interaction with another particle or an observer to dictate its ultimate properties, this makes the whole theory both more believable and more unfathomable. To me, these qualities beautifully describe the Lord himself.

Honestly, my faith is also strengthened knowing that God, who built such scientific conundrums into creation and gave us the Scriptures, kindly described his activity thousands of years ago in these understandable words (Isaiah 45:18):

Thus says the Lord,who created the heavens     (he is God!),who formed the earth and made it      (he established it;he did not create it empty,     he formed it to be inhabited!):“I am the Lord, and there is no other.”

ESA/Hubble

‘What Is Man?’

Many people tell me that when they learn about the immense objects in the heavens or the almost unimaginable distances to the stars, they feel incredibly insignificant. One can hear the same sentiment from King David in Psalm 8:3–4:

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,     the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,what is man that you are mindful of him,     and the son of man that you care for him?

Compared with the size of the universe — even one star in it — it’s true: we’re of very little account. But stars and galaxies aren’t the most impressive item of God’s creative work. Genesis tells us clearly that the creation of Adam and Eve was the pinnacle of God’s activity in the creation week. After everything else was formed, the triune God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1:26). Genesis 1:27 goes on to say, “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”

As stunning as they are, galaxies were not made in the image of God. It is men and women, boys and girls, who are rational and moral beings made like God himself. If he counts the trillion upon trillions of lifeless stars and has names for them all, do you think the eight billion or so human beings alive today, who exist in his very image, escape his moment-by-moment attention? In Matthew 10:29–30, Jesus says that our Father knows the whereabouts of every sparrow, and that even the hairs on our head are numbered (maybe he has names for them too?!). We should judge our significance to him in the light of these truths.

Hark! The Herald Heavens Speak

Psalm 19:1–2 tells us simply but so profoundly, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge.” The complexity, size, power, and grandeur of the universe are God’s intentional gifts to us. They are meant to help us understand what he is like — to lovingly help us apprehend our Maker as the unsearchable ultimate reality that he is.

Indeed, the heavens are declaring at this very moment that our God is magnificent beyond comprehension. Listen to them. Hear how their countless hosts strive day after day and night after night to declare the least part, the smallest measure, of his great glory. It is never enough; it never will be; it never can be. He is infinite. Have you heard their voices? Have you joined their chorus?

Dazzling phosphors in the night,     Silent orators, so bright,How I marvel at your story     And the Hand behind your glory.