No Match For God
One of the most important questions I’ve learned and continue to learn to ask myself is, “What do I need?” It seems pretty basic, and on some level, it is. In a way, we are born asking this question. Babies cry in frustration because they know they need something (to eat, a diaper change, to be comforted…), but they can’t identify what that is, and they can’t verbalize it even if they could, so as parents, we try all of it until something works.
As we get older, we have a better understanding of our needs, but we still struggle to identify them…even as adults. I’m sure you’ve found yourself feeling irritable and grumpy, and then realized that it’s 2:00 and you haven’t eaten lunch…you’re hangry. Or maybe you’ve had a long day and think you just need to get home, be by yourself, get in bed…but when you make it there, you just feel depressed. What you probably needed was connection with people you love…maybe even a hug. Sometimes our bodies are tired and we feel down. We may think we need sleep, but we might actually need exercise…or some sunshine…get outside…take a walk…
We aren’t always good at identifying what we need, so learning to ask what we need is an important learning step. This applies physically, emotionally, and spiritually. In fact, the most important place we can ever come to as a person is to realize that we have a great need that we can’t meet ourselves.
Today, our text is going to highlight that need and reveal where the solution lies. We’ll be in Psalm 36, so if you have your Bibles, I want to invite you to turn there. The Scripture will also be on the screen. We’ve been in the Psalms all summer, and next week will be our last Psalm for the year. Psalm 36 was written by David, but it isn’t tied to a specific event or time in his life. What I like about this Psalm is that it feels very much like we are reading David’s prayer journal. It’s like we get an inside look into his quiet time, where he’s sitting, reflecting, and praying.
In this Psalm, David paints two vivid pictures: one of man and one of God, and he puts them side by side for comparison. And as we’ll see, there’s a huge difference. And because of that, one is in desperate need of the other.
Look at verse 1.
1An oracle within my heart
concerning the transgression of the wicked person:
Dread of God has no effect on him.
2For with his flattering opinion of himself,
he does not discover and hate his iniquity.
3The words from his mouth are malicious and deceptive;
he has stopped acting wisely and doing good.
4Even on his bed he makes malicious plans.
He sets himself on a path that is not good,
and he does not reject evil.
David starts by painting a picture of the wicked person, and it’s almost like he’s looking at an autopsy. When someone dies and you want more information on the cause of death or what went wrong, the Medical Examiner will do an autopsy to examine the entire body and look for any answers. Well, David goes through the whole body of the wicked and reports what he sees:
He starts with the heart and finds that it’s cold and hard. This person may be breathing, but spiritually, they are dead. He says, “Dread (fear) of God has no effect on him.” Fear is often seen as a weakness. Little girls are afraid of bugs (some adults I know…). There’s a popular brand of clothing, No Fear. In reality, fear is essential. Fear is what keeps us alive physically, and the Bible tells us over and over again that fear of God is the beginning of being spiritually alive. That’s because the purpose of fear is to tell us what we need. Our fear of snakes or heights is because those things can hurt us, so we need to exercise caution. You know who has no fear of snakes or heights or sharks or anything else? Someone dead. Those things have no effect on them. Put them at the top of the highest cliff, or in a pit of Cobras, they don’t care…because they’re dead. They have no fear. David says the wicked person is the same before God. They have no fear. They don’t feel any awe, reverence, or even dread of the sovereign and Holy God.
Verse 2 provides even more detail as to what this looks like as David moves from the heart to the eyes. This person 1.) has a flattering opinion of themselves, and 2.) does not discover or hate their iniquity. In other words, they are spiritually blind. They are blind to reality, which causes them to be vain and presumptuous. They have an inflated view of themselves, which prevents them from seeing any sin in their lives. And if they don’t see it, they don’t hate it. And if they don’t hate it, then they accept it…and it begins to spread to other parts of their body, like a cancer… which leads to verse 3.
David examines the mouth of the wicked and sees that it is, in fact, cancerous. His words are malicious and deceptive, full of lies that build him up and tear others down. He is a master of manipulation to the point that he doesn’t know where the truth ends and the lie begins. The Bible has a lot to say about our words:
Proverbs 12:18, “Reckless words pierce like a sword…”
Proverbs 18:7, “A fool's mouth is his ruin, and his lips are a snare to his soul."
Matthew 15:18, “What comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person."
When a person moves to accepting their sin, they often think they can manage it and no one will know. But not only is that indicative of a hardened heart, it never works. Sin doesn’t stay buried. It comes out….it affects the way we see, it affects the way we speak, and it affects the way we act.
In verse 3, David examines the hands of the wicked and sees that they have “stopped acting wisely and doing good.” What used to be useful and have the potential for good is now gnarled and twisted…their purpose and ability distorted. My grandfather was a great athlete. He was a catcher at Georgia Tech and refereed sports for many years as an adult. But later in his life, he had severe rheumatoid arthritis. His hands and feet became so distorted that he had to have custom shoes made, and he could barely hold a fork to eat. The disease eventually took over his entire body. This is exactly what happens with sin. The progression may seem slow, and you may be able to keep it in check for a while, but eventually it spreads to the point of completely changing how you act, until you are no longer able to act wisely or do good. Even if you can fake it at times, your motivation behind your actions is twisted.
In verse 4, David moves to the head and finds a mind that has been poisoned. Sin is no longer unintentional and reactive, but it’s planned. This is a clue that David may even be reflecting on his own experience here. After his sin with Bathsheba, which may have started as a sin of neglect, he must have spent many nights lying in his bed trying to work out a plan to fix the problem, which led to intentional sin…with an elaborate scheme of lying and eventually murder. If left unchecked, sin will consume your thinking. You will become fixated on getting what you want and devising a plan to make it happen…even justifying your thinking and convincing yourself it’s all you're capable of. This toxic shame will eventually cause you to give yourself over to sin altogether.
This leads to the last piece of the autopsy - the feet. The feet of the wicked are unrestrained. They walk a dangerous path that is openly accepting of evil. This reference points back to Psalm 1, which warns of walking in the advice of the wicked and standing in the pathway with sinners. Every step we take in life moves us either closer to God or further away from him. There is no neutral path, and the wicked person is always moving further away because they’ve bought into the lie and accepted rejection of God as the better way.
So, if we step back and look at the picture that David gives, what we see is that the wicked person is determined to sin. Their heart is set on it.
It’s an appalling picture! If this were a landscape painting, it would be of the wasteland…the desert. We should be appalled because it’s the opposite of everything good and Godly. But we shouldn’t dismiss it as irrelevant to us. We should also be appalled because we can see ourselves in it.
The Apostle Paul quotes from this Psalm and Psalm 14 when he says in Romans 3,
10There is no one righteous, not even one.
11 There is no one who understands;
there is no one who seeks God.
12 All have turned away;
all alike have become worthless.
There is no one who does what is good,
not even one.
The universal language of those verses included Paul, and it includes me and you! So, the second thing we see from David’s picture is that the wicked (me and you) are hopeless….there is no one good, all are worthless…. Without Jesus, every one of us is a determined and hopeless sinner…. unrighteous, unworthy, running away from God. And we need to be very careful not to be like King Amaziah, who told Amos, the prophet of God, to “Go away…! Earn your living and give your prophecies there, 13 but don’t ever prophesy at Bethel again, for it is the king’s sanctuary and a royal temple.” Amaziah didn’t want to hear what God had to say about his sin, and as you can imagine, it led to his destruction. We need to let this autopsy expose our greatest need. Even as Christians, we can still see glimpses of ourselves in David’s description. It’s like a truth mirror. It’s hard but necessary to look at.
David gets to this point and completely shifts his focus. He sets that picture aside (probably disgusted) to start a new one…this one much more pleasant. Look at verse 5:
5Lord, your faithful love reaches to heaven,
your faithfulness to the clouds.
6Your righteousness is like the highest mountains,
your judgments like the deepest sea.
Lord, you preserve people and animals.
This is a picture of God, and it’s the complete opposite of the wicked man. I almost get the feeling that David is struggling to come up with words big enough to describe what he’s feeling. If these were literal paintings, the first is like an 8x10 canvas…small, not worthy of taking up a lot of wall space. But this picture of God is huge…it’s a mural…there’s not a wall big enough to contain it, because that’s who God is. In the side-by-side comparison, where we are hopeless, destined for no good, God is boundless. He is infinitely good!
David says his love and faithfulness extend to the sky. In other words, you can’t see where they end. I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about where the sky begins and ends, but it’ll kind of mess with your mind. At what height does the sky begin, and when does it end? It doesn’t have boundaries. There are definitive layers to the atmosphere, but David didn’t know about those. So this is his way of saying that God’s love and his faithfulness have no end. They are without limit. Nothing will ever stop God from being completely loving and faithful.
Next, he says, God’s righteousness is like the highest mountain. His righteousness encompasses his justice and truthfulness…it’s literally his rightness. He’s saying that everything about God is right and good in a way that nothing compares. You probably know that the biggest mountain is Mt. Everest. It’s over 29,000 ft tall and 12 miles wide at the base. For perspective, the tallest building in Orlando is 441 feet tall. And from where you’re sitting, it’s roughly 12 miles to the airport or downtown Sanford. That’s a big mountain! David didn’t know those details, but he knew that there was nothing that could even come close to comparing to the magnitude of God’s righteousness…not even a great king like himself.
He goes on to say that God’s judgments are like the deepest sea. His judgments refer to his ability to judge rightly, and to make ordinances and declarations. It’s his will, and, even more specifically, it’s His Word. From David’s perspective, God’s Word is immeasurable. As far as he knew, the deepest ocean was immeasurable. Today, we think we know how deep the deepest ocean is (35,000 ft), but still, only about 5% of the Earth’s oceans have been explored by humans! That’s probably similar to the percentage we know and understand about God’s Word. There’s so much more there than we will ever be able to uncover on this side of eternity. God is boundless!
I love the way Eugene Peterson interprets these verses:
God’s love is meteoric,
his loyalty astronomic,
His purpose titanic,
his verdicts oceanic.
Yet in his largeness
nothing gets lost;
Not a man, not a mouse,
slips through the cracks.
On top of all His grandeur, David says that God sees and preserves people and animals. The truth is that without these characteristics of God, we wouldn’t exist. Not only does God sustain life physically, but spiritually, God’s holiness is too great for our sinfulness. The curse is too great. But thankfully, his love, his justice, and his Word preserve life as he extends his grace to us. So, although we are determined to sin according to our flesh, God is undeterred according to his love. He sees us and doesn’t turn his back. He keeps coming after us.
Verses 7-9 zoom in to get a closer look at this.
7How priceless your faithful love is, God!
People take refuge in the shadow of your wings.
8They are filled from the abundance of your house.
You let them drink from your refreshing stream.
9For the wellspring of life is with you.
By means of your light we see light.
Compare that to the wicked person in vv. 1-4… a picture of disease and poison, sucking the life out of us. But God meets our needs and is life-giving! If the wicked person is the desert wasteland, this picture of God is the promised land.
David points out four ways that God meets our needs:
1. Protection. There is safety in the presence of God. The idea is a helpless baby bird hiding under its mother’s wing…its only form of protection from a storm. We’ve all experienced the storms of life. I’m not talking about the thunder and lightning like we had a couple of weeks ago. That was intense! But I’m talking losing someone you love, losing your job, the world shutting down because of a spreading disease….The storms always come, and too often, we look for our security and protection outside of the shadow of God’s wing, but nothing else is reliable. I was telling someone the other day how, when I was in college, I lived in a mobile home (Alabama double-wide). If I were home and there was the threat of a tornado, I would go to Walmart and walk around because my double-wide wasn’t exactly a storm shelter. Without protection, we are exposed, and that’s when fear and anxiety take over. The only place we can truly find refuge is under the covering of God’s faithful love. David says it’s priceless!
2. Provision. The second way God meets our needs is by providing for us. Psalm 50 says that God owns the cattle on a thousand hills. He has more than enough to meet our every need, and David says that he fills us from his abundance! That doesn’t mean that our bank accounts are going to be overflowing. That’s not necessarily what we need. But you can be confident that God sees you and knows you. We shouldn’t overlook the fact that in his model prayer, Jesus taught us to ask for our daily bread. Bread is a small matter in the grand scheme of things, but God wants to provide for his people. And more importantly, he wants us to learn to trust him to do that. Too often, we try and play God. We take our provision into our own hands, which limits our trust in him and hinders our ability to focus on our calling to live missionally, be generous, and multiply disciples, because we’re worried about and working to meet the demanding needs of life. There’s no rest when we don’t trust God to provide. This leads to the third way God meets our needs.
3. Satisfaction. God preserves his people by satisfying us with living water. In Isaiah 55, God invites us to come and drink from his water and eat his food. He warns us not to waste our money on things that will never satisfy. Jesus described himself as the living water that gives eternal life. We talk about this a lot at City Awakening because it is at the heart of the Gospel, and we need a lot of reminding that Jesus is enough for us….Our souls will be satisfied, and our hearts will have joy only when we learn to delight in the presence and person of God. He is a refreshing stream, and the good news is that he doesn’t hide himself or hold back. He offers himself to us! David says he’s a wellspring of water…. It’s constantly flowing and will never run dry.
4. Light. The fourth way God meets our needs is with his light. John 1 says, “4 In him [Jesus] was life, and that life was the light of men. 5 That light shines in the darkness, and yet the darkness did not overcome it.” The light of Jesus allows us to see the reality of our sinful condition and shows us the way back to the Father. His light pushes back the darkness to defend and protect his followers, and it pushes forward his will and his Kingdom. His light is powerful. And the book of Revelation teaches us that in the New Jerusalem, it will never be dark because Jesus is the lamp and his glory will light the city. We need his light. Without it, we are lost in the dark and walking the path that leads away from God.
Before we ever understand our own needs, God knows what we need. He knows that: Hopeless sinners need a boundless God, and Determined sinners need an undeterred God.
It’s no mystery or problem for him. And the good news of the Gospel is that Jesus came to be the bridge between us and God. Through faith in him, our greatest need is met.
David demonstrates his faith and concludes his reflection with a simple prayer. He knows where he wants to be, but he knows that he can’t get there on his own. He prays this prayer of confession, surrender, and trust. First,
10 Spread your faithful love over those who know you,
and your righteousness over the upright in heart.
He asks to be covered with love and righteousness. David knows he is a sinner, and even though he’s upright in heart, he will never be able to earn or deserve God’s approval. He needs to be covered. Second,
11 Do not let the foot of the arrogant come near me
or the hand of the wicked drive me away.
12There! The evildoers have fallen.
They have been thrown down and cannot rise.
He asked to be protected from the wicked. This is both physical and spiritual protection. He has an enemy that’s out to get him, and he doesn’t want evil to win in his life. And notice he’s confident that they will not, because he knows God is more than enough.
The Big Idea of Psalm 36 is that even our greatest needs are no match for God. When we put these two pictures side by side, there’s no comparison. God is infinitely greater than we’ll ever know, and Ephesians 3 says that He is able to do more than we can ever ask or imagine. No matter what kind of enemy you are facing today or no matter how far from God you think you are, it’s never too much and it’s never too far. God is boundless and undeterred…. He sees you, he knows you, and he loves you! Will you allow him to meet your needs today?
