“LORD, your faithful loves reaches to heaven, your faithfulness to the clouds. Your righteousness is like the highest mountains, your judgments like the deepest sea. LORD, you preserve people and animals. How priceless your faithful love is, God! People take refuge in the shadow of your wings. They are filled from the abundance of your house. You let them drink from Your refreshing stream. For the wellspring of life is with you. By means of your light we see light.” 36:5-9
I can’t read this Psalm without being reminded of the old “Third Day” song that borrows its lyrics from the same passage. What an encouragement to us today in the midst of uncertain days! God’s love is faithful and it cannot be measured; it reaches higher than the clouds, even up to the very heights of heaven. With beautiful language, David continues to extol the nature of God. His righteousness is higher than the mountains, his judgments are deeper than the deepest seas. One gets the sense that David was trying to describe the very indescribable and was grasping with mere human imagination, limited vocabulary and limited language to paint a picture that is too wonderful for us to ever imagine.
Yet, even though this God is indescribable and greater than all of creation combined, He cares about the smallest of things. David says, “You preserve people and animals,” and “People take refuge in the shadow of your wings.” This is what is meant by the transcendence of God… He is far and above all things ever created and yet in his immanence, He transcends all things and even descends to be involved in the very details and smallest aspects of our insignificant lives. What an encouragement to know that God’s faithful love is just as real and present now in the midst of the Corona Virus pandemic as it was on the first day of creation or on the day when Jesus went to the cross.
His love is “priceless” David says and He is the one who continually sustains all of us. We are “filled from the abundance” of His house (not ours… and not Walmart). We drink from His refreshing stream and He is the wellspring of all of our life. In the darkest of times, we see light… and we see the light by the means of “His light.” Let me encourage you again today. There is nothing that you are going through that is too big for God to handle or too small that God doesn’t care about it. His faithful love is with us in the good times and in the bad times. He is there with us in the light, and even when all seems totally black and void of light… He Himself is the light. He is the transcendent God of the Universe, outside of time and space, and yet ever-present with you all the time in every place.
