“Your lovingkindness, O LORD, extends to the heavens, Your faithfulness reaches to the skies. Your righteousness is like the mountains of God; Your judgments are like a great deep. O LORD, You preserve man and beast.” Vs 5-6
“Thy mercy Lord doth to the heavens extend,
Thy faithfulness doth to the clouds ascend;
Thy justice steadfast as a mountain is,
Thy judgments deep as is the great abyss;
Thy noble mercies save all living things,
The sons of men creep underneath Thy wings;
With Thy great plenty they are fed at will,
And of Thy pleasure’s stream they drink their fill;
For even the well of life remains with Thee,
And in Thy glorious light we light shall see.”
Sir John Davies
Sir John Davies penned these words in paraphrase of Psalm 36 in the seventeenth century, and a century later Spurgeon repeated the poem in his sermon on the same Biblical Psalm.
I don’t know how often it has been repeated between then and now, but I continue the tradition here to emphasize the truth that no matter how many centuries, no matter how many miles, no matter how many rising and falling cultures pass until the Father bids the Son call His church home, the glory and majesty; the goodness and faithfulness; the righteousness and justice of our God will be proclaimed – and the terminology need not change because He Himself will not change.
Yes, I want to continue the tradition today and not tradition only but fulfillment of my calling as a preacher of God’s Word, which is not only my calling but my delight.
However I would be negligent in my duties as such if I failed to preach also the striking, even infinite contrast between this God to be exalted, and His fallen creation, of which we are, each one, a part; desperately and hopelessly lost, ruined, doomed forever if not redeemed by a Savior.
After all, Sir John began his paraphrase at verse 5; but that’s not where the Psalmist began is it?
TRANSGRESSORS ARE WE
The Psalmist began where anyone who would approach God must begin. The cold hard fact is that we are all transgressors of God’s laws, rebels against holiness, enemies of truth, full of wickedness, hatred and deceit.
Now this is the point where our inner self rises up and cries ‘unfair’. What about this person or that person – people we know who are kind and just and reasonable and honest and morally upright?
How can I be so absolute, so all-encompassing and say that every man and woman born of Adam’s race is a ruined transgressor against God?
What about the heroes of history?
What about the men and women we honor and teach our children to emulate because of their humanitarian accomplishments and their great sacrifices and selfless deeds done to benefit mankind?
But you have to understand that we judge by man’s standards, not God’s, and man’s standards, built up on a very foundation of sin and enmity against God, are at their very foundation flawed and infinitely short of God’s standard of holiness.
We fall immediately into error when we value God and His Word in the light of what we see in mankind, instead of looking at mankind in the light of revelation in God’s Word.
In his Psalm of confession, Psalm 51 verse 5, King David declared, “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin my mother conceived me”. What does that mean? Was David accusing his mother of adultery? In saying, ‘I was brought forth in iniquity’ was he saying that it was a sin on the midwife’s part to deliver him from his mother’s womb?
Of course not. That would make no sense at all; especially in the context of confessing his own sin and God’s holiness and justice.
David understood something fundamental about himself and the entire race of men; that we are not sinners because we sin, but that rather we sin because from our conception we are sinners.
We must come to understand the utter sinfulness of sin if we are ever to begin to comprehend the depths to which God’s grace had to plunge in order to bring us up.
In a recent sermon, in making the point that we can never atone for our own sins, I asked the rhetorical series of questions; How many sins does it take to make one a sinner? How many does it take to condemn a soul to Hell? How many sins must a man commit before he is rendered unclean and unacceptable to God?
A friend and fellow preacher challenged me on this, knowing full well the point that I was driving toward but cautioning me that someone who does not know where I stand on these basic doctrines might go away thinking that my teaching is that it is our acts that make us sinners, rather than the other way around as I have stated in this sermon.
He made a valid point that we as preachers of the word must choose our words carefully and craft them together with all the care we can muster. For our job, our calling, is to clarify, not to confuse.
The fact is, people in the church as well as outside of the church, if in these enlightened times they are willing to concede that sin is even in question, will reveal by their speech and their life-choices that they think individual sins or the avoidance of such accumulate on a sort of divine balance which in the end will determine our rejection by God or acceptance in His presence.
In the motion picture, “The Shootist”, which was John Wayne’s last movie, his character John Bernard Books is an aging gunfighter who is dying of cancer. At one point in the story Lauren Bacall’s character is trying to persuade Books to come with her to church. When he declines she offers to have Reverend Saunders stop by to pray for his soul. Books, feeling pressured at her insistence, finally responds in anger, “My soul is what I’ve already made of it!”
I’ve always remembered that line clearly because it so aptly portrays the pretentious assumption common to men and women that our destiny and our fate are in our own hands and control.
It is a worldly view expressed in William Henley’s poem ‘Invictus’
“Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud,
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul.”
That is the absurd pretension that both denies God’s sovereignty and Lordship, and spits in the face of grace, rejecting the opportunity to reach out and take the very forgiveness and salvation purchased at the cross of Christ and extended to any who would turn from sin and self to the true and living God.
That is the utter sinfulness of sin; that is the power of sin; to blind and deceive and to convince the dead that somehow they have life in themselves that they themselves control and nurture. It brings them either to deny God and determine to enter the darkness defiantly, as in Henley’s poem, or to seek to finish this life with the balance tipping in their favor, thus requiring God to accept them on good merit alone.
Let me tell you about sin and the power of sin. It keeps its victims in an almost trance-like state. It is a sort of spell that keeps you from recognizing the deadly path on which you tread. It brings you to do things openly that would in any moment of clear thought shame you and that you would quickly condemn in someone else. But when you are under sin’s spell and in sin’s grip you are both blind to your plight and helpless with the helplessness of the dead.
Why can’t you help yourself? Why can’t you escape wrath by your good behavior? Because you didn’t stand a chance. You were brought forth in iniquity and in sin your mother conceived you.
Your mother and her mother and her mother, and your father and his fathers, were carriers and transmitters of this condition – this evil entity that you then carried with and in you into this world, and this ignoble line is traced all the way back to Adam and Eve, and will continue to and through the last person who will enter into this world by human procreation.
As I worked on this very portion of this sermon, during a break I read a message from my eldest daughter, recounting her morning experience with her 2 year old daughter who threw a tantrum from her big brother’s school all the way home in the car. She stiffened her body in an attempt to avoid being strapped into her car seat and then when that failed she screamed and kicked her little brother’s car seat all the way home. That is the sin nature in bloom, my friends; and grown ups don’t shed it, they just throw grown up tantrums. Sometimes those tantrums bring violence and death, sometimes they are expressed not physically, but in quiet, scornful refusal to listen to God’s still, small voice – the gentle call of His Holy Spirit to belief and obedience – but it is still the same deadly enemy of the soul that makes us, each and every one, a transgressor.
It is the condition that brought death to all creation when it was introduced into the world by the first man, and I promise you that you cannot escape or avoid it. If you could travel anywhere in the created universe in a moment’s time, you would find its effects wherever you go, and if you could not readily see it you would only need wait a few minutes for you would have brought it with you.
That is the broad scope of sin, beloved ones; it is the broad scope of your transgressions. They reach far, far beyond your spatial limits and offend the very God of Heaven. You were brought forth in iniquity, conceived in sin, lost before you ever acted, dead before you ever began.
GRACIOUS IS HE
Yes, the Psalmist begins his song with the unsettling portrayal of the blackened condition of all men in sin, and even cites the worst symptoms of this condition; the tendency to lay even in our beds contemplating evil and planning wickedness, taking personal pride in our self assuredness and independence from God, neglecting to hate evil and from our very lips pouring out the vileness that rises up from within.
But verse 5 comes like the bright sunlight beaming down when dark clouds finally part to let it through, as he begins to demonstrate with words the infinite contrast between the dark transgressor and the Light by whom we see light.
His lovingkindness extends to the heavens and His faithfulness to the skies. His righteousness is higher than the mountains and His justice – His judgments – are deeper than the deepest sea.
The Psalmist reveals God as the One who preserves and nothing can destroy; the One who is our refuge and no one and nothing can break through to harm. He alone is the giver of all that delights and He is the hiding place of men in trouble and the glad provider of the staples of life.
According to the ways of the world and the reasonings of man, verse 5, following the darkness and the indictments of the first four verses of this Psalm, would have continued with the outpouring of wrath against the transgressors. It would have finished verse 4 with ‘He does not despise evil’, and begun verse 5 with words like, ‘So God in His anger destroyed them all in a moment’.
That is the wisdom of men; that is the reasoning of the fallen, sinful nature. It was at work in James and John when the village of Samaria rejected Jesus and the brothers wanted to bring an early judgment on them and destroy them with fire from Heaven.
That is the worldly wisdom that creeps even into the New Testament church of our own day and responds to sin by kicking people out of the church or denying them entrance in the first place, and destroys the careers of pastors when their actions demonstrate that they also are only sinners saved by grace.
But God’s grace is greater than all our sin. Whereas your transgressions and mine reach to the boundaries of the universe, His grace comes from without the universe, and as the waters of the deepest ocean both fill and engulf the sunken ship, His grace not only extends to the farthest reaches of our sin but comes from without to cleanse that which is within.
One of my favorite passages of Scripture is found in Isaiah 59:15-16
“Now the LORD saw, And it was displeasing in His sight that there was no justice. And He saw that there was no man, And was astonished that there was no one to intercede; Then His own arm brought salvation to Him, And His righteousness upheld Him.”
This passage upholds the Biblical teaching that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; that there is no one righteous, not even one, that no one understands, that together they have been rendered ruined by sin, and that no one seeks for God or in their own person wants to do good.
The prophet, in these verses I’ve just read, indicates that this was displeasing to God; dismaying even; that in all of the world’s history from beginning to end there was not one man who could stand in the gap between men and God to reconcile them once again to one another. But in His mercy and grace and in His desire for us, His own strong arm brought salvation to Him. In other words, by His own strength and means and entirely apart from us, He provided the reconciliation – He Himself stood in the gap.
THE MAN HE SENT
He looked and saw no man, but by a Man He lavished His grace upon a world blackened with transgressors and their transgressions and by One who loved righteousness and hated lawlessness He spread out his lovingkindness like a blanket and His faithfulness like a covering, and His righteous judgments like a tent.
We must remember that this Man who was born of a woman and who came into the world, unlike any other man, by His own volition and power, is the very One the Psalmist is exalting in all his praises.
He is the one whose character is described in the terms ‘lovingkindness’, ‘faithfulness’, ‘righteousness’, and whose deeds are worthy of extolling, ‘preserver of man and beast’, ‘refuge for those in danger’, ‘giver of delights’, ‘fountain from which springs life’, ‘Light in whom there is light’.
Jesus said of Himself that he came to seek and to save that which was lost. He said that the Father sent Him into the world that the world might be saved through Him (Jn 3:17-19). He promised to all who would come to Him, the water that springs up to eternal life.
While the transgressor lies in his bed dreaming up all sorts of evils and planning to carry them out, the language of God’s lovingkindness says “Anyone who hears my word and believes in Him who sent me, has eternal life and shall not come into judgment but has passed out of death into life”.
It says that the Lord is “...not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance” and that He therefore waits patiently and that the seeming slowness in the fulfillment of His promises is only that His will is to save all who will respond to His call. (2 Pet 3:9)
The contrast between the depths of man’s need and the breadth of God’s grace is as vast as the contrast between the extent of man’s fall and the infinitude of God’s holiness.
It is only with the help of the Holy Spirit that any child of God can ever begin to comprehend the absolute ruin to which we were all subjected in sin, and the absolute holiness of the God who made us and who redeems us by the blood of His Son.
People have discussions about whether there is a heaven and a hell and foolishly ask one another if they believe they will be going to either place.
But they have not begun to touch on the real issue. Not only do we not deserve Heaven, we do indeed deserve Hell. Our deserving is complete and lacking in no measure of sin and evil. There is not a word that can be said in our defense; not one word, not the accounting of one righteous act or thought.
But God reached all the way down into the filthy, miry, viscous blackness into which we had sunk and were held and hopeless, and He got under us and raised us up, cleansed us, made us new, seated us with Christ in the heavenly places – not by any measure of our merit, I repeat, but because His grace is greater than the scope of our transgressions, and it reaches all the way down and lifts all the way up.
“God…has demonstrated how the very worst thing that has ever happened in the history of the world ended up resulting in the very best thing that has ever happened in the history of the world.
I’m referring to … the death of God himself on the cross. At the time, nobody saw how anything good could ever result from this tragedy. And yet God foresaw that the result would be the opening of heaven to human beings.
So the worst tragedy in history brought about the most glorious event in history. And if it happened there – if the ultimate evil can result in the ultimate good – it can happen elsewhere, even in our own individual lives.” John Kreeft, PH.D.
Beloved ones, there is no evil that is not vanquished at the cross. There is no blot of sin that cannot be washed whiter than snow in the blood of the Lamb. There is no trouble in your life that can thwart the God who used what men meant for the worst evil in history and turned it into the greatest victory in all eternity.
And you need to know for a certainty today, if you never have before, that God’s grace extended through the finished work of His Son and our Lord Jesus Christ on the cross of Calvary, and by His resurrection from the dead, is broader than the scope of your transgressions, greater far than all your guilt and shame, and therefore and in gratitude both now and before His throne of grace forever, seek to magnify the precious name of Jesus.
Praise His name! (Thanks to Haldor Lillenas, 1885 – 1959, author of “Wonderful Grace of Jesus”)
