The Brightness
of God and the Darkness of Sin
A few years ago I was fortunate enough to have a
book published; it’s called ‘Starting at the Beginning’, and it’s a book about
the basics of Christian faith. Of course, when we were getting close to the end
of the process we had to start making decisions about things like ‘What
typeface shall we use?’ or ‘Do we want a cover photo?’ or ‘What colour should
the cover be?’ The designers chose a very nice cover photo showing a very
diverse group of people sitting in church – at least, I think that’s where they
were sitting – and then, in a stroke of genius, they chose to use a black
cover. Somehow the black cover really served to emphasise the colours in the
photograph. Also, the red letters of the title really stood out well against
the black background. I’m told that artists will often do this – paint
something in bright colours against a dark background, so that the colours
stand out.
In Psalm 36, the author, who might have been King
David, is painting with bright colours against a dark background. David thinks
that the life of following the Lord is the most wonderful life he can possibly
imagine. He praises God for his steadfast love and faithfulness, and for his
righteousness and justice. He describes God’s steadfast love as ‘precious’, and
he celebrates how God has protected him, nourished him, and been a bright light
to his life. He calls on the world of nature to help him celebrate the wonder
of God: God’s steadfast love stretches to the heavens, his faithfulness to the
clouds, his righteousness is as strong as the mountains, and his justice is as
deep as the ocean. What a wonderful God, and what a wonderful life that God
gives to us! These are the bright colours David is using to paint his picture.
And yet, the bright colours are painted against a
dark background: the fact that there are some people who just don’t seem to see
it! They are ‘the wicked’, and they are convinced there’s no God looking down
on them to judge their actions, so they do whatever they like to get their own
selfish way, not caring how many other people get hurt along the way. This is
the dark reality of the world that David lives in, and he sees the joy and
wonder of God against the background of that dark reality.
This is the world that we Christians live in too,
isn’t it? We’ve read the story of Jesus and seen the brightness of God there.
We’ve put our faith in Jesus and committed ourselves to living as his
followers. We’re learning that following Jesus may be hard, yes, but it’s also
wonderful, a journey of discovering and experiencing God’s steadfast love for
us, of learning to see life as Jesus sees it and to live life as he taught it.
And yet, we know that many people around us don’t see what we see. And there are
times when we don’t see it either; there are times when we experience
unanswered prayer, or we go through suffering that seems unfair to us, and the
darkness looms large and the bright colours of God’s love seem to dim. That’s
the joy and the struggle we face. Psalm 36 helps us recognize that joy and
struggle, and it helps us choose to continue to follow God’s way.
So let’s start by looking at the bright colours.
David has chosen to live a life focused on God, the God who made the world and
everything in it. What has he found out about that God? Look with me at verses
5 and 6 (I’m using the New Revised Standard Version, not the version in the
BAS, because it’s closer to the original Hebrew):
Your steadfast
love, O Lord, extends to the heavens,
your faithfulness to the clouds.
Your
righteousness is like the mighty mountains,
your judgements are like the great deep;
You save humans
and animals alike, O Lord.
First, he reminds us of God’s ‘steadfast love’.
The words ‘steadfast love’ translate the Hebrew word ‘chesed’. The ‘ch’ sound
is guttural, so it’s a soft word with a hard sound at the beginning of it! And
‘chesed’ is a soft concept with a toughness behind it; it’s love, but not just
a sweet, sentimental love. It’s steadfast love, love that you can rely
on, love that will always be there, because the lover has committed himself to
the one he loves. It’s very close to the idea of ‘faithfulness’, which is why David
combines the two in verse 5: ’Your steadfast love, O Lord, extends to the
heavens, your faithfulness to the clouds’.
So the words ‘steadfast love’ reminds us that God
has made a promise to love his people
through thick and thin. This promise is utterly reliable, because God is
utterly reliable. I often say to couples preparing for marriage that in soap
opera land they might say “I do”, but in the church we’re a little wiser: the
promise they will make is “I will”.
“I do” is a promise about feelings; it answers the question ‘Do you love her?’ But really, why do we
have to ask that question at a wedding? We know they’re in love with each
other, in the emotional sense, but emotion isn’t enough to sustain a lifetime
together. “I will”, by contrast, is
about decisions and actions: I promise to be there for you, to care for you, to
serve you in big ways and little ways, even when I don’t feel like it. And
that’s what God’s steadfast love is like: God has bound himself to us by a
promise, and he will not let us down.
David says that God is also a God of
‘righteousness’. The Hebrew word for ‘righteousness’ is a hard one to translate
into English, because it holds together many different ideas. It includes the
ideas of straightness, staying on the path, of justice, of doing what it right.
It’s often tied with the idea of judgement, so God is a just judge who gives
righteous judgements to rescue his people and punish the wicked. So if you’re
one of the godly poor who are always being trampled on, God’s ‘righteousness’
is a comforting thought to you; it means that even though the wicked may be
getting it all their own way right now, it’s not always going to be like that.
What’s it like to live in fellowship with a God
like that? Look again at verses 7-9:
How precious is
your steadfast love, O God!
All people may take refuge in the shadow of
your wings.
They feast on
the abundance of your house,
and you give them drink from the river of your
delights.
For with you is
the fountain of life;
in your light we see light.
So living in fellowship with this God is like
having a place of protection you can go to when times get tough, just like the
little baby chicks will run and take shelter under the wings of their mother
when they’re afraid. That’s what God is like, David says; when times are tough,
we can go to him and experience a sense of safety, of protection from the
storm. We may not literally be delivered from our troubles – David certainly
wasn’t – but we will know that God is with us through them.
Again, David says, it’s like being nourished by
the best food and drink, with a feast that never ends and a river of cool,
fresh water to drink from. Jesus talks about the same reality when he says, “I
am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever
believes in me will never be thirsty” (John 6:35). Jesus is our soul food, and
it’s not just chicken soup for the soul, either: it’s a three-course meal of
the most delicious food imaginable.
Again, David says, it’s like shining a bright
light into a dark place and seeing things as they really are. When we don’t have
God in our lives, we can get really confused about what’s important and what’s
not important, about what’s good and what’s bad. But when we turn to God and
his way, his presence is like a bright light, and suddenly we can look at our
life and see things as they really are. As David puts it, ‘In your light we see
light’ (v.9).
These are the bright colours of the love of God
that David paints for us in the foreground of his picture. I wonder if you’ve
experienced these bright colours in your life? I wonder if you’ve begun to
discover the wonder of God’s steadfast love and faithfulness, and I wonder if
you’ve tasted of the goodness of God and thought, “This is the best thing life
has to offer! Nothing else matches up to this!”
But as we said at the beginning, the bright
colours aren’t the whole story. They are set against a dark background – the
fact that not everyone sees what David sees. Verse 1 says,
Transgression
speaks to the wicked deep in their hearts;
there is no fear
of God before their eyes.
The word ‘transgression’ is one way of describing
‘sin’; to transgress a law is to break it, so sin is seen here as breaking
God’s law. ‘Sin speaks to the wicked deep in their hearts’ – and not just to
the wicked, of course, but to all of us! David is describing an experience I
have every day, when a voice inside me points out how attractive it would be if
I would just cut loose and do what I
want to do, instead of what God wants
me to do! We call this ‘temptation’: the voice of evil calling us, singing a siren
song to lure us away from the way of God.
The wicked listen to the voice of sin in their
hearts; ‘There is no fear of God before their eyes’, says David, and so they
really do believe that there is no one watching what they do. Verse 2 says that
‘they flatter themselves in their own eyes that their iniquity cannot be found
out and hated’. And this has consequences for the way they live, as verses 3-4
point out to us. Here they are in the New Living Translation, which is
especially vivid:
Everything they
say is crooked and deceitful.
They refuse to
act wisely or do good.
They lie awake
at night hatching sinful plots.
Their actions
are never good.
They make no
attempt to turn from evil.
So – we have these two strongly contrasted ways
of seeing reality, the bright colours of God’s steadfast love and goodness, and
the darkness of those who don’t seem to see it, but hear only the voice of sin
calling them in their hearts. What makes the difference? Simply this, says
David: for the wicked, ‘there is no fear of God before their eyes’ (v.1). It
seems strange, after we’ve been celebrating the love and faithfulness of God,
to find that it’s the fear of God
that makes the difference! What on earth does that mean?
Well, it means that we remember this: even if no
one else is watching us, God is always watching us, and God is always pleased
when he sees people turning away from evil and doing what is right and good. God
is not just pleased by this: God is thrilled all the way down to his socks,
just as we are when we’re bringing up our kids and we see them finally getting
the hang of the things we’re trying to teach them. Those of you who are
parents, do you know how that feels? Don’t you cheer and shout and say “Good
job, buddy!” when your child learns that lesson? And that’s how God feels when
he sees us, his children, learning to turn from evil and do good, even when no
one else is looking.
And of course there’s another side of that too:
the disappointment of God when we choose not to follow his ways. We don’t want
to disappoint God, because he’s our wise and loving Father. And so we learn to
walk in the fear of the Lord – that is to say, we’ve made the decision that
losing the sense of his pleasure in us is the worst possible experience we can
have, and we’re determined to avoid it. So we intentionally remind ourselves
every day that we are walking in the sight of a just and holy and compassionate
God who wants us to walk with justice and compassion, even when no one else is
looking.
So the psalm sets before us this contrast between
the bright colours of God’s love for us, and the deep darkness of the life of
wickedness, where we listen to sin speaking to us in our hearts and we choose
to turn away from God. It’s not always easy to make the right choice, but we
pray for strength to make it anyway. And we hold the fear of God before our
eyes: we remember the sense of joy we get from the presence of God, and that
dull, painful sense of guilt when we realise that we’ve turned away from his
path, and the sunshine of his love seems to have gone dim.
So let me invite you again, as I finish this
morning, to remember and celebrate the wonder of God’s steadfast love for you.
Come and take refuge in the safe place under his wings! Experience the
nourishment that Jesus, the Bread of life, wants to bring into your life every
day. And let the light of God shine in the darkness to help you see reality as
it really is. In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.