In a Wicked World

For several summers, we have ventured into the Psalms. We jumped around a little in 2015 and 2016, but then we decided to start at Psalm 1 and preach through them consecutively.

Last summer, we concluded with Psalm 35. So today, we pick up the Psalter again, and open to Psalm 36 (this summer we will preach some psalms and some proverbs, Lord willing).

For today, Psalm 36.

From high school on, I’ve been a big fan of David Letterman, specifically his Top 10 lists. There’s one Top Ten list that has stuck with me over the years. This one debuted October 4, 2001:

Top Ten Words:

10. Biscuit

9. Yak

8. Epiglottis

7. Seersucker

6. Lozenge

5. Welterweight

4. Boysenberry

3. Meat

2. O’Clock

1. Toyotathon

Letterman is, without a doubt, the best. I’m willing to fight anyone who disagrees, especially those who preferred Leno to Letterman. If, after the evening news, you watched Leno instead of Letterman, what we have is an issue of discipleship and, frankly, church discipline. Segments like the Top Ten and Will it Float? will go down in history.

David Letterman had his list of Top 10 Words. I think King David would, too (if he thought in those categories).

There are words David uses again and again in the Psalms. One of his Top 10 words is hesed.

I talk a lot about hesed. One, because it’s a word used 245 times in the OT and is used over and over again in the Psalms (127 times). Hesed is used three times in Psalm 36 alone.

I get why hesed is one of David’s favorite words. It’s an incredible word, but a little difficult to define because hesed doesn’t translate into one word in English.

In fact, it’s really hard to get at the sense of hesed with just one word. Sometimes it shows up simply as “love”, but it’s more than that.

“It’s love, but love with an ‘umph’…“love with super-glue on it.” It’s the LORD Yahweh’s love that simply won’t let go. That’s hesed; that’s the word David is so enamored with here in our psalm (Ps. 36:5, 7, 10).” -Dale Ralph Davis

Hesed is unfailing love, steadfast love, lovingkindness. That’s hesed.

Sally Lloyd-Jones gives my favorite definition of hesed: God’s "Never Stopping, Never Giving Up, Unbreaking, Always and Forever Love.”

A few verses into this psalm—Psalm 36—David will start speaking about the LORD’s hesed. But, to start, David’s really focused on the wicked, those who oppress the faithful.

This is how David begins Psalm 36.

Psalm 36:1–4 NIV

1 I have a message from God in my heart concerning the sinfulness of the wicked: There is no fear of God before their eyes. 2 In their own eyes they flatter themselves too much to detect or hate their sin. 3 The words of their mouths are wicked and deceitful; they fail to act wisely or do good. 4 Even on their beds they plot evil; they commit themselves to a sinful course and do not reject what is wrong.

In a Wicked World, the Wicked Don’t Fear God

This seems obvious, but I’m regularly surprised when people are surprised at the behavior of the wicked.

“I can’t believe they did that!”

“Really?!?! You can’t believe the wicked behave wickedly?! You shouldn’t expect Christian behavior from non-Christian people. You can’t believe they did that?! It’s makes total sense they did that. Woulda been weird if they did anything else!”

The wicked, David says, have no fear of God before their eyes.

Paul uses this verse—Psalm 36:1—in Romans 3 when he’s describing the sinfulness of both Jew and Gentile.

Romans 3:10–18 NIV

10 As it is written: “There 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, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.” 13 “Their throats are open graves; their tongues practice deceit.” “The poison of vipers is on their lips.” 14 “Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.” 15 “Their feet are swift to shed blood; 16 ruin and misery mark their ways, 17 and the way of peace they do not know.” 18 “There is no fear of God before their eyes.”

This is the state of those who are under the power of sin—Jew and Gentile alike.

And, please understand, this is true in every age. It was true in David’s time. True in Paul’s time. True in the good ol’ “Leave it to Beaver” days. And it’s just as true in our time.

This will be true until Jesus returns and sets the world at rights: in a wicked world, the wicked don’t fear God.

It shouldn’t surprise us, but it seems to really strike David. He’s struck with this truth, with the reality of this wicked world.

There’s no fear of God. If fear of God is absent, you see, anything goes. There is no restraint in them, nothing outside of them to hold them back, to keep them from doing what they want to do.

They flatter themselves too much to detect or hate their sin.

This, true in every age, is certainly true of our current cultural moment.

Sinful people are too deluded, too self-flattering, to see any issue with that they’re doing. Indeed, most people (for lack of vocabulary and for lack of understanding) don’t see (and won’t see) that what they’re doing is sin.

The sinner, apart from the work of God and the Holy Spirit, won’t see their sin as sin. They don’t have that understanding.

“When we don’t fear God, we flatter ourselves, and that flattery gives us more confidence to sin. We don’t really see ourselves as the Lord sees us, and we are blind to our own sins and what they can do to us.” -Warren Wiersbe

The wicked can’t detect their sin. They certainly won’t hate their sin. Those who belong to Jesus only hate their sin because of the inward work of the Spirit and because the Bible teaches us to hate that which is displeasing to God.

The wicked don’t fear God. They sin and they think nothing of it.

The words of their mouths are wicked and deceitful. Of course they are. Wicked people will speak wickedly.

Haters gonna hate. Sinners gonna sin. Wicked people gonna act wickedly, speak wickedly, do wickedly.

They fail to act wisely or do good. Again, they can’t do anything else. No one under the power of sin can do good. It’s an impossibility, so says God’s Word.

The wicked do evil; it’s in their nature. Even on their beds (at night, instead of sleeping), they’re plotting evil. They’re committed to doing evil, they don’t reject what’s wrong.

Wicked people do wicked things. It shouldn’t shock us or surprise us. In fact, whatever we see on television, whatever we read on the ever-reliable Internet, should not unsteady us at all.

Let us not be astonished in the least when the wicked of this world behave wickedly.

David spends a bit of time contemplating the behavior of the wicked, but then he rightly turns his attention away from the wicked and turns it to the faithful, steadfast love of God.

Here’s a pro-tip from David himself:

When struck or overwhelmed with the state of the world around you, you should do what David does here: stop and acknowledge who God is.

This is what David does, starting with verse 5.

Psalm 36:5–9 NIV

5 Your love, Lord, reaches to the heavens, your faithfulness to the skies. 6 Your righteousness is like the highest mountains, your justice like the great deep. You, Lord, preserve both people and animals. 7 How priceless is your unfailing love, O God! People take refuge in the shadow of your wings. 8 They feast on the abundance of your house; you give them drink from your river of delights. 9 For with you is the fountain of life; in your light we see light.

In a Wicked World, the Faithful Focus on God

Maybe the word “should” belongs there. The faithful *should* focus on God.

Too often—far too often, really—our focus is on what’s happening in the world around us. We get fixated on the wicked, as I think David was tempted to do, and we end up paying them too much attention.

At verse 5, David rightly shifts to the LORD. He contrasts the wicked of the world with the faithfulness of the LORD, specifically the LORD’s great hesed love.

David stops contemplating the sinners and starts focusing on the glories of the LORD.

He doesn’t compare wicked people to righteous people; rather David compares the object of the faith of the righteous—the LORD—with the beliefs and practices of unbelievers.

No matter how wicked the wicked become, their wickedness is no match for the steadfast, unfailing, unchanging love of the LORD.

Listen/read along and see how Eugene Peterson translates/paraphrases verses 5-6:

Psalm 36:5–6 M:BCL

5 God’s love is meteoric, his loyalty astronomic, 6 His purpose titanic, his verdicts oceanic. Yet in his largeness nothing gets lost; Not a man, not a mouse, slips through the cracks.

The love of the LORD outpaces the Hebrew language, the English language, any language. There are no human words that get at the fullness of the hesed love of God.

To the heavens, to the skies, like the highest mountain, like the great deep.

David wants to stretch our faith to take in the infinite dimensions of the LORD’s unchanging love and goodness. We’ve been taken out of the dark hole where the wicked scheme, into the limitless spaces of God’s unchanging love.

Oh, that we would grasp how wide and how long and how high and how deep is the love of Christ!

There’s nothing we can do about the wicked (let me say that again); but we can turn our focus from the wicked and fix our eyes on the LORD.

There’s an important shift in mood and perspective David makes in this song, Psalm 36.

In World magazine several years ago, they mentioned this interesting event:

A woman Dorothy Fletcher of Liverpool, England, was on a plane headed for Florida. In flight, she had a heart attack. That’s a bad scenario—heart attack in a metal tube at 30,000 feet over the Atlantic ocean.

However, when the flight attendant called for a doctor to help the collapsed woman, within seconds 15 cardiologists unfastened their seat-belts and came to the lady’s aid.

They were en route to a conference on heart disease. So Dorothy recovered and got to her daughter’s wedding.

Heart attack in flight, but with a plane full of heart doctors! What could be better?

The world is wicked. Has been since Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of the tree. The world is wicked, but God’s love surrounds us; His hesed is greater far—wider, longer, higher, deeper—His love is greater far than the world is evil.

Our focus must be on Him and His hesed love.

In His love, people—not just Israel, but all people, mankind, the children of men—in God’s love every kind of person can take refuge in the shadow of [His] wings; they can feast in abundance, drink from the river of delights; they have life and light in Him.

The hesed love of God provides and protects, giving all we need.

It’s the unfailing, ever-sufficient love of God that outshines the wickedness of the world, and not the other way around.

Don’t ever forget this, friends. No matter how grim, how dark things might seem, the love of God is what lights it all up; the love of God is life to us, it’s water to the parched who live in a dry and weary land.

In Matthew 23, Jesus picks up this image from Psalm 36 and says, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.”

The hesed love of God finds its fullest expression in the person of Jesus, in whom we find light and life, protection, provision, and all good things.

Salvation is possible for all who come to Him, and only for those who come to Him and are gathered to Him.

What a privilege it is to be God’s children! We are resting safely under His wings, feasting joyfully at His table, drinking abundantly from His river, and walking confidently in the light of His love.

In a wicked world, the faithful focus on God—on God and His love.

David concludes this psalm with a prayer, a petition to the LORD God:

Psalm 36:10–12 NIV

10 Continue your love to those who know you, your righteousness to the upright in heart. 11 May the foot of the proud not come against me, nor the hand of the wicked drive me away. 12 See how the evildoers lie fallen— thrown down, not able to rise!

In a Wicked World, those who Know God are Protected

David’s prayer here has everything in its proper place. He’s reversed the order of the first part of the psalm.

He began this psalm with his focus on the wicked. He quickly turned to the love of God in all its grandeur and fullness.

So here, David begins his prayer by focusing on the steadfast love of God and then gives some attention to the wicked. He prays to the LORD about the wicked in light of the hesed love of God.

This is how it should be. David, by calibrating himself with the truths about God’s unfailing love, puts everything in proper order and shows where his trust is: in the continuing love of God toward those who know Him.

Continue your hesed to those who know you, your righteousness to the upright in heart.

The verb continue means “to draw out,” or “extend, prolong, to make it go on and on.”

David rightly understands and trusts who the LORD is and what the LORD will do. The end of this song sees the proper end of the evildoers (they lie fallen, thrown down, not able to rise!).

But verse 11 is current. It’s the present day for David; as David’s writing this, it’s ‘today’ for him. He’s up against the wicked and the wickedness of the world (as are we, today), so he prays that in his present circumstances, he prays that today the LORD Yahweh would continue His hesed love.

“Make your unchanging love go on and on. Let it have traction here in my need.”

David’s prayer, like all prayer, is about reorienting his heart to be in line with the will of God, to move our hearts more and more to trust Him no matter what we’re facing.

Yes, the wicked in the wicked world are thriving, seemingly unchecked. The wicked are celebrated and their causes are advanced.

BUT the hesed love of the LORD continues for us, for those who know Him. The LORD will protect His people against the proud and the wicked. The evildoers will not prosper forever; verse 12 sums up the fate of the wicked—they will be felled, thrown down, unable to rise up.

In a wicked world, those who know God are protected, this we know.

What’s more, this protection from earthly enemies prefigures protection from the ultimate evils of Satan, sin, and death.

God the Father delivered Jesus from His enemies in His resurrection, and Jesus’ resurrection is the basis of our deliverance.

David’s description of the wicked in verses 1-4 should cause us to stop and think and the wicked and what the answer is. For David, the answer is the love of God.

Paul describes the wicked (what we read earlier in Romans 3). It’s pretty clear: there’s no one, apart from God, who does good. All who don’t belong to God in Christ are the wicked. All. Every one.

What’s the answer, then?

Paul follows-up with the answer:

Romans 3:21–26 NIV

21 But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. 22 This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, 23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. 25 God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith. He did this to demonstrate his righteousness, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished—26 he did it to demonstrate his righteousness at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.

The answer for the wicked, what to do with the wicked is simple and it’s the same as what David found: the unfailing love of God.

For us, this is expressed in the person and work of Jesus who redeems the wicked by grace through faith.

Jesus is the atonement, the propitiation, the offering that turns away the wrath of God from the wicked.

Jesus is the One—the only one—who pays the price for the wickedness of the wicked. Jesus is the One—the only one—who can make the wicked person right with God.

And, praise God, Jesus does this, again and again! It’s what He did for me!

And if you are a Christian, this is your story, too. Once wicked, not good at all, unable to choose good—but God, in Christ, saved you, redeemed you, reconciled you to Himself!

And friend, if you’re not a Christian, wicked though you are, Jesus is the offering for your sin and your wickedness. Jesus is Light and Life. Jesus longs to gather you to Himself and save you from your wickedness and this wicked world.

In a wicked world, trust in Jesus. Give Jesus your life. Rest in Jesus’ unfailing love and try, just try to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ.