Wake Up!

Summary:

Dive into the profound depths of Psalm 36, where the light of God illuminates our path and transforms our hearts. Centered around verse 9, “For with you is the fountain of life. In your light we see light,” this sermon invites us to embrace the divine light that dispels the shadows of deception and self-centeredness. Through the powerful analogy of Plato’s cave, we witness the journey from darkness to enlightenment. The sermon paints a vivid contrast between the wicked, ensnared by their own deceit, and the steadfast love and faithfulness of God, whose expansive goodness reaches beyond mere salvation. With Christ as the key to understanding, we see Jesus as the fountain of life and light of the world, calling us to a life of joy and fullness. This spiritual journey is framed by the nurturing care of God, akin to a mother hen’s protection, inviting us into His eternal embrace. Let this reflection inspire a prayerful pursuit of deeper understanding and acceptance of our divine identity. 🙏

Transcript:

Our sermon passage this morning is from Psalm 36, and when I was thinking about what the Lord had laid on my heart this morning, I was honing in on a specific verse, but we're going to look at the whole psalm really in its entirety. But in verse 9, I want to begin by reflecting on these words. For with you is the fountain of life. In your light we see light. Now, these words, they kind of trouble me, and they kind of grab a hold of my attention, and I kind of wonder at them. Because it's such a strange turn of phrase, especially that last phrase, in your light we see light. It's kind of a strange thing.

I mean, think about what light is, if you know how the eye works, and how it is that we see things. It is light that reveals. It is light that allows us to see things. And yet, the psalmist says, in your light we see light itself. The very thing that reveals, the very thing that allows us to see and to understand, the very thing that reveals, it is that very light that is revealed in God's light. And as a philosopher, I kind of want to sit back and think about that for a minute, right? That's just kind of an interesting turn of phrase.

But we have to look at the broader context to kind of make sense of what's happening here. But have you ever had this experience? You know, you've been in a dark room. You know, maybe it's pitch black. You know, you're hiding in the closet. I caught one of our girls hiding in the closet, and I was like, what are you doing? And she says, I'm hiding, right?

And I'm like, okay. You know, she had her head stuck in the clothes in the closet. And I'm like, okay, you do your thing. You know, she liked something about the dark. And she told me afterwards, she's like, I like the dark, Daddy. Interesting. But have you ever had that experience?

You know, you're in a dark room, and you go out into the sunshine, and you're blinded all of a sudden, right? I want you to hold in your mind that image, right, of going from a dark room and just being blinded by the brilliance of the sun. This is an image that has captured the human imagination for thousands of years. The philosopher Plato, for example, he had his famous analogy of the cave, right, in which he was trying to describe how these persons, these prisoners that were held in the cave, right, they were bound in place, and they were looking at shadows on the wall cast by a fire behind them, right? And the idea here is that what if you allow one of these prisoners to be freed and to walk out of the cave and to enter into the true light that is the light that is coming from the sun? Just think of the disorientation, right? Think of the way in which they would be blinded by the brilliance of the sun.

And they would come to understand that that which they thought was reality is actually not reality itself. They were just seeing the images, the shadows of real things. And when they enter into the light, they come into this understanding. You know, I had that in my mind as I was thinking about these words, but I think even Plato can't help us to understand the fullness of what is meant in these words of the psalmist in verse 9. For with you is the fountain of life. In your light, we see light. Well, I'm going to put a pin in that for a minute because I want us to look at the broader context.

This is kind of a breaking the fourth wall kind of moment in the sermon. I am deeply jealous of ministers, of pastors, that they can take a single verse and they can just pontificate for hours on that given thing. John Wesley was kind of like this. Some of his sermons, he would pick out a specific verse and he would write for pages about that verse, right? But I'm kind of a contextual thinker, and so it's really important for me to kind of think about what is the context in which this verse is coming out? Do you ever, when you're reading the Psalms, find them a little bit jarring? When you're reading the Psalms, there's themes and there's kind of counter themes, and as you're reading through, you go from one subject to the next and it can be a little jarring.

I think we'll find in Psalm 36 that it's kind of like that. It begins in a kind of somber way, not just somber, but a kind of depressing way. It begins with these words. Transgression speaks to the wicked deep in their hearts. There is no fear of God before their eyes, for they flatter themselves in their own eyes, that their iniquity cannot be found out and hated. The words of their mouths are mischief and deceit. They have ceased to act wisely and do good.

They plot mischief while on their beds. I like that imagery, plot mischief while on their beds. They are set on a way that is not good. They do not reject evil. And here's where the whiplash comes in, because in verse 5, it just changes completely. And it says, Your steadfast love, O Lord, extends to the heavens. It's that tension in Psalm 36 that I think is going to help us to maybe understand what is happening in verse 9.

Again, that idea of by your light, we see light. Because the psalmist, he first of all, he turns his eye to the human person, right? Specifically persons that are, in his understanding, are wicked, right? These persons that in their deepest, most intimate places within themselves, deep in their heart, we find not good, but actually transgression speaking. These persons for whom there is no fear of God, they go through their life uncaring about God and God's judgment, about God's love and God's nearness.

They don't care. They have no fear of God. These persons, they even go so far as to flatter themselves. They flatter themselves in their own eyes and they think, my iniquity can't be found out. These deepest places of myself, they're unseen. They're unknown to those others. I can pull the wool over anyone's eyes around me. They don't understand this about myself.

They can't see my wickedness. And they flatter themselves thinking, I am not understood for my deepest, darkest self. The words of their mouths are mischief and deceit. They have ceased to act wisely and do good. And then that line that I said that I love, they plot mischief while on their beds. Hopefully you don't know people like this, but maybe you do. And hopefully, but maybe, we might see some of ourselves in some of these descriptions.

Now, maybe we're not all kind of evil masterminds laying on our bed plotting the demise of those around us or our next evil deed. But, you know, if we're truly honest, maybe we start to see some of those tendencies in ourselves if we really begin to examine ourselves. But that would be getting ahead of the story. But then the psalmist says in verse 5, your steadfast love, it goes from looking at, putting the kind of lens on the wicked person to all of a sudden talking about God and addressing the Lord. He says, your steadfast love, O Lord, extends to the heavens. Your faithfulness to the clouds. Your righteousness is like the mighty mountains.

Your judgments are like the great deep. You save humans and animals alike, O Lord. 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. It's interesting to follow the psalmist in this great juxtaposition that he's just created. You see, we begin looking at the wicked person kind of self-satisfied, kind of turned in on themselves, right?

I like this imagery from the Christian tradition. Martin Luther famously said that the heart of the person that is turned away from God, it has a curvature to it. It's turned in on itself. And that's the kind of image that we get of the wicked person. They're kind of all within themselves, right? They're deep in their heart, transgression speaks. They're the kind of person that thinks that they're planning up evil deeds and they're not being found out.

They're just kind of inwardly focused. And yet we see that the description of the Lord is so much more expansive than that description of the wicked person. Your steadfast love, O Lord, extends to the heavens. Your faithfulness to the clouds. To get a sense of this, you just have to think of the imagery here, the spaciousness of what's being talked about. Where the wicked person is turned in on themselves and they're kind of plotting things in their deepest, darkest places, in the depths of their heart. We see that the Lord is called one of steadfast love.

And that love extends to the heavens. It's all the way up to the clouds in terms of his faithfulness. His righteousness is like the mighty mountains and the judgments of the Lord are great. And as great as the deep. You see, it's as if you take this image of the wicked person and it's kind of self-satisfied. Think they pulled the wool over everyone's eyes. They think that they're planning up evil deeds that are going to succeed against their adversaries. And yet we learn that even the depths of their depravity are not deeper than the judgments of God.

Your judgments are like the great deep, the psalmist says. You save humans and animals alike. You see, the wicked person might think, you know, I could save myself, you know, through my mischief and my deceit.

I can, you know, craft a way forward. You know, I'm a kind of Machiavellian person. I can be smarter and out-politic everyone around me and I can succeed in life. That's what the wicked person tells themselves. And yet the reality is something very different. The wicked person has somehow deluded themselves to think that they are self-sufficient on their own, that they can somehow through their cleverness, somehow through their deceit, somehow through their mischief, make something of themselves. And yet we see in juxtaposition that it is in fact the Lord who operates in a steadfast love that extends to the heavens.

It has a faithfulness that extends to the clouds and has judgments that are as great as the deep. It is that Lord that is the one that brings salvation. That very thing that the wicked person thinks that they can secure for themselves, it is that salvation that the Lord provides. And he does it out of his very goodness, out of his steadfast love, the psalmist suggests. The Lord saves humans and animals alike. But it doesn't stop there. And that's what I think is the really cool part of what we learn here in the Psalms.

He goes on to say in verse 7, And 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. I was talking with a gentleman yesterday who's a pastor in a church, a different church here in Dallas. And he was sharing a little bit about what their church believes. And I didn't get a real good sense of what their theology was. But there

was one thing that he said that I was like, Oh, that kind of tracks with my own tradition, with our tradition, the Church of the Nazarene.

And he said, you know, our church emphasizes not just salvation, but that God is doing a work that isn't just saving us from something, but God is saving us for something, right? That God intends to do more than just save us from our own wickedness, save us from our sin-warped heart that's curved in on itself. But God desires to make us holy. He didn't use that word, but that was kind of, I suggested that to him. And he said, yeah, that kind of makes sense, that tracks. But there's this idea that this God who saves is not just trying to save us from what's wrong, but God is saving us for something, which is, again, what the psalmist, I

think, is describing in verses 7 through 8, and even including 9. How precious is your steadfast love, O God!

All people may take refuge in the shadow of your wings, right? God doesn't just save, but he also protects and nurtures and cares, like a mother hen. You know, Jesus uses this imagery in the Gospels, right? And he longs to take the people of Israel under his wing as a mother hen would take its chicks. As a way of protecting and keeping and nurturing, that is who God is. Not just a God who saves, but also a God, and is powerful and righteous and all these sorts of things. But God is also a God that loves and cares deeply for his creation.

Saving humans and animals alike, but going beyond that and offering a feast of abundance in his own house. And with that imagery, you should already be thinking ahead again to Jesus. You know, Jesus talks about, I will go and prepare a place for you, right? But the psalmist talks about it in this way, just the kind of basic fact of God's goodness. They feast on the abundance of your house, and you give them drink from the river of delights. You see what the psalmist is letting us onto here, is that God is not just saving humans and animals, right? From that which besets them, but also desires their fullest happiness, their greatest good, to satisfy their deepest longing.

This is what God offers. And I love the way, actually, if you read kind of how the patristic authors, these are kind of persons that were great teachers in the church in the first few centuries of its existence. This is kind of not Nazarene approved, but there's several examples. When they read this specific verse, in verse 8, the example that they use is actually drinking of wine, right? This idea of getting drunk, right? But this idea that this feast, it's not a drunkenness of the body, right? But it is drinking so deeply that one is over mastered, right?

By the goodness of God, right? Filled with the good things of God, that God delights the heart in a way that nothing earthly can achieve, right? That God takes a human person and gives them the greatest fullness that they could possibly have. That is the kind of idea here. And then we arrive at verse 9, where we started. For with you is the fountain of life. In your light we see light.

Now, I focused at the beginning on the light part, but I think it's worth just dwelling for a moment on the idea of the fountain of life, right? This is perhaps one of the most fundamental things that we can say about God. It's that God is the source and summit of life, of the human life, right? That we come from God, and I didn't come up with that phrase. That's another church father, but I love that phrase. That God is the source and the summit of our life, right? God gives us our being, and God is the summit of human life.

God made us for God's self, right? This is what we learn when we read scripture. That from Genesis to Revelation, there's this story, right? And this imagery of the fountain, I think, is not coincidental, right? In Genesis, you have a fountain flowing through the garden, right? From the place where the tree of life is, right? And that same fountain is present in the book of Revelation, flowing now also from the tree of life, from two trees that are said to be in the center of the heavenly place, right?

So it's not unusual for Christians and Jews to think about God as the fountain of life, but to say that God is the fountain of life, for Christians in particular, as they're reading the Psalms, takes on a very particular meaning, right? And this is where I'm kind of getting back to that thing that I said at the beginning. Christians, when we read the Psalms, right? We read them with the great history of the Psalms.

They go back to the Jewish... They have Jewish roots, and yet we read them, and we begin to recognize things in them that we maybe wouldn't have recognized before. It's as if a light has made us able to see a light that was present that we could not see. And Christians, when they read the Psalms, they see in this verse 9, Christians see the image of Christ, right? Christ is, in a sense, the key. The one that makes us understand perhaps the entire Psalm here, but also all of life, right? It is by the light of Christ that we see light for its very reality.

And in fact, if you look at the Psalm as a whole, we see that in Christ, we see also ourselves for what we are, right? You know, the wicked person, they're so caught up in their own schemes, right? They're so caught up in this idea that they pulled the wool over everyone's eyes that they don't realize that when God's light shines on them, they are revealed for who they are, right? Jesus famously made this claim about himself. He says in John 8 that, he says, What I want to suggest with you this morning is that when we think of these words in Psalm 36, specifically in verse 9, we see light. I want to suggest to you that this has a Christological meaning, right? That Christ is the key, the kind of answer that makes sense of what these words are trying to communicate to us.

You know, the Christians, we believe, and Christ claimed this about himself, right? Christians have long claimed that Jesus is creator, right? That Jesus is not just some kind of successful human being that kind of evolved to a high point of consciousness and all that, but Christians have long claimed that he is our very creator. He is God, God's self, right? And to say that Jesus is the key that helps us to understand this is to understand also the claims that Jesus makes about himself. You know, Jesus also, when he met a woman by a well, and this is told in John chapter 4, right? He tells her, you know, if you would have asked, I would have given you water, right?

The water of life that you would never thirst again. Jesus makes claims about himself that are eerily kind of resonant with the words that we find here in Psalm 36. In a sense, we see Jesus perhaps suggesting that he himself is that fountain of life. He is the source and the summit of life, and this is what the church came to understand. They came to understand that Jesus was, in fact, God. And when Jesus said, I am the light of the world, he really meant it. He was that light that allowed us to see light itself.

He is that light that allowed us to see who we were, but not just who we were, but who God had created us to be and what God was wanting to make of us. Christ is that light that allows us to see that God desired more for us than just saving us from what ailed us, but that God desired for us our fullest expression, our fullest happiness, our fullest joy. And so when we look at the psalm and we read the psalm and we kind of feel the juxtaposition, the kind of jarring kind of transition from this talk of these wicked persons to talk of the Lord and his steadfast love, we begin to see that Jesus is the thread that helps us to see all of those things. Jesus is the one that allows us to understand ourselves for who we are, but not just for what we've tried to make of ourselves, how we've tried to make ourselves wrong, how we've tried to kind of mess things up, but also for how God has created us and what God wants for us and what God desires for our fullness. And all of this is true in Christ. I want to leave you with a last couple of images because I think they're so powerful, right? If Jesus is in fact the very fountain of life and the very light by which we see light, I think this helps us to make sense not just of these kind of illusions that he makes about himself in the Gospels, but it helps us to make sense of kind of the grand sweep of Scripture, right?

I talked about how, you know, if we understand God as being the source and summit of human life and we pay attention to the kind of imagery that Scripture uses time and time again to explain these realities, we begin to see something really interesting. I'm fascinated by these images, right? We talked about how in Genesis, there's this image of a river going through the garden, right? Flowing from the tree of life. And we find that same river also in Revelation and flowing from the tree of life there and flowing actually from the throne of God, right? But there's actually another thing that happens in Scripture that I think is so fascinating. You know, Jesus, when he's crucified, is lifted up and nailed to a tree, right?

This is how the tradition talks about it, right? He's lifted up, you know, that tree of life now becomes the image of a cross, right? It's kind of used for nefarious purposes. He's lifted up on the cross. And at a certain point, Christ, according to the tradition, Jesus' side is pierced, right? And what comes out? When his side is pierced, there's both blood and water that flows out.

And I love this imagery because I think it ties together in my mind this kind of basic truth about who Jesus is, but also about how we might understand that he is the fountain of life. You see from his side, his pierced side comes down blood and water, you know, flowing down. And there's a sense in which we see the kind of unity of these pictures in Christ, right? We're not talking about just rivers. We're talking about the very source and the summit of our life. This is why we, as Christians, we understand Jesus is not just God, but he's also the image of humans made perfect, the image of what God desires for us, right? We see that God has made us for life and not for death.

You know, this is why we have a hope of resurrection, right? We recognize that God has not desired for us death and destruction, mischief and woe, but God has desired for us the fullness of life, that life continues with God and in God. And Jesus is the fulfillment of all of that. And so we see in these words something very true, but it's a truth that is bound up with the truth that is Christ. For with you is the fountain of life. In your light we see light. And as you leave this morning, I hope that you carry with you these images from the Psalms because I think they're so instructive and they're worth kind of meditating on, right?

It could just be verse 9, but you could also meditate on the juxtaposition between, you know, the description of the wicked person and of God's goodness. And what we learn as we begin to meditate on these things is we learn that God ultimately is for us. That God has not left us in that place of kind of mischievous evil planning on our beds, right? God has not left us in that place, right? God has allowed us to see ourselves as ourselves, not just as the kind of wicked persons that want to kind of wield woe, but as persons that are made for something more, right? That we see in Christ, we see ourselves as persons that are dearly loved. That God has desired and created for himself and desires to have life with eternal.

And that is a wonderful truth to take with us this morning. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we give you thanks for these words. They are ancient words, and they are words that have captured the imaginations of people throughout history. And Lord, we pray that we would be attentive to this truth that we've received this morning, that you and you alone are the fountain of life, and that it is by your very light that we see light itself. Lord, may we take these words to heart. May we meditate upon them, and may we be receptive to the grace that you offer.

We ask this in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.