ODJ: Astounding God

August 16, 2017 

READ: Psalm 36:5-12 

Your unfailing love, O Lord, is as vast as the heavens; your faithfulness reaches beyond the clouds. Your righteousness is like the mighty mountains, your justice like the ocean depths (vv.5-6).

My son and I constructed a model of the solar system in which each planet is aligned near the next. Looking at this contraption, one might think that real planets aren’t very far from each other. But that’s not the case: if the Sun was the size of a basketball, the pinheadsized Earth would be located 31 yards away and the small planetoid Pluto would be 1,232 yards away! The distances between planets are vast, almost beyond our ability to comprehend.

In Psalm 36, David wrote, “Your unfailing love, O Lord, is as vast as the heavens; your faithfulness reaches beyond the clouds. Your righteousness is like the mighty mountains, your justice like the ocean depths” (vv.5-6). But the full impact of these descriptions can be lost on modern-day people, because astronauts have soared into the skies and beyond, climbers have scaled the highest mountains and oceanographers have plumbed the depths of the oceans. So hearing God’s attributes described in this way might not immediately communicate to us the wonder of who He is.

But in David’s age, all of these locations were completely unknown—no one of his time knew what was truly in the heavens and beyond or what lay in the great ocean depths. David was stating that God’s love is incomprehensibly big, like the vast uncharted regions of space. As the apostle Paul wrote in Ephesians 3, it’s a love that surpasses knowledge. What an astounding thought—as vast as human knowledge and intellect are, they’re incapable of fully grasping God’s faithfulness, righteousness, justice and love.

What’s even more astounding is that this infinite God is on our side—and if such an incomprehensibly wonderful God is for us, who can be against us? (Romans 8:31).

—Peter Chin

365-day-plan: Luke 16:1-18