"Your steadfast love, oh Lord, extends to the heavens; your faithfulness to the clouds…
How precious is your steadfast love, O God!
The children of mankind take refuge in the shadow of your wings.
They feast on the abundance of your house,
And you give them to drink from the river of your delights.
For with you is the fountain of life; in your light do we see light."
-King David, Psalm 36:5, 7-9
I remember watching outer-space-themed movies as a pre-teen/early-teen in the late 90s. Deep Impact, Armageddon, Contact, etc. You might remember them. Latent as a sub-theme in most of these was the idea of the vacuity (emptiness) of space. On one occasion (on which movie, I can’t remember), a guy gets blown off of an asteroid by a random surface explosion, and goes hurtling into outer space, screaming in terror in his helmet, knowing he will die a lonely, miserable death in the vacuity of empty blackness. This view of the universe was woven into the minds of millennials with a ubiquity (and certainty) that takes major revisionism to deny.
Combine it with the naturalism of the Lion King (and to be clear, we all love the Lion King), where people and animals are merely a part of an impersonal “circle of life,” and you begin to see emerge the final product of the late modern presuppositions that make today's thirty and early forty-somethings the skeptics about theism that they are:
a) Space is big, dark, empty, and full of random explosions that will send us out into it
alone; and
b) My significance is found in the fact that I contribute to a food/survival chain. (Never
answered in Lion King is how this impersonal, mechanical view of the universe in any
way justifies Simba’s rage at his uncle for killing Mufasa: Doesn’t Scar’s ingenuity and
cleverness simply prove him to be higher on the chain?)
But David, under inspiration by the Spirit of the God who is, says something interesting in the text above: God’s steadfast love—his chesed love (it’s Hebrew; think covenantal, eternal, Trinitarian, relentlessly saving, protecting, healing)—extends to the heavens. Now God dwells perfectly in heaven (Matt. 6:9, Ecc. 5:2), so we would expect David to say that God's steadfast love extends from the heavens. But he says “to the heavens”; the implication seems to be that the the steadfast love of God, as far as humanity is concerned, starts on the ground. That is, our existence in this time and in this place is itself evidence of his steadfast love. He puts us where we are when we are, so that, as Paul says in Athens, “we’ll feel our way toward him and find him” (Ac. 17:27).
But note the very next thing Paul says: “Yet he is actually not far from each of us, for ‘In him we live and move and have our being” (17:27-28). So he has chosen to place each of us in our unique lot in life because it is the best lot in which each of us can seek and find him. But what we’re seeking is not something far off, but something with a presence that is experienced by so simple an act as breathing, even existing. We do nothing apart from God’s supplying of our being. “In his hand is the life of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind” (Job. 12:10); note, we breathe, but the breath is cradled in his hand. In that same sense he says via Jeremiah, “Do I not fill heaven and earth?” (Jer. 23:23); similarly still, Jesus says that even something as insignificant as a sparrow's death does not occur apart from God’s provision, and neither do we lose hairs so that he loses count of them (Matt. 10:28-30). Our being is continually supplied by God, as is all being in both general and particular. We don’t act apart from him: If we do good, we participate with him; if we do bad, we choose non-participation, but his wisdom is such that those acts of non-participation will serve his good purposes in the end. Obviously this raises a lot of follow-up questions about causality and evil, but I’m going to decline them for now. I’d recommend a couple of books, footnoted below.*
Simply put, the difference between this view of the universe and the impersonal, mechanical, prone-to-explosion, unavoidably lonely view of the universe is obvious: If all of life is lived before God’s face, deriving from God’s being, there is not even a single square inch of space in existence that is lonely. If some catastrophe happened while in outer space, sending someone hurtling away, it is not nothingness into which they hurtle, but the space which the God of steadfast love fills. Neither is our significance tied to our production in some survival cycle, but on God's graciously giving us life, breath, and everything (Ac. 17:25) which means he cares, and invites us to himself, moment by moment. Thus even the one hurtling into outer space would do well to learn to think, even in that moment of terror, “While I’m terrified, nothingness doesn't consist in this spiral away, but only in refusing to look to and believe in God, and instead to think what I want to about this. God will care for me, and if that means death, it means entrance into his joy” (“Enter into the joy of your master” Matt. 25:21).
I think that this is why v.5 in the Psalm above flows into vv.7-9 the way that is does: His steadfast love fills all space and time such that he is inescapable, and when people acknowledge it and learn to rest in him, his care, his provision, etc., two things happen, one following the other: a) He becomes their refuge from the troubles of life (v.7); and b) He satisfies them with the joy and delight that exists in his perfect glory (vv.8-9, “the river of your delights”; see also Ps. 46:4).
In short, if you know the steadfast love of God the Trinity, you know that this love both follows and precedes you everywhere you go (Ps. 23:6). There is no isolated place, period, mood, thought, etc. You derive all things from him who is the “fountain of life” who, echoing Calvin, never dries up, and is the source of all goodness.** Or, to summarize, quoting Calvin:
“After we have learned by faith to know that whatever is necessary for us or defective in us is supplied in God and in our Lord Jesus Christ, in whom it hath pleased the Father that all fulness should dwell, that we may thence draw as from an inexhaustible fountain, it remains for us to seek and in prayer implore of him what we have learned to be in him.”***
And even in uncertainty, pain, even despair, such thoughts or feelings don’t change that He who is the fountain of life and all good things shepherds even in this. It’s only matter of time before there’s rejoicing again.
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**This terminology comes from his Ephesians sermons.
***Institutes, III.20.1. Emphasis added.
