“Your love, O Lord, reaches to the heavens, your faithfulness to the skies. Your righteousness is like the mighty mountains, your justice like the great deep.” Psalm 36:5-6
I’m sure when many of us read these words, we also hear the music of the popular praise song entitled, “Your Love, O Lord.” The group Third Day may have written the music but the words come straight from God’s word. So let’s take a look at how it was written. First of all, David wrote it in such a way that love and faithfulness are connected, almost like two sides of the same coin. That makes perfect sense. What kind of love would it be if the giver wasn’t also faithful? We can always count on God’s love because of His faithfulness. And we can count on His faithfulness because of His love. The Hebrew word for love, hesed, has the idea of faithfulness built into the very definition of the word. This love and this faithfulness are both so great that we can’t see the end of them. Just as we can’t see to the end of the universe, God’s love and His faithfulness are beyond anything we can comprehend. They have no end.
David follows up this pair of words with another pair of words: righteousness and justice. Like the first pair, these two are also connected. In fact, we can find both pairs connected several other places in scripture, so God obviously intends for them to go together. Let’s look at the definitions before we see the connection. Righteousness means living according to God’s standards. If we do that, we’ll always be in the right. Since God is always perfectly righteous, we know we can trust His standards to be perfectly right. We often think of justice as getting what we deserve. If you steal money, it would make sense that you would have to return the amount you stole. That’s justice according to the world. But do we always know what is deserved? For example, I would think differently about someone who stole for kicks and someone who stole because their child was starving. Because of God’s righteousness, He is the only One capable of making those judgement calls perfectly every time. In fact, when it says that His justice is like the “great deep,” that includes a sense of darkness and secrecy. In other words, God is the only One who knows the intentions of the heart, the deep, dark secrets that make His justice the only one we can count on to be perfectly fair.
Does this mean we should never make a judgement call? I think God wants us to try to abstain from judging others as much as possible. However, sometimes we need to do just that. Have you ever served on a jury? That’s a perfect example of a time when we have to judge someone whether we want to or not. Or maybe you’re in a position of hiring and firing individuals. Or parenting. Or mediating between arguing friends or family members. What do we do in those instances? First, remember His incredible love and faithfulness available to us at all times. Keep in mind that He loves that individual just as much as He loves you or me. Then remember that we’re not God. Since He’s the only one capable of making a righteous judgement every time, we need to lean heavily on His wisdom. He may be telling us to make a decision that seems illogical. That’s okay! Sometime God is not logical. But He’s always loving, faithful, righteous and just!