Psalm 36:8-12 “How to Get Satisfaction and Keep it”

Translation & Sermon By Nate Wilson for Christ the Redeemer Church, Manhattan, KS, 15 Apr 2018

INTRO: Travelling First Class

Back in my travelling days when I flew more often and when airlines weren’t having to tighten their belts as much as they do now, I would occasionally get bumped to a first-class seat, even though all I could afford was the coach class. On those rare occasions, I milked that luxury for all it was worth.

Yeah, I’ll take that glass of wine before the flight.
Sure, give me that warm, lemon-scented rag to wipe my face.
And yeah I’ll have the fillet mignon, for lunch.
Then I’ll just lean this big comfy-chair all the way back and take a nap!

Of course, any of you who have enjoyed those luxuries know that they don’t “deeply satisfy” our souls, they merely leave us wanting more luxuries because you get accustomed to one level of luxury and crave even more, but maybe if we could magnify the difference between coach class and first class by a thousand, we could begin to form a picture of the difference between living in the household of God instead of in the household of sin.
Jesus said, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled. Blessed are the pure in heart… for they shall see God.” (Mt. 5:6-8)
“The transition in this and subsequent verses from the subject of vv. 1-4 is very happy.” Wrote William Plumer in his Studies in the Book of Psalms, “There the prophet had given the unscrupulous, self-conceited, deceitful, cruel, unrighteous character of the wicked… [and I might add of our own sinful hearts, and then] he holds up to our faith the glorious character of God.”
The ugliness of sin described in verses 1-4 acts as a foil to contrast and to bring out the astonishing wonder of God’s lovingkindness, like a precious stone, that is the perfect cure for the ills of sin in our own hearts.

That is why, at the emphatic center of the psalm, David exclaims, “God, how precious Your lovingkindness is!!” (NAW)
Now, as I pick up at the anticlimax of the psalm in v.8, I want to move from a focus on the foundation of how to start the Christian life to a focus on how to spend the rest of your Christian life - how to keep enjoying God’s lovingkindness. I see three ways suggested by Psalm 36:

First we need to understand that God can satisfy us like nothing else, so that we go to the right source to get satisfaction for the rest of our life. (Going to other sources is essentially idolatry.)
Second, we need to ask and trust God to keep supplying satisfying lovingkindness to us.
And Third, we need to guard against the things that break satisfaction with God’s lovingkindness, foremost of which are pride and wickedness.
This is “how to get satisfaction and keep it.”

A. GO TO THE RIGHT SOURCE:
v.8 They will be deeply-satisfied by the rich fare of Your household, and You will give them a drink of the river of Your pleasures,

“God's righteous ways in providence produce all the happiness there is on earth, among brutes or men… Making souls and satisfying them are prerogatives of God.” ~William Plumer, Studies in the Book of Psalms
What is this deshen – this rich fare, abundance, literally “fatness” of God’s house?

Psalm 63:3-5 “…Your chesed-lovingkindness is better than life… My soul shall be satisfied[1] as with marrow and deshen-fatness...” (NKJV)

o Psalm 65:3-4 “…As for our transgressions, You will provide atonement for them… We shall be satisfied² with the goodness of Your house, Of Your holy temple.” (NKJV)

o Isaiah 55:1-4 “Hey, all who thirst, step-forward to the waters… To what [purpose] do y’all weigh out silver with non-bread, and your labor with dissatisfaction? Listen carefully to me and eat the good, and let your soul indulge itself in the deshen-richness… and let me cut an everlasting covenant for y’all, the faithful lovingkindnesses of David.”

o Do you see that it is chesed-lovingkindness which provides atonement for sin and provides life and light that is what makes God’s house so rich and satisfying?

o “[U]nder it are comprehended all the blessings that are necessary to the happiness and comfort of the present life, as well as those which pertain to eternal and heavenly blessedness… [I]n the style of speaking which the prophet here employs, the use of earthly blessings is connected with the gracious experience of faith, in the exercise of which we can alone enjoy them rightfully and lawfully to our own welfare.” ~John Calvin

This richness is only to be found in God’s household, not the house of man or the house of the earth or the house of devils. The Tent of Meeting in David’s day was called the “House of the Lord” (Ps. 26:8), but even David saw that this was merely a symbol of heaven where Yahweh and His people would dwell forever (Ps. 23:6).

· Jeremiah 31:1-25 spoke of the same satisfying richness of being in the household of God in terms of what we can be experiencing even now in the New Covenant, "…I will be the God of all the families of Israel, and they shall be My people… I have loved you with an everlasting love; Therefore with lovingkindness I have drawn you… and you shall be rebuilt... I will cause them to walk by the rivers of waters, In a straight way in which they shall not stumble… Their souls shall be like a well-watered garden… I will satiate [satisfy] the soul of the priests with abundance, And My people shall be satisfied with My goodness, says the LORD…. For I have satiated the weary soul, and I have replenished every sorrowful soul." (NKJV)

· These words “pleasures,” “satisfied,” and “know” are also in the Bible’s vocabulary for sexual relations between a husband and wife. But it would be backwards to say that God’s love is like human love; it would be more Biblical to say that this earthly pleasure is a small and imperfect picture of a much greater and more satisfying pleasure in relating to God in heaven, which is exactly what Ephesians 5 says. The source of satisfying pleasure is God, not even your spouse. If you look to your spouse for that satisfaction, and your spouse looks to you for that fulfillment, you are, in the words of the pastor I grew up under, like “two ticks and no dog,” that won’t be a satisfying relationship!

The Hebrew word translated “delight/pleasure” is eden, as in “the Garden of Eden” in Genesis 2. To be rolled back to Eden, a world without sin, where there is perfect relationship with God such that there is no pain or sorrow, no hardship, sickness, or death – that is the destiny of God’s people in the new heavens and new earth which He will create for us to dwell in and in which He will dwell with His people. This will be far-and-away better than the luxury of riding first class on an airplane!
“The gains of the world and the delights of sense will surfeit [glut], but never satisfy. But the communications of divine favour and grace will satisfy, but never surfeit.” ~Matthew Henry God is the only true source of pleasure. In fact, He is also the only source of life:

v.9 for with You is the fountain of life; by Your light we see light.

This imagery of God’s grace as a fountain of life shows up throughout the Bible:

Proverbs 14:27 “The fear of the LORD is a fountain of life, To turn one away from the snares of death.” (NKJV) This fountain turns you away from sin which snares people into death.
Jeremiah 2:13 “My people… have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, And hewn themselves cisterns—broken cisterns that can hold no water.” (NKJV) Figuratively speaking of alliances with foreign countries that involved worshipping their gods – going to other sources besides God to find security and satisfaction.
Zechariah 13:1 "In that day a fountain shall be opened for the house of David and for the inhabitants of Jerusalem, for sin and for uncleanness.” (NKJV) A brief prophecy about the Messiah-Jesus as the focal point of God’s grace which would deal with the problem of sin! This is echoed by Jesus’ own words to the woman at the well in…
John 4:14 “…whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life." (NKJV) This is not merely biological life, this is eternal life!
Revelation 22:1 “And he showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding from the throne of God and of the Lamb.” (NKJV) Once again Jesus, the Lamb on the throne of heaven is the fountain-source of this life.
Revelation 21:6 And He said to me, "It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. I will give of the fountain of the water of life freely to him who thirsts.” (NKJV)
If He is the fountain, the source, it is insane to look for pleasure from other sources. “If the fountain is with Him, the streams can never be cut off from those who are in his bosom. Is not that clear? All other good is but a drop. With God is the ocean.” ~Plumer
Calvin: "There is not a drop of life to be found without God."

Similarly, the image of God as the source of light is a pervasive Biblical theme:

o Job 33:28-30 “He will redeem his soul from going down to the Pit, And his life shall see the light. Behold, God works all these things, Twice, in fact, three times with a man, To bring back his soul from the Pit, That he may be enlightened with the light of life.” (NKJV)

o Psalm 56:13 “For You have delivered my soul from death. Have You not kept my feet from falling, That I may walk before God In the light of the living” (NKJV)

o Luke 1:78-79 “Through the tender mercy of our God, With which the Dayspring from on high has visited us; To give light to those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death, To guide our feet into the way of peace.” (NKJV)

John 1:4 “In Him was life, and the life was the light of men.” (NKJV)
John 8:12 Then Jesus spoke to them again, saying, "I am the light of the world. He who follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life." (NKJV)
1 John 1:7 “But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin.” (NKJV)
Revelation 21:23-25 “The city had no need of the sun or of the moon to shine in it, for the glory of God illuminated it. The Lamb is its light. And the nations of those who are saved shall walk in its light, and the kings of the earth bring their glory and honor into it. Its gates shall not be shut at all by day (there shall be no night there).” (NKJV)

o This works both literally and figuratively,

§ for without light, our eyes literally can see nothing. It is the photons being emitted, some of which bounce off of objects and shift wavelengths then imprint themselves upon the retinas in our eyes that cause our brains to register visual impressions of things around us.

§ Also figuratively, without the intelligence of a personal God, there is no way to make sense of those physical impressions and think anything of them. Without the ability to understand the meaning behind the words on a page of the Bible, we would regard Scripture, just like a cat does, as meaningless - except perhaps as a convenient lining for a litterbox. Without a personal Creator, there can be no such thing as intelligence.

§ Light is also a parallel expression for life here. There can be no life and no meaning to life unless God provides it.

“God is light itself, the Father of lights, and the former of it in every sense; in the light of his countenance, and the discoveries of his love, they that trust in him see light, or enjoy comfort; and in the light of his Son Jesus Christ, the sun of righteousness and light of the world, they see the face of God, and enjoy his favour, and behold the glory and excellency of Christ himself; and in the light of the divine Spirit, who is a spirit of wisdom and revelation, they see their sins exceeding sinful, their righteousness as nothing, and a preciousness in the blood, righteousness, and sacrifice of Christ; and in the light of the divine word they see the truths of the Gospel in their native simplicity and excellency, and the duties of religion to be performed by them; and in the light of faith, which is the gift of God, they have at least a glimpse of the unseen glories of the other world; and when the beatific vision shall take place, they shall see no more darkly through a glass, but face to face, even God himself, as he is in Christ.” ~John Gill

Has it been sufficiently expounded that Yahweh – Jesus is the only source that will provide the life and the pleasure you are looking for. You will be disappointed by every other source you try to chase, so we come to the second point:

B. Ask & Trust God to Supply Satisfaction
v.10 Extend Your lovingkindness to those who know You and Your righteousness to those whose heart is right;

For the first time in this psalm, David asks something of God in verse 10. The first word of v.10 is a command addressed to God to “continue/extend” His chesed-lovingkindness and His tsaddik-righteousness in the direction of those who know Him and are justified.

18^th century Bible commentator John Gill noted that this imperative verb here involves God doing special work to “draw out thy lovingkindness;’ that is, to a greater length; make a larger and clearer discovery of it, that the height and depth, and length and breadth of it, may be more discerned.”
When I reviewed the two other uses of this command meshak in the psalms previous to this one[2], I was struck that both times they describe – not a hand reaching out to merely offer help but rather – someone forcefully tying ropes around someone else and dragging them off to the desired place!
David realizes that the only way he is going to get God’s lovingkindnes and righteousness that open into eternal life (and light and pleasure and satisfaction and refuge and salvation) is going to be if God gives it to him, because God’s lovingkindness is out of David’s reach. Remember from v.5; it is “in the heavens”!
And even once God has vouchsafed His lovingkindness and righteous to us, our hearts are so slippery that we need Him to keep on directing His mercies toward us. The people David asks God to direct His lovingkindness and righteousness to are those who already love God and who already have hearts that are right with God. That’s why we need to keep asking and keep trusting God to give this to us.
Although we in the New Covenant have certain advantages over the Old Testament Israelites (Jer. 31:31), still in many ways we are like the people of God described in Nehemiah 9:28-30, “…when they returned and cried out to You, You heard from heaven; And many times You delivered them according to Your mercies [רחמ]... Yet they acted proudly [הזידו], And did not heed Your commandments, But sinned against Your judgments, 'Which if a man does, he shall live by them.' … for many years You had patience[bore] with them, And testified against them by Your Spirit in Your prophets…” (NKJV)
We need God’s continued “drawing” of mercies into our lives, which is one reason why we have weekly gatherings as a people of God to commune with Him and with one another, and that is why we pray without ceasing every day: we need to ask and trust God to supply us with His life and His pleasures.

C. Guard against the things that destroy satisfaction
v. 11 let not the foot of haughtiness enter me, and don’t let the hand of wicked men cause me to waver.

This positive command to God is followed up with two prohibitive commands in v.11. David mentions two things that have a tendency to stop communion with God, namely pride and evil. (They may even be parallel descriptions of the same relational roadblock.)

1) PRIDE: Like the opening verses of this psalm, David is ambiguous as to whether this is someone else’s foot coming “against” him or whether this is pride in his own heart coming “upon” him – there is no explicit preposition in the Hebrew, so some translators have supplied the word “against” or “upon,” as though it comes from another person, but I have interpreted it as a prayer for God to guard one’s own heart against becoming prideful,

for, as we just saw in Neh. 9:29, pride was a driving force towards sin on the part of the Israelites,
and Jesus also warned in the New Testament of how pride can defile us (Mark 7:22).
“When one hath begun to be plentifully overflowed with that Fountain, let him take heed lest he grow proud. Wherefore said he, “the foot”? Because by walking proudly man deserted God…”~Augustine[3]
Even as we pray that God will keep us from proud men and from pride in ourselves, we fight pride by going to God in the first place, considering Him (instead of ourselves) to be the source of light, the fountain of life, the river of pleasure. We resist pride by humbly seeking lovingkindness from God!

2) EVIL: The other thing is the problem of evil. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen believers stumble over this one. They hear the Gospel and profess faith in Christ and get baptized and become regulars at church… and then something evil shatters their world – a friend’s betrayal, a financial loss, a painful illness, or a tragic death. The horribleness of that evil shakes them so badly that they lose faith in God, become cynical and bitter, or throw religion out the window – the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak.

The Hebrew word David uses in v.11 (and also the Greek word chosen in the ancient Septuagint translation) pictures something wavering back and forth, about to topple, like a building in an earthquake.
“It usually happens, that in condemning the wicked, the contagion of their malice insinuates itself into our minds… And whenever the corruption of the world affects our minds and fills us with amazement, we must take care not to limit our views to the wickedness of men who overturn and confound all things; but in the midst of this strange confusion, it becomes us to elevate our thought in admiration and wonder to the contemplation of the secret providence of God.” ~John Calvin
“[R]eflections on what ought to be, in the clear, hard light of what is can lead to conflicts of Joban proportions. Like Job, the faithful are driven to confront God with our questions… we can also be tempted to anger, bitterness, cynicism, and despair. We can even be tempted to give up on God, his world, even life.” ~Gerald Wilson, The NIV Application Commentary
David begs God to protect him from getting dislodged from the house of God by any such crisis.

This protection might come externally, in the form of preventing tragedies so terrible that he wouldn’t be able to handle them,
or it might come in the form of internal fortitude so that even persecution won’t cause you to waver in your faith. (Augustine, in his homily on this psalm, noted how the martyrs of the early church were so inebriated with God’s lovingkindness that they were not shaken as they were led to their death past their own weping spouse and weeping children. They didn’t seem to be sad at all!)

If you really want to drink from that river of God’s pleasures, if you really want to enjoy God’s lovingkindness forever, then it would behoove you to take a cue from David here and pray that God will keep His merciful kindness flowing toward you and stop in its tracks every threat to your relationship with Him, including pride or evil.

“Those that have experienced the pleasure of communion with God cannot but desire that nothing may ever remove them from him.” ~M. Henry
Does this mean that we should be consumed with fear that we might fall away and lose our salvation? No, I think that would be extracting more from the text than is warranted. But can we express our love to God by letting Him know we don’t want anything separating us from Him, even after He has told us in Romans 8:35-39 that nothing can separate us from the lovingkindness of God? Sure, we can express our solidarity with His will on that point, and we can join with David in saying, “Lord, keep loving, me, and don’t let pride take control of me and don’t let evil shake me, because I’m going to dwell in Your house forever!”

I think that v.12 continues this thought. It starts with the Hebrew word for “there” (which, unfortunately, is omitted by the NIV). Now, the question is, “Where is ‘there’?” I suggest that “there” is the same Scylla and Charybdis of pride and evil circumstances mentioned in v.11.

In Greek mythology there was a narrow channel with sharp rocks on both sides that many sailors had tried to navigate and had wrecked upon. The rocks on one side were named Scylla (which was the Greek word for getting a “whipping”) and the rocks on the other side were called Charybdis (Which seems to be related to a Greek word for “piercing” your boat.)
I think that David is saying that the wicked founder on those two rocks of pride and evil, whereas the upright have a God to give them the wings of His lovingkindness and the protection to get them safely through to the rivers of His pleasure.

12 There those who commit iniquity have fallen; they have been shoved down, and they have not been able to get up.

If we know that the wicked have fallen into the pit of hell because they were proud and overcome by evil, and if we know that our hearts are desperately wicked, then we have reason to ask God to keep pride from getting a foot in the door and to keep the hand of evil from pulling us down too!
“How bad soever the world is, let us never think the worse of God nor of his government; but, from the abundance of wickedness that is among men, let us take occasion, instead of reflecting upon God's purity, as if he countenanced sin, to admire his patience, that he bears so much with those that so impudently provoke him, nay, and causes his sun to shine and his rain to fall upon them. If God's mercy were not in the heavens (that is, infinitely above the mercies of any creature), he would, long ere this, have drowned the world again… The… workers of iniquity are cast in the judgment, are cast down into hell, into the bottomless pit, out of which they shall assuredly never be able to rise from under the insupportable weight of God's wrath and curse.” ~Matthew Henry
“The overthrow of the wicked will be beyond expression fearful. They will never recover, they will never begin to recover, they will never hope to recover from their dreadful fall…” ~William Plumer
Without God’s lovingkindness, that’s where David would be: “…like chaff before the wind while the angel of Yahweh shoves [them] down,” as Psalm 35:5 put it. And there, but for the grace of God, is where we would be too.
“[T]his distinguishes the falls of the wicked from those of the righteous; for though the righteous fall, whether into sin, or into any calamity, they rise again; not so the wicked (Psalm 37:24)” ~John Gill

Conclusion

This is how to spend the rest of your Christian life - how to keep enjoying God’s lovingkindness:

Understand that God can satisfy us like nothing else,
Ask and trust God to keep supplying satisfying lovingkindness,
And guard against pride and wickedness that break satisfaction with God’s lovingkindness

This is “how to get satisfaction and keep it.”

Psalm 36:8-12[A]

Septuagint (Psalm 35)	Brenton’s translation of LXX	Douay-Rheims Vulgate	King James Authorized Version	Nathan A Wilson’s Version	Masoretic Text
8 ὡς ἐπλήθυνας[B] τὸ ἔλεός σου, ὁ θεός· [οἱ][C] δὲ υἱοὶ τῶν ἀνθρώπων ἐν σκέπῃ τῶν πτερύγων σου ἐλπιοῦσιν.	7 How hast thou multiplied thy mercy, O God! so the children of men shall trust in the shelter of thy wings.	8) O how hast thou multiplied thy mercy, O God! But the children of men shall put their trust under the covert of thy wings.	7 How excellent[D] is thy lovingkindness, O God! therefore the children of men put their trust under the shadow of thy wings.	7 God, how precious Your lovingkindness is! So the children of mankind take refuge in the shadow of Your wings.	ח מַה יָּקָר חַסְדְּךָ אֱלֹהִים וּבְנֵי אָדָם בְּצֵל כְּנָפֶיךָ יֶחֱסָיוּן.[E]
9 μεθυσθήσονται ἀπὸ πιότητος τοῦ οἴκου σου, καὶ τὸν χειμάρρουν τῆς τρυφῆς σου ποτιεῖς αὐτούς·	8 They shall be fully satisfied with the fatness of thine house; and thou shalt cause them to drink of the full stream of thy delights.	9) They shall be inebriated with the plenty of thy house; and thou shalt make them drink of the torrent of thy pleasure.	8 They shall be abundantly satisfied with the fatness of thy house; and thou shalt make them drink of the river of thy pleasures.	8 They will be deeply-satisfied by the rich fare of Your household, and You will give them a drink of the river of Your pleasures,	ט יִרְוְיֻן מִדֶּשֶׁן בֵּיתֶךָ וְנַחַל עֲדָנֶיךָ תַשְׁקֵם.
10 ὅτι παρὰ σοὶ πηγὴ ζωῆς, ἐν τῷ φωτί σου ὀψόμεθα φῶς.	9 For with thee is the fountain of life: in thy light we shall see light.	10) For with thee is the fountain of life; and in thy light we shall see light.	9 For with thee is the fountain of life: in thy light shall we see light.	9 for with You is the fountain of life; by Your light we see light.	י כִּי עִמְּךָ מְקוֹר חַיִּים בְּאוֹרְךָ נִרְאֶה אוֹר.
11 παράτεινον τὸ ἔλεός σου τοῖς γινώσκουσίν σε καὶ τὴν δικαιοσύνην σου τοῖς εὐθέσι τῇ καρδίᾳ.	10 Extend thy mercy to them that know thee; and thy righteousness to the upright in heart.	11) Extend thy mercy to them that know thee, and thy justice to them that are right in heart.	10 O continue thy lovingkindness unto them that know thee; and thy righteousness to the upright in heart.	10 Extend Your lovingkindness to those who know You and Your righteousness to those whose heart is right;	יא מְשֹׁךְ חַסְדְּךָ לְיֹדְעֶיךָ וְצִדְקָתְךָ לְיִשְׁרֵי לֵב.
12 μὴ ἐλθέτω μοι ποὺς ὑπερηφανίας, καὶ χεὶρ ἁμαρτωλῶν μὴ σαλεύσαι με.	11 Let not the foot of pride come against me, and let not the hand of sinners move me.	12) Let not the foot of pride come to me, and let not the hand of the sinner move me.	11 Let not the foot of pride[F] come against me, and let not the hand of the wicked remove me.	11 let not the foot of haughtiness enter me, and don’t let the hand of wicked men cause me to waver.	יב אַל תְּבוֹאֵנִי רֶגֶל גַּאֲוָה וְיַד רְשָׁעִים אַל תְּנִדֵנִי.
13 ἐκεῖ ἔπεσον [G]οἱ ἐργαζόμενοι τὴν ἀνομίαν, ἐξώσθησαν καὶ οὐ μὴ δύνωνται στῆναι.	12 There have [all] the workers of iniquity fallen: they are cast out, and shall not be able to stand.	13) There the workers of iniquity are fallen, they are cast out, and could not stand.	12 There are the workers of iniquity fallen: they are cast down, and shall not be able to rise.	12 There those who commit iniquity have fallen; they have been shoved down, and they have not been able to get up.	יג שָׁם נָפְלוּ פֹּעֲלֵי אָוֶן דֹּחוּ[H] וְלֹא יָכְלוּ קוּם.

[2] Psalm 28:3 “You must not put me in tow with evil men or with those who commit iniquity…”

Psalm 10:9 “…He nabs a lowly one by drawing him into his net”

[3] All the other commentaries I read, however, attributed it to a proud third party who wanted to conquer David and step on him as a symbol of victory, which I must admit, is a reasonable interpretation.