"Come Thou Fount" Psalm 36 Sunday Morning Worship Service

Let's open our Bibles to Psalm 36.

Psalm 36.

If you are shopping this week for a favorite psalm, I suggest you buy this one.

Psalm 36.

Treasure, a precious psalm this is.

I hope it encourages your heart.

If you've ever been in a Bible study with me or a discipleship group with me or a marriage group or any of the groups that I've led over the years, this has been our first lesson every time.

Psalm 36.

But I want to bring it to the church today as we gather online, and I hope that this encourages your heart and the knowledge of God.

I'll begin by reading it.

Psalm 36.

To the choir master of David, a servant of Yahweh.

Transgression speaks to the wicked deep in his heart.

There is no fear of God before his eyes, for he flatters himself in his own eyes that his iniquity cannot be found out and hated.

The words of his mouth are trouble and deceit.

He has ceased to act wisely and do good.

He plots trouble while on his bed.

He sets himself in a way that is not good.

He does not reject evil.

Your steadfast love, O Yahweh, extends to the heavens, your faithfulness to the clouds, your righteousness is like the mountains of God.

Your judgments are like the great deep.

Man and beast you save, O Yahweh.

How precious is your steadfast love, O God.

The children of mankind take refuge in the shadow of your wings.

They feast in the abundance of your house, and you give them drink from the river of your delights.

For with you is the fountain of life.

In your light do we see light.

Oh, continue your steadfast love to those who know you and your righteousness to the upright of heart.

Let not the foot of arrogance come upon me, nor the hand of the wicked drive me away.

There the evildoers lie fallen.

They are thrust down, unable to rise.

Growing up in Albuquerque, you know this if you've been there, the east side of Albuquerque is a massive mountain, the Sandia Mountain.

It's the southern tip of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the southern tip of the Rocky Mountain range.

The whole city exists under the shadow of the Sandia Mountain.

No matter where you are in the city, you can see the mountain.

The city goes down the side of the mountain, goes down to the river, and then goes up on the west side.

It doesn't matter where you are in the city, you can find the mountain.

You learn to tell directions by what where the mountain is.

Everybody is aware of where it is.

The west side of the city has these volcanoes on it.

It's very easy to miss the volcano.

If you are behind a house or if maybe the fence in your backyard is high enough it blocks outside of the volcano.

If you're in traffic, the stoplight could block your side of the volcano.

But if you're facing the other way, there is no blocking the mountain.

It is over the entire city.

There is no hiding from it.

Trees can't block it out.

There's no neighborhood wall tall enough to block it out.

You can see it everywhere.

I want you to imagine now someone who lives there that denies that that mountain exists.

Denies that it's there.

Perhaps he's turned around and is facing the other direction.

And so he declares that there can be no mountain behind him.

After all, he doesn't see it right now.

He might see a volcano off in the distance, but he can spy no mountain.

You could explain to him that the sun rises later in Albuquerque than it does north or south of it because the mountain blocks it.

It's not going to have an effect on him.

You can explain to him at night you can't see stars in that direction because the mountain blocks them out.

He he'll be oblivious to it.

He refuses to believe that there's a mountain behind him.

Perhaps he's in his basement and he has the windows boarded up.

And he complains that he can't see the mountain.

If someone called me from Albuquerque and said, I I don't I can't see the Sandia Mountain, my first question to him would be, are you inside?

If you are, go outside and look.

Now it's interesting to think of someone who refuses to believe that a giant mountain exists, because there's no moral component to it.

It's just foolishness.

But this is the situation the person finds himself in who denies the existence, or particularly who denies the love of God, who denies the kindness of God, who denies the benevolence or the sovereignty of God.

They are compared in this psalm to a person that refuses to believe that a mountain exists, a person who refuses to believe that light exists because his eyes are closed.

And there's a moral component to this objection.

The moral component is the person doesn't believe in the mountain because he hates the mountain.

The person doesn't believe in light because he hates light.

The person refuses to see the mountain because he's turned away from it, not just by the luck of the draw that he happens to be facing a different cardinal direction, but he refuses to look at the mountain because he hates the mountain.

This is the dynamic with those who reject the existence of God.

One of my favorite things to say to someone, which is has yet to get me punched, surprisingly, when they tell me they don't believe in God, my response is generally, your problem isn't that you don't believe in him.

Your problem is that you hate him.

And to which point the normal response is, I don't hate God.

Which God don't you hate?

The one you don't believe in?

I mean, it doesn't make any sense.

The person who has closed their eyes to God is doing so out of a moral mandate in their hearts.

They refuse to honor him because they don't love him.

And this leads to a life of absurdity, it leads to a life of moral confusion, it leads to a life where you're unable to say basic things like, why is stealing wrong?

Why is murder wrong?

Why is lying and deception wrong?

You're unable to answer those questions when you don't have the rock beneath you of God's moral mandates.

You're unable to give an articulate answer to why there are certain things that are morally not acceptable.

If your morals are dependent upon you or changing as the wind or as the culture.

And so it's lost in the Hebrew here, but the psalm begins with a description of this person.

Literally, in the ESV, it says transgression, transgression speaks of the wicked.

But there's kind of a funny, absurd line in the Hebrew.

It says an oracle of wickedness.

And that phrase oracle in the Hebrew, it's usually in the Old Testament used to introduce a prophecy.

It's something like the oracle of the prophet Jeremiah or the Oracle of Amos.

I think the book of Amos begins with the same phrase, so I'm not mistaken.

And here it's used negatively, like an oracle of wickedness, an oracle of a prophecy about depravity, a prophecy and a clear moral, prophetic declaration from someone who doesn't believe in prophecy, from someone who doesn't believe in moral absolutes, from someone who doesn't believe in right and wrong.

It's a declaration from God about someone and from someone who doesn't believe in God.

It's meant to be absurd.

When you read this verse at the very beginning, if it was translated that way, you would make you pause and it would make you chuckle and say, what kind of, you know, somebody says, I don't believe in prophecy, let me give you a prophetic prediction about why prophecy always fails.

Here you have a moral oracle from someone who doesn't believe in morality.

So where does a person who rejects God, who rejects the idea of moral absolutes and of right and wrong and of ethics that are dependent upon an unchanging God, where does that person come up with his understanding of right and wrong?

You know, for the believer, we can say that murder is wrong because the Bible says it is wrong.

We can say that stealing is wrong because it goes against the nature of God, and the Bible reveals it.

But when you reject the nature of God and you reject the scriptures, where do you go for your moral mandates?

Where do you go for your prophetic declarations about the way the world should be?

You find this out in the middle of verse 1.

The person says that my moral mandate, my moral oracle comes from deep within my own heart.

That's the fountain of their insight for this world.

They reject what God says, they reject what the Word of God says because they have their heart.

And after all, their heart has never failed them.

Yikes.

I mean, you can't even get through the sentence with a straight face.

Their heart has failed them indeed, and they know this to be true if they were to reckon with it.

The person who turns their heart for a moral authority, if they were honest, could go through a catalog of times in their life, their heart has lied to them, their heart has deceived them.

And yet they still count on it.

Now, how can this be?

How can this be?

I'm reminded of a tattoo that has gone out of style now, but was very popular when I was in high school.

It was probably the most common tattoo I saw in people in my high school.

It's said it said, Only God can judge me.

That was the tattoo of style growing up in Albuquerque, only God can judge me.

And it was normally worn by people who are leading a flamboyantly lawless life.

It was meant to say that you can't judge me because only God can judge me.

But it was not meant to convey any kind of fear of God's judgment.

I mean, if you think about that kind of declaration that only God can judge you, you would imagine that it would lead to a more humble life, not a more proud life.

A person who really lives in light of the knowledge of God's judgment would have some fear before him.

But these people, it says in verse 1, they have no fear of God before their eyes.

Now, this lack of fear, this living a life that comes from a fountain of transgressions in their hearts, it manifests itself, and there's five different ways that listen.

I'm not gonna give these to you all as five points.

I'm just gonna rattle through them pretty quickly because the good stuff in the Psalm is coming later.

But first, they flatter themselves.

And you think about the progression.

There's definitely a progression of this evil here.

They flatter themselves because they think they're better than they are.

I mean, that's the idea of living off of what your heart says.

In order for you to really believe your heart, you have to flatter yourself to convince yourself that your heart isn't, of course, good.

Your heart is, of course, not steering you a wrong way.

So you flatter yourself, you tell yourself, as every American does, that, you know, after all, I actually really am basically a pretty good person.

That's the way people think.

I mean, that is flattery.

It is flattery.

They say, I'm a good person, they flatter themselves.

Now that self-flattery will very quickly, we'll notice the progression here, produce lying.

It produces lying.

Verse 3 the words of his mouth are trouble and deceit.

And we're skipping some phrases in here.

You can go through this part on your own.

I want to hurry up and get to the good stuff in the psalm, but the self-flattery gets to the lying about yourself.

The words of his mouth are deceitful.

Because he flatters himself, he begins lying.

And why does a person lie about moral things and about ethical things?

Why does a person lie about their life?

Because they realize that their flattery was wrong, and so they have to cover it.

They flatter themselves about how good they are.

They fail to live up to even their own basic standard.

And so they lie.

They lie.

It's the are you a good person?

And you flatter yourself by saying, Yes.

Is it wrong to steal?

Maybe.

Do you ever steal?

No.

Okay, you're lying.

We're three questions into this, and you've already gone from declaring you're a good person to lying.

But that's the progression.

You realize that your flattery was not true, and so you cover it with lies, and that produces a form of apathy here in the middle of verse 3.

He ceased to act wisely and do good.

As the person goes on and gets older, they don't get more philanthropic, they don't get more benevolent, they get more apathetic versus the transgression we're going through.

You flatter yourself, then you lie about yourself, and then you stop the pretense even of doing good.

You give up the pretense of it.

They cease to act wisely.

Because, by the way, the fountain of the heart is not a good source for wisdom.

And so there's if you're not drinking from the water of God's word and the unchangeable nature of God, you're you're going to get morally thirsty.

You're going to get morally famished.

You don't have any way to feed yourself morally.

And so it leads to a lack of action.

There's nothing to strengthen the action.

And so they cease to do wisely and act good.

By the way, this verse is picked up in the New Testament in Romans 3 to describe all of mankind.

And so if you're listening to this and you think I'm just picking on those non-believers or those atheists that might have made it 10 minutes in the sermon, I'm not.

I mean, you understand what the Christian ear on this psalm understands that this is not mocking the moral confusion of the world.

The Christian ear, when you put this into Romans 3, understands this is all of us.

When any of us lie in our own hearts, this is where we all are.

When you start believing your heart for right and wrong, you're going to end up in this place where you don't know what you're doing.

Romans 3.20 says, this is true of everybody.

They avoid doing good.

And then fourthly, they begin plotting trouble.

Verse 4 says, He plots trouble while on his bed.

So I hope you see, it should make you smile, just the progression here, where they begin by declaring they're a good person.

And they start lying to cover up their lack of meeting their own standard.

Then they just lay down in apathy and aren't doing anything morally good or bad.

They just give up.

And while they're laying down in their moral apathy, what do they start scheming about?

Wickedness.

How long were they left in the scheming stage?

Not very long.

The end of verse 4.

They set themselves up in a way that is not good by not rejecting evil.

So this is the progression.

In college I read Alexander Pope's essay in Man, and a line that stands out from that to me even now is his description of what really is Psalm 36.

Vice is a monster of such frightful mean, as to be hated, it needs to be seen.

Vice is a monster of such frightful mean.

Vice is sin is so greedy that it must be seen.

In order for you to hate sin, you have to see it, so it reveals itself.

And yet, Pope goes on, yet seen too oft, familiar with her face, we first endure, then pity, then embrace.

Your approach to sin is first you endure it, then you pity it, and then you embrace it.

That's the slide here.

You go from declaring yourself to be a good person to just being sorry for your lack of conformity to your own standard to finally embracing vices of virtue.

The bottom line: the people that are in these first four verses here find themselves self-deceived, and such as anybody, by the way, who relies upon themselves as their moral compass.

What a contrast with what comes next.

Verse 5 comes out of nowhere.

It hits you broadside, and this is where you get into the nature of God.

We're leaving those that are plotting evil on their bed behind.

We're going from the person who's facing with his back to the mountain and pretending it doesn't exist.

Now that person is going to turn around and he's going to be confronted with the nature of God.

And there's really two points to this message this morning in the next two paragraphs that God is a mountain and God is a fountain.

And we're going to look at God as a mountain first.

Verse 5: Your steadfast love, O Yahweh, it reaches to the heavens.

Your faithfulness up into the clouds.

And he's describing this, a mountain that has no top that you can't see.

Your righteousness is like the mountains of God, he goes on to say.

So this person who is embraced in moral apathy, who has just deceived themselves into thinking they're a good person, deny the existence of God.

That's one way of living.

But then something happens, and this person turns around.

And what he is struck with in front of him is the massive character of God that is immovable.

It can only be compared to a mountain.

It can't be moved.

You can't move a mountain.

You can't push it, you can't dig it out.

Not this kind of mountain.

This mountain, it says, goes all the way through the clouds.

And perhaps you've seen mountaintops like that.

If you've gone skiing in Colorado, you've seen mountaintops like that.

You've gotten on the chairlift and look up in the chairlift, the cable just disappears in the clouds.

Not if you've been skiing in Pennsylvania or Virginia.

You have not had that experience.

But trust me, there are places where you get on the chairlift and you just see the cable.

It goes over the next tower and it dips down in the clouds, and you have no idea where you're going, just up and up and up.

That's the experience that the psalmist has right now as he looks at the character and the nature of God.

He turns around and sees it, and it extends all the way up into the heavens.

What particularly about God extends up in the heavens?

Certainly, God is not part of his creation.

He is the creator.

He's distinct from his creation.

So this is all word pictures here.

What is the psalmist describing about God's character that is this unfathomable and unsearchable?

Well, he calls out his love, his steadfast covenant, faithful love.

God is a covenantal God, that God makes a covenant with people that he keeps throughout all time.

This is why God's interactions with people are often described in terms of a covenant.

From the very beginning, the promise with Adam and Eve, for example, and then the covenant with Noah that he would never flood the earth again, as Noah sacrifices the animals to Abraham, that he'll make him a people and a nation, to Moses, who inaugurates the what we refer to as the old covenant by bringing the law to the Israelites, to David.

He makes a covenant with David that his descendant will be a king forever.

And then he makes a new covenant with Jesus Christ, which we participate in through faith in the gospel.

God interacts with people with his covenantal language.

He's a God that loves to save and loves to reach down to people throughout all time.

It's this covenantal love, the psalmist says, that goes all the way up into the heavens.

It's faithfulness that endures throughout time.

There's never a moment where God is unfaithful, never a moment where his word isn't true.

What a contrast with the first five verses of the psalm where a person can't even stay on a morally straight line for five minutes.

When you turn around to God, you say, There's never been five minutes where he hasn't been morally pure.

He is so exalted, so changeless.

His judgments, it says, are like the great deep.

In other words, the deepest ocean, the deepest ocean, the deepest spot in the water, God's judgments go that far.

And so there's a contrast.

We're going from the highest thing imaginable in the world to the lowest point in the world.

The highest thing, the highest concept in the world is the love and the covenant faithfulness of God.

The lowest, most deep that you cannot explore is the image here.

You cannot begin to understand it.

Even today, even today, the most prolific underwater marine biologists, they can go as deep as they possibly can with these faint lights that can illuminate just a 12-foot circle around them.

It's almost comical how little they can scratch the floor of the ocean surface today.

Now imagine during the life of David here writing this.

The ocean for David symbolized the uncertainty, the judgment of the nations, the uncertainty of all the invading nations of Israel, not all of them.

Many of the Phoenicians came through the water.

The Philistines came over the sea.

And so for the Jews, the water was just unsearchable.

You could never explore it.

You could never discover what was underneath it.

Stay out of the ocean.

But here, you want to know about the judgments of God?

You have a better chance of exploring the bottom of the ocean floor than figuring out what's behind the judgments of God.

They're so unsearchable.

Our minds are so finite we cannot understand it.

We create categories of things that we say, you know, I can picture a God that is in charge of the big things in the world, but I can't picture a God that is in charge of the little things in the world because there's so many little things, it's not possible.

And so we invent this whole kind of theology that says God is sovereign over the general direction of history, but not.

The particulars of the history, like if that grasshopper hopped over there, God can't possibly be sovereign over that because that's such a minor level, and there's so many grasshoppers that it's just not conceivable in my mind that God could really be sovereign over nature.

And David says, You don't even have the half of it.

God is sovereign over everything, he rules the world.

And you can't understand all the infinite capacities of his mind and his sovereignty.

You can't do it.

His judgments are like the great ocean.

Now, what does God do with his covenant love and his faithfulness and his righteousness and his judgments?

He uses them for salvation, verse 6.

Man and beast you save.

He saves people.

Speaking of people here, he saves them morally.

He converts them.

He brings them into a covenant relationship with them.

Man and beast you save.

He sustains life on the planet.

Made a covenant with Noah that he wouldn't flood the earth again.

And how do you begin to understand how the holy, righteous, exalted God can enter into relationships with people in this way?

He's unsearchable.

Unsearchable.

Deidre and I and our honeymoon went to Argentina, where we went out to the Andes Mountains, the Patagonia Mountains out there, and we rented a car, and the car that I wanted to rent in my mind was just going to be this massive mountain exploring Jeep.

What we got was like some kind of Kia thing.

They don't even sell in the United States.

It fits in your pocket kind of thing.

Like the Kia is about the size of the car.

That's what we got, but nevertheless, we decided to go exploring, exploring in the Patagonia Mountains.

And so we there's no Google Maps, it doesn't work up there.

And so we're just driving and we get off one road and we're just aiming up and onto another road and then a dirt path, and eventually the dirt road is signs.

They look like no trespassing signs, but they weren't in English.

If they wanted me to follow them, they would have put them in English.

And I know I did major in Spanish, but it was a good excuse at the time.

And so we just kept going until finally DJ said, I don't think we're gonna be able to make it out.

I don't want to get lost.

Who's gonna come find us?

I don't have cell phones up here, and so I was positive though.

Not gonna get lost in the mountains.

Come on, how hard is it to get you can't get lost, you just turn around and go downhill.

That's how you get out of the mountain, go down, the water gets out, just follow the water.

That was my I read it in like a Hardy Boys book once.

It made sense to me.

But she kept insisting.

So we we did finally turn around.

Common sense prevailed.

And when it started to snow, actually, is when we decided this is like all the makings of a mystery novel.

Let's turn around.

Get back, and we look up in the maps where we were, and in my mind, we had gone so far in the mountains we were probably gonna get into Chile, just around the next corner, and you look at the maps, and we hadn't gone anywhere.

We were like on some guy's cattle ranch, really.

It was pathetic.

You can't scratch the surface of the mountains even.

This is the love and the mercy and the majesty of God.

You go so far into it you feel like you're lost.

And you're right where you began.

You're right where you began.

Well, that's the first image here of God is like a mountain.

But the second image here, the one that is special to me, is that God is like a fountain.

He's like a mountain there in verses five and down through seven and eight.

But he's like a fountain, particularly here.

And so let's look at the in verses seven through nine, sorry, that God is like a fountain.

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.

You give them drink from the river of your delights.

So notice the change in imagery here.

For you to get the beauty of this word picture, notice the change in imagery.

The God is like a mountain, his God is so immense and immovable that you can't understand him.

You'd have better luck swimming yourself down to the ocean floor than understanding the judgments of God.

He's like the mountain that goes through the clouds.

You can't get your mind around him.

He's vast.

And then we go from an impersonal illustration to a very personal illustration.

We go from the impersonal idea of these extended mountains and these deep oceans to the immediate and very personal relationship with this God, where he's drawing people in as an individually.

The children of mankind are taking refuge in the mountain.

He's extending his wings over them and bringing them in, verse 7 says.

This is a mountain with wings.

And the mountain is using its wings to give shelter to people that are coming to him for refuge.

They're feasting.

This is, again, very personal, very immediate.

There's nothing more personal and immediate here than food.

You're eating.

It's a one-on-one relationship with God.

He's feeding you.

And you're feasting, by the way.

He's not just keeping you alive, you're feasting on those things that were so impersonal before.

You're feasting on his love, you're feasting on his faithfulness, you're feasting on his righteousness.

It's all the abundance of his house.

You give them drink from the river of your delights.

He's not just feeding us, but he's giving us water.

And here's where the analogy shifts, verse 9.

For with you is the fountain of life.

God was a mountain in the sense that He was a mountain is too good to comprehend, but now He's a fountain, and the fountain is too good to let it slip by.

If you're wandering in the mountains and you're you're lost and you need water, and you come across a spring, you come across a fountain, it's the most treasured thing you can find.

It's the most treasured thing you can find.

And this has happened to me before, mountain biking with my brothers up in Steaboat Springs, and we didn't really know where we were, and we didn't bring enough water, and we were just uh we thought we were gonna die of dehydration, honestly.

And so I should have remembered this with the whole just go down thing I said earlier.

But we eventually did become across a stream, come across a spring coming out of the ground, bubbling up, and filled up our water bottles with that.

And what a what a precious sight when you're so thirsty up in the mountains and you find a spring.

This is the image of God that He Himself is the spring.

And there's supposed to be a contrast here with the first part of the psalm.

Because do you remember where the people who didn't believe in the mountain, where were they getting their moral clarity from?

Their own heart.

Their heart was a fountain of moral clarity, and of course it means that sarcastically.

Their heart was a fountain of prophecy, a fountain of moral certainty, which is comical because you know it's not that.

That's not the kind of fountain you want to drink from your own heart.

What a contrast now with verse 9, where God Himself is described as a fountain.

He is the one giving life.

Now in English, we have two different words, fountain and spring.

Hebrew also has those two different words.

What makes a fountain different than a spring in Hebrew is a fountain has to be cultivated.

The spring just occurs naturally.

The fountain would be around a spring, you would build it up, and you would make it, you perhaps put a well into it, and that becomes the fountain.

The water is being brought up naturally.

They didn't have the electric circulating fountains like we might have.

The water is coming naturally from the earth, but you cultivated it.

So it's very interesting that God describes himself as a fountain, not just as a spring of life, but he describes himself as a fountain, implying that there has been work done on God to allow him to reveal himself, that the very nature and character of God is coming into the world.

The life and love and covenants of God are flowing into the world from the very nature of God that has been worked on so that we can drink from it.

Well, who worked on God?

Who cultivated God so that we could drink from his water?

No human did this, of course.

This is another one of those analogies that only makes sense when it's Trinitarian.

When you picture the Father and the Son and the Spirit, together they they labor to bring the world into existence and not just to create the world, and of course you see all three in creation, right?

The Father speaks, the Son is the Word, the Spirit hovers in Genesis 1.

But you also see all three in operation to make God discoverable, to make God enjoyable, to not just create, but then to bring the knowledge and the love and the life and the salvation of God into the world.

All three persons of the Trinity are at work doing this, to the point where you would describe it as a fountain.

The fountain, a fountain, a water fountain, gives itself.

A water fountain is pouring out water.

God, in the same way, is giving himself.

God's fountain, what he is distributing to the world for our own sustenance and nurture and protection, like shadow of the wings and feasting in the house, or river, verse 8 even uses a water analogy here, the river of your delights.

All that is coming to us from God, the fountain, who is giving us his very self.

Why is God called a fountain of life?

He uses this analogy in a few places in the Old Testament.

Why does he call himself a fountain of life?

Well, because he is the source of all life.

And by the way, it's Jeremiah chapter 2, that is where the phrase the fountain of life is also used there.

Jeremiah 2 · chapter mention

But I just love Psalm 36, verse 9, a fountain of life.

Psalms 36:9

How can God describe himself as a fountain of life?

And the answer is because he gives life to the world.

He is life himself.

Jesus Christ says, this is eternal life, that you know the Father and the Son whom he sent.

God is so much life in and of himself that he can describe eternal life as knowing him.

God alone has eternal life.

Everything else that has life is borrowed life, and you'll have to return it, by the way.

You'll have to return it.

It's not yours.

You have to give it back.

We have so many books in our house right now.

We max out, Dieter and I both have library cards, we've maxed out our books.

And the library is closed, and we keep getting emails saying you don't have to return them.

You don't have to return them yet.

Next week, next week, next week, next week.

If I would have known that these are the books I'd be stuck with for several months, I would have chosen differently.

Every book from the library has to go back.

Every person who has life, it's borrowed life.

It doesn't belong to you.

You didn't make it, it's unloaned to you.

But it comes from God.

He does not borrow life from anyone.

He's the source, he's the fountain.

He gives life.

And he doesn't just give life, he also gives love.

He's described here as the fountain of love earlier.

He has love in and of himself.

And this again only makes sense in the Trinity.

A non-Trinitarian God cannot have love in and of himself.

And I want you to follow, I think this is such an important point, so stretch your minds with me here for a second.

A non-Trinitarian God, a God who is only one and not in fellowship with anyone else, who would that God love?

If that God was love by nature, who could he love?

He would have to love his creation.

He'd have to love things that aren't God.

Which would mean that that God is dependent upon his creation for his own identity.

A God who is love that is not Trinitarian would need to make people so that he could love them.

And so he becomes dependent then upon his creation for a very central part of his identity.

The God of the Bible does not fall into that trap.

Because the God of the Bible is Trinitarian.

The Father loves the Son, and the Father loves the Spirit, and the Son loves the Spirit, and the Son loves the Father, and the Spirit loves the Son, and the Spirit loves the Father.

There's intra-Trinitarian love that is eternal.

And so you can really say that God is a fountain of love without making him dependent upon his creation.

Because he does love perfectly without his creation.

He doesn't need to make people to love them.

He doesn't need to make people to show that he loves.

He doesn't need to make people to show that he's a God of community and a God of relations and a God of love or a God of life.

God is by nature a God of life.

Again, a solitary God could not be a God of life without creating people to make alive.

But our Trinitarian God is.

There's unity in the Godhead, there's one essence of God, but there's diversity in the Godhead.

There's three persons in the Godhead.

And the Son very much says he receives his life from his Father.

Again, without beginning.

All through eternity, he's the eternal Son and the eternal Father.

The eternal Father is called the Father.

The Bible calls God our Father because He is the Father of life.

That's what it means to be a Father, to give life.

Jesus is called the eternal Son.

What does it mean to be a Son?

It means to receive life.

And so in eternity past, without beginning, the Father has always given life to the Son.

The Spirit has always proceeded from the Father and the Son, never with a beginning.

For eternity.

So we can really legitimately say that God is a fountain of life.

We can really and legitimately say that God is a fountain of love.

We can say those things because He is.

So why then does He create the world?

Because I know the common answer that people say is God created the world so that He could show how much He loves people.

And there's a sense that's true, but know that God doesn't need to do that in order to show that.

He shows that love perfectly within the Trinity.

And then this is one of the sentences, you know, it's not books that change people's lives, it's chapters of books, and it's not even chapters, as much as it is paragraphs.

And for me, it was a sentence.

It was a sentence that really did change my life, a sentence by Jonathan Edwards about this verse, a commentary on this verse, Psalm 36, verse 9, which changed my life.

Psalms 36:9

It is no sign of a fountain's weakness that it is prone to overflow its banks, Edwards writes.

In other words, God doesn't create the world because he's lacking anything.

God creates the world because he's such a full fountain and such a full source of love and life that it's almost natural that that would overflow its banks.

God creates the world because it's an overflow of who he already is.

The Father creates the world, the Son is the means by which he does it, the Spirit is hovering at creation because all of the world is an overflow of the very nature of God, the very desire of God to display his love and display his life to the world.

So if you believe that, then you believe that God is a fountain.

And if you believe that God is a fountain, then you believe that everything that exists, in some sense, comes from him.

He is the source of all things.

That's what it means to be a fountain.

He is the source of all things.

And we are the receiver of all things.

We are receiving what he made.

So see your role in this image.

The role in the the role, your role in a mountain is to look at it and go, whoa, that's a big mountain.

Your role in a fountain is very different.

You don't rightly use a fountain when you look at it and say, whoa, that's a fountain.

That water looks clean, looks tasty.

Nice fountain, though.

That's not the right way to use a fountain.

The right way to use a fountain is to drink from it and to enjoy it.

That's the right way to drink.

That's the right way to use a fountain.

And so if you really believe that God is a fountain, then your job, your relationship to God here now, is to drink and to enjoy.

And what are you drinking from?

You're drinking from what he's made, from what exists in the world.

Now, how do you take that in?

By understanding how it reveals God and his nature, how it reveals who he is.

Every true form of knowledge in the world should be knowledge of God, because he has made things that you study.

Every true form of love in the world should be a form of love of God, because God is a fountain of love.

Every true form of happiness in the world should be rooted in God and who he is, because he's the source of happiness.

And that's what verse 9 means.

C.S.

Lewis described Psalm 36, verse 9, as one of the most significant verses in his life.

Psalms 36:9

He wasn't focused on the fountain part.

That's the part I love about this.

Lewis is focused on the second part.

In your light do we see light.

When you understand that God is a fountain, you understand that only when you relate things back to him can you even see what's existing in this world.

Only when you see how things connect back to God do you rightly see them.

Only in the light of God can you even see light.

That's the image here.

It sounds like a circular argument, but it is profoundly true.

Only with your eyes open can you see what can be seen, is another way of saying it.

Only when you open your eyes to look at God can you appreciate what God is doing in the world.

I mean, why did God make anything for you to drink and enjoy?

So how do you know how to enjoy it?

By understanding why he made it.

So, I mean, let's start with easy things.

Why did God make love?

Because God is the source of love.

So when you love someone else, you are experiencing a shadow, a smaller sense, of how God loves his son and how his son loves us.

But all love comes from God.

Why did God make families?

So that you, in some sense, can understand, in some small sense, that you can understand how a father loves his children, and how a mother gives life, and how the family, brothers and sisters, relate to one another as brothers and sisters in the church.

You rightly understand and experience and appreciate things in this world when you connect them back to God.

Why does God commend us to forgive?

Because He's forgiving.

So see how those are easy ones, right?

Those are easy ones.

How about harder ones?

How about things that aren't inherently spiritual?

Why did God make orange juice?

So that you would enjoy it.

And you would marvel.

I mean, do you know all that goes in?

Have you cut open an orange and looked at all those little water droplets in there and the little membranes that hold and the sun hits the leaves and the leaves turn it to sugar and it channels that sugar by connecting it to the water that's drawn up out of the ground and it puts it in those little membranes and gives it a nice little seal around it, and you cut it down and you slice it and you juice it and you drink it and it's good.

And it's you're just supposed to marvel at the goodness and kindness of God.

That he didn't only make oranges as magically as he did, but he made people that like them.

It's really incredible.

That's why you pray before you eat, by the way.

Look at this that God made.

I mean, it's incredible.

Thank you, God, for this and for making me that likes it.

Why did God make cows?

Apologies to vegetarians.

For the same reason.

How about even harder things?

Why did God make education?

So that you could learn about Him.

There's no concept of education apart from the knowledge of God.

Why did God allow sin in the world?

The question is at our house is why did God allow coronavirus?

Our kids just always ask it, why did they make coronavirus?

They're fully into this Chinese bringing us down.

Why did they make coronavirus?

They did not get that from me, by the way.

Some of you are a bad influence on my daughters.

Why did they make coronavirus?

Okay, we don't know who the they is in that sentence, but the bigger question is, why did God allow coronavirus in the world?

Now you only rightly understand it.

Do you hear what I'm saying?

You only rightly understand why we live in a world with viruses when you understand how they reveal the knowledge of God, how they make you humble, how they break you down, how they show how frail life is, how quickly God could bring the earth to a halt out of fear of a virus, how much people love life.

This is Jesus Luke 13 style, you know, dig a trench around it because next year I'm going to cut it down.

This happens so you would all learn that unless you repent, you likewise will perish.

That's why God allows coronavirus in the world, to drive you to repentance and faith in Jesus Christ, to show you how fickle your body is.

God doesn't catch a virus, by the way.

Show you how much we're held in the slavery of the fear of death.

Those are some reasons.

To give us opportunities to show compassion on others, another reason.

Spend more time with as a family, another reason.

You could make a hundred things in your list.

But I'm telling you, you only rightly understand why God allows coronavirus when you rightly connect it back to Him.

I used to coach soccer at a Christian high school, and at the first day, at the end of tryouts, the end of the first day of tryouts, I would tell the team, you may not come back to practice tomorrow unless you are ready to tell me how you playing soccer glorifies God.

Because I did math.

I knew how many hours they were spending an hour and a half at practice, 20 minutes beforehand getting ready, 20 minutes afterwards in the locker rooms, call it two and a half hours a day at soccer practice for the length of the season.

I did the math.

I knew how many hours they were going to spend out there on the soccer field.

And I would tell them, you may not come back here until you have a good answer for how you playing soccer glorifies the Lord.

Because you're going to spend a lot of time doing it.

You may as well figure out the right way to do it.

Because the right way to play soccer is to glorify God by doing it.

Amen.

I know at home you all said amen.

You don't understand anything until you understand how it reveals the Lord.

This is what Paul means, Romans 11, 36.

From him, through him, and to him are all things.

To him be the glory forever.

Imagine, if you will, a fountain flowing, spraying its water in the air.

Imagine the sun shining on the fountain.

Imagine the refulgence of the fountain, the rainbow light that is breaking through the mist of the water.

Imagine the pool the fountain is landing and swimming with fish and frogs jumping everywhere.

Imagine the green hill that grows up where a person is surrounded by trees and having a picnic there.

Imagine the deer walking down and drinking from the water.

Imagine the grove of trees, the thirsty willow trees that are sucking up the water from the pond there.

Imagine the butterfly flitting over the water.

How do you rightly appreciate that scene unless you begin with the fountain?

Everything that's there is there because of the fountain.

The person who is there having his picnic is there because everything else is there.

The trees are there because the water is there.

The butterfly is there because the water is there.

The sun, which is shining everywhere, is particularly beautiful here as it displays the mist of the fountain.

The mist of the fountain is obviously coming from the fountain.

The fish are there because the fountain fountain.

The deer is there because of the fountain.

Everything is there because of the fountain.

And you only rightly appreciate it when you connect it back to the fountain.

Jonathan Edwards, after he wrote, It is no sign of a fountain's weakness that it overflows its banks, writes this in the creature's knowing, esteeming, loving, rejoicing, praising God, and glory of God is exhibited and acknowledged, its fullness is received in return.

Let me translate that into more modern English.

That when you understand how everything is there for the fountain, what's your emotional response going to be?

This is beautiful.

You understand it, and then you exhibit it.

You become joyful about who God is because you drank from the fountain.

You drink in the water and you then rejoice in who God is.

And so you, in a sense, become your own fountain.

You're drinking from the nature of God by appreciating Him, and they're radiating that, amplifying that to others.

You become a mini fountain.

Proverbs 10, verse 4.

Proverbs 10:4

The mouth of the righteous is the fountain of life.

That as you speak the truth about God, you become your own little fountain.

You're not the source, of course.

God is the source.

But because you drank from the water, you delight in it.

This should flavor how you view the world, and I'm speaking particularly to our college graduates today.

This should flavor how you want to lead the rest of your life.

You make it your goal to learn about God so that you can enjoy Him.

Take delight in who He is.

Whether you're serving in a wealthy country or an impoverished nation that's dependent upon charity for food, whether the rich or the poor together all can drink from the same fountain and have the same joy in understanding God and who he is.

Wisdom is rooted in the fear of God.

Education in the knowledge of God.

Love in light of how the Trinity loves itself.

Friendship with each other, your friendships reveal the very relations of God.

And you devote your life to serving God, not out of a sense of duty to give back to him, but out of a sense of delight that he gave so much to you.

A common analogy, but remember, if you find water from a fountain that is so good, the wrong thing to do is to fill it up and dump it back into the fountain.

Oh, this water is so good.

Let me give it back to the fountain to show the fountain how much I appreciate it.

Whoop, whoop, whoop, whoa.

You have an incredible Cook Zero.

It's the best Cook Zero you've ever tasted.

You don't drive back to the Coca-Cola factory and give it back to them.

I love this so much.

Here you go.

Show you how much I appreciated it.

I'm giving it back to you.

Are you nuts?

If you really appreciated it, you would drink it.

And if you really, really appreciated it, you maybe would give it to your friends.

You'd share it.

You'd tell other people where to buy it.

That's what you'd do with it.

And so it is with God.

This is the nature of God as a fountain.

And only in his light can you see light.

I just want you to let that verse hit you.

That means that only when you're looking at him can you see anything.

Now, sin, on the other hand, is a refusal to do that.

Sin turns your back to the mountain and says, I don't believe in mountains.

Sin looks at a fountain and says, I don't like water.

Sin says, I reject the fountain of living water, and I'm going to build myself a broken cistern that doesn't have any water.

Can't even hold it and say that this is what Sin says, I don't need a mountain.

Look, because I have a pile of dead leaves in my yard.

That's my mountain.

That's sin.

But God sanctifies you by causing you to take more and more joy in who He is, causing you to see more and more light.

Look at verse 10.

Oh, continue your steadfast love to those who know you and your righteousness of the upright of heart.

This is what sanctification does.

It increases, and here it is, knowledge of God.

It increases your knowledge of God.

You are sanctified when you learn more about God.

Because it's axiomatic.

When you learn about God, you delight in him.

You want to grow more righteous, which comes through growing in more knowledge.

You want to go into his love more.

You want to know him more.

Because the more you know, the beams of light come from the sun, they shine in the fountain, and the more you study it, the more you appreciate it.

In his light you see light.

In his knowledge you have knowledge.

Only in his righteousness can you be upright in heart.

If you reject his righteousness, you cannot be upright in heart.

And so this psalm begins.

I don't want to speak specifically to the college grads today.

This psalm ends kind of where it begins with the contrast, it ends with you having to choose which path you're going to walk on.

Are you going to be the person that turns your back to the mountain and says, I can see just fine looking this way?

Are you going to be the person that rejects water because you think you don't need it?

Are you going to devote your life to the study and the knowledge of God, the enjoyment of Him?

Oh, let not the foot of arrogance come upon me, nor the hand of the wicked drive me away.

The psalmist is begging now.

David is saying, I don't want to be driven away from you.

I don't want to be shooed away.

I want to stay close to God.

There the evildoers life fallen there, thrust down, unable to rise.

This is a psalm that ends with a tug of war between knowledge and falling, between standing in God's grace and falling into sin, between knowing God and knowing sin.

Psalms don't often give theological explanations for evil in a world owned by God.

Instead, they just give you a way to navigate them.

And the way here is you navigate the fallenness of the world by trusting the Lord, not just trusting him, but believing in him and not just believing him, but by loving him and rejoicing in him.

You don't need to pretend there's no such thing as hardships in the world.

You don't need to pretend there's no suffering in the world.

There's very much hardships, very much suffering.

But you also don't need to pretend that there isn't a God who's called you to love and worship him, because he gives us light to see his glory in nature.

And of course, the ultimate fountain here is Jesus Christ.

Do you see how Jesus uses all of these analogies for himself?

He says, when you come to faith in him, you will have rivers of living water coming to you.

Which means that God creates this world, this world sins and falls into sin, and God sends himself to be a fountain of life to the world.

And only when you drink from that fountain can you have eternal life.

But what is that fountain filled with when you come to Jesus Christ?

Well, he becomes a fountain of love and a fountain of life because he, in a very real sense, is a fountain of blood.

That he dies on the cross for our sin, a very real death.

Or he suffers and dies for our sin.

So that we can have eternal life.

You see the thing with this fountain, you can't drink from it unless your heart has been changed.

And there's no way for your heart to be changed except by faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Person refuses to acknowledge Jesus Christ as the one who has holed himself up in his basement and refuses to believe in mountains.

The love of Christ is so evident, the cross itself ascends up to heaven through the clouds.

The cross itself extends beyond any human capacity to understand it.

The cross itself serves as a fountain of blood and a fountain of life to our world.

Lord, we are thankful that you have given us your very self, that you've given us eternal life through belief in Jesus Christ, that you've given us every blessing.

Every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places comes with the knowledge of Christ.

This is why Paul can declare from him to him, and through him are all things.

We confess that all things come into this world through Jesus Christ.

They're for his glory and for a worship of him.

And so we really can sing, Become thou fount of every blessing, because you are the fountain of every blessing.

We can sing a fount of love divine that flows from our Savior's bleeding side.

We can sing what can wash away our sins.

Nothing but the blood of Jesus, because no other fountain do we know.

We declare there is a fountain filled with blood, and it is drawn from Emmanuel's veins.

And sinners plunged beneath the flood lose all of their guilty stains.

So we are here this morning because the fountain of blood that has cleansed us from our sin, the fountain of life that has given us eternal life, the fountain of love that has drawn us into a saving relationship with Jesus Christ.

It's in his name we pray.

Amen.

And now for a parting word from Pastor Jesse Johnson.

Thank you for watching Emmanuel Bible Church today.

You know, today's sermon was filmed in front of an empty worship center because of the coronavirus lockdown.

But it's my prayer that if you live in the DC area, I'll be able to meet you when the church doors open again.

In the meantime, if you want more information about Emmanuel Bible Church, you can find us at iBC.church.

Or if you want more information about the Master Seminary in their Washington, D.C.

location, go to tms.edu.

In the meantime, I hope today's ministry enables you to seek God through Jesus Christ, to serve Him with gladness, and to share Him with boldness.

May the Lord bless you.