“Be careful, in doing battle with this guy, that you don’t become just like him.” (Advice from my exceedingly wise father-in-law, when I was a young pastor. A man in the church I served was stirring up a lot of dust.)

“Turn your eyes upon Jesus. Look full in his wonderful face. And the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace.” (Words from a wise old hymn)

The first four verses of Psalm 36 focus on the wicked person. It is not a pretty picture. But then, in verses 5-9, the psalmist makes a dramatic pivot. Suddenly, he is no longer focusing on the wicked person. No! Instead, he is focused on the sweet goodness of God.

“Psa. 36:5        Your steadfast love, O LORD, extends to the heavens,

                        your faithfulness to the clouds.

6          Your righteousness is like the mountains of God;

                        your judgments are like the great deep;

                        man and beast you save, O LORD.

Psa. 36:7         How precious is your steadfast love, O God!

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

8          They feast on the abundance of your house,

                        and you give them drink from the river of your delights.

9          For with you is the fountain of life;

                        in your light do we see light.” (Psalm 36: 5-9, English Standard Version)

Someone has said that whatever gets your attention gets you! This could suggest that if we focus on wicked people too much, we become the slaves of those wicked people. Perhaps we also become, in some measure at least, like those wicked people. The possibility is that we become like whatever or whomever we look at for a long time. If this is true—and I suspect that it is—we need to be very careful about our focus. Yes, we need to recognize and admit the wickedness of the wicked. Perhaps we have areas of our lives where we are wicked and don’t really want to change. That needs to be taken seriously.

However, we shouldn’t camp out with wicked people, even when those people is me! We need to move on. The psalmist eventually gets his eyes off the wicked and instead decides to focus on God. And what sort of God does the man see?

Well, for one thing, the psalmist speaks of a God who is loving. Now I hear someone say, “Wait a minute! This is the Old Testament! Isn’t the God of the Old Testament a God of wrath, while the New Testament God is a God of love?”

I would say that I hate to break the news to you, but the truth is that I’m glad to break the news to you: God’s love is all over the pages of the Old Testament. Yes, there is also a lot of violence and wrath, but there is a lot of love too. It all depends on where you look.

Notice that the love of the LORD reaches the heavens. God’s love is high, like the heavens, overarching the world. God’s love is high above the wicked, high above the righteous, high above everyone and everything.

And then, there is God’s faithfulness. It reaches to the clouds. I am writing this meditation on a cloudy day. It is a wonderfully encouraging thing to think on a penetrating, dreary day—the first day of winter—that God’s faithfulness, God’s consistency, reaches so high. It is a wonderful thing that God is loving, but if God’s love is not consistent, such “love” wouldn’t do us much good. We need a God who sticks with us.

And that is the sort of loving and consistent God that we do, in fact, have.