Your love, Lord, reaches to the heavens,

    your faithfulness to the skies.

6 Your righteousness is like the highest mountains,

    your justice like the great deep.

    You, Lord, preserve both people and animals.

7 How priceless is your unfailing love, O God!

‘In this psalm, there is a choice to be made which determines the sort of life we experience now and the destiny that awaits: the choice is how to react to the revelation of God. To reject it is to be condemned to listen to our own hearts and to a life without values; to embrace it is to enjoy life, light, provision and protection.’ (Alec Motyer: ‘New Bible Commentary’, p.508).

Ultimately, there are only two types of people in this world:  those who are marked by the self-love of sin, and those for whom the love of God has become their greatest reality. This is a love the psalmist describes as “priceless” and “unfailing.” Motyer says, reflecting on verse 5, that it is ‘something far bigger and higher than anything on earth.’

What hope can there be for sinners (1-4) – something we all are by nature?

“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life’ (John 3:16).

I heard that on a wall, in a mental institution, somewhere behind the ‘iron curtain’, a (no doubt) sane person, imprisoned there for having the ‘wrong’ beliefs, had written:

‘Could we with ink the ocean fill,

And were the skies of parchment made;

We’re every stalk on earth a quill,

And every man a scribe by trade;

To write the love of God above

Would drain the ocean dry;

Nor could the scroll contain the whole,

Though stretched from sky to sky.’