Psalm 36:5-10
Maybe you’ve heard about the “hierarchy of needs.” It’s an idea developed by a psychologist by the name of Abraham Maslow. It’s usually demonstrated in the shape of a pyramid.
Simply put, we need to be able to move from bottom to top if we are going to become, what Maslow called, a “self-actualized” human being. It’s hard to reach the peak of your potential as a person if you haven’t met some of the lower needs--if you’re starving to death, for example. It’s hard to have a sense of self-esteem if you have no friends or intimate relationships.
So we start at the bottom. A person is at-risk, so-to-speak, if they don’t have the very basic necessities of life: food, water, air. Those are the things we need just to be able to exist. No way to go any higher on the pyramid if you’re dying of thirst, or have absolutely nothing to eat.
Once you have those very basic needs met, then you need a sense of security. You need shelter. You need to be out of harm’s way. You can be well fed, but if you’re homeless and have to sleep outside, that’s not going to help you move up the pyramid.
So you get the idea. This has been used by missionary teams that I know of who have worked in places like the refugee camps in Uganda, Tanzania or Kenya. Thousands upon thousands of people pour over these boarders, trying to get away from mass, tribal genocide in their own countries. These refugees are just trying to get some place where they can get their most basic needs met. Missionaries going into these refugee camps don’t immediately start preaching Jesus. It’s hard to hear the gospel when the growling of your hungry stomach is so loud.
On one mission trip, I worked for an organization in the San Joaquin valley in California. This organization went around and got all the excess fruit (peaches and nectarines when I was there), dried them, packed them into big white buckets, and shipped them to some of those refugee camps.
One batch was sent to Sierra Leone. It’s predominantly a Muslim country. Some of the fruit we packed, along with soup mix, and other food stuffs were sent to this refugee camp. After a month of doing nothing but receiving food, these Muslim refugees came to the missionaries and said, “We want to hear about your Jesus Christ. You Christians were the only ones who fed us when we were starving. Not even our Muslim brethren did that.”
So there’s a lot to be said about a kind of evangelism that is aware of and takes care of people’s basic needs--those on the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid--before worrying about the needs on the upper tiers.
One of the things that caught my attention about this Psalm, and I don’t know if David intended it to be this way, is that his pyramid of needs is very different. If we take verse 5, 6 and the first part of verse 7 as the bottom, most basic tier of the needs pyramid, what we have there is God’s immense love, loyalty, and purpose. Without that as our base, nothing else works or makes sense. Without that as our base, anything else we build on top of that will not hold.
Let’s take a look at this bottom tier, and then work our way up. What we’re going to find is that David reverses what Maslow eventually came up with. We’ll have to decide which pyramid of needs holds more validity.
God’s love, loyalty and purpose. We know that God’s love is the basis for David’s pyramid, because he mentions it here in verse 5, 7 and 10. Whenever you see something about God mentioned a number of times, you need to pay attention. David is letting us know that God’s amazing and massively huge love is vital to all he’s saying in this Psalm.
God’s love is as far reaching as it is from earth to the heavens. God’s loyalty is as boundless and boarderless as it is from the earth to the clouds.
The heavens, is the term David uses. It’s not heaven, like we think of as Christians, that place where the Lord’s followers go after death. It’s the heavens. The heavens, for David was the great expanse of the universe. It was what he would lay down in the grass at night time, when out with the sheep, looking up through clear, dark skies to the stars. The Milky Way spread out like sugared butter on a piece of well-toasted bread. From horizon to horizon, the wide open spaces of space. That’s how David described the height and breadth of God’s love.
In classic, Hebrew poetic fashion, David layers image upon image, building a picture of God’s amazing character. David takes God’s love which is spread out like the heavens, and layers that with God’s loyalty which is large enough to fit into the space between the earth and the clouds. See how those two go together? David will use that imagery scheme throughout this Psalm--each line progressing, building, complimenting the one before it until we are overwhelmed by God.
David further describes God’s love and faithfulness as steadfast or constant. That is there is a persistent quality to God’s love. It keeps coming at us. It keeps following us. It keeps trying to get our attention.
In Men’s Bible Study we are looking at Psalm 23. This past Wednesday we were looking at the phrase, “...your goodness and mercy follow me all the days of my life.” There is this theme that David takes up so often, that our God is a persistent God who follows us, who keeps coming at us, who keep enveloping our lives with love and faithfulness. We will never be able to get away from it, just as we will never be able to get away from the largeness of the universe we find ourselves in.
“Where can I run from your presence?” David asked God in Psalm 139. Then David answers the question for God:
If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the world of the dead, you are there.
If I rise with the sun in the east
and settle in the west beyond the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me. (vs.. 7-10)
God’s persistent, all present love is as basic, or more necessary than the air we breathe.
Let’s move up to the next tier in David’s pyramid of needs in Psalm 36. The next tier, up, is protection and refuge. The image is that of a mother hen covering her chicks with her wings against harm.
As Jesus was making his way into Jerusalem, where he would be crucified, he stops on the Mount of Olives, looks across and says, “How many times I wanted to put my arms around all your people, just as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you would not let me!” (Matthew 23:37).
God’s love for us, which is the first level of the pyramid, leads God to be a protective God. A God whose love is a refuge of safety where we can go when life is hard, and cruel and mean. We are kept in a safe place by God because His love is so strong, so settled, so secure. There is no security like the security of being loved with a love like that--a love that we know for sure is not going anywhere, or become unsettled.
When I was out in Leoti, I worked with a junior high kid whose mother told him nearly every day that she wished he was someone else’s kid; that he wasn’t her son; that she wished he could just go away and live with someone else.
One of his teachers screamed at him every day because he never got his homework done. She’d stand over him, yelling, “What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you just get your assignments done?” I finally took her aside and told her this boy is floundering, not because he can’t do his homework. He can. He’s able. He’s just got an unsettled love he’s having to deal with at home. He’s worrying about something much more basic--whether anyone in this world loves him. Homework is the least of his worries. He’s got to settle the love question before he’ll be able to do anything else.
God’s love is that refuge. That place of security. God’s love are those mother hen wings that are opened up over us that we always know will be there. Once we have that love question settled, then we have that sense of security that, “Hey, I’m loved, and I can deal with all the other stuff in life.”
The third level of David’s pyramid of needs is the food and drink. But for David, and especially for God, food is not just for keeping you alive. Food and drink are for celebrating. This phrase that David uses to describing “feasting on the abundant food you provide,” in the Hebrew literally means to “enjoy the fat.” What David literally said was, “We ‘enjoy the fat’ the you provide.” The fat was the best, the most flavorful part of the meat. The best cuts of meat are marbled with fat. The fat is the best.
As we look at David’s pyramid and move our way up it, we see how it all fits. We are immersed in the expanse of God’s love and loyal faithfulness. Because of that love we feel protected, secure and safe. And because of God safe-place-love, we want to party. We want to feast. We want to celebrate what God has provided. And when we feast we want to eat the best there is to eat. We want to drink, not just plain water, but water that has been dipped from “the river of God’s goodness.”
When Jesus talked about what the Kingdom of God would be like, what image did he use most often? A feast! Look in Luke 15. Several parables of things or people who were lost. When the lost was found, how did they celebrate? They had a feast! Food isn’t, as Maslow had it, just for staying alive. Food and drink are for celebrating all the goodness and love that comes from God.
At the top of David’s pyramid of needs is the Fountain of Life. On Maslow’s pyramid of needs, what he calls “self-actualization” is at the top. That is, reaching your fullest self-potential. But for David, the top of the pyramid has nothing to do with the individual. The top of David’s pyramid is God and being fully immersed in the person of God--what David calls the fountain of life.
Several times in the book of Jeremiah, God calls himself “the fountain of living waters.” When Jesus has the conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well, in John 4, Jesus tells her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water” (4:10).
To go through all the different levels that David laid out in this psalm is to reach life--life as God meant it to be lived: in God’s love and faithfulness; safe and secure in a God who covers us when the world is throwing rocks of hate and meanness; life like a feast of fat. Life, a fountain of life, because life is God.
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