Guess How Much I Love You - Psalm 103:10-12, 17-18

"He has not dealt with us as our sins deserve or repaid us according to our offenses. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is His faithful love toward those who fear Him. As far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us...But from eternity to eternity the Lord’s faithful love is toward those who fear Him, and His righteousness toward the grandchildren of those who keep His covenant, who remember to observe His precepts" (Psalm 103:10-12, 17-18, HCSB).

In a popular children's bedtime story by Sam McBratney, father and son rabbits use ever-greater exaggerated measures to quantify how much they love each other until the baby rabbit falls asleep.

"I love you right up to the moon--and back," the father rabbit whispers as the baby rabbit dozes off.

This Psalm uses the same sort of superlatives to quantify how much our Heavenly Father loves us.


The Psalm says that God loves you as far as the heavens are above the earth!

The Psalm declares that God loves you from eternity to eternity! In other words, God's love for us is absolute or infinite or eternal (or all of these). His love for us is so vast that we can't even comprehend it.

Yet, the exceeding greatness of God's love has an effect on us that we can certainly understand.

God's faithful love removes our sinfulness from us and enables us to enter into a covenant relationship with Him.

See, a sinner such as I could not approach this awesome and holy God unless He removed my sin from me--unless He approached me in some other way than what my sinfulness deserves, according to this Psalm.

And God did this by sending Jesus, His Son, as the palpable expression of God's infinite love for us--saving and delivering us from the sinfulness that prevented us from entering into a covenant relationship with God.

And for those of us who are grandparents, there's an additional benefit of God's eternal love identified in this Psalm: God extends His righteousness to the grandchildren of His covenant-keepers!

"For God loved the world in this way: He gave His One and Only So so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life" (John 3:16, HCSB).