HIS LOVE ENDURES FOREVER

HIS LOVE ENDURES FOREVER
Psalm 136:1
“Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever.” 

Like the chorus of a song, this line is repeated, 26 times in 26 verses. Not ad nauseam but ad infinitum, not repetition to a state of boredom, but crescendo to a climax in eternity. Note how time and eternity are intertwined. In each verse, the first part is sounded on earth below, the second is echoed from heaven above. Whatever happened below—the call to give thanks, the beauty of nature, the rescue from Egypt, the conquest of Canaan—all transpired, thanks to the goodness and love of the Lord from above.  

We are dwellers on earth, earthbound in our perspective, often preoccupied with the immediate and the visible, unable to see beyond them. But life is more. The eternal breaks into the temporal, the spiritual into the material, like the chorus of the psalm weaves in and out of each stanza. Could we live with our eyes on both worlds, the now and the beyond? 

The psalm narrates the high points of Israel’s history (as it does the high points of God’s creation) when we find it easy to declare God’s goodness and enduring love. But what if it recounts the panic of Israel caught between Pharoah’s armies and the Red Sea? What if it retells the complaints of Israel during those long years in the wilderness? 

Likewise, when we go through difficult times in our earthly sojourn, will we lift our voices and sing, “Give thanks to the LORD….”? That takes faith, to see beyond and above our circumstances, to still believe God is good and loving. We can do so, knowing we are not alone, for this song has been sung by countless people down the centuries.

Not only does song celebrate the enduring nature of God’s love, the song itself is enduring. First sung during King Solomon’s reign (2 Chron 5.13), it endured through the divided kingdoms, the fall of both kingdoms, and the captivity in Babylon. When the exiles returned to Jerusalem under Ezra, we read (Ezra 3.11): “And they sang responsively, praising and giving thanks to the Lord, ‘For he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever toward Israel.’” Between Solomon and Ezra span 500 years, and we still sing the lyrics today, 2,500 years after Ezra!

An enduring song about God’s enduring love