Psalm 136 - His Faithful Love Endures Forever

help me to serve in the strength that you supply, that you might receive all glory, and we pray that from our hearts we'd be able to give thanks to you because, indeed, your faithful love endures forever.

We pray these things in Jesus name, amen.

This is a Psalm of thanksgiving.

This is a Psalm of thanksgiving.

Each of the first three verses begins give thanks to the Lord, and the final verse also begins give thanks to the Lord.

So you could really read that almost as though every single verse could begin give thanks to the Lord.

But the psalmist who wrote this Psalm, who's inspired by God, but the psalmist who wrote this psalm, who's inspired by God, he didn't choose to specifically highlight give thanks to the Lord every single verse, but he does, under God's inspiration, highlight the reason we're called to give thanks to the Lord.

Give thanks to God because his faithful love endures forever.

Give thanks to God, his faithful love endures forever.

Give thanks to God, his faithful love endures forever.

Okay, I got it, mike, I got it.

Why does this Psalm repeat so much?

Because God is so great that sometimes, like those angels, you just want to cry out holy, holy, holy.

Because God's love is so deep that sometimes it just takes a barrage of praise to really put ourselves in the place where we're rightly acknowledging him, because God knows that we need repetition.

You that are parents know this, but God, speaking to his children, he knows this also.

This psalm is a song.

The 150 Psalms are the earliest Christian songbook that we have.

It's the only inspired songbook that we have.

And if you turn in, that first song has a chorus that repeats 26 times.

Sometimes I'll be talking with someone.

A song will come up and I'll say, ah, we shouldn't sing that song.

I'll say, why?

Say it repeats too much.

Say, tell me, tell me more.

And they say, well, the chorus repeats like five times.

And sometimes now I'm sure this would never, ever happen in our church, but sometimes they say it in a way that's kind of like.

You know, I feel bad for all those poor, immature Christians who like a repetitive song, but thankfully I've moved beyond that in my Christian life.

The inspired psalmist repeats the chorus 26 times.

We need intensive repetition.

It can be good to have songs that have intensive repetition.

His faithful love endures forever 26 times.

Now, having said that, let me also say how many Psalms are like this one.

There's 150.

Other Psalms do have repetition, but not the same way that this one does.

So that's one out of 150.

Sometimes you're listening to an album or a radio station, you're in a church service and it feels like eight out of 10 songs are trying to do a Psalm 136.

You know what I mean.

That's not wrong, but if you never have intensive repetition you're not matching the breadth of what you find and the variety in the Psalm.

And if you are always leaning into intensive repetition, you're not also quite matching the breadth of what we have here in the psalm.

And one other thing if you notice it doesn't repeat 26 times in a row, every single verse.

There's a new example of God's faithful love.

So you've got fresh fuel every single time you get to that wonderful chorus that's rehearsing God's faithful love.

But this is a sermon on 136, and I can understand why Pastor Doug would have given me this psalm because, as I said, it begins and ends with thanks and we should give thanks to God for his faithful love.

We need repetition.

I think I can prove it Now.

Hopefully this doesn't backfire.

I want you to raise your hand.

Do not be shy.

Often a week of Thanksgiving we might go around the table or at some point during the week and give thanks to God for something.

So how many of you this past week said I want to give thanks to God because his faithful love endures forever?

Go ahead, put the hands up, don't be shy.

Now.

I was at a Thanksgiving meal where Nikolai actually brought up this Psalmsalm without any provocation from me.

So Nicholas is being shy, but that's one, nikolai.

Who else?

All right, okay, okay, there are a couple of hands, thank you, very good.

So we have like two or three hands, over a hundred people here.

It's not that we all have to say this every single time every Thanksgiving, but you think I got it.

I got it.

This faithful love endures forever.

But if it's really lodged in our hearts, if it's really on the tip of our tongue, don't you think it would have come out a bit more than that?

In a group this size, I won't do it, but if I said how many of you thank God for the food or for family, how many hands would go up with those things?

And those are good things to give thanks for.

We need the repetition because perhaps this truth of God's faithful love isn't planted in our hearts and on the tip of our tongues the way that it should be.

So here's what we're going to do this morning.

First we're going to explore what God's faithful love is.

We need to unpack that.

And then, as you look at the Psalm, it breaks into two sections.

So there's the opening, thanks, but then there's two main sections in the Psalm.

If you look, you'll see verses four to nine speak of God's acts and creation, and then verses 10 to 24 speak of his acts for Israel.

So we'll consider God's faithful love and creation is faithful love for Israel.

And then, finally, we'll conclude by again reflecting on God's faithful love in our lives and what that means for us.

So first, god's faithful love defined.

What is it?

Well, the chorus of this Psalm, as we read it from our pew Bible, which happens to be the Christian standard Bible.

It reads his faithful love endures forever.

If you're looking at a King James Bible this morning and it's another excellent translation that reads his mercy endureth forever.

Okay, mercy and love, that's two different words.

That's interesting.

If you're looking at the English Standard Version today, it says his steadfast love endures forever.

So that's very similar to the CSB.

You know, steadfast, faithful those are overlapping words.

In our everyday English we use the word faithful a lot more than steadfast, but that's very similar.

And then if you're looking at the NIV this morning these are all great translations the NIV just says his love endures forever.

So what is the psalmist trying to communicate here?

Yes, the Old Testament is written in Hebrew, so your first inclination might be to say, okay, well, in Hebrew does it say love or mercy, does it have an adjective faithful or something like that, or does it not?

Translation is not always as simple as that.

Sometimes there are words that have different shades of meaning in different contexts and it's not always easy to communicate that in a translation.

Think about our English word love.

If I say I love my parents and I say I love Thanksgiving turkey, I love Thanksgiving turkey.

If someone's trying to learn English, would they conclude okay, so they love.

So he has the same relationship to his parents as he does to Thanksgiving turkey.

I understand.

I hope for my parents' sake that that's not true.

The love I have for my parents is a much higher love.

There's a family commitment and obligation there.

There's a depth of relational experience to that.

When I say I love Thanksgiving turkey, I just mean I like the taste of it a lot, the word that's here in Psalm 136 is the word hesed in Hebrew.

To pronounce it correctly, you have to act like you're about to spit on someone.

Let's not do that today.

But it's a word that's used quite often in the Old Testament and there's no extra adjective of faithful or steadfast in the original language.

So you could say in this case, the NIV actually is the most word-for-word translation if we're going to say it that way.

But the reason why translations like our Pew Bible or the English Standard Version say faithful love or steadfast love, they're trying to communicate that this is not just a generic love, it's a special kind of love.

Many times this word is used in the Old Testament in the context of forgiveness Numbers 14, 18,.

The Lord is slow to anger, abounding in faithful love, forgiving iniquity and rebellion.

Pardon the iniquity of this people, in keeping with the greatness of your faithful love.

There it is again.

Your hesed, just as you have forgiven them from Egypt until now.

Numbers Nehemiah 9, verse 17.

Nehemiah 9:17

They refused to listen, did not remember your wonders you performed among them.

They became stiff-need and appointed a leader to return to their slavery in Egypt.

But you are a forgiving God, gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in, has said faithful love, and you did not abandon them.

Psalm 25, 7,.

Do not remember the sins of my youth or my acts of rebellion, in keeping with your faithful love.

Psalm 25, 7,.

So that's probably one reason why the King James translators use the word mercy because we think of a love that's so forgiving.

We do think of mercy, of a love that's so forgiving, we do think of mercy.

But those verses that I just read that use the same word that we heard over and over again in Psalm 136, they emphasize also the idea of covenant loyalty.

God especially shows his chesed to Israel.

He especially shows his chesed to Israel.

He especially shows his chesed to David because he entered a covenant with them, he had a commitment to them.

He entered into a covenant with David, he had a commitment with David.

So this is a word of unwavering loyalty.

In 1 Samuel 20, jonathan and David are talking together about what to do in light of Saul's, jonathan's father's, hatred of David, and Jonathan asked David to show him chesed.

So it's not always used only of God, but it is used here in the context of a deep loyalty Show him chesed from the Lord.

And Jonathan even says if I die, don't withdraw your chesed, david, from my household.

And then it says Jonathan once again swore to David and his love for him because he loved him as he loved himself.

So Jonathan and David have already committed themselves to each other in this covenant of friendship and deep loyalty.

Committed themselves to each other in this covenant of friendship and deep loyalty.

And now, as they prepare to part, jonathan calls to mind that commitment and says don't you ever stop showing chesed to me, and even if I die, you better show chesed to all of my family.

So if we had a Venn diagram up here with this Hebrew word for faithful love, we'd have overlapping English words like mercy, like love, definitely loyalty.

That's what we're talking about here in this verse.

Psalm 136 celebrates a deeply loyal love.

Give thanks to God because his faithful love endures forever.

And let me, before we press on, let me also say we have visitors, sometimes more than usual on the holidays.

If you're here visiting, maybe someone in your family convinced you just come to church with me.

This morning he said all right, like whoa, I didn't come looking to get a lecture on the semantic domain of a word from 3000 years ago.

I just want the preacher to tell me to love my family and I can get back home and watch some football and eat some leftovers.

What's going on here?

It's okay to watch football.

It's wonderful to eat leftovers.

You should give thanks for your family, and we don't.

We don't talk about specific Hebrew and Greek words every Sunday, but the Bible we believe in this church is the word of the living God.

It's God's speech to us.

It's not just a moral totem that we take in our pockets to kind of help our lives be a little better.

So if God is speaking to us, we're desperate to know what he says.

So we do hope that when you would come, you'd find people that are hungry to know.

What is God saying?

What does this word mean?

I want to know it for myself and my life.

Second heading this morning, creation sings God's faithful love.

Verse four invites us to give thanks to God because God does great wonders.

What wonders are those?

Verses five to nine tell us some of those wonders.

God, because God does great wonders.

What wonders are those?

Verses 5 to 9 tell us some of those wonders.

And they're the wonders of creation, making sky and land great lights, like the moon and the stars and the sun.

This is a very frequent theme in Psalm the glory of God in creation.

You could look at Psalm 8 or Psalm 19 or Psalm 139.

But truly we can say the heavens declare the glory of God.

Here this Psalm brings us all the way back to the first pages of Genesis.

In verse 5, it says God made the heavens.

In Genesis, chapter 1, it said God created the heavens and the earth.

Genesis 1 · chapter mention

Here, in verse number seven, god makes the lights Genesis 1.14, god made the lights.

Verses eight and nine of this Psalm picture the sun ruling over the day and the moon ruling over the night.

Again, language borrowed from Genesis chapter one.

So from creation until the time when the Psalm writes, so from creation until the time when the psalmist writes, until now, you see God all throughout.

We could be tempted, can't we, to think that the sun just kind of rises and sets on its own, the moon and the season cycles and the waves just kind of come and go on their own.

No, it's God that maintains the created order.

He upholds all things by his powerful word.

It's amazing.

When we think of creation, we often think of God's skill, his wisdom, his power.

And it's true, we even see.

In verse number five.

It mentions that skill, but the psalmist still is emphasizing God's faithful love throughout.

You notice that we might expect the writer here to say who spread the land on the waters, his power endures forever.

That's not what he says.

We might expect the psalmist to say the moon and stars to rule by night, his craftsmanship endures forever, but he doesn't say that.

We might expect the writer to wait until we turn to Israel, god's covenant people, and then to introduce the idea of his faithful, loyal love.

But he doesn't do that.

So how does creation reveal God's hesed, his loving loyalty?

God is not forgiving the whales when they eat other fish.

God doesn't have a personal relationship with the stars.

In the same way he's got a personal relationship with Adam and Eve, with Israel.

How does creation reveal God's faithful love?

Give you a few ideas.

These aren't mutually exclusive.

First, exclusive.

First, we have to remember that God's hesed is part of his nature.

It doesn't just emerge at some later point in time.

It's part of who he is.

It's always been a part of who he is.

And there's a contrast here.

The gods of the ancient world think of the Egyptian gods or the Greek and Roman gods.

They're powerful, but they're often not loving and personal and loyal in the way that God is, and that's been true all the way from the beginning.

God is not just merely some ogre who throws down lightning bolts.

He does throw down lightning bolts, but he's not an ogre.

He's always been a God of love and he sends rain on the just and the unjust in commitment to his creation.

Second, god created the world for his own enjoyment, but he created the world for our enjoyment as well, for his people.

Creation is a gift of God's love to us.

So when you see a beautiful sunrise, that's God's love for you.

When you see, on a crisp, clear night, that full moon, if you know the Lord, that's a token of God's love for you.

When you taste a slice of warm pumpkin pie and vanilla ice cream, the world and everything in it belongs to God.

That's God's love for you.

So all of creation should be a reminder to us that our God made it.

And yes, our God made it, and yes, he's a God of faithful love who loves his own.

Third, god's commitment to upholding the created order should remind us that he will always be faithful to love his people.

Jeremiah 33, 25.

This is what the Lord says.

If I do not keep my covenant with the day and with the night and if I fail to establish the fixed order of heaven and earth, then I might also reject the descendants of Jacob and my servant, david.

You hear the logic in those verses.

God is saying he's got a commitment, a kind of creation covenant with the day and the night and he's moving those things along with perfect regularity with the day and the night.

And he's moving those things along with perfect regularity.

And then he says to his own people look at, look at the seasons, look at the day.

Has that stopped?

Why would you think my love for you would stop?

It's, it's a witness to his love for his people.

So all of the created order sings of God's faithful love in the reminder that his faithfulness will never end.

He will be loyal all the way.

And that leads us right into the last half of the Psalm.

Because, yes, creation sings God's faithful love, but Israel sings God's faithful love.

We see that in verses 10 to 24, the Bible so often recounts God's wonders in the life of the people of Israel.

It recounts those wonders here, verse number 11, he brings them out of Egypt.

Verse 13, he divides the Red Sea so they can walk through Verse 16,.

He leads Israel through the wilderness Verse 21, he gives them an inheritance.

And all of these acts showcase God's chesed sacrifice.

God's chesed, his faithful love, his merciful loyalty.

There wasn't anything in Israel.

Deuteronomy says he loved them because he loved them Pure, benevolent love.

But it's a love of commitment and it's a good thing that it's not based on them, or it would be a love that changed.

But God made that commitment.

God made a promise.

He made a promise to Abraham and God doesn't go back on his promise.

He's loyal even when his people are not loyal.

How could Israel forget God's faithful love?

But they do.

Why would they need to be reminded of it 26 times in one Psalm?

Because they do.

They need to be reminded of it, just like we need to be reminded of it.

The Psalm here hits some of the high points in Israel's history, out of Egypt, through the Red Sea, into the wilderness, into the promised land of inheritance.

It hits those high points.

It couldn't detail every single occasion of God's faithful love.

That would be too much.

But it hits those high points to remind them in part.

God is always acting in faithful love.

It's not just once in a while.

These great occasions show us that God is faithful in the every day of Israel's life.

He's faithful in the every day of our life as well.

So sing Israel.

Sing of God's faithful love that endures forever.

Verse 23 says he remembered us in our humiliation.

It's a beautiful theme in the Old Testament of God remembering his people.

It doesn't mean that he oh yeah, israel.

Let me get back to that.

It wasn't that he forgot and now it comes to his mind.

It's covenant language.

He always has his people on his heart and there are times when he moves to act in specific ways on behalf of his covenant.

He knows and he remembers.

When they were in Egypt in slavery, god knew and God remembered this Psalm.

It's a Psalm of Thanksgiving.

As I said, it contains a lot of violence and some of you and I know some of your mind works like I know it's Thanksgiving.

I know this is.

You know we want to emphasize God's love, but when you talked about all the things God did for Israel, you skipped over every other verse where there was a lot of violence.

And this gets back to what I said earlier.

I'm glad you're thinking that way.

We love all of God's word.

We know it's all good for us, and there's a lot of violence in this Psalm.

So if we could ask well, how does creation showcase God's faithful love?

Showcase God's faithful love?

What about?

Isn't there judgment here alongside of love?

How does judgment showcase God's faithful love?

Look at verse 18.

Look at it in your Bibles.

God slaughtered famous kings.

His faithful love endures forever.

How does that work?

How does that work?

In this Psalm?

God's judgment is not a separate thing from God's love, just as the creation is not a separate thing from God's love.

He created with a view to showing his love for his people and he judges, yes, for his glory.

He judges also with a view to showing his love for his people.

Verse 22 says god gave israel an inheritance.

He gave them a land.

It was promised as an inheritance, but then, if you look back at verse 21, the land was not all virgin wilderness.

Other people were living in the land, and god takes and he gives.

Others, others are cursed and Israel is blessed.

You might say, well, that sounds a little bit loving, but a lot unfair.

Friends, remember God owns everything.

He owns the cattle on a thousand hills.

It is his to distribute as he pleases.

He made the world and everything in it.

We can put a no trespassing sign in our yards, but that's not for God, that's for our fellow citizens.

God already owns it all anyway.

He's in the heavens, he does whatever he pleases.

And notice also these are not innocent people.

There's verse number 24 says they are Israel's foes.

They aren't trying to help God's people, they're trying to kill God's people.

And this goes all the way back to Egypt.

Pharaoh was not trying to help Israel get their economic feet in place so they could stand on their own as a nation.

He ruthlessly enslaved them.

And God flicks his finger and hurls Pharaoh and his army into the Red Sea.

Verse 20 mentions Zion, king of the Amorites.

Perhaps he was famous in his own day, not so famous in our day.

Listen to Numbers 21.

Israel sent messengers to say to King Zion of the Amorites let us travel through your land.

We won't go into the fields or vineyards, we won't drink any well water.

We'll travel the king's highway until we have traveled through your territory.

But Zion would not let Israel travel through his territory.

Instead, he gathered his whole army and went out to confront Israel in the wilderness.

Gathered his whole army and went out to confront Israel in the wilderness.

So this king wouldn't even let Israel walk through his land, much less give them any food and water.

He tried to put up a no trespassing sign, and it's never a good idea to tell God no trespassing.

So in Psalm 136, these occasions of judgment even highlight God's faithful love for his people.

You don't mess with the Lord's bride.

You see, there there's something else about this love.

It's not a wispy, sugary love.

You can watch all kinds of Hallmark movies this time of year and find all kinds of platitudes.

If that's what you're looking for, god's love is a deep and affectionate love.

It's a tender love, but it's a love that has teeth, it's tenacious.

He's plowing through mountains, he's walking across surging oceans in behalf of his own beloved ones.

That's the kind of fiercely loyal love that God has.

Creation sings God's faithful love.

Israel sings faithful, god's faithful love.

And finally, beloved.

Yes, we should sing God's faithful love.

How does this Psalm intersect with us and with our lives?

Well, in Luke, chapter one, mary is the mother of Jesus.

She rejoices at the coming of Christ and she says that the Lord has helped his servant Israel, remembering his and then most of our versions say his mercy.

That's the same word in Luke that the translators, the Greek translators of the old Testament, used over and over and over again in this particular Psalm.

So that's probably another reason why the King James has the word mercy here.

But Mary's point is, god's got this promise.

He had this promise of this loving loyalty, this willingness to forgive all the way in the past, and now it's coming to fulfillment in Jesus Christ.

And that's where we see the reality of how is God extending forgiveness and judgment.

Well, in Jesus we see both judgment and forgiveness, because Jesus himself was judged in the place of those who trust in him.

He bore the wrath of God's judgment that we might experience mercy, not just the mercy of defeat over a temporary area and territory for one period of time, that we might receive eternal mercy in Christ.

God has looked with pity on his people and God's love is so determined that he actually took up residence among sinners.

He humbled himself the son of God did and became obedient to death, even death on a cross, that we might receive the gift of righteousness.

Oh, what faithful love.

What has said God has shown to us?

Psalm 136 traces Israel's history.

It traces the steps of their history out of Egypt through the Red Sea into the wilderness, into the place of inheritance.

Consider the steps of Jesus out of Egypt into the waters of the Jordan River, tempted in the wilderness, now exalted and has received his inheritance from the Father.

Israel's history becomes Christ's history.

You see how that is happening.

As we bring in the rest of scripture in the New Testament to this, a text like this, israel's history becomes Christ's history.

So now, through our union with Jesus Christ, if indeed we've turned from our sin, we're trusting in him alone, we are united to Christ, so that Christ's history becomes our history.

He's our representative.

Christ's history becomes our history.

He's our representative.

But then that also means that through Jesus Christ, israel's history becomes our history too.

Whether we're Jew or Gentile, by faith we share that history through Jesus Christ.

We think about the high points of Christ's work his birth, his death, his resurrection, his ascension, all of those high points, just like the high points in this Psalm.

They remind us oh, god's always at work to show his faithful love in the high point and every way in between.

Ephesians says that he has appointed Christ to be head over all things for his church, which is his body.

Christ is always ruling in a way that reflects his faithful love, his deep, loyal, covenant commitment to his people.

Having loved his own, which were in the world, he loved them to the end.

His faithful love endures forever.

Give thanks because the Lord's faithful love endures forever.

Often people have forever plans.

They're going to have a forever spouse and forever children and a forever job, and sometimes those plans are adjusted, sometimes those plans are shattered.

You know some of you.

You're sitting around a table this week and there was someone that you always thought was going to be there, and they're just they're not there, they're gone.

Thought was going to be there and they're just they're not there, they're gone.

And even apart from being sinned against and the sin that we contribute at times ourselves, death can intrude into our lives at any time, and the Burghards experienced that this week.

But there is a real forever that moves beyond the disappointments, the massive disappointments of commitments that have since come and gone, to the disappointments of death, to even the very sweetest relationships.

That God gives to so many of us till death, do us part.

That God gives to so many of us till death, do us part.

This is an actual, forever, eternal love.

So, no matter what our present situation in life, we can give thanks to God because his faithful love endures forever, and a love that's that big, that's that vast, that's that high and deep, as Ephesians, is praise for all the saints to know the height, the breadth, the depth, the length of this loyalty of our Lord, oh, that's where we can rest, that's where we can enjoy the gifts God has given to us in this life, where we can pray, where we can seek him.

It's distraction where, even amidst plans that are not at all what we thought they were going to be, the faithful love of our God endures forever.

And, ultimately, there's only one forever faithful love.

Because there's only one forever Lord, the Alpha and the Omega.

Let's pray, oh Lord, how we thank you that this is the faithful love that we need, this is the loyalty that our souls crave and long for.

So write it on our hearts and blazon it in our souls that reflexively, involuntarily, we would be saying the faithful love of God endures forever.

That we give thanks in all circumstances because God's faithful love endures forever.

That, as we see death and destruction and as we anticipate future judgment to come, your faithful love endures forever.

And as we see the way you've provided for us all things that we truly need in Christ, how your faithful love endures forever.

When we see the love of father, son and spirit, this eternal bond and commitment that we can be invited into, that, that the love the Father has for the Son can be placed in us, that the joy, the expanding and abounding, super abounding joy of the Lord can be brought to us.

Lord, give us as much as possible in this life the eyes of faith to have that real experience of your love.

That it would not be merely a vain repetition, but a repetition that is fueled by the knowledge of all of your word and deeds in the past, of your redemption in the past, the anticipation of redemption in the future and the present experience that we can say from our hearts we love you because you first loved us.

We have peace with you through our Lord, jesus Christ.

We have a communion with Father, son and Spirit, and this is no small communion.

This is a communion that envelops our whole souls and motivates every deed of our lives.

So write that into our hearts, make it a beautiful writing, Make it a permanent writing.

We pray in Jesus' name, amen.