The Steadfast Love of God Will Last Forever (Psalms 135–138)

Praise lives where memory and hope meet. We open Psalms 135–138 and trace a path from Israel’s rescue to your daily resolve, showing how gratitude grows when we remember what God has done and trust what He has promised to do. The journey moves from naming past mercies to handing God our reputation, from repeating the refrain of enduring love to facing the hard edges of justice and lament.

We start with Psalm 135’s call to remember. When the heart can’t think of a single reason to give thanks, Scripture fills in the blanks with rescue, provision, and patient care. That backward glance strengthens tired faith. Then we look forward: vindication belongs to the Lord. Rather than ride the roller coaster of gossip and pushback, we take Nehemiah’s cue—speak truth plainly, pray “strengthen my hands,” and keep building. In a culture obsessed with image, entrusting your name to God is an act of liberated courage.

From there, Psalm 136 trains us through repetition. Twenty-six times the congregation answers, “His steadfast love endures forever,” linking every act of God to covenant loyalty. We explore why this refrain is not filler but formation, shaping a reflex of trust. Creation itself joins the chorus: God “hung the moon,” a poetic line with scientific weight, stabilizing the earth and sustaining life. The world is not an accident; it is a crafted home, a daily invitation to worship with our eyes.

We do not skip the shadows. Psalm 137 sits by Babylon’s rivers, where songs go silent and justice is pleaded, not packaged. We face the imprecatory lines with honesty, understanding them as a cry for God’s righteous judgment in the face of brutal evil. Finally, Psalm 138 lifts our gaze with David’s confidence: “The Lord will fulfill His purpose for me.” Paul later echoes it—what God starts, He completes. That promise steadies us to sing—clearly, loudly, and publicly—so a watching world hears that steadfast love is not a slogan but the true headline of reality.

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Chapters

• 1:56 Praise With Past And Future In View
• 3:41 Reasons To Praise From Psalm 135
• 5:32 Vindication And Trusting God With Reputation
• 5:37 The Refrain Of Enduring Love In Psalm 136
• 8:26 Creation Wonders And The Moon’s Design
• 10:56 Exile Grief And Praying For Justice
• 12:07 David’s Assurance In Psalm 138
• 13:22 Purpose Completed And A Call To Praise

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 1:37

Welcome to the Wisdom Journey with Stephen Davy. If you're like most Christians, you've praised God for what he's done for you. But you should never forget to praise him for what he's promised to do in your future. You can rejoice that he will fulfill his purposes in you and that his righteous justice will be accomplished. Stephen's gonna explore this today in a lesson that he's called The Steadfast Love of the Lord Will Last Forever.

SPEAKER_00: 2:14

Well, as we continue sailing along this wisdom journey, today we come to Psalm 135. Now, the theme from this point on here in the book of Psalms will be simply this: Praising God for his steadfast love. I think of F. B. Meyer, who wrote more than a hundred years ago that here in Psalm 135, the psalmist seems to pick some beautiful flowers from other psalms and gather them into one bouquet. You know, you can almost smell the fragrance of praise in this bouquet. Verse 1 says, Praise the Lord, praise the name of the Lord, give praise, O servants of the Lord. Now you and I can sometimes forget what the Lord has done for us, and you know, just kind of give a blank stare when somebody asks you, Oh, what can you praise God for today? Well, here the psalmist is not going to give you a blank stare. He's going to fill in the blanks. He reminds Israel, first of all, of their escape from Egypt years earlier and the good hand of God upon them. And by the way, that's a good reminder for us today. You know, the devil tries to choke off your praise to God by getting you to forget what happened in the past, or to only focus on what's happening in the present, and it doesn't seem like God is doing anything good for you in the present. Well, let me encourage you to take a longer look back. Go back a year, go back five years or ten years. Remember the work of God in your life then. That'll help you in the present. Now, here in verse 14, the psalmist praises God that he will vindicate his people and have compassion on his servants. So if you're going to praise the Lord, you're going to have to take a longer look back in the past, and then you need to take a longer view of the future. God will vindicate his people. God might not make everything right today or tomorrow, but one day everything will be made right. Right now you might be mistreated. You might be treated unfairly, unjustly, unkindly. Maybe somebody's out there ruining your reputation with gossip or lies. Well, I recommend you act like Nehemiah, who wrote a letter one time saying, none of that gossip is true, and then left it at that. However, he did get on his knees and pray, Lord, strengthen my hands. That's all in Nehemiah chapter six. So don't get on that roller coaster of you know trying to straighten out every piece of gossip. Let the Lord vindicate you. Let me ask you a question. Are you willing to leave your reputation in the hands of God? Do you think he's capable of taking care of it? Well, if you do, you can rest in this promise right here. The Lord will vindicate his people. Now, this next Psalm, Psalm 136, repeats twenty-six different times the phrase God's steadfast love endures forever. In fact, nearly half this psalm is the repetition of that promise that God's steadfast love is going to last forever. Now, this psalm here is also a uh what we call a responsive song. Somebody sings out a truth about God, and other people respond. So here in verse 1, uh the soloist sings, give thanks to the Lord, for he is good. And the entire congregation now responds, for his steadfast love endures forever. Now when you read this psalm, you'll notice that everything God does for his people is motivated by his steadfast love. This term refers uh more specifically to his covenant commitment to keep his promises to his people. And by the way, if you're one of God's children by faith in his son Jesus Christ, God happens to be just as passionate about keeping his promises to you as well. So the psalmist starts bragging here, so to speak, about the power of a faithful creator God. He isn't like all those false gods out there who can't see, who can't speak, who can't move, who can't do anything. God alone is alive and powerful. Verse 4 tells us here, he alone does great wonders. Alpha Psalmist sort of rattles off some of those wonders here. God alone made the universe, verse five. God spread out the continents, uh, verse six. God created the sun and moon, verse seven. You know, we sometimes talk about somebody who's very special to us by using the expression he hung the moon. Well, God actually hung the moon. And and so far, scientists have spent, I've read, more than twenty billion dollars trying to figure out how that moon got up there, how it evolved. Well, the Bible tells us in Genesis chapter one that the moon was created by God on day four. God hung it out there. He spoke it into existence, and essentially he had to do that in order to sustain life, the life he would create on planet Earth. In fact, without the moon, the earth would wobble on its axis. Seasons would disappear. We we'd be locked into either a deep freeze or a deep fry. In fact, without the moon's gravitational pull, which creates the tidal systems and it drives the ocean's currents around the world, the earth's seas would become just a stagnating cesspool. And you know, the moon is something that I don't know about you, but I take for granted. I don't think all that much about it, unless I see it, perhaps when it's full and it's beautiful. It's it's it's actually one more piece of evidence of God's powerful and loving design. He is our great creator, God. Now, Psalm 137 reminds the Israelites of a time when praising God was the last thing on their minds. In fact, it seemed like the gods of all those other nations out there were more powerful. The psalmist looks back here to the destruction of Jerusalem and the Babylonian captivity when the defeated people, well, they put away their harps. The Jewish people stopped singing and began crying. He begins here in verse one by writing, By the waters of Babylon there we sat down and wept. On the willows there we hung up our lyres. A lyre was a little handheld harp that they played. Verse 4 says, How shall we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land? Now with that, the psalmist asks the Lord to deliver justice to his people's enemies. Essentially, here it would be the Edomites and the Babylonians. These are two wicked, idolatrous nations. They had plundered, they had persecuted the Jewish people, and well now it's time for justice to be served for these nations. The prayer here in this psalm is actually based on Jeremiah chapters 49 through 51, which declares the Lord's judgment on these two nations. And the psalmist is going to write about it here in verse 8. Blessed shall he be who repays you with what you've done to us. Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock. Of course, this was the practice of these enemy armies, back in 2 Kings chapter 8 and Hosea chapter 10. And now no doubt this is what the Babylonians had done when they had destroyed Jerusalem. Now this psalmist, by the way, is not urging the Israelites to go do the same thing to their enemies. What he's praying for here isn't revenge. He's praying for justice, the justice of God. And I believe he's also asking God to keep the Babylonians from raising up another generation who will then turn around and persecute the Jewish people. This is one of those imprecatory psalms. Now this next Psalm, Psalm 138, begins a series of eight Psalms, all written by David. More than likely they're placed here to encourage the Jewish exiles, returning to Judah with the assurance that God's going to keep his promise to David. God's going to keep his promise to the nation of Israel. And so David is repeating God's promise to him here in verse 8, for instance, the Lord will fulfill his purpose for me. By the way, don't go too fast here. Let those words just sort of sink in, beloved. This isn't just God's promise to David. This is this is his promise to you. God will fulfill his purposes for you. Well, you might ask why. Verse 8 answers, because your steadfast love, O Lord, endures forever. You see, God isn't going to let any person or any power anywhere in the universe stop him from accomplishing his purpose for your life. The Apostle Paul essentially restates this same promise a thousand years after David wrote this particular psalm. Paul writes, I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. That's from Philippians chapter 1, verse 6. That's another way of saying God is not going to stop working in your life until you see Jesus one day. In the meantime, let's sing these praises to God today. And let's sing loud enough for the lost world around us to hear this message. Here it is. Amen.

SPEAKER_01: 13:01

Thanks for listening to The Wisdom Journey with Stephen Davey. To learn more about us and access all of our Bible teaching resources, visit wisdomonline.org. Our phone number is 866-482-4253. And you can email us at info at wisdomonline.org. Stephen developed this daily program to help you know what the Bible says, understand what it means, and apply it to your life. So please join us next time to continue the wisdom journey.