His Love Endures Forever!

July 15, 2019 Monday Message

“His love endures forever.” Ps. 136:1b

Psalm 136 is a list of God’s positive attributes, with each verse ending the same way: “His love endures forever.” Limited by mankind’s languages, it’s challenging to express exactly how much love the Lord has for us.

In the English language, we have only one word for love. “I love my car, I love my dog, I love my wife, I love my God.” We intend to state different degrees of love, but we have only the one word to express our emotions.

The Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Old Testament, gets us closer with “agape love,” the unconditional love a parent has for a child. The child might do something wrong from time to time, but we still love them. We still welcome them home. God still loves us even when we’re off track, and will welcome us home in spite of our transgressions.

The original language writes, “His chesed endures forever.” ‘Chesed,’ or ‘khesed,’ or sometimes just ‘hesed,’ is like extreme agape love, taken to the max! It’s an unconditional love that can never be changed, never be taken away. It’s forever love, no matter what happens. (It’s always challenging to write Hebrew words using English-language letters!) The King James version sometimes writes ‘everlasting lovingkindness,’ which always triggers my spellchecker!

God looked over his creation, and saw that it was very good. God has lots of extreme love for everything he created, and he’s not about to change his mind.

Norton Lawellin

Jesus in the City Fellowship meets Sunday July 21, 2019, 10:30AM, 3249 30^th Ave. S., Minneapolis, MN 55406. This week, Pastor Van Dickerson opens up 1 Cor. 6.