God's Unfailing Love
Psalm 33v22
6th September 2024
This is our seventh and final study of Psalm 33. This wonderful song of praise has taught us, or reminded us of, many important doctrines:
- Verse 1 tells us that it is right - fitting - that God's people praise Him in joyful song.
- Verses 2-3 tell us that it is good to play musical instruments, skilfully, in our songs of praise, and that is it good to sing new songs as well old ones.
- Verses 4 and 5 celebrate God's honesty, integrity, faithfulness and love.
- Verses 6-9 remind us that God created the earth, and all people should fear and revere Him.
- Verses 10-11 say that God is in complete control of all human history. He overrules all human plans while His own plans stand firm for ever.
- Verse 12 celebrates our blessed state as "the nation whose God is the Lord".
- Verses 13-15 celebrate God's omniscience - He sees and hears everything that happens, and proclaim that God forms the heart of every human.
- Verses 16-19 tell us that God is the only one who can protect us in battle, or anywhere else, and that His eyes are on those who fear Him, to deliver us from death until the time He has appointed for us to be with Him in glory.
- Verses 20-21 remind us to wait for God to act, to hope in Him and to rejoice in Him. He will never fail us.
I have found it very refreshing and encouraging to study these truths afresh. I hope you have, too. The Psalm ends with a prayer, which is surely the best way to respond to all these wonderful truths:
Psalm 33v22
May your unfailing love be with us, Lord,
even as we put our hope in you.
God's love is truly unfailing. The Holy One, the Ancient of days, The Creator of the universe the Alpha and the Omega, never grows tired, never stops loving, and never stops working. It is unthinkable that the Omnipotent One, The Everlasting Father should ever stop loving the people He had chosen. His love will always be with us.
Nevertheless, it is good to pray for this to be so. We often pray for what we know God will do. The most obvious example, perhaps, is in the Lord's Prayer, when we pray "Your kingdom come" (Matthew 6v10a). There is no doubt that God's kingdom will come but we pray for it to do so. This is a mystery, but God includes our prayers in the working out of His purposes. We can't say God needs us to pray, because God doesn't need anything; He is completely self-sufficient. Nevertheless, God calls us to pray, it does us good to pray, and God answers our prayers. In the same way, it is good to pray that God's unfailing love will be with us, even though we know it will.
The phrase "even as" is not familiar to our generation, and it surprises me that some modern translations use it. The Good News version simply deletes the word "even". Perhaps that's too simple, though. Perhaps "even as" means something like "correspondingly" or "accordingly". The NASB translates "even as we put our hope in you" as "Just as we have waited for You." Eugene's Peterson's paraphrase, The Message, has "That's what we're depending on". I think I would suggest a translation of this part of the Psalm could be:
Psalm 33v22
We put our hope in you, Lord.
Please respond by your unfailing love always being with us.
That mixes up the word order, but translations often do that. It's rather like "Answer our prayer, Lord". We pray but we don't trust in our prayer, or our hope. We trust in the God who answers prayers, the God who fulfils our hope, the God who will always love us.
Hebrews 13v5b
God has said, "Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you."
God has given us the gift of faith. His love and grace to us will never be less that that which we have received grace to believe it will be. God does not promise what He will not deliver. May God help us to trust Him more and more. Amen.