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Twenty-six times. That is how often the writer of Psalm 136 repeats the refrain “for his steadfast love endures forever.” He does this while walking through the whole sweep of redemptive history—creation, exodus, conquest—and beneath every single line runs the same revealed truth: His steadfast love endures forever. That repetition is not a filler. It is the psalmist’s making sure that we cannot walk away from this psalm without the truth lodged in us that God is good and that His love has no end.
The Hebrew word behind “steadfast love” is hesed, and no English word quite captures it. The ESV says “steadfast love,” the NIV simply “love,” the KJV “mercy,” and the NLT “faithful love.” Each translation is reaching for something that our language cannot fully hold in one word—covenant love, the loyalty of God who bound Himself to an undeserving people by promise and who keeps that promise because He is faithful to His own word, not because we earned it. It is mercy poured out on people living in rebellion. It is grace given to people who do not love well, who profess one thing and live another. And it is love fulfilled ultimately in Christ. Paul does not just tell us how we are saved; he tells us why: “God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ” (Eph. 2:4–5, emphasis added).
Here is what makes this psalm remarkable. It is immediately followed by Psalm 137, one of the saddest psalms in the Bible—God’s people as captives in Babylon, mocked by their captors, asking, “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” (v. 4). Perhaps you can identify with the sorrow, brokenness, and hopelessness embedded in the question. Yet the Bible places this deep sorrow right beside the psalm about the unending love of God and follows up with the promise of the same in Psalm 138:8: “Your steadfast love, O Lord, endures forever.” This is not an accident. By both form and content, the steadfast love of God envelops and covers our sorrows and pain. God indeed is good to His people.
How do we then respond to this God of steadfast love? “Give thanks to the Lord” (Ps. 136:1; see vv. 2–3, 26). That is why Paul can tell us to give thanks always and for everything (Eph. 5:20), to let thanksgiving accompany our prayers and every anxious circumstance (Phil. 4:6), and to give thanks in all things because this is God’s will for us in Christ Jesus (1 Thess. 5:18). Even unbelievers give thanks when life is going well. What sets God’s people apart is that we give thanks even when it is not—not because we are good or optimistic but because we know who God is and His promise to be with us.
So wherever you find yourself, hear the psalmist’s repeated and unending refrain: His steadfast love endures forever.