Do you remember popular contemporary “choruses” from the 80s and 90s? They were disapprovingly labeled “Seven-eleven songs” because they allegedly had only seven words repeated eleven times – and that seemed to be the entirety of the song. We are blessed by contemporary hymn writers like Getty Music, Sovereign Grace Music, and CityAlight that produce beautiful, singable music with biblically rich lyrics. I remember participating in the criticism of the musical “cotton candy” of bygone decades, but I must admit that my harsh rhetoric was tempered…by Scripture. Psalm 136 repeats three words (in Hebrew) a total of twenty-six times! Now what!?
What did we learn in kindergarten about the value of repetition? It is the key to learning. If you memorize Scripture – and I trust you do – then you also take a few words and recite them repeatedly to remember them. What is it that God’s Spirit wants His people to remember about our loving Creator/Redeemer that He would inspire three words to be repeated twenty-six times in one song? “…for His steadfast love endures forever.” If you think I failed mathematics, then remember that often it takes multiple words to translate the meaning of one word in another language. Hesed is one of those words.
When Moses asked God, “Please show me your glory,” God’s response was to pass before Moses and disclose Himself in veiled fashion by proclaiming His name. In that brief and awesome response, He used the word hesed twice (Exodus 34:6-7). God was telling Moses, “This is who I am and what I am like. This is what I want to occupy your understanding of Me – that My steadfast love is rich and abounding and endures forever.” God is holy and just, but that is what makes His hesed so remarkable.
I like Michael Card’s definition of hesed – “When the person from whom I have a right to expect nothing gives me everything.”1 This is the substance of celebration and meditation in the 136th Psalm. God – our Creator, our Redeemer, our Protector, our Provider – through every event and detail of life shows Himself as the One who gives us everything. And we don’t deserve any of it! Let this be what occupies your mind. Let it become the mental lens through which you perceive everything you experience “…having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints.”2
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1Michael Card, Inexpressible: Hesed and the Mystery of God’s Lovingkindness, (2018, IVP Books), p.5
2 Ephesians 1:18
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