LORD, your word continues forever in heaven. You are loyal forever and ever. You made the earth, and it still stands. All things continue today because of your laws. Like slaves, they all obey you.
God spoke His creative word in the beginning, and He has been continuously speaking His providential word ever since. Everything He created depends upon His word for its continuing existence. Everything that happens is a result of what He says, even the weather on earth: “He gives a command to the earth, and it quickly obeys. He makes the snow fall until the ground is as white as wool. He makes sleet blow through the air like dust,” (Psalm 147:15-16).
Knowing the dependency of all things on the His word, our God is loyal to what He has made. If He wanted, He could stop speaking at any moment. Instead, His speech continues to flow forth from heaven, and the universe continues to exist. God sees to it that all the conditions that make life on earth possible continue to hold. Moreover, our verse for today says that God’s loyalty to all things goes on forever and ever. There will always be a heaven and an earth obeying the laws He speaks.
The unbeliever denies the existence of God; therefore, he has no comfort in what he sees and frets about his fate. He speculates that the universe is fragile and may one day cease to exist. He does not understand that the dependency of the universe should point him to God, the designer, creator, and sustainer.
It’s true that at the second coming of Jesus Christ the heavens and the earth will undergo a radical change, but they will not be annihilated. Rather, God will purge them of evil. Peter tells us that just as the earth was once purified of evil by the waters of the great flood, so shall the heavens and the earth be purified by fire (2 Peter 3:6-7).
God’s loyalty, in other words, will never cease. Indeed, quite the opposite, for it will beneficently transform the old heaven and earth into an even better, new and eternal heaven and earth (2 Peter 3:13).
By John Huisman, friend of Bible League International
