Psalm 100:5: Longer Than You Can See

For the Lord is good and his love endures forever; his faithfulness continues through all generations.

Psalm 100:5 (NIV)

Longer Than You Can See

An old man at the library has been telling the same story for eleven minutes. It has his wife’s cousin in it, a car that wouldn’t start, a church in another town, and a man named Bill whose part in the whole thing never becomes clear. The woman at the desk keeps typing and lets him get there.

Psalm 100 is a song for a crowd coming through the gates. Shout, worship, know who made you, come in with thanks. Then the reason underneath the noise: For the Lord is good and his love endures forever; his faithfulness continues through all generations.

Nobody in that crowd could vouch for all the generations. You get one stretch of years, and some of that stretch is hard to read even while you are walking through it. They were singing a claim that ran far past the evidence any of them had.

So they sang it together, in a building, at a set hour, on the days their own proof was thin. Plenty of people got the words that way, through somebody’s mouth. A woman sang them over a crib in a house that no longer stands. A man kept showing up to a service he wasn’t sure about, and the line stayed in his ears, and years later he said it to his son in a parking lot without knowing why he picked that moment.

That is how the words travel, badly and at length and with too many names in it. God’s faithfulness is his own, and it holds whether or not the mouths hold. What comes down the chain is the sentence, not the thing the sentence is about.

So you sing a line today that you cannot prove, next to people who cannot prove it either. The psalm hands you the words anyway, and it puts them in the mouth of a crowd, which is the only place a claim that long has ever been sung from.

The old man at the library gets to the end of it. “It was the alternator,” he says. “All that, and it was the alternator.”