The Strangest Verse in the Bible Psalm 136:10

When you’re dealing with God, the creator of the ends of the earth and all that there is, there will be things that you will not understand.  Count on it.  Now that doesn’t mean that you stop trying to understand. 

Proverbs 6:23 says that the reproofs for instruction are the way of life.  Life is one long continuous learning process.  Or at least it should be.  If you’re not learning, you’re not growing, and if you’re not growing, you should probably check to see that you are not dead.

So, my choice for strangest verse in the Bible is Psalm 136:10      To Him who smote the Egyptians in their firstborn,              For His lovingkindness is everlasting,

You recall what the verse is referring to.  You remember from the movie The Ten Commandments where the angel of death came to Egypt and killed the firstborn of man and beast, everyone who had not taken shelter, by putting blood on the doorposts of their house.

The whole story seems a strange one, like a lot of things that happened in the Old Testament.  The reason is that God was trying to teach some fundamental principles about life that were difficult to understand, so He created elaborate rituals and did strange things that pictured higher realities.  If He just tried to explain them like in a classroom, they, and we, just wouldn’t get it.

Some things that happened in the Old Testament seem brutal, unfair, and unkind, and I will not attempt to unravel all the mysteries of the Bible in one short Bible lesson.

The phrase For His lovingkindness is everlasting is one that we will encounter often in our Bible studies, because it is one of the most important phrases in the Bible.  The rest of it goes: Oh give thanks to the Lord, for He is good, for His lovingkindness is forever, or everlasting.

Three years ago, I got cancer.  I had to quit work, and I had, well, let’s just say, a lot of time on my hands.  The roughest part was what it did to my Christian life.  One of the things that I felt the most was that, I didn’t really know God at all.  Oh, I know what the Bible says about God, but the God that I knew didn’t seem to be like that at all.

And then God taught me about that verse, Oh give thanks to the Lord, for He is good, for His lovingkindness is forever. 

I began giving thanks to God that He is good, while telling Him at the same time that I didn’t understand His goodness or His lovingkindness at all.  And it seems that that was OK.  I think what God wants from us is to be able to say right out loud, thank you, Lord, for you are good.  We don’t have to understand what that means, what that looks like, but to be able to praise and give thanks to God, for He is good.  He is worthy.  He is the creator of the universe.  He is my creator.  There are a lot of things that I will never understand, but that doesn’t make them any less true. 

And that was when my life started to mend,