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| “I know that everything God does will endure forever…” |
| —Ecclesiastes 3:14a |
When you buy an ice cream cone, do you ever wish that it would last longer than it does? What if that ice cream cone would last forever? It would never get warm and melt. The same amount of ice cream would be waiting for you whenever you decided to eat from the cone. Even if you took a spoon and scooped out a significant quantity of ice cream, you would find that the amount of ice cream in the cone would not diminish.
For one thing, you would want to choose your flavor carefully because, after all, it’s going to last forever. You would want to choose the type of cone carefully—waffle cone or sugar cone—because no matter how many bites you take, the cone never disappears.
As silly as this analogy may seem, everything that God does is like this imaginary, never-diminishing ice cream cone. That is to say, everything God does lasts forever.
King Solomon wrote about this attribute of God’s mercy, grace, and love, when he penned these words found in Ecclesiastes 3:12-14:
I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God. I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it. God does it so that people will fear him.
This quality of God that endures forever, Solomon states, is so that people will fear Him—or, as we may be more comfortable saying: revere, or honor, or obey Him. God is who He is. While we puny humans can only partially comprehend the fullness of who God is, in His written Word (the Bible) He has revealed enough of Himself for our finite minds to apprehend this quality of His forever endurance.
The stability that we have in our lives, as followers of Christ, comes from the fact that God’s nature and activity endures forever. James 1:17 states these familiar words:
Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.
The “un-shifting shadow”—or as the Authorized King James Version states: “with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.” God has ultimate stability. And, because He is who He is, we can build the entirety of our lives on that ultimate stability.
As we begin a new day, let’s thank God for the fact that everything He does endures forever. His mercy, grace, and love will never fail because everything God does endures forever. His power to redeem us from the penalty of our sins will never fail to preserve us for eternity because everything God does endures forever. His ability to set us on a pathway toward holiness will never turn in an unchartered direction because everything God does endures forever.
