“Could we with ink the ocean fill / And were the skies of parchment made; / Were every stalk on earth a quill, / And every man a scribe by trade; / To write the love of God above / Would drain the ocean dry; / Nor could the scroll contain the whole, / Though stretched from sky to sky.”
That is the third stanza of the song, “The Love of God” by Frederick M. Lehman. Those words were found penciled on the wall in the room of an inmate in an insane asylum when he died, and it was thought that in a moment of lucidity, he had composed them. Lehman wrote later that those words were actually written by a Jewish songwriter nearly 1000 years before. The inmate may have simply remembered them and penciled them on his wall. Either way, they could not be truer words.
When Solomon’s temple was completed in 2 Chronicles 5, Solomon gathered the elders, priests, and Levites together to bring the Ark, the Tent of Meeting and all the sacred furnishings to install them in the new temple. They made many sacrifices along the route. At the temple site were the singers and the musicians who joined in unison to praise the LORD. Their song? “He is good, His love endures forever.”
Simple song. Following their song, God’s glory filled the temple in the form of a heavy cloud.
We are now the temple of the Living God. His spirit fills our temple, but our song is still the same song. “He is good, His love endures forever.”
While Solomon’s Temple was eventually destroyed, and the glory of the Lord departed, we have the promise that nothing … absolutely nothing … will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. For all eternity, our song will be “He is good, His love endures forever!”
Romans 8:38-39: For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. [NIV]
