“1 Praise the Lord, all you Gentiles!
Laud Him, all you peoples!
2 For His merciful kindness is great toward us,
And the truth of the Lord endures forever.
Praise the Lord!”

Summary

Verse 1 is a call to all people, Israel was meant to reveal the one true God to the world.
Verse 2 praises God for his great mercy to us. To see His mercy implies an awareness of our sin, that we have turned away from the good we were meant to do.
And verse 2 states “the truth of the Lord endures forever.”

Truth of the Lord

In Romans 1:20, Paul states that, “since the creation of the world, God’s invisible qualities have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made.”
Ancient writings confirm this. The Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle thought our world pointed to the reality of ideal types or forms, we refer to as transcendent realities, which explain and give understanding of our world. Plato’s list included Truth, Beauty and Goodness. All peoples rely upon them for meaning and structure in life. These realities are not formed from local materials of this earth, they exist above and beyond human construction, they are invisible, universal, and apply over all things on earth.
And if our world points to these invisible underlying realities, these realities also point to an even higher and invisible reality, of God himself; we know from the Bible these transcendent realities are just attributes of God.

But we are in the midst of spiritual warfare, and Satan’s attacks upon us and our faith include causing a blindness to these attributes of God.

Beauty of creation

The beauty of creation shows our world is too wonderful to be a random accident, the reality of beauty reveals the glory of our creator. But the art establishment has become blind to beauty.
Hans Rookmaaker, who was a Professor of History of Art, explained Picasso’s message was that “There are no absolutes, no universal principles, and so this world is absurd, nonsensical, without meaning.” This message spread, and many art schools came to teach that art is whatever you want it to be, that there is no universal reality of beauty.

This blindness extended into philosophy, and all aspects of thought. Absurdism became a major trend in the 20th century; it stated the universe is irrational and meaningless, and man’s search for meaning leads it into conflict with the world. The Theatre of the Absurd included playwrights who dwelt on this conflict, and the play “Waiting for Godot” is a prime example. It’s about the tension between a meaningless universe and our constant striving to find meaning.

The attack on truth is not new (Pilate – “What is truth?“) But in the modern world this attack has found some success in official institutions we previously relied upon, and produced a blindness to truth. In 2016 the Oxford Dictionary named “post-truth” as its word of the year, and a couple of years ago on ABC radio I heard an announcer repeated declare we live in a “post-truth world”. I heard last week the term “my-truth” now appears in a US dictionary.
To people who believe our world is a random chaotic mess, the existence of truth as an absolute reality is an unbelievable claim. The existence of universal and verifiable truth shows our world to be built with meaning, reflecting God’s infinite wisdom, and it provides the basis for scientific inquiry.

Goodness

I find the third ideal form is the most convincing in pointing us to God.
The absolute existence of goodness means there is a real difference between good and evil. It means the terms “ought” and “ought not”, and the choices we make in life, have real meaning, and the source of that meaning is God’s perfect righteousness and holiness. Without it, concepts like right and wrong, and justice and mercy, have no meaning.

The perfect beauty, truth, and goodness of God were part of mankind, being created in the image of God, but were lost when man chose to sin and separate himself from God, causing all sorts of strife and decay, and death. That left a deep gap in our being, with a hunger that nothing of this world, but only God, can satisfy.

Thanks be to God for sending Jesus to heal that gap.