God is righteous. If God is righteous, there is hope in God.
142 Your righteousness is everlasting
and your law is true.
Since God is right, God’s righteousness is “everlasting” (l’olam). If God’s righteousness — his utter faithfulness to his own character of love — is everlasting, then his law is true.
And if true about an everlastingly righteous God, then there is hope in listening to and observing that righteousness made manifest in the Torah of God.
Inherent to a Christian approach to Scripture is not only a listening and learning mentality, but a hopeful one as well: the Christian listens and learns, and then hopes in the God who makes himself manifest and his ways known in these very words. If God’s righteousness is everlasting and God’s laws — coming as they do from God — are right, then living in light of them is a life of hope.
Somedays we don’t feel like listening to them; somedays we don’t want to learn; somedays we don’t want to observe. But the challenge is to listen, learn, and hope anyway. Why? Because of our hope in God — that these words will guide us when the days seem dreary and the path unclear.