Having moved from heaven to earth and from nature to the specific event of the Jewish Exodus from Egypt, the writer now turns to the faithfulness of God to his people generally (vv. 14-18). At this point he brings in many other attributes of God which his people have experienced and for which they praise him. These attributes are added to faithfulness as basic to God's character and as a foundation for faith in his faithfulness. God has the power to be faithful, but does he want to be? Is God willing? These attributes assure us that the answer is "Yes."

There are as many attributes of God as there are names of God, one for each day of the year, according to ones writer's collection. But of all these divine attributes it would be hard to find one as important to us as faithfulness. Men and women are unfaithful. We make promises and break them. We want people to rely on us, but we cannot be relied on ourselves. God is utterly faithful. What he promises, he performs. This is what Psalm 89 is about. It is about God's faithfulness.

Well, Heman’s last word may be "darkness,” but it does not have to be the last word for us. If we do not repent of sin and come to God through faith in the atoning death of Jesus Christ, the darkness of death, hell and judgment is all we can anticipate. However, if we believe the gospel and receive Jesus as our Savior, not only is the future changed from darkness to brightness and from death to life, the past is changed.

I used the word "darkness” to describe the tone of the last stanza, but the word actually occurs for the first time in verse 6, in a stanza that takes us even further into the abyss. What makes this darkness so dark and this stanza so depressing is that here God is thought of as having caused the psalmist's problems. In verse 1 the writer called God the one “who saves me.” In verses 3-5 he described his actual, present state. But here, in verses 6-9a, he says, contrary to his opening statement, that God is the cause of his misery.