But I have trusted in Your mercy; my heart shall rejoice in Your salvation. I will sing to the Lord, because He has dealt bountifully with me. Psalm 13:5-6 (NKJV)
I have trusted in Your mercy. I have been bold, confident, secure, sure, put my hope in, run for refuge to Your mercy.1
What a wonderful, bow-down-to-the-ground-in-adoration, gasping, grasping, reaching-out-my-hand-for-yours truth. Yes Lord, in your mercy I trust. There is nothing else. It's all I can go on. Yet, it's all that I need. But this verse made me want to dig deeper.
What is God's mercy?
The Oxford English Dictionary defines mercy as:
- Clemency and compassion shown to a person who is in a position of powerlessness or subjection, or to a person with no right or claim to receive kindness; kind and compassionate treatment in a case where severity is merited or expected, esp. in giving legal judgment or passing sentence. compassion or forbearance shown especially to an offender or to one subject to one's power
- Forbearance, compassion, or forgiveness shown by God (or a god) to sinful humanity, or to a particular person or soul.
(I have received your great mercy, oh God!)
Looking further, I found that A.W. Tozer, in his book The Attributes of God,2 has a whole chapter devoted to God's mercy. This is some of what he has to say:
"According to the Old Testament, mercy has certain meanings: to stoop in kindness to an inferior, to have pity upon and to be actively compassionate. It used to be a verb form of the word compassion, but we don't use it anymore – maybe because we don't have the concept anymore. God actively 'compassionates' suffering men – I like that wonderfully well. For God to feel compassion at a distance is one thing, but for God to be actively compassionate with people is something else." -- A.W. Tozer
God turns mercy into a verb! Think about that. God "mercies" us. He actively "compassionates" us. In another place Tozer declares:
"Mercy is God's goodness confronting human guilt and suffering. When the goodness of God confronts human guilt and suffering, God listens, God hears, and the bleating of the lamb comes into His ear and the moan of the babe comes into His heart, and the cry of Israel comes up to His throne. The goodness of God is confronting human suffering and guilt, and that is mercy."3
God bending down to listen, God hearing our cries, God forgiving our weakness by the Blood of the Lamb, Jesus, who came down here and actively compassionated us, who suffered our sufferings and felt our pain, and carried our burdens, our guilt, our sin, our isolation and rejection all the way to the cross, so that He could bring us all the way home. Let Him actively compassionate you, dear one.
I am still searching out the full meaning and impact of mercy, but I leave you with some quotes and scripture verses that have touched me along the way.
"Because God is the living God, He can hear; because He is a loving God, He will hear; because He is our covenant God, He has bound Himself to hear us. If we can each one speak of Him as 'My God,' we may with absolute certainty say, 'My God will hear me.' Come, then, O bleeding heart, and let thy sorrows tell themselves out to the Lord thy God! I will bow the knee in secret, and inwardly whisper, 'My God will hear me.'" -- Charles Haddon Spurgeon, "God Always Hears," Faith's Checkbook
"God, who foresaw your tribulation, has specially armed you to go through it, not without pain but without stain..." ⏤ C.S. Lewis, Letters of C.S. Lewis (Sept. 2, 1949)
"The Holy Spirit does not come to you because you are perfect, but because you need Him." -- Derek Prince
"If you were a hundred times worse than you are, your sins would be no match for His mercy." -- Timothy Keller, The Prodigal Prophet
The Lord passed before [Moses] and proclaimed, "The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness ... Exodus 34:6 (ESV)
Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions. Psalm 51:1
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me (pursue me, chase me down) all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the LORD forever. Psalm 23:6 (ESV)
But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. Lamentations 3:21-23 (ESV)
"So remember that if you hadn't had the mercy of God all the time, stooping in pity, withholding judgment, you'd have perished long ago ... God is holding up His justice because He's having mercy. He is waiting because a Savior died. All of us are recipients of the mercy of God." -- A.W. Tozer4
Photo by Sheila Bair
1 definition from Strong's Exhaustive Concordance
2 The Attributes of God, Volume 1: A Journey Into the Father's Heart. New ed. WingSpread Publishers, 2007. Chapter 5, God's Mercy.
3 ibid.
4 ibid.
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