My God is Gracious and Compassionate
Let’s look a little further into Psalm 145 to see who God is. Verse 3 said that He is great, that His greatness cannot be fathomed, but verse 8 brings a different perspective when it says these words: “The LORD is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and rich in love.”
For many Christians, they emphasize one of these parts of God at the expense of the other. So they’ll celebrate God’s might and power, but downplay His love and compassion. Or they make much of His loving grace, but treat Him as soft and weak instead of mighty and great. We need to remember that God is both powerful, and gracious. This is the wonder of our God – the perfection of His power and His grace!
Divine Patience Revealed
The great preacher Charles Spurgeon meditated on this passage in his morning and evening devotional book, and he said something profound: “The Lord is slow to anger,” because He is GREAT IN POWER. He is truly great in power who has power over himself. When God’s power restrains Himself, then it is power indeed: the power that binds omnipotence is omnipotence surpassed… God marks His enemies, and yet He doesn’t stir Himself, but holds in His anger. If He were less divine than He is, He would long before this have sent forth the whole of His thunders, and emptied the magazines of heaven; He would long before this have blasted the earth with the wondrous fires of its lower regions, and man would have been utterly destroyed; but the greatness of his power brings us mercy.
That’s deep stuff. God is so gracious, he says, because He has power over Himself! And He restrains Himself and pours out mercy, delaying His anger and fury as long as He can.
And I can attest to this. I’ve seen in my life how God has been so, so patient with me. So gracious. So compassionate. In moments when I least deserved it, His grace was there to wash me clean, to cleanse and forgive. There’s a song that sums it up which says “a thousand times I’ve failed, still your mercy remains”. That’s been my story.
Call to Return
My God is a God who has held back his anger, and treated me with such grace and compassion, that it amazes me! And yet friends, God promises that unless we return to Him, His mercy will not always be there. We can’t play God for the fool, openly living in sinful and godless ways and expecting that He will just overlook it. No, unless we return to Him, and throw ourselves on His mercy, He will eventually give us what we deserve.
But the ones who return and place their faith in Jesus realise this: that Jesus took what we deserve on that cross. And so we are free. In the words of another song, “amazing love, how can it be that Thou My God shoulds’t die for me!”
My God restrains himself and gives His children countless chances to return to Him and find grace. But friends, that grace and compassion is for those who return to Him, not just for everyone.
Return to Him today would you? He has incredible mercy for you, and He will cleanse and forgive you with gladness, if you return.
