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The Lord is Compassionate and Gracious by Fr. Reid Hensarling
Psalm 103:8-13
The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love.
He will not always accuse, nor will he harbor his anger forever;
He does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities.
For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him;
As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.
As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him.
The history of God’s people is a proof to David of God’s grace. “Yahweh is a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in grace and faithfulness” (Exodus 34:6, see also Psalm 86:15). God loved Israel even when Israel forgot and abandoned him. “For the Lord your God is a merciful God; he will not abandon or destroy you or forget the covenant with your forefathers, which he confirmed to them by oath” (Deuteronomy 4:31). The Lord God is truly loving and full of grace and mercy.
As long as man has not plumbed the depths of the knowledge of sin he does not really know what grace means. It is precisely because sin is the most shattering experience in his life that the poet David is able to recognize the truth that God’s grace is greater than man’s sin and his love is stronger than his anger. Although sins are punished, the primary motivation is the desire to restore the sinner rather than to destroy him. In other words, God’s retribution is tempered with his mercy. God, infinitely wronged, not only tempers wrath but tempers justice, though at what cost to himself, only the New Testament would reveal with the death and burial of his only Son.
David illustrates the overwhelming greatness of the divine grace, an effort which is bound to end up in demonstrating man’s incapability to produce anything on his side that could bear comparison with God’s incomparable grace. Even the largest dimensions such as the distance between heaven and earth or the interval between sunrise and sunset do not suffice to make clear the difference between the world of human sin and the reality of the divine grace into which God allows the sinner to enter. Immeasurable distances are one way to express immeasurable love and mercy.
We see a beautiful picture of God’s fatherly love. The concept of God as father is an ancient one, and it is found not only in Israel, but also among other Near Eastern peoples. In this psalm the father-son relationship is dependent not so much upon one’s nationality, as upon obedience. Just as true fatherly love never deserts the child but guides him with a strong hand and does so even when the child does wrong, and just as his compassion proves itself to be greatest in precisely this latter case, so is God’s love for the man or woman, boy or girl who fears him. These are wonderful and powerful actions taken by the Lord for us out of sheer love and grace.
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