“Gracious is the Lord, and righteous; our God is merciful.”
I don’t know how this verse has escaped me all of these years, but it recently caught my attention. When I read Psalm 116:5 I saw it as a great description of God, and I base this on my experience with Him and on what I read in the Bible. Actually, the verse was the result of the psalmists experience with God during a trying time in his life. In verses 3 and 4 he wrote: “The sorrows of death compassed me, and the pains of hell gat hold upon me: I found trouble and sorrow. 4. Then called I upon the name of the Lord, I beseech thee, deliver my soul.” The result of that prayer was the text written above. How does it describe God? It tells us that the Lord is “gracious.” Of course the word “gracious” is similar to our word “grace,” which tells us a lot about God. Graciousness is defined as kind, beneficent and benevolent. That is certainly a good description of God. A lot of people put so much stress on the wrath of God and His punishment of sin, that they overlook God’s graciousness. I certainly don’t intend to minimize God’s wrath, but, at the same time, I do not want to minimize His graciousness. One of my favorite points that I make about God’s treatment of us is that He really and truly wants to bless us, but we really and truly need to live a life that brings on God’s blessings. Throughout the Bible we see the graciousness, kindness and benevolence of God at work, and throughout the Bible we see people doing everything that they can to run away from His blessings. This is greatly illustrated by the nation of Israel. No one in the Bible had greater treatment from God than Israel, yet they continually disobeyed and disappointed Him. They preferred gods made of wood and stone to Jehovah. All these false gods brought to Israel was heartache and destruction. The good news to us is that God is still gracious, kind and benevolent. He proved that through the sacrifice of His Son. Accept and claim the graciousness of God in your life, and don’t let the cares of this world turn you away from Him. It tells us that the Lord is “righteous.” This word means a lot of things, the greatest of which is that God is Holy. God is totally and completely holy and good. It means that He is always right and righteous in what He does. The great thing is that He offers to share this righteousness with us through faith. One main theme of the apostle Paul was that any righteousness that we have comes by faith. God knows that we are all sinners, and by His grace He has made us righteous through faith in Jesus. It is called “imputed righteousness.” This means that God gives us His righteousness to enable us to live the Christian life. It was said of Abraham, that because he believed the promise of God that God would bless him and make of him a nation that God “imputed it to him as righteousness.” (Romans 4:22) It tells us that the Lord is “merciful.” This means that God is compassionate. He cares about what happens in our lives, and He cares about the quality of our lives. We shouldn’t take God’s mercy for granted, but we can be assured when we take a wrong turn in life, that when we see the error of our way, confess, repent and ask for His forgiveness, we will get it. It was God’s mercy that carried Israel through the Red Sea when they were exiting from Egypt. It was God’s mercy that carried Israel through the wilderness to the Promised Land. It was God’s mercy that brought Jesus into the world to save us from sin. It was God’s mercy that placed our sins upon His Son on the cross. Without God’s mercy, we would be in dire straits and it would be impossible to be saved. Do you see what I mean by “a great description of God?” These three great qualities are fundamental to our relationship with God, and we need to be reminded of them often. Bro. Joe
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AuthorDr. Joe Beauchamp is the author of this blog and website. Categories
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