The Terror of God's Mercy

Have you ever longed for God's Mercy? Maybe you have felt overwhelmed and sense potential disaster just beyond your vision. Jeremiah knew how you felt. He lived with ongoing destruction and conflict. His spirit was undone by the coldness of God's people, his own relatives and friends. In the midst of these difficult times he writes,  "By the LORD’s mercies we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not. New every morning. Great is Your faithfulness!" (Lamentations 3:22-23). It has been an encouragement to many and the source of Thomas O. Chisholm's well known hymn, "Great is Thy Faithfulness", composed back in 1923. The words can be a source of strength and assurance when we find ourselves in times of distress. God's mercies are new every morning, not jut scraps left over from the day before. However, have you ever considered what God's mercies look like? Have you put Jeremiah's encouraging words into the context from which he writes? Do you know of the history of the times? If not you may not see the power behind the Lord's mercies or how they were realized for Jeremiah and God's people. An honest look at the passage will show that there can be great terror in God's mercy.

I encourage you to take a minute and read Lamentations 2 and Lamentations 3. Let us consider a bit of history and a few excerpts to help you gain the context of Jeremiah's confident claim to God's unending mercy. In the days of Jeremiah Judah was in religious rebellion against the Lord. Idolatry,  Baal, and Ashtaroth worship permeated the land. The Northern tribes had already fallen to Assyria do to their unfaithfulness and now Judah was taking the same path. Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon was chipping away at what little was left of the kingdom of Judah. Judah's destruction was imminent. Jeremiah's message was one of impending doom and coming exile and the grieve he carries in almost unbearable. Lamentations 2 and 3 record his words of anguish. A few excerpts from the chapters reveal his heart and the emotions he endures.

Lamentations 2:1, "covered the daughter of Zion with the cloud of His anger," 2:2 "swallowed up and not pitied, thrown down in His wrath," 2:4 "Poured out His fury like fire," 2:7 "Lord has spurned His alter, abandoned His sanctuary," 2:8 "The Lord purposed to destroy," 2:17 "Lord has done what He purposed; thrown down and not pitied, caused an enemy to rejoice over you," 2:21 "Young and old lie in the streets. You have slaughtered and not pitied," In chapter 3 Jeremiah turns from God's hand against the nation to his personal pain. Jeremiah 3:1 "I am a man who has seen the affliction by the rod of His wrath," 3:4-9 "broken my bones, bitterness and woe, set me in dark places like the dead,made my chain heavy, shuts out my prayer, made my paths crocked." Jeremiah goes on; 3:11-16 "torn me to pieces,set me as an arrows target, arrows pierce my loins, ridiculed by my people, filled me with bitterness, broken my teeth, removed my soul from peace." After pouring out his desperation for the nation of Judah, for God's chosen people, Jeremiah cries out his personal pain in a flood of emotional distress. These chapters may picture the greatest rendition of God's wrath and judgement upon His people you will find in Scripture. It is hard to find a silver lining here when you read the text as it is  recorded.

After chapters of woe and destruction Jeremiah gives us 3:22-23, "By the LORD’s mercies we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not. New every morning. Great is Your faithfulness!" How can this be? The Hebrew word translated mercy is Hesed, which speaks of the depth of the covenant love shared by Yahweh and His people. It is often translated "lovingkindness" and is simply hard to capture in English. There is an intimacy and richness of commitment that offers security and grace. The word for compassion is the Hebrew racham, meaning bowels or womb. The picture her is a passionate and tender love that comes from the inner depths of our being. The power of God's magnificent covenant love keeps God's people from being consumed, finished, brought to an end. God's compassionate love, that flows from the very core of His being, never fails.

If Jeremiah is right, how can we reconcile such vivid and, in all honesty, terrifying pictures of God's wrath and judgement being poured out upon His own people? How can His fulfill servant, Jeremiah, know such suffering and torment? When you read chapters two and three do you come to the same conclusion as Jeremiah? Pain, bitterness, slaughter, fury, wrath, destruction all reveal the Lords unending mercy and compassion? Perhaps verses 22 and 23 belong somewhere else or maybe Jeremiah is trying to make us feel better in the midst of apparent annihilation. Or perhaps Jeremiah is right on target. Perhaps we are the ones who have packaged God's mercy and compassion in our own little box and misunderstand the depth of His covenant love for His people.

Solomon was the wisest man to have lived and gives this bit of advice in Proverbs 3:2, "For whom the LORD loves He corrects, just as a father the son in whom he delights." Solomon also tells us, "He who spares his rod hates his son, but he who loves him disciplines him promptly" (Proverbs 13:24). The writer to the Hebrews borrows this verse in Hebrews 12:6. In Johns Revelation he records the Lords words,  “As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten. Therefore be zealous and repent" (Revelation 3:19). Out of love the Lord must discipline. The longer and further His people go astray the stronger the discipline must be. Generations of warnings and disciplines had come and gone and yet God's people still worshiped other gods. From simple sacrifices on the high places to the burning of their children alive to appease some other god the Lord's people had forsaken Him and placed themselves in greater danger than they could have realized. Now the time had come to bring a severe judgement or correction to deliver them from themselves. Now God's temple would be razed. The people of God would be deported to Babylon. No temple to offer sacrifices, no alter to sprinkle the blood on when the Day of Atonement came. No Jerusalem to celebrate the required feasts and festivals. Just Babylon, the center of pagan worship. A serious time of judgement that would last for a generation. Even then it would be even more years before God's Temple would be rebuilt and the offerings restored. God's people got what they had long practiced. Pagan gods, pagan worship, no temple, no Jerusalem, no way to be obedient to the Lord's commands for worship.

Consider the consequences both of the discipline of the Lord and the dangers if the discipline had not come. The result of the deportation to Babylon, the temple's destruction, the razing of Jerusalem and the removal of the opportunity to worship in accordance with the lord's commands was deliverance. God's people would never again chase after foreign gods. No more Baal or any other god or goddess would be acceptable to God's people. Now consider the results of no discipline. Worship of Yahweh lost. The covenants fully forsaken and replaced with the religious traditions of the nations. Torah lost, the prophets replaced or executed. Yahweh becomes just another of the plethora of gods and goddesses demanding attention from Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome, Egypt and all the little local deities in regions of the Middle East. What would have happened to the promise of Messiah? What would have happened to the Covenant to David, or Abraham or Moses? All we believe in and hold to be true could have been lost. However, in the depth of His compassion and love God intervenes.From the depths of His mercy He brings the needed discipline to deliver His people from themselves. In the process Jeremiah reveals the terror of God's mercy.

Just a final note, the terror that was God's mercy touched the righteous as well as those who strayed. Jeremiah had to hold onto the memories and knowledge of who the LORD was in order to endure the discipline that fell upon the nation as a whole. And it was enough, Lamentations 3:20-21, " My soul still remembers and sinks within me.This I recall to my mind, therefore I have hope." Can we be like Job? "Behold, how happy is the man whom God reproves, so do not despise the discipline of the Almighty" (Job 5:17). I appreciate the truth shared in Hebrews 12:11, "Now no chastening seems to be joyful for the present, but painful; nevertheless, afterward it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it." The discipline of Lamentations chapters 2-3 did not seem joyful. They were times of terror and apparent disaster. Yet, the result was deliverance and the protection of God's promises and covenants. Our loving Heavenly Father demonstrates His love, His mercy, His deliverance, in His discipline. Sometimes the terror of God's mercy is precisely what we need.