Jan 20

Jan 20 Divine Lenses

God's Grace, Mercy, Compassion, Love, Salvation, God's Character

“O LORD, …I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity.”

Jonah 4:2

There is no doubt in my mind that Jonah had a greater than passing acquaintance with the LORD. After all, he was a prophet with whom God shared His mind. The Hebrew for know is “yada: to know by experience”.

Gracious, compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love—some of the ways God described Himself to Moses on Mount Sinai (Exodus 34:6). Jonah knew all the stories of God’s grace and mercy and love down through the years. And come to think of it, he’d experienced them firsthand. God could have left him to die in the raging seas or in the belly of that fish.

But the words that stuck in Jonah’s craw revealed the attitude of his heart: a God who relents from sending calamity. Yes, Jonah knew God, but he did not have the heart of the Almighty. The Hebrew word for relent is “naham: moved to pity”. Jonah lacked the sorrow and compassion to move him to that state of grace and mercy.

How well do you know God? How high does your pity factor measure? God’s perspective is so much better than mine:

Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!

How unsearchable his judgments,

and his paths beyond tracing out!

—Romans 11:33

I love what Priscilla Shirer* has to say: “Considering things from God’s vantage point gives us a filter to view the tangled web of earth’s realities, thereby allowing us the divine momentum we need to move forward toward His goals.”

Time to grab our divine lenses. Moving in close to the Lord is the key to seeing things as He sees them. In His time on earth Jesus understood the necessity of looking through the Father’s eyes: “I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can only do what he sees the Father doing” (John 5:19).

Grace, compassion, love, and a relenting spirit are ours for the asking. And the Spirit helps us in our weakness (Romans 8:26). We need but fix our spiritual eyes on the things of God and keep them there.

Nancy P

*Jonah…Navigating a Life Interrupted, Lifeway Press, p.148

All Scripture quotations are from the NIV 1973, 1978, 1984, unless otherwise noted.

Tags: mercy, grace, compassion, love, salvation, God’s character