Exodus 34:4-9 – Tawa Baptist

Scriptures: Psalm 145:8-9, Psalm 103:1-13, Exodus 22:16-27, Exodus 34:4-9

Structure:

Introduction
The Lord is gracious and compassionate
The Lord is slow to anger and rich in love
The Lord removes our transgressions
Conclusion

Introduction:

Some of you may have been on the Inter-Islander ferry

The Inter-Islander is a relatively large boat that transports people and cars across Cook’s Straight, between the North and South Island
Sometimes, when there is a bit of a swell on the ocean, the boat heaves backward and forward like a see-saw
When that happens the best place to stand is in the middle of the boat
If you try to walk around it is hard to keep your footing – each step is uncertain
And if you are standing at either end of the ship you will feel the up and down motion of the swell a lot more
But when you are near the centre, holding on to something firm, it doesn’t feel so bad

The world is in a bit of turmoil at the moment with this COVID-19 virus

For some people it feels like being on a ship in a heavy swell.
People’s plans are being thrown out and shut down
The horizon is constantly changing and each step feels uncertain
Perhaps the best thing we can do is find a firm hand hold and centre ourselves, stand still for a while.

For Christians, Jesus is our centre. He is the rock, the firm foundation on which we stand and find security in unsteady times.

Today we continue our ‘Anthems’ series

In this series we are looking at the lyrics of one hymn or Christian worship song each week to see how that song informs our thinking about God and how it connects with Scripture and the heritage of our faith.

The song we are looking at this morning is called The Lord is gracious and compassionate

The words of this song come straight out of the Bible – they are woven throughout the Old Testament and find human form, in the person of Jesus Christ, in the New Testament.
These words reveal the heart of God and, consequently, are at the centre of Jewish and Christian faith
For centuries they have given millions of believers, stability and a firm handhold in unsteady times.

Although the lyrics to The Lord is gracious and compassionate have been around for literally thousands of years, the music is relatively new

Graham Ord recorded the song in 1998 with Vineyard music

Graham Ord was born on the 22^nd March 1961 in the U.K. which means today is his birthday – he is turning 59. (Isn’t that a lovely piece of synchronicity)

Graham learned guitar when he was 15 and got heavily involved in the punk music scene during the 1970’s. He describes his conversion…

“I met a girl and she told me about the Lord and that was when I first got interested in Christianity. I never had any background of Christianity at all. I spent six weeks trying to find out if it was true, doing a lot of soul searching…

I thought about the Lord, and eventually I got on my knees in my bedroom and asked the Lord to come into my life. At that point I realised that was why I was born, to use the music that God gave me to communicate something about Him, His love and all that sort of stuff.

I gave up music for a while because before it had been like an idol, really. Then one day, about a year later, the pastor says to me, ‘Are you hiding your light under a bushel?’ I thought, ‘What the flippin’ heck is a bushel?’ I’d never heard of a bushel before… But he said, ‘I hear you used to play, in a band.’

I said, ‘Yeah’, and he said, ‘Well don’t you think it would be good to play your guitar in church?’ So I started playing in my punk style” [in church].

That was Graham Ord’s story of becoming a Christian

He didn’t end up playing all his music in church though – he also plays in pubs and bars, both covers of popular songs as well as Christian worship songs – so he’s not afraid to publicly express his love for Jesus.
There is an authenticity to his character and his faith

The Lord is gracious and compassionate:

A backbone gives strength and stability to the body

It runs through our centre (physically) and keeps us steady & flexible
Graham Ord’s song starts with the words, the Lord is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and rich in love
This is a direct quote from Psalm 145, verse 8, in the NIV
These words provide a backbone for our faith

So let’s consider what each of the key words in this phrase mean

‘The Lord’ is the personal name of God Almighty – that is, Yahweh.
Yahweh revealed his name to Moses.
The name, Yahweh, cannot be contained by any definition we might try to give it. Yahweh may mean something like ‘I am who I am’, which is another way of God saying, ‘You don’t define me. I define myself.’
And the backbone of the way God defines himself is, gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and rich in love.

We heard last week about the graciousness of God when we took a closer look at the song Amazing Grace

Grace is a word which simply means ‘gift’
A gift is not something we earn like wages and it’s not something we deserve like justice, nor is it something we are entitled to by law
To receive grace is to be given something good that we haven’t earned, don’t deserve and are not entitled to
God’s grace, his gift of unmerited favour, is multi-faceted
Sometimes God’s grace feels pleasant and other times it may feel painful but it is always good for us.

The word compassion is also very rich in its meaning

Our English word for compassion comes from a Latin word
In Latin, ‘com’ means with and ‘passion’ means suffer – so to have compassion for someone means to suffer with that person
We might also call that empathy – putting ourselves in the other person’s shoes, feeling what the other person is feeling
Therefore, to say ‘the Lord is compassionate’ is to say that God suffers with us – he feels what we feel.
God is not aloof or unfeeling or disconnected from the suffering of his creation

But suffering with someone only goes so far. If you are going through difficult times you don’t just want God to empathise with you – you want God to be moved – to do something to help you

Which is where the Greek word, splagchnizomai, comes in
Splagchnizomai is the New Testament word for compassion
Splagchnizomai means to be deeply moved in the depths of your being, in your guts, in your spleen.
For the people in the ancient world love and compassion didn’t come from your heart (like we might think of it) – love and compassion come from your bowels
So compassion is a gut wrenching feeling that moves you to action
This was a revolutionary thought. The gods of the Romans and Greeks had no compassion for mortals – they were unmoved by our situation
The living God, Yahweh, is deeply moved by our predicament and will take action for humanity’s well-being.

But wait, there’s more. The Hebrew word for compassion, used in the Old Testament, is taken from the word rechem, which means ‘womb’

I like the connection Bonnie Wilks makes here when she talks about the womb of compassion…

To have compassion on someone means, symbolically, to carry them in your womb. In the womb of compassion, the suffering one is nurtured and protected and given what is good for them. They are carried until they are strong enough to come out of the womb.

Now when we think of God’s compassion as a womb, it makes us feel safe and close and connected to God with the deepest bond known in human experience

Like a woman in labour God suffers with us to give us life
God’s compassion is a source of security for us

In Exodus 22, God gives some laws about social responsibility.

Things like, don’t take advantage of a widow or an orphan,
Don’t mistreat immigrants,
Don’t lend money at interest,
Don’t make life hard or uncomfortable for the poor, that sort of thing.
And in the same breath (in verse 27) God says: For I am compassionate.
In other words, the widow, the orphan, the immigrant, the poor and the powerless are like a baby that I carry in the womb.
This means if we mistreat them, we are mistreating God and he will be moved to take action in their defence.

There is a line in Graham Ord’s version of the song which reads…

The Lord is good to all; he has compassion on all that he has made
This is a quote from Psalm 145, verse 9
It basically refers to the universal scope of God’s goodness and compassion.

Jesus spoke of God’s goodness and compassion for all, in Matthew 5

Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.

God’s love and compassion makes him vulnerable to rejection and abuse

We human beings sometimes take God’s goodness for granted.

Graham Ord was well aware of God’s vulnerability to rejection. He says,

“When I first got saved I wrote a tract, and I used to go out on the streets with a friend of mine and give this tract out to people…. So we started giving them round, we used to pray for people at bus stops, all sorts of things.

I gave one chap this tract, and he said, ‘I don’t want to know’.

So I said, ‘Well, Jesus loves you’.
And he said, ‘Well I don’t give two monkeys. So what?’
That really shocked me, because I thought everyone must be interested in Jesus; it was such a real thing to me.

So I went home and prayed saying, ‘Lord, how do you feel when people just completely reject you?’ The thought came to me,

‘Well, I know all of that. I know that people turn their back on everything I’ve done for them. But just like a bird doesn’t need to try to fly, so I can’t do anything but love you. That’s the way it is… I don’t make up the love I have for people – I just feel love for people. That’s the way I am.'”

God shows goodness and compassion and love for people (whether they appreciate it or not) because that’s who he is – he’s simply being himself.

The Lord is slow to anger and rich in love:

As well as being gracious and compassionate, the Lord God also defines himself as slow to anger

Many of us don’t like this idea that God is capable of anger but actually anger is part and parcel of love and justice and compassion

My spiritual director said to me once, ‘If you cut yourself you bleed. If you experience injustice you feel angry’
And it’s true, if someone does something to harm a person you love then it cuts you and you naturally feel angry
Or if you yourself are treated unfairly you will inevitably feel angry
If God did not get angry over injustice then he would not be a loving and compassionate God, he would be an apathetic god
Apathy (not caring at all) is the opposite of love

Anger is essentially an emotional energy. Anger is not a sin in itself.

So it is okay to feel angry. The critical thing is what we do with the emotional energy of anger
Do we use that energy to destroy and take revenge?
Or do we use that energy to declare the truth and restore?

It needs to be said that God’s anger is not the same as human anger

God is always in control of his anger. We human beings, on the other hand, are not always in control of our emotional energies
God’s anger is carefully measured. Our anger is often out of proportion.
God’s anger is provoked by injustice and untruth, whereas our anger may be fuelled by fear or selfishness rather than love or righteousness
To say that God is slow to anger is to say he has a long fuse – he is patient and fore-bearing
We human beings tend to have a lot shorter fuse
God’s anger is always righteous. Human anger is often unsteady.

In thinking about the contrast between divine anger and human anger I’m reminded of the story of Jonah

Jonah was a Jewish prophet, in the Old Testament, who was told by God to preach a message of repentance to his enemies – the people of Nineveh
Jonah did not want to do this and ran away in the opposite direction
But God, who is gracious and compassionate and slow to anger, pursued Jonah with his love, turned him around and put him on the right path

Jonah went to Nineveh and told the people that God was going to destroy their city. The people repented and God relented

The people turned their lives around and God saved the city.
This made Jonah angry – he was furious with God and said…
“Isn’t this what I said, Lord, when I was still at home? That is why I was so quick to flee to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity.
Don’t you love the irony – God’s grace and compassion and slowness to anger actually made Jonah angry. God listened to Jonah and then he said,
Have you any right to be angry, Jonah? Nineveh has more than 120,000 people who cannot tell their right hand from their left and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about that great city?

There is a bit of Jonah in all of us I think. We want God to be patient and gracious with us but quick to anger with our enemies.

We can’t have it both ways.

The Lord God is slow to anger and rich in love.

What does it mean that the Lord is rich in love?
Well, the Hebrew word, translated as love here, is actually hesed.
I’ve spoken before about the meaning of hesed but for those who missed it, hesed refers to loyal love or steadfast (covenant) love
Depending on the context in which it is used, hesed can also be translated as mercy or kindness

There are three criteria to hesed in the Hebrew Bible:

First, an act of hesed is done for someone you know already
Second, the action is essential to the survival or basic well-being of the recipient (it is no small thing)
And thirdly, the needed action is one that only the person doing the act of hesed is in a position to provide [1] (no one else can do it)

When God gave Sarah & Abraham a son (Isaac), that was an act of hesed

When Joseph saved his family from starvation and forgave his brothers for selling him into slavery, that was an act of hesed

And, when God delivered the people of Israel out of slavery in Egypt that was an act of hesed.

There are many other examples of divine and human hesed in the Bible

To say ‘the Lord is rich in love’ is to say God is not mean or stingy with his hesed – his love for humanity is long and deep and generous.

The Lord has removed our transgressions:

The second verse of Graham Ord’s song reads…

As far as the east is from the west, that’s how far he has removed our transgressions from us

This line is a direct quote from Psalm 103, verse 12

It is basically talking about God’s forgiveness of Israel’s sin
Transgressions is a word which means breaking God’s law
The distance between the east and the west is an infinite distance
It is immeasurable – you can’t get further apart than the east and the west

Now we may be inclined to take a romantic view of God removing our transgressions from us

We might think it happens without any cost or inconvenience to us
But that is not always the case
For example, if you are a recovering alcoholic or a drug addict then having God remove that addiction from you is not usually an easy process. Withdrawal can be painful and requires your cooperation.
Or perhaps your sin is less obvious, more socially acceptable.
Maybe you love money or your reputation or your personal freedom or something else, more than you love God. We call this idolatry
If money is our idol, then having God remove our transgressions and sin means losing our excess wealth
Or if our reputation is more important to us than God, then having God remove our transgressions will probably involve some form of public humiliation
And if personal freedom is what we worship, then the remedy will sound something like, ‘deny yourself, pick up your cross and follow me’.

God’s forgiveness may be free but it’s not cheap.

After God had done hesed for the Israelites, by rescuing them from slavery in Egypt, they did a terrible thing in the wilderness

They repaid Yahweh’s loyal love with betrayal and disloyalty
The people made a golden calf and bowed down to it in worship and then they had a big booze up
Moses was on the mountain at the time getting the ten commandments
When he came down and saw what was happening Moses was so angry with the people he broke the stone tablets on which the commandments were written and destroyed the golden calf
Then Moses interceded for the people, asking God to forgive them, and God listened to Moses. (A good use of angry energy one thinks)

Afterwards Moses went up the mountain again with new stone tablets for God to write on. Take two.

While he was up the mountain The Lord came down in a cloud and stood there with Moses and proclaimed his name, the Lord. He passed in front of Moses saying, “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished…”
The Lord showed hesed (loyal love) to the nation of Israel by forgiving their sins and renewing his covenant with them
In that situation those who had sinned eventually died in the wilderness but the next generation were allowed to enter the Promised Land
In this way the Lord removed Israel’s transgressions as far as the east is from the west.

God’s grace and compassion and love don’t always make us feel good but they are always good for us.

Conclusion:

The song finishes with the opening and closing line of Psalm 103 where David says, Praise the Lord, O my soul;

In this context the soul refers to the individual person – in particular to a person’s inner self, their inmost being
David is intentional about worshipping God genuinely, from the inside out, in spirit and in truth; not just putting on appearances

Graham Ord understood this when he chose these words from the Psalms

In an interview he talks about the need to be real in worship, saying…

“I’ve worked a lot in Eastern Europe in the past. I used to smuggle Bibles…

One thing I’ve learnt is that Christians out there [in Czechoslovakia] aren’t afraid of the pain as well as the joy when they worship. Like if you hear a Romanian choir they very rarely sing songs that are all happy-clappy. Their music is very mournful; minor key type songs, because they’re singing about things that are touching their hearts. Worship… is about expressing everything, every facet of human experience… It’s very, very important to be honest in worship.”

With many of the events that are unfolding in our world today it may feel difficult to ‘praise the Lord with our soul, our inmost being’

We don’t need to pretend. We have freedom to be honest with God
Honesty in worship ultimately enables us to take our eyes off the situation and leads us to praising God for who he is, not just what he can do for us
When we get to that place of praising God for who he is, our perspective and our peace are restored.

Let us pray…

Father God, we praise you, for you are bigger than Corona Virus or empty supermarket shelves or any other threat
Lord, we praise you, for you are gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and rich in love
You are able to bring good out of the current circumstances and make all things serve your purpose. Blessed be your name. Amen.

Song Lyrics:

The Lord is gracious and compassionate
Slow to anger and rich in love
The Lord is gracious and compassionate
Slow to anger and rich in love
The Lord is good to all
He has compassion for all that He has made
As far as the east is from the west
That’s how far He has removed our transgressions from us

Praise the Lord, oh my soul
Praise the Lord
Praise the Lord, oh my soul
Praise the Lord.

Questions for discussion or reflection:

Listen to the song, ‘The Lord is gracious and compassionate’. What are you in touch with as you listen to this song? (What connections, memories or feelings does the song evoke for you?)

How are you feeling about recent events in the world? Why do you think you feel this way?

What gives you strength and stability in times of uncertainty or change?

Discuss / reflect on the meaning of compassion.
- What are some of the implications, for us, of God’s compassion? (E.g. Exodus 22.)
- What are some of the implications for God in being compassionate?

Why is God’s anger inseparable from his love?
- How is God’s anger different from human anger?

What does it mean that God removes our transgressions from us? What are the implications of this for you personally?

What does it mean to praise the Lord with our soul, with our inmost being?
- Why is honesty in worship so important?

Take some time this week to remember God’s particular acts of hesed for you and give him praise.

[1] Katherine Doob Sakenfeld, Ruth, page 24.

Tag: Exodus 34:4-9

The Lord is gracious & compassionate