Watching Our Steps

Look out! You're going to trip!  If you're not careful, you'll fall! 

Stumbling hurts. It can give you a scraped knee or get a fat lip.  Falling, however...well, falling means big trouble.  Falling can mean destruction.

But stumbling, common to us all, does not, because God catches those who delight Him.
If the Lord delights in a man's way, He makes his steps firm.  Though he stumble, he will not fall for the Lord upholds him with His hand.--Psalm 37:23-24
A righteous man may have many troubles, but the Lords delivers him from them all.--Psalm 34:19
The Lord watches over the way of the righteous.--Psalm 1:6

We can't behave well enough, we can't walk carefully enough, to stay completely out of trouble.  We will slip, and often.  But our God, because we delight Him, because He has made us righteous, will keep us safe.


Our job, then, is to delight in Him, to acknowledge His saving grace, to know that His cross made us righteous. 

When we delight God in righteousness, we become eligible for God's mercy.  Then He can bring all of His mighty power to make sure that, although we slip, we will not fall.  He watches our steps.

The Quality of Mercy

The prophet came to the King of Israel and said, "Strengthen your position and see what must be done, because next spring the king of Aram will attack you again."--1Kings 20:22

I have the hardest time understanding mercy. By its very nature, mercy implies the principle of subjection: I cannot show mercy unless the other party is under my power. I know that You are merciful, gracious and compassionate, and slow to anger (Joel 2:13). I know You save men purely on the basis of your mercy (Titus 3:5) and you delight in doing so (Micah 7:8). I also know that You command me to demonstrate mercy to others (Micah 6:8, Luke 6:36, Matthew 5:7). But, then, there are those times....

Like in 1Kings 20, when you commanded Israel's King Ahab to attack the blasphemous King of Aram and he did, but then showed mercy to him at the end. Ahab recognized the attacking king of Aram as his brother, sympathized with him, and You punished him for it. And You certainly did not show mercy on the Pharisees in Matthew 23. You called them every name in the book, Your book, condemning them for their own blasphemous behavior. You did not immediately destroy the pharisees, but the Romans did about thirty years later, when they destroyed the temple, leaving only the rabbis. These two instances of withheld mercy tie the Old Testament to the New Testament, bridging the old law and the new, the supremacy of the law to the gospel of grace. I have to find some common ground here.

I think your lesson in the application of mercy lies here: Both the King of Aram and the pharisees denied God's power: the King in words, the pharisees in action. That was bad enough, but they had something else in common. They also both held positions whereby they each wielded authority over others and, if they went unchecked, would continue to harm them. The Tanach, my Hebrew Old Testament, says this: "Mercy to the evil is in itself a manifestation of cruelty, for the surviving evildoer will cause others to suffer." This is the principle you define in 1Kings 20:22 above when Your prophet tells Ahab that, if he doesn't eradicate the evil before him, it will return.

If this idea had remained confined to Old Testament judgement, I might not consider it so compelling, but it didn't. You continued to demonstrate it in the New Testament when you specifically accuse and condemn the pharisees for corrupting those under their care (Matt 23:15). Like Ahab, I also recognize my brotherhood with some who blaspheme your Name. Mercy, however, belongs to You and my sympathy and feelings for someone against whom You send me to war cannot supersede Your clear instruction. Mercy comes from and belongs to you.

I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion."--Exodus 33:19 and Romans 9:15.

Glad Thorns

One of Your gifts to me is to show me my sins. As I am getting older, my physical limitations increasingly show themselves, but whether these rise to attention or not, my desire to do wrong remains. Part of Your mercy lies in the revelation of my weakness in the face of Your holiness. I think so often that Your mercy lies in rescue, but today I am not so sure. Today I think that a great deal of your mercy lies in Your constancy and in reminders that I am a human and You are God.

Every morning, I measure my new day against You. You are not in unflagging desert heat. You are not in the friendly sun. Cool clouds like today's do not bring You. You show Yourself only in startling fire, in thunderous rolling clouds. I stretch out relaxed flesh under sweet, mild days and in those times, am fully human, but You come only in ferocity of Spirit.

To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassing great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my side, a messenger of Satan, to torment me.--2Cor 12:7

Paul said that the thorn in his side was a messenger of Satan, but it also came as a gift; he knew torment because it brought him to his all-too-human knees before You in constant humility. I don't like that, either. I want to stand before You, to recall my supremacy on earth, my rule over creation. You want me to kneel and acknowledge You, Creator of all, and supreme over all You made, including me.

When You made Adam and gave him dominion over all other creatures, you put him in direct conflict with Satan, to whom you had already given power on the earth. You always knew that Satan's resulting temptations would reveal man's most repulsive parts and thereby show Your greatness in sustaining and forgiving. All in Your plan. It was always all in Your plan.

So I glory in my weakness. Every time I hurt, I recall You do not. Every time I sin, I know You do not. Every time I miss the mark, I remember where to look to aim better next time. Every time the storm comes, I remember Your glory and ferocity in it. In the end, I do not want You to be like me. I want You strong and powerful, but once I acknowledge that You are, that difference lasts for all time. I will always be weak before you, but my condition's corollary is that I know You as You truly are. My thorns become my allies in this.