1. Steadfast love (hesed) is the “predominant” characteristic of the heart of God.
2. Steadfast love (hesed) is God’s posture toward repentant sinners who trust in Him.
3. God’s steadfast love toward us is active and sure even in our sickness, adversity, hopelessness and apparent abandonment.
_______________________________
I. Steadfast love (hesed) is the “predominant” characteristic of the heart of God.
Exodus 34:6-7 5 The LORD descended in the cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the LORD. 6 The LORD passed before him and proclaimed, “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, 7 keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.”
(cf. Num 14:18-19; Neh 9:17; Ps 86:15; 103:8; 145:8; Joel 2:13; Jonah 4:2)
“When we speak of God’s glory, we are speaking of who God is, what he is like, his distinctive resplendence, what makes God God. And when God himself sets the terms on what his glory is, he surprises us with wonder. Our deepest instincts expect him to be thundering, gavel swinging, judgment relishing. We expect the bent of God’s heart to be retribution to our waywardness. And then Exodus 34 taps us on the shoulder and stops us in our tracks. The bent of God’s heart is mercy. His glory is his goodness.” (Dane Ortlund, Gentle and Lowly, p.147).
God uses numerous terms “to convince us of his compassionateness and forbearance, and not till the close of all makes any mention of his severity, as that which he will not exercise towards any [except toward those] by whom his compassion is despised.” (John Owen – quoted by Dane Ortlund, p.150).
“If we would know the name of God, and see God as he is pleased and delighted to discover himself to us, let us know him by those names that he proclaims there, showing that the glory of the Lord in the gospel especially shines in mercy” (Richard Sibbes – quoted by Dane Ortlund, p.151).
(on this next slide, make the scripture references very SMALL. Ppl don’t need to write them down during the message; they can pull them off the website later)
How does the OT describe the extent and extravagance of God’s steadfast love for His people?
• “abounding” (Ex 34:6; Num 14:18; Neh 9:17; Psalms 5:7; 33:5; 69:13; 86:5,15; 103:8; 106:7,45; 145:8; Is 63:7; Lam 3:32; Joel 2:13; Jonah 4:2)
• “as high as the heavens” (36:5; 57:10; 103:11; 108:4)
• “endures forever” (100:5; 106:1; 107:1; 108:4; 117:2; 118:1-4,29; 136 (every verse – 26x!); Jer 33:11; same refrain as 2 Chron 20:21)
• “to thousands” or “to the thousandth generation” (Ex 20:6; 34:7; Deut 5:10; 7:9; Jer 32:18)
• from eternity past . . . to eternity future (Ps 103:17)
• what He “delights in” (Jer 9:24; Ps 147:11; Micah 7:18-20)
Ps 103 8The LORD is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
9 He will not always chide, nor will he keep his anger forever.
10 He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities.
11 For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him;
12 as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us.
15 As for man, his days are like grass; he flourishes like a flower of the field;
16 for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more.
17 But the steadfast love of the LORD is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him,
and his righteousness to children’s children,
18 to those who keep his covenant and remember to do his commandments.
Micah 7 18 Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity and passing over transgression
for the remnant of his inheritance?
He does not retain his anger forever, because he delights in steadfast love.
19 He will again have compassion on us; he will tread our iniquities underfoot.
You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea.
20 You will show faithfulness to Jacob and steadfast love to Abraham,
as you have sworn to our fathers from the days of old.
“The Christian life, from one angle, is the long journey of letting our natural assumptions about who God is, over many decades, fall away, being slowly replaced with God’s own insistence on who he is. This is hard work. It takes a lot of sermons and a lot of suffering to believe that God’s deepest heart is ‘merciful and gracious, slow to anger.’ The fall in Genesis 3 not only sent us into condemnation and exile. The fall also entrenched in our minds dark thoughts of God, thoughts that are only dug out over multiple exposures to the gospel over many years. Perhaps Satan’s greatest victory in your life today is not the sin in which you regularly indulge but the dark thoughts of God’s heart that cause you to go there in the first place and keep you cool toward him in the wake of it.” (Gentle & Lowly, pp.152-53).
II. Steadfast love (hesed) is God’s posture toward repentant sinners who trust in Him.
Ps 130:3-8 If you, O LORD, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?
4 But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared.
5 I wait for the LORD, my soul waits, and in his word I hope;
6 my soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning.
7 O Israel, hope in the LORD! For with the LORD there is steadfast love, and with him is plentiful redemption.
8 And he will redeem Israel from all his iniquities.
“We need to understand that however long we have been walking with the Lord, whether we have never read the whole Bible or have a PhD in it, we have a perverse resistance to this. Out of his heart flows mercy; out of ours, reluctance to receive it. We are the cool and calculating ones, not he. He is open-armed. We stiff-arm. Our naturally decaffeinated views of God’s heart might feel right because we’re being stern with ourselves, not letting ourselves off the hook too easily. Such sternness feels appropriately morally serious. But this deflecting of God’s [gracious] heart does not reflect Scripture’s testimony about how God feels toward his own. God is of course morally serious, far more than we are. But the Bible takes us by the hand and leads us out from under the feeling that his heart for us wavers according to our loveliness. God’s heart confounds our intuitions of who he is.” (Gentle and Lowly, 166-67).
III. God’s steadfast love toward us is active and sure even in our sickness, adversity, hopelessness and apparent abandonment.
APPLICATION: How do we attach ourselves to God’s steadfast love so that we can walk in the daily joy and assurance of it?
First: Repent of your sins and receive his forgiveness…
Second: Rehearse the gospel; review & recount; read the Psalms; sing loudly; pray & petition on the basis of God’s steadfast love for you.
“The Christian life, from one angle, is the long journey of letting our natural assumptions about who God is, over many decades, fall away, being slowly replaced with God’s own insistence on who he is. This is hard work. It takes a lot of sermons and a lot of suffering to believe that God’s deepest heart is ‘merciful and gracious, slow to anger.’ The fall in Genesis 3 not only sent us into condemnation and exile. The fall also entrenched in our minds dark thoughts of God, thoughts that are only dug out over multiple exposures to the gospel over many years. Perhaps Satan’s greatest victory in your life today is not the sin in which you regularly indulge but the dark thoughts of God’s heart that cause you to go there in the first place and keep you cool toward him in the wake of it.” (Gentle & Lowly, pp.152-53).