God Who Pardons

There are one or two failures you have never said in a whole sentence, and every few months the drawer slides open by itself while you are driving.

Here is where Micah is standing when he writes this. He has spent seven chapters on a country where the good man is perished out of the earth, where the princes and the judges ask for bribes and get them, where a man's enemies are the men of his own house. He has watched the whole fabric go. Then, at the end, he stops accusing, looks around at every god on offer in that world, and asks a question that is really a taunt: Who is a God like unto thee, that pardoneth iniquity? It is also a pun on his own name, which means who is like Yah. He has been asking it his entire life and he answers it in the last paragraph of his book.

Look at the verbs he picks. Pardoneth is the word for lifting and carrying away, taking a weight off somebody's back. Passeth by the transgression is deliberate overlooking, a decision not to see what has already been seen. He retaineth not his anger for ever admits there is anger and then puts a limit on it. And the reason is five words long: because he delighteth in mercy. Not tolerates. Enjoys. One verse later he casts their sins into the depths of the sea, which in that world was the one place nothing was ever recovered from.

Notice who is pardoned: the remnant of his heritage, his own people. The way in is to belong to him, not to qualify.

So the drawer is yours and nobody is standing over you. If you want to, say the thing with the actual noun instead of the euphemism, then read the last four words again and let them be about you. He delights in mercy. You are allowed to stay there until you believe it.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 191 is The Whole Matter (Ecclesiastes 12:13).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna