Daily Manna · Day 235 · August 23
Ready to Forgive
“For thou, Lord, art good, and ready to forgive; and plenteous in mercy unto all them that call upon thee.”
Many of us picture God the way we picture someone we have hurt. They are sitting inside the house with their arms folded, while we sit in the car outside, practising what to say.
That picture is a confession, and nearly everyone shares it. We imagine God wanting to hear us grovel for a while first, and needing to see that we have suffered enough before anything can be settled. Most of us learned that from somebody, and we passed it on to God without noticing.
There is a fair objection here, and it deserves to be said out loud. A God who is "ready to forgive" can sound like a God who never took the wrong seriously, and cheap pardon is not what anybody who has been hurt really wants from Him.
Look closely at the wording. The Hebrew word behind "ready to forgive" is sallach. It is a describing word found only here in the Old Testament, and it comes from the verb for forgive that the Old Testament uses only of God. It does not describe what He does once He has been talked into it. It describes what He is like before you say anything at all: He is forgiving by nature, already leaning toward you before your first stumbling sentence. And "plenteous in mercy" uses the word chesed, God's loyal, faithful love. Plenteous means great in amount, more than the need requires.
The same verse also puts a fence around this, and the fence answers the objection: "unto all them that call upon thee." The supply is huge, and it flows toward people who open their mouths and call. So the wrong is not being treated as small. It is being brought into the open, by the person who did it, where it can be dealt with. That is the opposite of cheap.
So stop practising the speech. Say the plain thing to God right there in the car. Name what you did and ask Him for mercy, with no warm-up, because He is already "ready to forgive." Then do the harder half, and make the same short confession to the person inside.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 235 is Balm in Gilead (Jeremiah 8:22).