Ready to Forgive

We assume God is like the person waiting inside.

That is the confession, and it is close to universal: arms folded, wanting to hear us grovel a while first, needing to see that we have suffered in proportion before anything can be settled. Most of us learned that from somebody and transferred it without noticing we had.

The objection deserves stating rather than dismissing. A God who is ready to forgive can sound like a God for whom the offence was never serious, and cheap pardon is not what anybody who has been wounded actually wants from him.

So look at the wording. Ready to forgive is one word in Hebrew, sallach, an adjective used of God and of nobody else in the Old Testament. It does not describe what he does once persuaded. It describes what he is like standing still: forgiving by disposition, already leaning that way before your first stumbling sentence. And plenteous in mercy is chesed again, with a word for plenteous that means great in quantity, more than the need requires.

But the same verse fences it, and the fence is the answer to the objection. Unto all them that call upon thee. The supply is enormous and it moves in a direction; it reaches people who open their mouths. The offence is not being treated as trivial. It is being raised, out where it can be dealt with, by the person who committed it, which is the opposite of cheap.

So stop rehearsing the speech. Say the plain thing in the car: name what you did and ask him for mercy on it, with no preamble. 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).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna