Slow to Anger

If you grew up in a house with an angry parent, slow to anger does not sound like good news. It sounds like a countdown. The word slow concedes that the anger exists and is coming, and everything in you starts calculating how much time is left.

So it is worth knowing exactly where this sentence was first spoken, because David is quoting and the original setting is the point. It comes from Exodus, from the LORD passing by in front of Moses and naming himself aloud: merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth. And the occasion of that self-naming is the golden calf. Israel had just done the single worst thing in the book, and the words God chose to describe himself in the immediate aftermath are the ones you are reading this morning. They were not coined on a good day about people who were behaving.

Then David keeps going, and the next verse does the work the countdown fears. He will not always chide: neither will he keep his anger for ever. Not that there is nothing to be angry about, which would be a smaller and less useful God. That the anger has a term and the mercy does not; the psalm goes on to measure the mercy against the height of the sky and the distance from east to west, and it never measures the anger against anything at all.

May the long fuse be something you experience this week rather than something you have only read about. May the anger that has a term on it and the mercy that has none be measured for you the way the psalm measures them, against the height of the sky and the distance from east to west. And may you be slow with the person who provoked you yesterday, in the same measure you have been handled.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 335 is There I Will Meet (Exodus 25:22).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna