Met Together

"Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other." Four things are named here as if they were people, all arriving at one place. A kiss is how two people greet each other, even two who had every reason to pass by without speaking.

The verses before this one show why they might never have met. The psalm is a nation asking God to stop being angry with them: "Turn us, O God of our salvation, and cause thine anger toward us to cease." The truth about the people and God's mercy toward them seemed to pull in opposite directions. Everyone singing the psalm knew which one they deserved.

The next verse keeps the picture going and tells us which way each one is travelling: "Truth shall spring out of the earth; and righteousness shall look down from heaven." One comes up out of the ground where the people live, and the other looks down from where God is. They meet in between. Another psalm says that mercy and truth go ahead of God Himself: "Justice and judgment are the habitation of thy throne: mercy and truth shall go before thy face." Then a man was born and lived among us, and John reached for nearly the same pair to describe Him: "full of grace and truth." In Jesus, the meeting of mercy and truth has a face and a name.

For years you may have asked God to choose between those two things, as if He had to pick mercy or truth when He looks at you. He has never had to choose. Paul puts the difficulty and the answer into one line, saying God did all this "that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus." Mercy did not come by pushing truth aside. The two met at the cross, and because they met there, God can be true to Himself and merciful to you at the same time.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 249 is Carried Like a Son (Deuteronomy 1:31).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two