Daily Devotionals

Devotional: January 21st

MERCY AND FAITHFULNESS

To show forth Thy loving-kindness in the morning, and Thy faithfulness every night. - Psalms 42:2

Weave the loving-kindness, or mercy, and faithfulness of ’ God together, and see what a strong cord they are on which a man may hang, and in all his weakness be sure that it will never give nor break. Mercy might be transient and arbitrary, but when you braid in "faithfulness" along with it, it becomes fixed as the pillars of Heaven, and immutable as the throne of God. Only when we are sure of God’s faithfulness can we lift up thankful voices to Him, "because His mercy endureth for ever." A despotic monarch may be all full of tenderness at this moment to some subject, and all full of wrath and sternness the next. He may have a whim of favour to-day and a whim of severity to-morrow, and no man can say, "What doest thou?" But God is not a despot. He has, so to speak, "decreed a constitution." He has limited Himself He has marked out His path across the great wide region of possibilities of the Divine action, - He has buoyed out His channel on that ocean; and has declared to us His purposes.

And so we can reckon on God, as astronomers can foretell the motions of the stars. We can plead His faithfulness along with His love, and feel that the one makes sure that the other shall be from everlasting to everlasting. The next beam of the Divine brightness is righteousness. "Thy righteousness is like the great mountains." Righteousness, not in its narrow sense of stern retribution, which gives to the evildoer the punishment that he deserves. There is no thought here, whatever there may be in other places in Scripture, of any opposition between mercy and righteousness; but the notion of righteousness here is a broader and greater one. It is just this, to put it into other words, that God has a law for His being to which He conforms; and that whatsoever things are fair and lovely and good and pure down here, those things are fair and lovely and good and pure up there; that He is the archetype of all excellence, the ideal of all moral completeness; that we can know enough of Him to be sure of this - that what we call right He loves, and that what we call right He practice’s.

Unless we have that for the very foundation of our thoughts of God, we have no foundation to rest on. Unless we feel and know " the Judge of all the earth doeth right," and is right, and law and righteousness have their home and seat in His bosom, and are the expression of His inmost being, then I know not where our confidence can be built. Unless Thy righteousness, like the great mountains, surrounds and guards the low plain of our lives, they will lie open to all foes.

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