Micah 7:18-20 “Where is the god who can compare with you—wiping the slate clean of guilt, Turning a blind eye, a deaf ear, to the past sins of your purged and precious people? You don’t nurse your anger and don’t stay angry long, for mercy is your specialty. That’s what you love most. And compassion is on its way to us. You’ll stamp out our wrongdoing. You’ll sink our sins to the bottom of the ocean. You’ll stay true to your word to Father Jacob and continue the compassion you showed Grandfather Abraham—Everything you promised our ancestors from a long time ago.” This episode talks about how great our Lord is and how we can be more like Him. Music:"Adding the Sun" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Where is there a god who can compare with you?
Micah 7:18-20 “Where is the god who can compare with you—wiping the slate clean of guilt, Turning a blind eye, a deaf ear, to the past sins of your purged and precious people? You don’t nurse your anger and don’t stay angry long, for mercy is your specialty. That’s what you love most. And compassion is on its way to us. You’ll stamp out our wrongdoing. You’ll sink our sins to the bottom of the ocean. You’ll stay true to your word to Father Jacob and continue the compassion you showed Grandfather Abraham—Everything you promised our ancestors from a long time ago.”
I decided to use the message translation today as sometimes it is nice to take look at what the Lord is saying in His scripture in everyday terms that we use often. Usually I use the New Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition. However, I do sometimes use other translations. This morning felt like a message translation kind of morning. I liked this verse when I heard it yesterday because it talks about how great our God is and how He is unlike any other god. In today’s day and age we don’t really hear about a lot of other God’s. However Micah is an Old Testament prophet and back when He lived there were a lot of other Gods. People were worshiping all sorts of Gods. Gods of light, fertility, water, you name it and there was probably a God for it. However, in this verse Micah is talking about how great God is and how the other God’s can’t even compare with Him. I also like how it goes into detail on why our God is so great.
The first thing Micah talks about is something that a lot of people have a hard time believing about God. God can wipe our slate clean of guilt. He can forgive our sins and then never think about them again. This is not something that is difficult for God. If you turn to Him and you truly repent for having sinned, He forgives those sins, wipes your slate clean you never thinks of them again. It is like they didn’t happen. He does not secretly hold them against you. This is something that do as humans and so we find it hard to comprehend how God can just forgive and forget.
When people come to us and apologize for the things they have done, we can sometimes struggle to forgive. Sometimes we don’t want to forgive and sometimes we want to but just don’t know how to forgive. When you find yourself in this circumstance the best thing to do is to pray about it. Ask God for help to forgive the person. Forgiveness is super important, not for the person asking, but for you and for your soul. The other thing that we struggle with is the wiping the slate clean. Wouldn’t it be great if we could forgive the sins and then wipe the slate clean? This is hard for us because we want to protect ourselves. We are afraid if we forgive and forget then the person will do it again and we will get hurt again. This is something that can happen. I am sure it even happens to God.
If we sin against God and then we truly repent, he forgives us and wipes our slate clean. However, we are human and so even if we were truly sorry we will inevitably sin again, it is in our nature. Each time we sin, we hurt our relationship with God. So, even though we keep sinning God is still willing to wipe our slate clean each time. Maybe we should try to do this as well? It won’t be easy. We have a strong instinct within us to protect ourselves. I don’t think this is a bad instinct. However, I do think that if we pray to God for help and we try to forgive more we would be happier and less stressed. Also, think about how different your relationships would be if you could truly forgive and forget the past sins of others. When I say forget, I mean, don’t hold their past sins against them. Don’t throw them in their face time and time again. If they have repented and you have forgiven them, they we should try to wipe the slate clean. They get to start again, like a do over. I know this won’t be easy, but what if we all gave it a try? How much greater would the world be with more forgiveness in it?
Next, he goes on to say, “You don’t nurse your anger and don’t stay angry long, for mercy is your specialty. That’s what you love most. And compassion is on its way to us.” This is another thing that is so great about our God. He doesn’t stay angry long. Yes, He does get angry, we have seen that enough times in the Bible, but God doesn’t stay angry, He is quick to forgive. When I read the words, “you don’t nurse your anger,” I thought about how easy this is to do. This is for sure something that many of us do. If we get angry about something we can let it consume us. We think about how upset we are, how thoughtless the other person was, or how unfair the circumstances are. Instead of trying to find a way to be less angry we allow these angry thoughts to take over our thinking. We pay close attention to them and we let them control how we feel. In some cases we may think about how we can get revenge on the person that we are angry at. Can you think of a time when you have nursed your anger? When you let you anger take over? How did that turn out? How did you feel when you were nursing your anger? I am guessing you didn’t feel too good as anger is not a feel good emotion. We would feel much better if we could quickly pass through anger and move on to forgiveness.
I love how the verse says that mercy is God’s specialty. This is another thing that we have a hard time believing. We find it hard to trust that God has mercy on us. It is hard for us to believe because we find mercy hard for us to give. We think if we struggle with mercy then God probably does too. Why would He forgive us and have mercy on us when we can’t even have mercy on ourselves? God isn’t like us. He is God, He is our creator. He loves us and gives His mercy freely to us. Even though we might struggle to have mercy on others, we tend to have more mercy for our children. They are our kids and we love them. We have mercy when they mess up because they are our children. This same thing can be said for God. We are His children. He loves us and shows us mercy, He does not struggle with it. Wouldn’t it be great if we could all make mercy our specialty? Maybe we could try to have a little more mercy to those that anger us?
The last two things that Micah talks about in this verse is the Lord’s compassion and the fact that He always stays true to His word. These are both really important as well. What comes to mind when I look over this verse is that Micah is giving a road map of how to be more like God. God created us to be in His likeness and image. Our job here on earth is to be God’s light to others. He wants us to make Him known to one and all. How do we do this? How do we make sure that others know God? One way would be to reflect God in all we do. If people look at us and they see God’s light shining through, if they see His peace and His joy, they will want to know Him. If we know what God is like, we can do our best to adopt these characteristics.
Today we learned that God does not nurse His anger. He forgives our sins and then moves on, He does not hold our past sins against us. We learned that mercy is His specialty and that he buries our sins at the bottom of the ocean. This means, that our past sins will never see the light of day again. They are gone forever. We also learned that God is full of compassion. And finally, we learned that He is always true to His word. When I look at this list, I think that these things are doable. They are not things that will be easy to do, but they are things that we are all capable of doing if we try. I think if you are listening to this episode, you are already someone who tries to be compassionate to others. This is not something new that we learned today. Everyone that knows the Lord our God knows that He is compassionate. Compassion itself isn’t hard. The hard part is to have compassion for everyone. Compassion for some people comes easy and for others we have to try harder. It is something we can do though.
The ability to let go of our anger will be something harder to accomplish. Having mercy can be difficult as well depending on the circumstances. If we truly want others to know God then it is important that we be an example. I know that these things will be hard and at the same time I think Micah laid out a pretty simple, but not easy, roadmap for us. If we work on increasing these characteristics we can become a better example of God to one and all. God is happy to help us whenever we ask Him. He will transform our hearts and minds if we ask and if we let Him. So why not ask? Why not try to become more like Him? We may think that we can never change this much and this is true if we are trying to do it all on our own. However, with God, all things are possible. If we truly want to change, He will change us. Let’s at least try, what have we got to lose?
Dear Heavenly Father, I ask you to bless all those listening to this episode today. We ask that you help change our hearts and minds Lord. Help transform us to be more like you. Help us to become better examples of your love. Lord, we want others to see you when they see us. We want to bring others to you. We want to be living examples of your word Lord. Help us to forgive, have mercy and be compassionate. Help us to be all the things you want us to be. Give us the desire to change if we aren’t quite there yet. Give us the courage to change and the knowledge that we can change if we want to because you are with us. We love you Lord, you are truly amazing. We are so grateful for all the ways that you love us and take care of us. We ask all of this in accordance with your will and in Jesus’ holy name, Amen.
Thank you so much for joining me on this journey to walk boldly with Jesus. I look forward to seeing you again on Monday. Have a blessed weekend!