Main news for 27 March 2024

With attentive reading of the biblical books, it is not hard to become convinced that the Bible says very little to us, if anything, about God's nature, perhaps because God has no "nature" at all in the sense familiar to us. But it speaks to us constantly about God's will. Yet His will is not only the commandments He gave; it is also His attitude, whether toward an individual person or toward an entire people. And often by the "nature of God," about which it seems to us the Bible speaks, we mean biblical references to God's attitude toward us and toward our actions. When the Bible tells us that God is full of generosity and condescension, that He is, as the Synodal translation renders it, "gracious and merciful," and that He shows long-suffering and mercy, "long-suffering and abundant in mercy" according to the same translation, the issue is undoubtedly what we might call God's "nature," His properties, which we encounter every time we turn to Him. Why then does God turn out to be not only generous but also condescending toward our sins? Can such condescension bring a person spiritual benefit? Perhaps much is explained by the mercy of which the hymnographer speaks. The corresponding Hebrew word means above all readiness to do for a person more than the law or covenant obliges, if the issue is relationships between people, or more than a person deserves, if the issue is the relationship between a person and God. This is how God's relationship to the human person turns out to be, and, as Hosea already testified, only in this is a person's hope for justification on the day of Judgment: the people violated the Torah repeatedly, and according to the law no one can count on anything on that day. But even before the day of Judgment the situation is not so simple: committed sins, or more precisely their consequences, hang over the people, and if catastrophe has not yet happened, and the psalm was most plausibly written before the Babylonian captivity, it is only because God shows His mercy not only on the day of Judgment but throughout the history of His people. To us this can seem like condescension or even indulgence. In reality, however, the issue is not indulgence but salvation: if God were not filled with mercy, it is hard to imagine how the people could have lasted until the coming of the Messiah.