NOTES for Psa 103:8

With attentive reading of the biblical books it is not hard to become convinced that the Bible tells us very little, if anything, about God's nature, perhaps because God has no "nature" in the sense familiar to us. But it speaks to us constantly about God's will. His will, however, is not only the commandments He has given; it is also His attitude, whether toward an individual person or a whole people. And often by the "nature of God," about which the Bible, as it appears to us, speaks, we mean the 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 "gracious and merciful" as the Synodal translation renders it, and that He shows patience and mercy, "longsuffering and abundant in mercy" according to the same Synodal translation, the issue is without doubt what we would call God's "nature," His properties, which we encounter every time we turn to Him. Why then does God prove not only generous but also condescending toward our sins? Can such condescension bring spiritual benefit to a person? Much is explained by the mercy of which the hymnographer speaks. The corresponding Hebrew word denotes, first of all, readiness to do for a person more than the law or agreement requires, if the issue is relations between people, or more than a person deserves, if the issue is relations between a person and God. This is precisely how God's relations to the human person prove to be, and as Hosea already testified, this is the only human hope for justification on the day of Judgment: the people violated the Torah repeatedly, and according to 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 of all written before the Babylonian captivity, it is only because God manifests His mercy not only on the day of Judgment but throughout the whole history of His people. To us this can appear as condescension or even indulgence. Yet in reality the issue is not indulgence but salvation: for if God were not full of mercy, it is hard to imagine how the people could have lasted until the coming of the Messiah.