OCTOBER 29, 2024
“Hath God forgotten to be gracious? hath he in anger shut up his tender mercies?” (Psalm 77:9)
This is not the first time that the psalmist Asaph looked at his present circumstances and wondered if the Lord was doing right by him. On one occasion, he confessed that his “steps had well nigh slipped,” as he stewed over what he perceived to be the Lord’s preferential treatment of wicked rich people. In this case his trials are so severe that he is wondering, “Will the Lord cast off forever, and will he be favorable no more?” We are not privy to the particular circumstances of his present “troubles,” only that they had produced sleeplessness and much weeping, and that the recollection of past mercies had not stopped his “sore” from running in the night. His disparate soul is exercised as he argues within himself, “Is the Lord’s mercy clean gone forever?…Hath he forgotten to be gracious?”
God had not forgotten to be gracious, because He cannot forget His own, and certainly “His mercies, they fail not.” The problem was with the psalmist, who Mr. Spurgeon describes as “a musician who often touched the minor key.” He had forgotten that trials and affliction are sent with a merciful design. God in judgment remembers mercy, and the judgment that begins at the house of God is sent in mercy. Life’s finished story will reveal that those times when it seemed that God had forgotten to be gracious, the exact opposite was indeed true.
A bird spent the whole day building her nest in a pile of branches that had been pruned from a tree in a farmer’s orchard. In the evening, however, the farmer, having noticed the nest, scattered the twigs and bits of straw. The next day the little creature resumed her task, but again her work was destroyed. The third day she began her nest once more, but this time she chose a bush beside the kitchen door. The farmer smiled and allowed her to finish. The brush pile where she tried repeatedly to build was destined to be burned, and was so before ever her eggs would be hatched. The farmer appeared to be cruel and ungracious, when, in fact, he was showing mercy to the unknowing bird.
To Asaph it seemed as if the Lord had forsaken him and his nation. He began to wonder if the Almighty had changed, but in reflecting upon God’s ways in the past, and meditated upon His holiness and incomparable glory, he realized that Jehovah forever remains the same. He who created the heavens and the earth and all things therein; where omnipotence caused the waters of the Red Sea to draw back, as if in awe of His majesty still lives. The one who made the clouds to pour down rain, the terrific peals of thunder to reverberate through the sky, the forked lightning to illuminate the world, and the earth to shake, hasn’t changed. While it may sometimes appear that God is cruel in breaking up our nest (our plans, our hopes) we may be sure that He has not forgotten to be gracious. His providences are wonderfully kind and infinitely wise.
“Lord I would clasp Thy hand in mine,
Nor ever murmur nor repine;
Content, whatever lot I see,
Since ‘tis God’s hand that leadeth me.”
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