By Neil Earle
I was telling our House Church in Fontana, California this morning, April 19, that the only question I scored wrong on an Old Testament Survey Course way back in 1970 was this one: “Was Grace offered in the Old Testament?”
I wrote – NO.
I was wrong. I will always remember how the professor scribbled in the margin: “Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord” (Genesis 6:8).
It is a common misconception – to think that the Old Testament equals Law and the New Testament equals Grace.
I would never have missed that had I paid attention to a beautiful word picture that the translator Miles Coverdale send resounding across his version of the Old Testament and lingers today in the King James family of Bibles. The phrase is found many times, but Psalm 25:6 was our text for this morning: “Remember O Lord your tender mercies and your loving-kindnesses.”
Loving-kindness. It is not a word one encounters very often today – and what a shame! Loving-kindness is a distinctively Biblical word, and for a good reason – it comes close to summing up the very nature and character of God, specifically the God of Israel. The word is taken from in the Hebrew is HESED and Bible commentators cannot help but wax eloquent on the beautiful thoughts it conveys. Listen to the New Bible Dictionary:
“Most of its occurrences are in the Psalms but it comes seven times elsewhere in the Authorized (King James) Version, which has ten other renderings, the most frequent being mercy, kindness and goodness…Its meaning may be summed up as a steadfast love on the basis of a covenant. It is employed both of God’s attitude toward his people. And of theirs to him, especially in Hosea” (page 702).
What is surprising in light of many misconceptions about a stern Old Testament Jehovah and a meek and mild Jesus Christ is the spot where God reveals his name and character to the Israelites. This is found in Exodus 34:6-7 where Moses catches a greater insight into the God of Israel:
“And the Lord passed before him and proclaimed, The Lord, the Lord God, merciful (from Hesed) and gracious, longsuffering and abounding in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, by no means clearing the guilty…”
The attributes here are those we like to think of in God—merciful, gracious, longsuffering, forgiving. The Arab people preserve some memory of this in their various prayers to the One God, “Allah the Merciful, the Compassionate One.”
The word can be traced all through the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms.
(Interestingly, both Rahab and Ruth are ancestors of King David and David’s greater son, the Lord Jesus Christ – see Matthew 1.)
Linking Rahun, the Womb, with Hesed, might make a fine and pleasant subject for meditation upon God’s character as Mother’s Day approaches. Through that example of Hesed let us learn all over again to appreciate the loving-kindnesses of God, the One who, as Jesus taught, is kind even to the unthankful and the evil (Luke 6:35).