A New Year With God's Consistent Mercy

When New Year’s rolls around, we all enter some kind of reflective state where we almost critique ourselves on what we’re doing right and what we need to improve upon. The New Year seems to allow us an opportunity to start over, or at least that’s what we’ve convinced ourselves of. Something that I’m sure most of us need to work on would be our attitudes while driving. I say this because I place myself front and center for those who need to improve on this aspect. Just ask my brother whom I drove to school when we were teenagers or my wife who has noticed how little patience I have for other people on the road. Why is it that we’re that way? When someone cuts us off on the street we have no problem yelling at them or maybe even cussing up a storm. But, when we are the one who made the mistake, we give ourselves the pass. We think that it wasn’t that big of a deal, or that it was an innocent mistake, or that the other person should’ve been paying more attention even if we were the one in the wrong.

Why do we do that? We make the harshest judges in the world, and not just in driving, but in all areas of life when it comes to everyone else. Yet, we make the most cunning and ruthless defense lawyers when it comes to ourselves. Having committed every sin under the sun, in at least some shape or fashion, we should be the ones who would show the most leniency to others. But, that’s often not the case.

On the other hand, if there was anyone ever who should not be lenient, it should be God. We have a good example of that with the people of Ezra’s time. Earlier in Israel’s history, they often broke his rule which ordered them not to intermarry with the other peoples of the area. God did not establish this rule because he was racist, but instead to preserve the faith of Israel and to protect the line of the Savior since he would come from them. However, the people did not listen to God and disobeyed him. This in turn led to other various sins, including that of unbelief. For by intermarrying with heathens, they adopted their culture and their worship.

Having allowed them to be taken into captivity for some time, you would’ve assumed that the people would’ve done everything they could to keep from breaking this law again so that they would not be punished once more. However, even now at Ezra’s time, after God had brought them back from Babylon, God found them breaking the same law that their fathers did. Once more, they were intermarrying with the heathen peoples around them.

We, just like them, know what we must avoid, but somehow don’t avoid it anyways. We keep on returning to the same well of sin and drinking its poisonous waters. This should make us doubly fit for hell. It should make us that much more able to be hated by God.

Yet, we are able to speak the same words Ezra once did: “What has happened to us is a result of our evil deeds and our great guilt, and yet, our God, you have punished us less than our sins have deserved and have given us a remnant like this.” God has every right to cast us away forever into the fires of hell. Yet, he has punished us less than our sins deserve. Ezra here was speaking of how God had allowed them the pain of exile as punishment instead of the pain of eternal death. In the same way, God has lovingly disciplined you so that you would receive temporal pain instead of an eternal kind. He, however, did not spare his Son from that punishment. Being the just God that he is, he had to enact the full force of his punishment on someone. That punishment did not fall to you, however, and for this we are thankful. Christ has taken our place in full.

That, and we are given a remnant like Ezra’s Israelites too. At his time, not everyone wanted to return to Israel to restore their nation. Many had lived full lives over in the land of Babylon/Medes and Persians. God, though, lovingly brought back some of his people to Israel so that the Promised Savior could come about since that promise was attached to the people and the land of Israel. You, friends, are God’s remnant on this earth. There are many who come to faith in their Savior for a time but end up falling away because of their sins and foolishness. You, though, are made secure in the hope of God by remaining attached to him and his promises for you.