God Is Merciful and Gracious
Text: Psalm 103 ESV
Well, like it or not, we are in a war. Satan will attack you today. Period. No question. And the frontline battle almost always is our mind. This has been his tactic from the beginning. Picture the garden, to Eve he says, “Did God really say that.” It's an attack of the mind. Our memory is quite forgetful. We forget who God is—whether he is good, kind, or even real.
Well the psalm we are reading is a perfect opportunity to sharpen our swords for this battle. David is going to walk us through who God is as he demonstrates how to fight against the enemy in his mind.
Remember last week I mentioned David preaching to his own soul, telling himself to believe and understand that God is his refuge? Well, this week he does it even more. He doubles down.
David opens up in the psalm addressing himself principally. Here's the first two verses:
“Bless YAHWEH, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name! Bless YAHWEH, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits,” (Psalm 103:1–2 ESV)
David is well acquainted with a reality that we've all probably experienced. It's when our mouth is praising God, but our heart is far away. This is how Matthew puts it:
“This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.” (Matthew 15:8 ESV)
That’s called hypocrisy. And David knows how dangerous it is. We can’t treat our hearts being numb to God as if that is no big deal. So, David takes up arms and starts preaching to his heart to wake up.
He addresses his own heart, his own soul, and he says, “Bless Yahweh. Don’t forget all he has done.” Just like I'm preaching a sermon to you today, David is preaching a sermon to his own heart to fight the battle. He knows he can forget who God is. He can forget God’s mercy. So he preaches to his soul to remember that.
So we're going to see how he preaches to his own soul. In fact, this preaching to himself brackets the entire psalm. I call it the “Bless the Lord Sandwich.” Jump down to the last verse, the last line:
“Bless the LORD, O my soul!” (Psalm 103:22 ESV)
This psalm begins and ends with this call. And then he also invites others to join in the praise:
“Bless the LORD, O you his angels, you mighty ones who do his word, obeying the voice of his word! Bless the LORD, all his hosts, his ministers, who do his will! Bless the LORD, all his works, in all places of his dominion. Bless the LORD, O my soul!” (Psalm 103:20–22 ESV)
But even more importantly than seeing how David preaches to his own soul, we're going to see the God who he is preaching to his soul.
In between the “Bless the Lord bread,” David gives all the reasons that his soul should bless the Lord. You could probably break it up a handful of different ways, but here's how I've divided it.
Slice one: here's the first meat in the sandwich, bless the Lord because he is good.
Slice two: bless the Lord because he is merciful and gracious.
Slice three: bless the Lord because he is compassionate.
So this psalm can be summarized very simply: Bless the Lord because he is good, merciful and gracious, and compassionate. Bless the Lord.
God is Good
Let’s look at slice one—God is good—verses three through five.
“Who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit, who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy, who satisfies you with good so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.” (Psalm 103:3–5 ESV)
We weren’t able to choose who God would be. He created us. But out of all the things God could have been, it turns out that he is a really good and gracious God. At the center of the world is not an angry God. God is not some cruel guy with a magnifying glass, and we are not the innocent ants. Rather, as the psalm sings forth, “God is good.” Isn’t that great?
He is the God who forgives our sins, heals our disease, gives us crowns of love and compassion. And then we see this nice summary statement—satisfies our life with good so that our youth is renewed like the eagle’s.
But as much as this is good news for us. This psalm is principally about God, not us.
God is not like evil men seeking to always inflict harm so he can gain. Rather he is the exact opposite. God just pours out good on us.
Look at this description in Jeremiah 32:40–41:
“I will make with them an everlasting covenant, that I will not turn away from doing good to them. And I will put the fear of me in their hearts, that they may not turn from me. I will rejoice in doing them good.” (Jeremiah 32:40–41 ESV)
Wow, how great is that! Not only does he promise to do good to us, he rejoices to do good to us! He doesn’t do good to us while pouting about it. He is not begrudgingly working for good. He delights to give us good—to work all things for our good.
This psalm is saying loud and clear that God is good, and he is working everything for his good. The principal way that this psalm shows that God is good is by talking about his mercy and grace. David has already introduced this point, but in the second slice, we are going to see him expand on it much more.
God is Merciful and Gracious
Here are verses 6–12:
“YAHWEH works righteousness and justice for all who are oppressed. He made known his ways to Moses, his acts to the people of Israel. YAHWEH is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. He will not always chide, nor will he keep his anger forever. He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us.” (Psalms 103:6–12)
David now moves to talk about God being gracious and merciful. He’s going to quickly make it concrete, and he does so by recounting history. So once again we get some help from David on how to actually preach to our souls. In short, don’t stay abstract, but call to mind tangible events of God displaying his mighty acts of mercy and grace.
So in verse 7 David does just that:
“He made known his ways to Moses, his acts to the people of Israel.” (Psalms 103:7 ESV)
David goes all the way back to Egypt—to real people, in a specific time in history, to a real place where God displayed his works. We are back in Egypt with Pharaoh enslaving God's people. God sees his people living in oppression under an evil one. So he sends a redeemer to come and take his people from bondage into his place of rest. He works all of these mighty miracles. And then God's people are free.
But lest we think that God saved Israel because of who they are, the Bible reminds us that it was because God was gracious, not that the people were good.
Here's what it says in Deuteronomy:
“Know, therefore, that YAHWEH your God is not giving you this good land to possess because of your righteousness, for you are a stubborn people” (Deuteronomy 9:6 ESV)
God's not giving this land because Israel earned it, but because God is gracious and merciful and loving and pours out his love for his people. He is the kind of gracious God that forgives his people their sin, rescues them from bondage to an evil one, and brings them into a promised land of peace.
Christ as the Centerpiece
You may see where this is going. If we were trying to write our own Psalm 103 today, we could absolutely recount God rescuing his people from Egypt. We could recount hundreds of other gracious actions that God has performed throughout all time. But at the centerpiece of our song is a person, Jesus, God’s own Son.
This is real history—a real person, in a real place, at a specific moment in time. No one debates that Jesus was an actual person who lived here. No one debates if he walked the earth. He was here. Trusting in Jesus is not some kind of act of blind faith.
Jesus came. He died. He rose again. This was a real occurrence in history, and we should preach it to our heart and soul. We preach it to remind ourselves that God is real, God is gracious, God is loving.
When our mind is starting to totter all over because the enemy is attacking, here's what we do. We say, “Stop!” And we look at the cross—an event that actually happened. We let that event remind us that God is gracious and God is merciful.
Who Is YAHWEH
Then David turns from this very specific example to remind his heart that acts of mercy do indeed display the very heart of God. Look at verse 8:
“The LORD is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.” (Psalms 103:8 ESV)
If we had to choose just one verse to be the main verse of this psalm, I would circle this verse. This is a direct testimony to God's own character. He revealed himself that exact way to Moses. Here it is in Exodus 34:6–7:
“YAHWEH passed before him and proclaimed, “YAHWEH, YAHWEH a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.” (Exodus 34:6–7 ESV)
When he is revealing himself to Moses, he says, I am God like this—gracious and merciful.
Look at the example David gives:
“He will not always chide, nor will he keep his anger forever. He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us.” (Psalm 103:9–12 ESV)
This is why David can declare that God is good. God really does remove all our sins away. Here's how Charles Spurgeon puts it:
“Fly as far as the wing of imagination can bear you, and if you journey through space eastward, you are further from the west at every beat of your wing. If sin be removed so far, then we may be sure that the scent, the trace, the very memory of it must be entirely gone. If this be the distance of its removal, there is no shade of fear of its ever being brought back again; even Satan himself could not achieve such a task. Our sins are gone, Jesus has borne them away.” (Treasury of David, Psalm 103:12)
Jesus has borne away our sins.
No God like Our God
This puts our God in a category by himself. That’s the way Micah says it:
“Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity and passing over transgression for the remnant of his inheritance? He does not retain his anger forever, because he delights in steadfast love.” (Micah 7:18 ESV)
The Bible declares, if you could survey every idol of man, every creation that they have deified, every so-called god, every religion ever created—if you were to take them and compare them to our God, none of them would come close.
Who's like him? None of them.
I actually had a Hindu gentleman come up to me in the library this week, and he said, “Hey, don't take that line about there being only one God too seriously. There are multiple gods.” And our response to something like that is, ”What God is like our God?”
Why?
There's no other God that forgives iniquity, no other God that is so sold out to his steadfast love that he would wipe away sin deserving punishment. No one. Nothing anywhere in all of creation compares.
Here's how we know no other God is like this. No other religion has Jesus. Zero. Our God is merciful and gracious so he sends his Son in order that those who believe in him would have their sins forgiven.
But he is still just. God is gracious and forgiving but he cannot let sin go unpunished. If he did, he wouldn’t be good. Sure there are gods out there who claim to forgive everyone. But they're not just. They're not righteous. Wickedness deserves punishment.
God's very character is that he is gracious and merciful. He sends his Son so that the guilty might have their sins forgiven in Christ.
God is Compassionate
Finally, David says, in the last slice, that God is compassionate.
“As for man, his days are like grass; he flourishes like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more. But the steadfast love of YAHWEH is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him, and his righteousness to children’s children, to those who keep his covenant and remember to do his commandments. YAHWEH has established his throne in the heavens, and his kingdom rules over all. (Psalm 103:15–19 ESV)
David makes this stark comparison. It might feel like it comes out of nowhere. He says that man is fleeting. We just kind of pass away, which is true.
Think of the thousands and thousands of years humans have lived here, and we know almost none of them by name. They've all just passed away. We don't even remember them.
David then takes that humbling picture and compares it to God's love:
“But the steadfast love of the LORD is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him, and his righteousness to children’s children” (Psalm 103:17 ESV).
We may blow like the wind or be gone like a breath that just evaporates, but God's steadfast love is going nowhere.
It will not move. It does not change. This is who God is, period. No question.
You can look at every loving father ever to walk the earth, and none of their love compares to God. Whether you had a loving father or not, that’s not the point. No matter how compassionate a person you can picture, God far out does them. He is far better than any gracious father we could ever know. He is far more merciful than any gentle person here on earth. He is far more just than any judge. He is far more generous than any servant here.
And this love is going nowhere for those who fear him. We get to stay in the steadfast love of God for ten thousand years, and when those years are up, we are no closer to the end than when we began. We get to go on and on and on receiving from a God who rejoices to do us good.
Deep in Our Bones
Let us drill this into our hearts, especially for those times when life is so hard that it doesn’t seem like God is being gracious, merciful, or kind. We have got to get these promises deep in our bones, so that when hardship strikes, this is what flows out.
David helps us here by specifically calling to mind God’s rule and reign over everything in verse 19:
“The LORD has established his throne in the heavens, and his kingdom rules over all” (Psalm 103:19).
So let me show you how this works in times of suffering. When suffering strikes, we can recall that God is over all things, including this suffering. But what gives us any hope that God will turn this suffering into good?
Well, we can call to mind incredible pictures of God’s grace, like our sins being removed as far as the east is from the west. Then, we look at the cross and actually ground this truth in a real event. This really did happen, and Jesus is our assurance that it did.
Then, here’s the last step, we go to promises like Romans 8:32, and we preach this to ourselves:
“He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” (Romans 8:32 ESV)
The logic here is so helpfully simple. Let me rephrase it. If God would remove my sins as far as the east is from the west, then surely this suffering I’m facing is no problem for him.
It’s an argument from a greater to the lesser. If God is the kind of God who would remove our sins from us, we can rest assured that he is the kind of God that will do all good to us even if we can’t see it now.
So this morning is a reminder to us to bless him. That's where David ends. In light of all of these realities—in light of God being good, of God being gracious and merciful, and of him being compassionate—in light of all that, bless him.
Here’s the conclusion:
“Bless the LORD, O you his angels, you mighty ones who do his word, obeying the voice of his word! Bless the LORD, all his hosts, his ministers, who do his will! Bless the LORD, all his works, in all places of his dominion. Bless the LORD, O my soul!” (Psalm 103:20–22 ESV)
I hope it was helpful to hear about how to apply this sermon in a few different ways. I tried to show how we can learn to preach truth to ourselves by seeing how David does it. I tried to show how the logic of this psalm gives us hope amid the deepest of trials. But ultimately there is a simple way to apply this psalm—bless the Lord! Oh, bless the Lord, Table Rock. Bless the Lord. If you haven't ever praised the Lord this morning, do so for the first time. If you have a hundred times, let this be a reminder of why you praise him.