Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers

by Dane C. Ortlund

He joins you in your anger. Indeed, he is angrier than you could ever be about the wrong done to you. Your just anger is a shadow of his. And his anger, unlike yours, has zero taint of sin in it. As you consider those who have wronged you, let Jesus be angry on your behalf. His anger can be trusted. For it is an anger that springs from his compassion for you.

it is not his disciples but his antagonists who most clearly perceive who he is. Though the crowds call him the friend of sinners as an indictment, the label is one of unspeakable comfort for those who know themselves to be sinners.

What does it mean that Christ is a friend to sinners? At the very least, it means that he enjoys spending time with them. It also means that they feel welcome and comfortable around him. Notice the passing line that starts off a series of parables in Luke: “Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear him” (Luke 15:1).

Continuing to move toward the center, some of us are blessed to have a particularly close friend or two, someone who really knows us and “gets” us, someone for whom it is simply a mutual delight to be in each other’s company. To many of us, God has given a spouse as our closest earthly friend.

Here is the promise of the gospel and the message of the whole Bible: In Jesus Christ, we are given a friend who will always enjoy rather than refuse our presence. This is a companion whose embrace of us does not strengthen or weaken depending on how clean or unclean, how attractive or revolting, how faithful or fickle, we presently are. The friendliness of his heart for us subjectively is as fixed and stable as is the declaration of his justification of us objectively.

Jesus wants to come in to you—wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, naked you—and enjoy meals together. Spend time with you. Deepen the acquaintance. With a good friend, you don’t need to constantly fill in all gaps of silence with words. You can just be warmly present together, quietly relishing each other’s company. “Mutual communion is the soul of all true friendship,” wrote Goodwin, “and a familiar converse with a friend has the greatest sweetness in it.”

he is already standing at the door, knocking, wanting to come in to you. What’s our job? “Our duty,” says Sibbes, “is to accept of Christ’s inviting of us. What will we do for him, if we will not feast with him?”

God in Christ allows such little, poor creatures as you are to come to him, to love communion with him, and to maintain a communication of love with him. You may go to God and tell him how you love him and open your heart and he will accept of it. . . . He is come down from heaven and has taken upon him the human nature in purpose, that he might be near to you and might be, as it were, your companion.

Do you see the common strand? Notice the word “mutual” or the phrase “one another” throughout these various facets of Christ’s friendship. The point is that he is with us, as one of us, sharing in our life and experience, and the love and comfort that are mutually enjoyed between friends are likewise enjoyed between Christ and us. In short, he relates to us as a person. Jesus is not the idea of friendship, abstractly; he is an actual friend.

But Christ’s heart for us means that he will be our never-failing friend no matter what friends we do or do not enjoy on earth.

There are many valid biblical answers to that question. The Spirit: Regenerates us (John 3:6–7) Convicts us (John 16:8) Empowers us with gifts (1 Cor. 12:4–7) Testifies in our hearts that we are God’s children (Gal. 4:6) Leads us (Gal. 5:18, 25) Makes us fruitful (Gal. 5:22–23) Grants and nurtures in us resurrection life (Rom. 8:11) Enables us to kill sin (Rom. 8:13) Intercedes for us when we don’t know what to pray (Rom. 8:26–27) Guides us into truth (John 16:13) Transforms us into the image of Christ (2 Cor. 3:18)

And what I propose in this chapter, once more with help from Thomas Goodwin, is that the Spirit makes the heart of Christ real to us: not just heard, but seen; not just seen, but felt; not just felt, but enjoyed. The Spirit takes what we read in the Bible and believe on paper about Jesus’s heart and moves it from theory to reality, from doctrine to experience.

What is the advantage of the Spirit coming? The natural reading is that he will rectify something that is wrong. And what is wrong? “Sorrow has filled your heart” (John 16:6). Apparently the coming of the Spirit will do the opposite: fill their hearts with joy. The Spirit replaces sorrow with joy.

All that we see and hear of the gracious heart of Jesus in his earthly life will, during his ascended state, enter into the consciousness of his people as experiential reality. When Paul gets personal in Galatians and speaks of “the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20), he is saying something that no one could say apart from the Spirit.

Paul is saying that the Spirit has been given to us in order that we might know, way down deep, the endless grace of the heart of God.

The Spirit’s role, in summary, is to turn our postcard apprehensions of Christ’s great heart of longing affection for us into an experience of sitting on the beach, in a lawn chair, drink in hand, enjoying the actual experience. The Spirit does this decisively, once and for all, at regeneration. But he does it ten thousand times thereafter, as we continue through sin, folly, or boredom to drift from the felt experience of his heart.

One way to understand the purpose of this study of Christ’s heart is that it is an attempt to make our mental image of who God is more accurate. I am seeking to help us leave behind our natural, fallen intuitions that God is distant and parsimonious and to step into the liberating realization that he is gentle and lowly in heart.

Christ did not live, die, and rise from the dead as a moral example mainly or a triumph over Satan mainly or a demonstration of his love mainly. Supremely, the work of the Son, and especially his death and resurrection, satisfied the Father’s righteous wrath against the horror of human rebellion against him. His wrath was propitiated—turned away, assuaged.

The key is to understand that at the level of legal acquittal, the Father’s wrath had to be assuaged in order for sinners to be brought back into his favor, but at the level of his own internal desire and affection, he was as eager as the Son for this atonement to take place.

Theologians call this the pactum salutis, the “covenant of redemption,” referring to what the triune God agreed upon before the creation of the world. The Father did not need more persuading than the Son. On the contrary, his ordaining of the way of redemption reflects the same heart of love that the Son’s accomplishing of redemption does.

“The Father of mercies.” As Paul opens 2 Corinthians he gives us a window into what came into his mind when he thought about God.

We’ll return in the next chapter to what it means that mercy is God’s “natural” work and punishment his “strange” work.

A correct understanding of the triune God is not that of a Father whose central disposition is judgment and a Son whose central disposition is love. The heart of both is one and the same; this is, after all, one God, not two. Theirs is a heart of redeeming love, not compromising justice and wrath but beautifully satisfying justice and wrath.

There is no sin or misery but God has a mercy for it. He has a multitude of mercies of every kind.

All the mercies that are in his own heart he has transplanted into several beds in the garden of the promises, where they grow, and he has abundance of variety of them, suited to all the variety of the diseases of the soul.

Beyond what we are conscious of at any given moment, the Father’s tender care envelopes us with pursuing gentleness, sweetly governing every last detail of our lives. He sovereignly ordains the particular angle of the flutter of the leaf that falls from the tree and the breeze that knocked it free (Matt. 10:29–31), and he sovereignly ordains the bomb that evil minds detonate (Amos 3:6; Luke 13:1–5).

Jesus is the embodiment of who God is. He is the tangible epitomization of God. Jesus Christ is the visible manifestation of the invisible God (2 Cor. 4:4, 6). In him we see heaven’s eternal heart walking around on two legs in time and space.

The heart of Christ is gentle and lowly. And that is the perfect picture of who the Father is. “The Father himself loves you” (John 16:27).

“He does not from his heart afflict nor grieve the children of men.” But when he comes to speak of showing mercy, he says he does it “with his whole heart, and with his whole soul,”

And therefore acts of justice are called his “strange work” and his “strange act” in Isaiah 28:21. But when he comes to show mercy, he rejoices over them, to do them good, with his whole heart and with his whole soul.3

what he delights to do, what is most natural to him. Mercy is natural to him. Punishment is unnatural.

Some of us view God’s heart as brittle, easily offended. Some of us view his heart as cold, uneasily moved. The Old Testament gives us a God whose heart defies these innate human expectations of who he is.

For God to cease to be, say, just would un-God him just as much as if he were to cease to be good.

Theologians speak of God’s simplicity, by which we mean that God is not the sum total of a number of attributes, like pieces of a pie making a whole pie; rather, God is every attribute perfectly.

He is well-pleased if they forsake their evil ways, that he may not have occasion to execute his wrath upon them. He is a God that delights in mercy, and judgment is his strange work.”

Left to our own natural intuitions about God, we will conclude that mercy is his strange work and judgment his natural work. Rewiring our vision of God as we study the Scripture, we see, helped by the great teachers of the past, that judgment is his strange work and mercy his natural work. He does afflict and grieve the children of men. But not from his heart.

The only two words Jesus will use to describe his own heart are gentle and lowly (Matt. 11:29). And the first two words God uses to describe who he is are merciful and gracious.

The first part of this passage tells us what to do. The second part tells us why. The transition comes toward the end of verse 7 (which concludes, “for he will abundantly pardon”). But notice the exact line of reasoning.

The parallelism of Hebrew poetry then gives us another way of saying that God will exercise compassion toward us: “He will abundantly pardon” (v. 7). This is profound consolation for us as we find ourselves time and again wandering away from the Father, looking for soul calm anywhere but in his embrace and instruction.

What would we say to a seven-year-old who, upon being given a birthday gift by his loving father, immediately scrambled to reach for his piggy bank to try to pay his dad back? How painful to a father’s heart. That child needs to change his very view of who his father is and what his father delights to do.

So God tells us in plain terms how tiny our natural views of his heart are. His thoughts are not our thoughts. His ways are not our ways. And not because we’re just a few degrees off. No, “as high as the heavens are above the earth”—a Hebrew way of expressing spatial infinitude—“so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (v. 9).

Even the most intense of human love is but the faintest echo of heaven’s cascading abundance.

He doesn’t limit himself to working with the unspoiled parts of us that remain after a lifetime of sinning. His power runs so deep that he is able to redeem the very worst parts of our past into the most radiant parts of our future. But we need to take those dark miseries to him.

Our joyous restored humanity will surge forward with such spiritually nuclear energy that the creation itself will erupt in raucous hymns of celebration.

Because although his ways are higher than our ways, the way in which his thoughts are higher than ours is that we do not realize just how low he delights to come.

His capacious affections for his own are not threatened by their fickleness, because pouring out of his heart is the turbulence of divine longing. And what God wants, God gets.

Some of us separate out our sins from our sufferings. We are culpable for our sins, after all, whereas our suffering (much of it anyway) is simply what befalls us in this world ruined by the fall. So we tend to have greater difficulty expecting God’s gentle compassion toward our sins in the same way as toward our sufferings. Surely his heart flows more freely when I am sinned against than when I myself sin?

The world is starving for a yearning love, a love that remembers instead of forsakes. A love that isn’t tied to our loveliness. A love that gets down underneath our messiness. A love that is bigger than the enveloping darkness we might be walking through even today. A love of which even the very best human romance is the faintest of whispers.

What if we saw God’s heart not in a prophet telling us words, but in a prophet telling us he was God’s Word—the embodiment of all that God wanted to say to us? If Jeremiah 31:20—“my heart yearns for him”—if those words were to get dressed in flesh, what might those words look like? We need not wonder. It looks like a Middle Eastern carpenter restoring men’s and women’s dignity and humanity and health and conscience through healings and exorcisms and teaching and hugging and forgiving.

On the cross, we see what God did to satisfy his yearning for us. He went that far. He went all the way. The blushing effusiveness of heaven’s bowels funneled down into the crucifixion of Christ. Repent of your small thoughts of God’s heart. Repent and let him love you.