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January 2, 2021 - August 15, 2024
What we are saying is that, yes, Christ got angry and still gets angry, for he is the perfect human, who loves too much to remain indifferent. And this righteous anger reflects his heart, his tender compassion. But because his deepest heart is tender compassion, he is the quickest to get angry and feels anger most furiously—and all without a hint of sin tainting that anger.
While Christ is a lion to the impenitent, he is a lamb to the penitent—the reduced, the open, the hungry, the desiring, the confessing, the self-effacing. He hates with righteous hatred all that plagues you. Remember that Isaiah 53 speaks of Christ bearing our griefs and carrying our sorrows (v. 4). He wasn’t only punished in our place, experiencing something we never will (condemnation); he also suffered with us, experiencing what we ourselves do (mistreatment). In your grief, he is grieved. In your distress, he is distressed.
In that knowledge, release your debtor and breathe again. Let Christ’s heart for you not only wash you in his compassion but also assure you of his solidarity in rage against all that distresses you, most centrally death and hell.
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.
The Spirit is the continuation of the heart of Christ for his people after the departure of Jesus to heaven.
the Spirit has been given to us in order that we might know, way down deep, the endless grace of the heart of God. “Freely given” in this text is simply the verb form (charizomai) of the common Greek word for “grace” (charis). The Spirit loves nothing more than to awaken and calm and soothe us with the heart knowledge of what we have been graced with.
Bible’s revelation of what God’s deepest heart is—that is, what he delights to do, what is most natural to him. Mercy is natural to him. Punishment is unnatural.
God’s heart is mercy. His glory is his goodness. His glory is his lowliness. “Great is the glory of the Lord. For though the Lord is high, he regards the lowly” (Ps. 138:5–6).
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.
Perhaps Satan’s greatest victory in your life today is not the sin in which you regularly indulge but the dark thoughts of God’s heart that cause you to go there in the first place and keep you cool toward him in the wake of it.
Where is the heart of God, the unspeakably exalted one, naturally drawn, according to Isaiah 57:15? To the lowly. When Jesus showed up seven hundred years after Isaiah prophesied and revealed his deepest heart as “gentle and lowly,” he was proving once and for all that gentle lowliness is indeed where God loves to dwell. It is what he does. It is who he is. His ways are not our ways.
The high point of Jeremiah’s prophecy is chapters 30–33. Scholars call this “the Book of Consolation” because God reveals to his people in these chapters his final response to their sinfulness, and it is not what they deserve. Expecting judgment, he surprises them with comfort. Why? Because he had pulled them into his heart, and they cannot sin their way out of it. “I have loved you with an everlasting love,” he assures them (Jer. 31:3).
And as love rises, mercy descends. Great love fills his heart; rich mercy flows out of his heart.
That God is rich in mercy means that your regions of deepest shame and regret are not hotels through which divine mercy passes but homes in which divine mercy abides.
It means on that day when we stand before him, quietly, unhurriedly, we will weep with relief, shocked at how impoverished a view of his mercy-rich heart we had.
