The Mercies of God

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 24, 1874

The Mercies of God.

The Hebrew word for mercy has no singular. When God opens his hand to bless, we may say as Leah did on the birth of Gad, “A troop cometh.” Who ever saw a mercy standing in solitary grandeur? Do we err when we sing in the evening hour—

“Minutes and mercies multiplied Have made up all this day; Minutes came quick, but mercies were More swift, more free than they?”

or when we pray with the psalmist, “According unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions”? We might as well attempt to number the stars, or the sands on the seashore, as to count the mercies which have been quietly falling upon us in the years of our pilgrimage. Truly, “it is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not;” and well might Paul, retaining the Hebrew idiom, say, “I beseech you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice [in contrast to the Levitical sacrifices, which were slain animals], holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.” Rom. 12:1. Reader, have you—moved by “the sure mercies” of God manifested in Christ, and couched in the promises—complied with the apostolic request? or, “despisest thou the riches of his goodness and forbearance and longsuffering, not knowing that the goodness of God leadeth thee”—that is, is designed and adapted to lead thee—“to repentance”? Rom. 2:4. Oh, beware “lest he take thee away with his stroke, and then a great ransom can not deliver thee.”—Messiah’s Herald.