The Tender Mercy of Our God
And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High;
Luke 1:76–79, ESV
for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways,
to give knowledge of salvation to his people
in the forgiveness of their sins,
because of the tender mercy of our God,
whereby the sunrise shall visit us from on high
to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feat into the way of peace.”
Zechariah’s words in Luke 1:76–79 speak of his son John, who came as the forerunner to Christ. John was to be the one who would “go before the Lord to prepare his ways,” and in so doing he would “give knowledge of salvation to (the Lord’s) people in the forgiveness of their sins.” John came and proclaimed a message of repentance with the accompanying sign of baptism (Luke 3:3) so that people would know that there is forgiveness of sins in God. And Zechariah, whose words here are inspired by the Holy Spirit (Luke 1:67), declares that this forgiveness and this knowledge of salvation is “because of the tender mercy of our God.”
God’s tender mercy is the grounds for both the knowledge of salvation in the forgiveness of sins going out to people and it is the grounds for the coming of Christ—who is called here “the sunrise (who) shall visit us from on high”—who himself would provide for that forgiveness. So the coming of Jesus, and the forgiveness he provides, and the even the spread of the gospel to this day, are all rooted in God’s tender mercy.
God is full of tender mercy. To be fair, the translation “tender” is a bit of an interpretation. The Greek word behind it is the word splagchna, a word that literally means “bowels.” (In Acts 1:18, the word is used to refer specifically to a person’s physical insides, his literal bowels or intestinal organs.) We today occasionally use “bowels” to speak of those things down in the deep places; for the Hebrew culture, however, this notion of the “inside organs” was used to describe the location of origin of the deep-seated, passionate emotions like love and compassion and mercy.
What you need to know today is this: God’s mercy is from down deep in his being. His mercy is embedded deep down in who he is. And his mercy is directed to sinners like you and me.
God is passionate, deeply passionate, about showing mercy through forgiveness in Christ. Let that tender mercy of God encourage you to run to him and find again that he is full of mercy and forgiveness, and let his tender mercy send you to proclaim this good news to others around you.
Bert Watts has served since December 2016 as the Senior Pastor at Mountain Creek Baptist Church, where he has been on staff since 2012.
Photo by Kent Pilcher on Unsplash
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