GOD’S GOODNESS
‘The riches of His goodness and forbearance and longsuffering.’
What is that in God which is most fitted to affect and to subdue us? The greatness of His power? The infinitude of His nature? The severity of His holiness? Nay, the riches of His forbearance and longsuffering; the wealth of that goodness which shows itself in bearing so patiently with us.
I. Forbearance magnified by power.— We hesitate to punish because we doubt whether we can afford to do so. But God is not restrained by such considerations as these (Psalms 73:19-20). There is nothing to hinder Him from putting forth His retributive powers and making us suffer the full penal consequences of our sin. Yet He does not ‘deal with us after our sin, nor reward us according to our iniquities.’ Why not? Because of the riches of His forbearance.
II. Forbearance magnified by holiness.—We feel bound to correct the undutiful child, to punish the guilty citizen or the criminal community. We feel thus because we have accepted the idea, which we believe we have gained from God, that righteousness, integrity, purity, is the supreme thing; that any amount of mere present happiness should be sacrificed to secure it. But what is our sense of the supremacy of moral goodness compared with God’s? How is it then that He suffers long and endures our wrongdoing? It can only be because He is so inexhaustibly rich in holiness.
III. Forbearance magnified by sensibility.—Some men are good, sound, estimable, but they are men of small sensibility. They do not feel keenly. Others are men of great sensibility, and they feel acutely both the good and the evil which touches and tries them. Our Divine Father feels, with a keenness and exquisite sensibility of which we can form no conception, a Divine pleasure when He witnesses in us that which He loves, a Divine pain when He sees ingratitude, selfishness, cruelty, impurity, iniquity, in any of its forms. We know it is so. God has told us this both in Old and New Testament Scripture.
(a) Why was leprosy singled out by Him as the peculiar type of sin? Why, but that it expressed the exceeding hideousness of sin in His sight, as a thing which He ‘could not look upon.’
(b) There was One Who came to be to us the very Word of God, His perfect expression: and we know how He felt toward sin; how He hated it with fervent indignation; how evil it was in His pure sight. Sin is something which excites in the Holy God a feeling of infinite abhorrence.
How is it then that He bears so long with us—with us in whom and in whose lives is so much that is evil? Only one thing accounts for it, ‘the exceeding riches of His grace.’
IV. He endures and blesses in the boundless wealth of His forbearance!
(a) Take the broad view: the view of humanity, created for the glory of God, to live a life of holy service, of spiritual beauty, of mutual helpfulness, and yet for long centuries living a life of idolatry, ungodliness, and cruelty, and God looked down in mercy, forbearing to destroy, sending down His sunshine and His rains!
(b) Take the personal view. How great have been our personal privileges; how God has encompassed us with opportunities, and laid upon us the hand of His gentleness and His power! And still, it may be, we are failing to respond, still keeping that patient One waiting and knocking outside the home of our heart! How wonderful the riches of His forbearance to ourselves. Let us not ‘despise’ these riches, lest we pay the sad penalty of presumption; let us, without delay, change our attitude toward the pleading Saviour, and instead of the look and the tone of indifference or indecision, let us rise with eagerness and earnestness to admit and to enthrone Him.
Illustration
‘It was a precept of John Wesley’s to his evangelists, in unfolding their message, to speak first in general of the love of God to man; then, with all possible energy, and so as to search conscience to its depths, to preach the law of holiness; and then, and not till then, to uplift the glories of the gospel of pardon, and of life.’