The Character of God- Part 3

Subtitle:  God is Compassionate

Exodus 34:6-7.  This sermon was preached by Pastor Marty Bonner on December 22, 2024.

Over the last two weeks, we have looked at the greater context of this passage, which shows God’s promise to help humanity at The Fall in the Garden of Eden.  We then looked at the immediate context of God’s miraculous deliverance of Israel from slavery in Egypt and bringing them to Mt. Sinai in order to make a covenant with them.

Today, we begin looking at the 5 character descriptions that God gives of Himself in Exodus 34:6, which begins with God being compassionate.

As we approach Christmas, it is fitting for us to contemplate the incarnation of Jesus as the compassion of God.  Jesus is the compassion of God that has come down to earth to lift us out of our predicament.

God’s compassion for Israel

In the immediate context, God’s actions toward Israel has been a demonstration of His compassion.  I’m talking about the supernaturally powerful way that God delivered them from Pharaoh and his armies.  They were redeemed out of slavery and back to the inheritance that had been promised them through the patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  They are brought to Sinai to create a covenant that is sometimes pictured as a marriage.  They are declaring that Yahweh alone will be their God, and Yahweh is declaring that He will make them His special people.

It would be good to define exactly what is meant by the compassion of God.  The Hebrew word in this verse is ra-‘khum and comes from a related noun ra-kha-mim’ (adj.=compassionate, noun=compassion).  This word has an inner and an outer aspect that we will look at.  But, I would like to mention something else before we get into that.

There is a sense that all character descriptions of God are simply facets of a unified being of God that underlies it. It might be better to think of all these different character traits as a facet of love.  God in His being is love, and that love manifests in many colorful ways.  They are all love, but they take on particular aspects of love.  That is what is happening with compassion as we break down what it essentially means.

The inner aspect of compassion refers to a deep-seated feeling (i.e., down in your guts, aka visceral).  This deep-seated feeling involves a softening towards the plight of another.  It is the part of us that sees someone in their difficulties and melts towards their need instead of being hard towards them.  There is typically a natural connection that elicits the emotion, and sometimes even a direct relationship.  This can be one human to another (simply because they are human), or as close as a father and mother towards their child.  In fact, in this passage, we are contemplating an inner softening in the heart of God towards His human creations.  He could have been hard towards the plight of Adam and Eve.  He could have been hard towards the plight of the people of Israel.  Instead, God saw them and was internally softened towards their situation.  He is their Creator.  He made them to be human imagers of Himself, and compassion for them, for us, was deeply felt within Himself.

Yet, there is always an outer aspect to compassion.  It is not a word that only speaks of a feeling.  It also refers to the action that results because of this inner softening.  Sometimes the context of these words may focus on either the inner or the outer aspect, but it is never understood that the other did not happen.  They go hand in hand.  It is the inner compassion of God that drives the external actions of God’s compassion towards us.  He is compelled by His own compassionate character to do something compassionate towards our need.

It is worth pausing at this point and asking yourself this question.  Do I truly believe that God feels compassion and exercises compassion towards me, towards us all?  I say this because there has been a targeted campaign by the devil and his angels against the character of God.  Yes, he makes this case through people, but he does so through tempting rationales like he used with Eve and Adam in the Garden of Eden.  He accuses God of not being trustworthy, having an ulterior motive, lying, and even keeping Adam and Eve from something good.  So, he tempts us to disbelieve the truth about our compassionate Creator.

God has always been, and even now is, perfect in His compassion towards us all.  He has helped us at all times along the way, but especially through Jesus.  The flip side to God’s compassionate help is our often unwillingness to accept His help.

In the final verses of Exodus 33, God tells Moses what He is going to do in this revelatory event of Exodus 34 that we have been talking about.  In verse 19, He references His compassion.  “Then He said, ‘I will make all My goodness pass before you, and I will proclaim the name of the LORD before you.  I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.’”  Essentially, He is declaring that He is sovereign in His compassion.  There is no one who can charge Him with a lack of compassion and so force Him into a particular action.

This causes some to think of God as being whimsical or capricious.  If God is such, then you can never know if you will have His compassion or not.  Perhaps, you would even believe that your own smallness would mitigate against any probability that He would have compassion on you.  This is not what is meant in this verse.  God is sovereign in His compassion, but it is not talking about a sporadic event that only falls upon certain special people that He whimsically picks. 

God’s compassion is not something He does from time to time to break up the monotony, as if He were playing with people.  Rather, the very being of God is compassion.  His actions are not like a New Year’s resolution, i.e., not like us.

This begs the question.  How can I be one to whom God wants to give compassion?  The truth of Scripture is that there is a foundational compassion that everyone has received.  God in His compassion has made salvation and help available to us.  However, we have to have faith in Him in order to take hold of it.  Jesus is the compassion of God.  There is no access to His compassion by ignoring Jesus and trying to sue for it on other grounds.  Even those who are rejecting God’s compassion in Jesus are swimming in the compassion of God.  They may not recognize it.  They may push it aside and go after something they think is better.  But, God’s compassion is all around us at all times.

All of God’s actions, even judgment, are impacted by His compassion.  Yet, they are also informed and affected by His wisdom and knowledge.  Imagine a child complaining that the parents are not being compassionate because they won’t give him some particular item that he fancies.  It is generally not until a child becomes an adult and matures that he comes to see that his parents were compassionate towards him, perhaps especially when they didn’t give him what he wanted.  God knows things that we cannot.  He is infinitely wiser in His decisions than we ever could be.  Thus, there is a part of this discussion about God’s character that calls for true humility on the part of us as humans.

Let’s dial back to the context of this event in Exodus 34.  When God first approached Moses about Israel’s slavery (Exodus 3), it can be read as primarily a judgment upon Egypt.  However, the story is primarily an action of God’s compassion for Israel.  Look at Exodus 3:7-8.

God gives several descriptions that help us to understand His compassion.  He states that He has “surely seen” the affliction of Israel, and that He has “heard their cry.”  He even states, “I know their sorrows.”  I can imagine that many Israelites were even then complaining that God doesn’t see or care about their sorrows in Egypt.

This then leads to verse 8, “so I have come down to deliver…”  The word to deliver has a sense of rescuing, even snatching them out of the hands of Pharaoh.  Thus, even though we can talk about God’s compassion for all humanity, in some situations, there is one part of humanity oppressing another part.  It can also be that both are mistreating one another.  God’s takes all of these things into consideration by His knowledge and through His wisdom.  Yes, God still cares about the Egyptians, but He also cares about all of humanity.  Israel was a key part of His plan to help humanity.  If God is to help all humanity, then He must step in to save Israel.  Yet, how He does it involves a wisdom that we can only superficially know.

I don’t know if we understand just how huge this statement of seeing, hearing, knowing, and coming down, is.  Humans have forever charged that God can’t know what it is like to suffer.  If He did, then surely He would do something about my/our situation.  Yet, when we are completely honest, we will come to see that God is compassionate, but also wiser than we can fully comprehend.

You actually have to get away from suffering before you can gain perspective on it.  When you are in the middle of suffering, it is hard to process your grief and emotions.  I believe that God has compassion upon our difficulties while suffering. 

When you and I imagine God having compassion on us, it does not involve Him coming down and becoming like we are in mortal flesh and vulnerable.  We want Him to strike our enemy down with fire from heaven, but what good does becoming weak like us do?  Well, God’s compassion is much deeper than we often want it to be.

You see, God’s compassion is not just about the difficult situations that may keep us down.  He also has compassion for our enslavement to sin and the consequences it brings.  Yes, He cares about your external situation, but He also cares about our internal slavery to sin.  This is a much harder problem to help.

Our natural bent is to think that God is not compassionate because of difficult things we have experienced and the things that we don’t have.  But, God made you for something greater than you may want to embrace, at least not yet.  Yes, God saw Israel in its external slavery.  Yes, God sees us in our external problems.  But, He also sees something worse in us that needs His help.

We all have different sins that we are drawn towards.  We may even find ourselves in bondage to those sins thinking that God has abandoned us.  We would be like Israel wondering where God is.  Why did He leave them in bondage for so many years, if He was eventually going to deliver them?  They needed to see their internal bondage, but often it is only our external bondage that opens our eyes to the internal bondage of sin.  We may be willing to give lip-service to God and His promises, but at the end of the day, we tend to want to do whatever we please without repercussions.

God saved Israel from Egypt, but their sins kept pulling them away from God and into bondage throughout their time in the “Promised Land.”  Eventually God let the kingdom of Israel be torn in half (north and south).  He later let each of them be conquered and taken into exile, slavery again.  Yet, even in exile, God promised through His prophets that He would have compassion upon them.  Let’s go to Isaiah and see some of these promises.

God’s compassion for humanity (Isaiah 46:3-4 and 49:5-6)

In this passage, God references the birth of Israel from the womb.  By the way, the word for womb here comes from the same root for compassion.  It isn’t the only word for womb, but it is the one used here.

God uses the picture of a mother carrying her newborn baby.  He states that it was He who carried them in their “young age” (as a fledgling nation), and it will be He who carries them “even to your old age,” which must represent their nation being at a place of going out of existence.  God tells them that He will “save” them.  The word for saving them is related to the idea of delivering a baby.

Israel continually had trouble with being unfaithful towards God and turning towards idolatry.  Eventually, God would hand them over to their choice, which always led to bondage.  God in His compassion for Israel (and for us) gave them over to the bondage of their (our) sinful choices.  It is His deep compassion that wrestles with us over our stubborn sin.

It is easy to fear as our predicaments become stronger, and we become weaker (much like a person growing old).  Three chapters later God brings Isaiah back to this again (Isaiah 49:5-6).

The book of Isaiah has a section from chapters 42 through 53 where there are four “servant songs.”  This passage is part of the second one.  They are pictures of, and interactions with, the Promised Messiah.  Here, we have Messiah [Jesus] declaring what God had told him.  Messiah was formed to save Israel!

However, we also see that God says saving Israel is too small a thing for such a Messiah.  The Messiah will also be a light to the nations so that God’s salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.  You see, God had compassion on Israel, even a compassion that was filled with tough love.  But, in the end, His compassion was not just for Israel.  He had compassion for the rest of the nations as well.

This is where the greater context of the book of Genesis is intended to be understood in Exodus 34.  The tragedy of the Fall in the Garden (Genesis 3), the tragedy of man’s rebellion and destruction in the Flood (Genesis 7-8), and the casting off of the nations at the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11) may look like God just keeps picking favorites and getting rid of everyone else.  This is far from the truth, however.

Each of these events were accompanied by promises of God to help humanity.  God disciplines humanity, but through it, His compassion has always been present in the promise of the serpent-crusher, the Anointed One of God.

Think about it.  If Israel worried that God didn’t care about their situation, how much more could the Gentiles worry that God didn’t care, or even give up hope on His care?

Yet, later in Isaiah 49 (verses 14-15), God meets their complaint of being abandoned, forsaken, and forgotten, with the image of a nursing woman.  Can a mother forget her nursing child (i.e., helpless)?  Generally, the answer is no, though a broken world can stomp motherly compassion out of some moms.  Even if it happens among humans, God will not forget Israel.  It may feel like He has forgotten them, but this is simply not true.  Yet, at the same time, God cares about the Gentiles too.  He cares about the “light,” the truth, that they are seeing about His true character.  He cares that they are reached with the good news of His faithfulness, even to promises that are millennia old.

Jesus emphasized this faithfulness to his followers before he left to ascend into heaven.  “I will never leave you nor forsake you, even to the end of the age.”

God does care about us, and He has compassion for us.  Yet, in His wisdom, He deals with us in ways that is best for overcoming our sin.  This is true for individuals, but also for people groups, even all of humanity.  Jeremiah was a righteous man, but he witnessed the destruction of Israel.  God’s compassion to him and to Israel was not just focused on external circumstances (like we want it to be).  It is even more focused on internal slavery to sin.  His compassion is bigger than my external situation, bigger than my individuality, and bigger than any one group of people.  It involves all of humanity.

Genesis, Exodus, and the whole Old Testament, are about the promised compassion of God centered in the being we call Messiah, Christ.  This is Jesus.  Over 2,000 years ago, Jesus was born into this world as a baby in Bethlehem.  He is the compassion of God, however, not in the form we wanted.  Yet, he is in a better form than we could have hoped for.  Just think of how easy it is for humans to idolize a person.  We tend to idolize the wrong people because of our sinfulness.  Thus, even embracing Jesus as our Messiah becomes a test of us.

How can the life of a man 2,000 years ago help me today?  Let’s look at what the followers of Jesus discovered about him.

John 14:8-9

In this passage, we see that Philip asked Jesus to show them the Father.  In this moment, they discover that Jesus wasn’t just teaching them about God, but that they were seeing God the Father by seeing him.  Yes, Jesus was human, but in a way they couldn’t understand, he was a perfect picture of what the Father was like.

God in His compassion did not wave a wand over the world in order to fix it.  He didn’t say a word and destroy all of the evil in the universe.  Rather, He joined us in the suffering so that we can see that, all along, it was He who has suffered without us understanding the depths of it.

He who made the eye, does he not see?  He who made the ear, does He not hear?  He who made pain receptors, does He not feel pain?  Sometimes, God lets us feel pain so that we can come to realize the pain that He has endured from before the foundations of the earth.  He is not untouched by everything.  He is in intimate contact with every part of His creation at all times.  As He created, He had already counted the cost and foresaw the price of suffering He would have to pay.  He could heal the pain, and it would be worth it.

We may be angry that God allows their to be consequences to sin, i.e., living life adverse to His wisdom.  Yet, the consequences themselves are an invitation from God to join Him in His suffering, particularly through Jesus.  In Jesus, we are enabled to see just how much God feels about our sinful condition, and what He is willing to do to save us from it.

The amazing thing is this.  When we enter into his suffering, our suffering suddenly takes on meaning.  Victor Frankl spoke of the value of purpose and meaning when a person is suffering.  We can suffer anything, if we think it has purpose and meaning.  In Jesus, the purpose and meaning of suffering takes form.

So the disciples came to understand that seeing, hearing, and following Jesus was to see, hear and follow God the Father.  This is at the heart of the first chapter of John’s Gospel.

John 1:14-18

John describes Jesus in this passage as the very Word of God that created all things.  More than this, he is the glory of the only Son from the Father.  He is full of Grace and Truth, which are two descriptions of God’s character in Exodus 34:6.  John speaks of him existing before himself, even from the beginning of creation.  Lastly, John sees Jesus as the only one who came down from God to reveal him.  He is not just another prophet.  He is God with us, Immanuel.
Let me close by reminding us of the life of compassion that the Lord Jesus lived.  He did not come to pat the elite of Israelite society on the head.  Rather, he spent his time among the common people, the poor, the lowly, the diseased, and the oppressed.  He didn’t do this because they were righteous.  He did this because he was the compassion of God.

It was often said that he was “moved with compassion” at the multitudes.  He touched lepers and cast out evil spirits.  In Matthew 23:37, Jesus said, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her!  How often I wanted to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!”

Notice the big problem with compassion here.  Sometimes the people you are trying to help are actually running from true help.  Sometimes, you have to step back and let them suffer the consequences before they will be open to true help.

Jesus sent his disciples out to share the truth of God’s love, God’s compassion for all those who want it.  May we stop complaining about our lot.  May we start praising God for His loving compassion, and the honor we have to represent it to others.  May we turn from our sin and follow the Promised One from God who leads us in victory over sin, the devil, and a world that often chooses evil over Him!

God is Compassionate audio