The longer I study the Bible, the more I learn, and the more I understand, the more I realize how little I really know about God’s Word. Imagine for a moment a drawing I used as an illustration in class. You are walking in a field and spot a nugget of gold laying on the ground. Excited, you reach down to pick it up, but you can’t move it. “It must be bigger than I imagined,” you think. So, you run grab a shovel. When you begin digging you realize it’s not a small nugget but a massive chunk of the precious metal. The more you dig, the larger it gets. My last picture is a man in a hole about fifty feet deep looking up at a pyramid of gold. With every shovel of dirt, the breadth and length and height and depth of the gold increases (Eph 3:18). As a lifelong student, this pictures God’s Word. It may begin as a small nugget but grows and grows and continues growing the more we dig.
Occasionally, the Holy Spirit leads us to a single word that is a golden nugget in itself. In Psalms 136 the Psalmist ends all 26 verses with the stanza, For His lovingkindness is everlasting. We still sing the song written in the 50s by Hugh Mitchell, “Thy Loving Kindness Is Better Than Life”. But what does lovingkindness actually mean? How does His lovingkindness assimilate into our practical daily living? I recently discovered this nugget. Old Testament writers used the Hebrew word hesed over 250 times. Lovingkindness is only one of the many ways it is translated. Bible scholars say it is one of the most important theological concepts in scripture, but the most challenging word in the Bible to translate. The meaning of hesed is multi-dimensional with no one English word or even a parallel Hebrew thought that can bring out the complexity, depth, and richness of its significance.
Other ways it is translated include kindness, mercy, steadfast love, unfailing love, favor, and goodness. Translators struggle with all 251 uses to express the best meaning. Hesed conveys more than a characteristic of God or merely a truth about Him; hesed (lovingkindness, steadfast love, mercy, etc.) is who He is. In the New Testament, John reaffirms this, God is love (1Jn 4:8). Because God is infinite, and He is hesed—love, full comprehension of all that implies, is beyond human language, and understanding. His lovingkindness is not an emotion, or a feeling, or an intellectual fact, but hesed is God’s love in action. Paul wrote the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge. His love or lovingkindness is something we experience. The Lord’s entire relationship to us is rooted in His hesed. It is ‘covenant’ love, established first through His covenant with Israel and again His covenant with believers through the shedding of Jesus’ blood on the cross.
I know this has covered a lot of technical information, but with that foundation let’s examine how God’s lovingkindness affects His relationship with us. Grace is God giving us something we do not deserve, i.e. salvation, forgiveness, and eternal life. Mercy, hesed, is God not giving us what we do deserve. It is His act of withholding punishment we deserve. Lovingkindness never depends on whether we’re good enough. We never are good enough or can we do enough. Hesed is God’s unmerited favor, His unfailing kindness, and His steadfast love which He gives because of the covenant He made when we received grace by our faith in Christ. His lovingkindness has no limit; there is no place it does not exist. This not only includes physical situations, but places as the depth of depression, our worst failures, or when we are overwhelmed with doubt. His lovingkindness is deeper than our deepest pain. “For the mountains may be removed and the hills may shake, But My lovingkindness will not be removed from you, And My covenant of peace will not be shaken,” Says the Lord who has compassion on you (Is 54:10).
Many of you, myself included, grew up in homes where complete love was attached to what you did. You were always striving to do enough for love. But nothing was ever quite good enough. I still hate the four words etched in the back of my mind, “You can do better”. The worst result happens when as believers we transfer this mentality to God. We believe He created us for a lifetime of testing in order to prove if we are good enough. But, like fantasy, pleasing Him was always one arm’s length out of reach with one more hoop to jump through. When you find the nugget of lovingkindness, you can’t dig fast enough with each scoop revealing more and more about His hesed— lovingkindness, mercy, unmerited favor, steadfast love, unfailing love, kindness, favor, goodness, and His lovingkindness is everlasting.
Satan tells you, “You blew it this time. You’ve gone beyond the boundary. You will never do enough now.” His lovingkindness doesn’t depend on us. Instead, He has given us His everlasting covenant of love.
Sustaining Word for the Week: The moment we receive Christ into our life, God says, “it is enough”. Keep digging, you haven’t reached the bottom.