God’s Delights

“Who is a God like unto Thee, that pardoneth iniquity, and passeth by the transgression of the remnant of His heritage? He retaineth not His anger forever, because He delighteth in mercy.”  Micah 7:18

I don’t hear folks use the term “delight” very often.   Webster’s Dictionary defines “delight” as “to give great joy or pleasure; be highly pleased”.  Many years ago, not long after my husband and I married, we invited his parents and sister over for dinner.  I don’t even remember what we served, but I do remember my mother-in-law exclaiming, “Your biscuits are delightful”.  No one had ever claimed anything that I cooked as “delightful”.  I wasn’t the greatest cook in the world, but my husband was pleased with my cooking, so that was all that mattered.  I could do a pretty good Thanksgiving feast, but I could not make dressing like my mother made, so I used Stovetop.  I also served the cranberry sauce that is shaped like a can!  Everything else was made from scratch.  Those were the good old days.

The terms “delight” and “delighted” are found in scripture several times.  When Joshua and the Hebrew people were preparing to enter the promised land, the spies returned with good news that the land was exceedingly good.  Joshua spoke to the people and said, “If the LORD delight in us, then He will bring us into this land, and give it us; a land which floweth with milk and honey” (Numbers 14:8).  The righteous man’s “delight is in the law of the LORD; and in His law doth he meditate day and night” (Psalm 1:2).  The 119th Psalm has several verses in which the Psalmist “delights” himself in God’s law (16,24,35,47,70,77,92,143,174).  Proverbs 19:10a states “Delight is not seemly for a fool”.  I wasn’t exactly sure what that meant, so I looked in the Message Bible, which said, “Blockheads shouldn’t live on easy street!”  Matthew Henry wrote that “A man that has not wisdom and grace has no right nor title to true joy, thus nothing to really delight in.

Micah was an Old Testament prophet who lived in the eighth century B.C. during the reigns of Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah.  Like Isaiah, he prophesied about the invasion of Israel by the Assyrians and the captivity of Judah by Babylon.  It is interesting to note that his name means “who is like Yahweh?”  In ancient times, names meant something.  Sometimes a name would actually foretell a person’s future.  Not much is known about him, but from his writing, we can see that he must have been a loyal servant of the LORD.

The above verse taken from Micah’s prophecy was written as a praise to God for there is no god like Jehovah.  Only He can pardon sins and cleanse a sinner as if the sinner had never sinned.  God is angry at sin because of the harm it does to people, but His mercy is greater than His anger.  Because of His compassion, He made a way whereby sinners could be reconciled back to Him.  Giving One’s only Son to die for all of us sinners could only be done by Someone with unlimited mercy and love.

The verse states that God “delights” in mercy, that is, it gives Him great joy to give mercy upon those whom He pleases to give mercy.  Several times in the Psalms, it is declared that God’s mercy endures forever.  He will never run out of mercy.  How easy is it for us to extend mercy to others?  Sometimes we would rather take revenge upon another for something that they did to us, to get back at them, to make them see what it was like to feel like we felt when they betrayed us, but that’s not what God did.  Look at all the uncountable times that men and women betrayed their Creator, yet He still has mercy available to them.  Even when Jesus was hanging on the cross, He had mercy on those who hated Him.  He asked His Father to forgive them (Luke 23:34).  Grace is getting what we don’t deserve, but mercy is not getting what we do deserve.  That is certainly something to delight in.