The Spirit of Forgiveness Part IV
Today’s blog post is the fourth of five in a series on The Spirit of Forgiveness by Marc Fisher, my husband, for the week of Advent.
“And the cherubim shall spread out their wings above, covering the mercy seat with their wings, facing each other and looking down toward the mercy seat” (Exodus 25:20, AMP).
God continues, facing each other, or as the King James says, their faces shall look one to another.
What a magnificent thing!
Being married this has become even a more enlightened truth for me now!
It takes two on either side, the polarity of everything that is in nature, God, the church, and the callings of God.
He could have told Moses to make one figure, like the pagan religions of the day with a single idol, but God’s unity comes out of conflict and opposition. That reconciliation that comes in the end through His grace, which could not have begun to come if He had only fashioned one thing, what glory there is in that amen!
We never want to gaze into opposition with a steady and non-faltering gaze; we want to look into that which compliments us only.
God is calling us not to just tolerate those differences but to understand and apprehend them.
To contemplate them.
Look into the face of them.
To appreciate them.
Admire them.
And see the beauty of God in them.
If He has required it, then He will give us the grace. It wasn’t just they were looking each other in the face though; it was also that they were looking down toward the mercy seat. Through the mercy seat to the testimony God told Moses to put there, namely the Ten Commandments, His righteous decree to His people.
Every issue that seems to create these irreconcilable differences has got to been seen in the context of God’s righteousness.
But to see God’s righteousness independently of God’s mercy is not to see rightly. Can you imagine a church with this type of understanding and disposition? Can you imagine your own relationships with this type of understanding and disposition?
Right is wrong if not tempered by mercy.
To be right is not right enough.
To be correct is not correct enough.
To be right without mercy is more painful than error.
Can you be wrong even when you are right?
What seems as a paradox amidst contradiction, but God’s ways are not our ways and His thoughts not our thoughts. [Isaiah 55:8–9] We must see the righteous requirement of God through the place of mercy or we don’t. We NEED to have that reality in our lives.
A spirit of forgiveness is required if ever such a reality will be allowed to seep into every part of your soul.
We are so quick to cause a rift between us and another when it comes to wanting to be right. We see something through our own vision and immediately it becomes irreconcilable.
They don’t talk like me.
Think like me.
Dress like me.
Enjoy the things I enjoy.
Act the way I act.
Wwhatever it may be but this is our own distorted vision of trying to see righteousness apart from mercy, apart from forgiveness.
Oswald Chambers once wrote, “There is always one fact more in every man’s case about which we know nothing” and if we did know it would radically alter our perception and reality about that person. But you see it is NOT for us to know, just as we do not know why exactly “two and a half”. We need to learn to be humbled in our knowledge that there always is one more thing and that we cannot be complete in our own assessment of any person or be offended because if we knew the totality it would remove the offense.
Can we see the beaten work?
Can we understand what goes into the making of such a man or woman? Oh to be wrong even when we are right!
[Photo taken from our wedding via Danny Avila]