Today’s Podcast
Today’s Bible reading plan:
Read it in a year – 1 Corinthians 5-6
see the whole year’s plan [here](http://www.bible-reading.com/bible-plan.pdf)
Today’s Devotional
Matthew 12:7-8
Do you not understand what the prophet Hosea recorded, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice”? If you understood that snippet of Scripture, you would not condemn these innocent men for ostensibly breaking the law of the Sabbath. For the Son of Man has not only the authority to heal and cast out demons, He also has authority over the Sabbath.
What do Jesus’ words mean for us today?
Jesus points back to a peculiar prophet. God told Hosea to demonstrate His words through actions that all of Israel would understand. God told Hosea to marry a prostitute who then ran away from him and went back to her long list of lovers. But Hosea went after her and brought her home. Hosea graphically showed us God’s incredible love for us and His attempts to bring us back into His fold through Hosea’s actions with his wayward wife.
One of the outcomes of Hosea’s demonstration was the realization that God shows mercy to His children. He is more interested in mercy than the rituals we go through year after year and day after day to try to please Him. It’s not those rituals that He wants. He wants our love, He wants us to show others grace and mercy just as He shows us grace and mercy. He wants a relationship with us.
One of the things necessary to build a relationship with God is obedience. And one of the things He demands of us is mercy to others. Because He shows us mercy, we should show mercy to others, something the Pharisees seemed to have in short supply. They were ready to condemn Jesus’ disciples for being hungry and eating a few grains of wheat on the Sabbath. Their rules said you couldn’t harvest on the Sabbath and the disciples act of running their hand across a ripe stalk of wheat growing in the field and eating those few grain, they considered harvesting.
Now, you and I would probably think about harvesting as cutting down the whole field then thrashing the wheat to separate the grain from the chaff. We would think about that kind of work as a harvest activity, not the simple act of running your hand across one or two stalk to get a few grains to satisfy your immediate needs. But the Pharisees carried their rules and regulations to extreme. They put limits on even the simplest of activities. The distance you could walk on the Sabbath. The maximum weight of any object you could lift. The types of activities in which you could participate. The preparation of meals allowed and disallowed. The type of food you could eat. The clothes you could wear. They tried to control every aspect of life.
It was bad in Hosea’s day and got continually worse. God reminded His people through His prophet that He wanted them to give each other mercy. Don’t be so hard fast with rules that you forget people are involved. Don’t forget the mercy He showed you when you broke His rules and failed to obey the commands He gave you. Remember, all of us have sinned. All of us fail in our attempts to reach God in His glory. Yet He extends His mercy to us. We should extend mercy to those around us in the same way.
God instituted the ritual sacrifices to point out the necessity of coming to Him to ask forgiveness for our sins. He pointed out through those rituals that He is God and we are not. He deserves our worship and He extends His mercy to us. He reminds us the consequence of sin is death and the price demanded takes the life of the animal sacrificed in the rituals that remind us of that consequence. God gave His people those rituals as reminders of the awful justice that sin demands, but He extends His mercy to us when we follow Him. As His children, He forgives and substituted first animals and then Himself as the price for our sins.
Can we do anything short of showing the same mercy to those around us who fail to meet the standards that we hold? Does that mean we condone bad behavior? Absolutely not! No more than God condones bad behavior. But we can learn to forgive. We can show mercy and demonstrate God’s love to others. We can show others how to extend grace and in so doing, bring them into the knowledge of God. We can introduce them to the One who brings hope and joy and life to a world of hopelessness and death.
The people around Jesus that day didn’t listen to Hosea and many of them didn’t listen to Jesus. Unfortunately, it’s the same today. But the few that will listen and understand, find His peace, the legacy He left behind. They find His joy, His love, His life coursing through their veins. All it takes is trusting in Him and following His commands.
Extend a little mercy today. You’ll be surprised at the difference it will make in you.
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