Prayer Meeting Oct2018
In this verse God cited five attributes that characterize him—all of which would be welcome to Moses and the Israelites, who needed very much to count on his compassion toward them in light of their having previously angered him by their behavior. The first attribute of Yahweh listed is that he is a “compassionate” God, meaning that he genuinely cares about humans and holds toward them a tender attitude of concern and mercy.164 Second, he called himself “gracious,” meaning that he does things for people they do not deserve and goes beyond what might be expected to grant truly kind favor toward people, favor of which they are not necessarily worthy.166 Third, he described himself as “slow to anger,” meaning that his patience with people’s less-than-satisfactory behavior and/or failures in any realm, including the moral, is very great. Fourth, he declared himself to be “abounding” (lit., great) in covenant “love [loyalty].” Careful studies of the Hebrew word, ḥesed, translated as “love” by the NIV here demonstrate that it connotes long-term, reliable loyalty of one member of a covenant relationship to another. However fickle and unreliable humans may be in their relationship to God, he is nothing of the sort but can be counted on in every situation and at all times to be completely faithful to his promises for his people.
Next he described himself as “[abounding in] truth,” meaning that whatever he says is correct and reliable and may be trusted even to the extent of life and death issues, or indeed eternal life and death issues.
34:7 The list of divine attributes continues. First comes “maintaining covenant loyalty to thousands” (NIV “maintaining love to thousands”) which, in light of the fuller wording of this attribute in 20:5–6, must be understood to be a slightly elliptical wording of the great promise that God will continue his covenant blessings to his people indefinitely—to thousands of generations, not merely thousands of people—as long as they do not break his covenant and thereby force him to unleash its sanctions. “Forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin” refers to the forgiveness of evils and sins of all sorts, something God alone can accomplish and indicates that it is a characteristic of his nature to do so.
Thus the New Testament doctrine of the forgiveness of sins, on which the promise of eternal life so decidedly depends, flows from the very nature of God. He does not reluctantly forgive sins against himself and others; he does so eagerly, as a manifestation of his character, by which he delights in doing so. In the list “wickedness, rebellion and sin,” the final term, “sin,” is the most inclusive. These are not three distinct kinds of behaviors but three vocabulary words used together to indicate what any of them might convey; and since they are used together, they combine to indicate what Jesus meant when he said, “Every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven” (Matt 12:31).
God then issued a corrective against the natural human tendency to accept grace on the assumption that because an infinite God can produce an infinite amount of grace, sin has no significant consequence. This corrective is introduced simply by the normal Hebrew word for “and,” which the NIV justifiably translates “yet” but which is not a strong adversative word. Perhaps an even more revealing, even if tendentious, translation would be something like: “[Forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin] and at the same time not letting anybody off [i.e., making sure that the guilty get what they deserve].”
In connection with the wording “he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation,” see comments on 20:5–6. As already suggested there, this wording means something quite different from what it might seem to mean to the casual reader. It does not mean that God would punish children and grandchildren for something their ancestors did but that they themselves did not do. Rather, it describes God’s just punishment of a given type of sin in each new generation as that sin continues to be repeated down through the generations. In other words, God here reminded his people that they could not rightly think something like “we can probably get away with doing this in our generation because God punished an earlier generation for doing it, so the punishment for it has already been given, and we don’t have to worry about it.”
