Skip to main content

Advent 2025: Mercy

I'm going to read the whole Bible.


The question came up in my homegroup recently (have you ever...?) and even though large parts of the Bible are embedded in my brain, and even though I'm pretty sure I have read all of it at some point, I have never set out to read the whole thing.

My friend Dave read through the Bible several times. He was one of the most Christian men I know, in all the best ways, and he died recently. So. This is for Dave, too.


Today is the first Sunday of Advent. I was going to start on December 1st, and I was going to do the obvious thing and start with Genesis, alongside the Psalms. Then I saw something that mentioned reading Luke in Advent (24 chapters: 24 days) and then I had some spare time today and thought why not? so here I am, a day ahead of myself already.

Luke 1 is hardly a voyage into the unknown. In the sixth month the Angel Gabriel was sent by God, the Magnificat and the Benedictus... all woven tightly into the liturgies of the church.

But there's always something new. The word that stuck out for me was mercy. His mercy is for those who fear him... the Lord had shown his great mercy to her... he has shown the mercy promised to our ancestors.

It's funny, that. This morning at church we had a few moments of quiet to listen to God. Put like that, it sounds like it should be the whole point of going to church, but in fact it is rare in the kind of services I attend. Plus I'm often running the kids' group. Not many moments of quiet there!

So, during this rare moment of quiet and listening to God, a partly-remembered prayer came to mind. Holy God, Holy Immortal... something like that. I looked it up. The full version is:

Holy God, Holy Mighty One, Holy Immortal One, have mercy on us and on the whole world.

And following that, on the website I found (which I later noticed was called The Divine Mercy) was another beautiful prayer.

Eternal God, in Whom mercy is endless and the treasury of compassion — inexhaustible, look kindly upon us and increase Your mercy in us, that in difficult moments we might not despair nor become despondent, but with great confidence submit ourselves to Your holy will, which is Love and Mercy itself.

I've been a little despondent myself over the last few days, so I appreciated that.

I was also going to read Psalm 1. But a line from the Benedictus: that we would be saved from our enemies reminded me of the song I will call upon the Lord which turned out to be Psalm 18. So I read that. It's all about God delivering David from trouble. Mercy is not mentioned, but it is very much in evidence.

This stream-of-consciousness method might not be the most logical way to read the Bible from start to finish. I will try to apply a little common sense and not leave Numbers and Deuteronomy till the last. But equally, I didn't want to be stuck with a rigid four-chapters-a-day approach. 

A lady called Camille Harris has produced a nice simple checklist of every chapter in the Bible. This is great. I can read all the chapters in whichever order I want to, as long as I keep ticking them off. And if you know me, you know I love ticking things off lists.

You know, somehow when I had the idea to read the whole Bible, the word Mercy wouldn't have been the first word I expected to find in it. It's so often associated with harsher words, like Truth and Judgement and Sin. 

Mercy, I think, will be a good word to carry through those harder bits. I'm glad I started where I did.

By the tender mercy of our God,
the dawn from on high will break upon us,
to give light to those who sit in darkness
and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace.
Luke 1:78-29
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mr White Watson of Bakewell

Once upon a time, back in 1795 or so, lived a man who was always asking questions.  The kind of questions like, "Why is glass transparent?" or "Why do fruit trees grow better in that place than in this place?" or "What does the earth look like underneath the surface?"  This last question was one that he was particularly interested in, and he went so far as to work out what the rock layers looked like where he lived, and draw little pictures of them.  Now he was a marble sculptor by trade (as well as fossil hunter, mineral seller, and a few other things) so he thought it would be even better to make his little pictures in stone.  That way he could represent the layers using the actual rocks they were composed of.  Over the course of his lifetime he made almost 100 of these tablets, as he called them. Then he died.  And no one else was quite as interested in all those rocks and minerals as he was.  His collection was sold off, bit by bit, and the table...
Post a Comment
Read more

Laid-back Lille and Bustling Brussels

After a night in a tiny AirBnB in Canterbury , where there were chocolates on the table and artwork on every inch of the walls, we boarded a ferry with an absolute minimum of fuss, enjoyed a smooth crossing of the channel, and were deposited in the decidedly unscenic surroundings of the port of Dunkirk two hours later. Once we got past the cranes and shipping containers, though, the countryside was flat but pleasant. We stopped at a small town called Cassel, reached by cobbled roads winding up a hill. On the summit was an old windmill and a topograph telling you the distances to various improbable places; St Omer may have been visible in the haze, but Manchester was surely over the horizon.  In Lille, we found our apartment, unpacked the luggage (one rucksack apiece), and set out to find food. Our first choice was fully booked, so we embarked on that kind of aimless wandering where everyone is hungry and no one wants to actually choose a restaurant. We reached a Lebanese place call...
Post a Comment
Read more

Canterbury Cathedral

We were booking a trip to France, and I persuaded the family that it was madness to drive four hours to Dover and get straight on the ferry. "We should definitely stay overnight somewhere," I said. "Oh look, Canterbury is very handy - just twenty minutes from Dover." Of course, my suggestion was not influenced in the slightest by the fact that Canterbury contains England's most famous cathedral. On the way down, we stretched our legs on Dunstable Downs, an area of chalk grassland owned by the National Trust. I was pleased to spot a scarlet pimpernel for my 100 Plants Challenge . We also enjoyed watching gliders ascending and descending. We turned onto the M25 and made our way through busy traffic to the Dartford Crossing. This is one of those mythical points on the UK road network, like Scotch Corner and Watford Gap: the name familiar from traffic reports on the radio; the reality - for someone who grew up west of London - a hazy blur of imagination. It turns ou...
Post a Comment
Read more