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