Who Is a God Like You?

Scripture: Micah 6–7 (with Matthew 10:35–36)

Before this session, read Micah 6–7: the LORD bringing His people into court with the tender question, how have I wronged you?, the famous summary of what He requires (6:8), the prophet’s lament over a society where no godly man is left, and the soaring confession of pardoning grace with which the whole book ends (7:18–20). Watch how Micah sets the demand of the law and the gift of the gospel side by side in two facing chapters. Keep your Bible open, and ask: why can carrying out justice, loving faithfulness, and living obediently before God never be a ladder we climb to God, and how is the God who hurls our sins into the sea the only answer to the requirement we have failed?

Who is a God like you? Who forgives sin and pardons the rebellion of those who remain among his people? Who does not stay angry forever, but delights in showing loyal love?
(Micah 7:18)

The LORD’s Case Against His People

The sixth chapter opens like a courtroom. Listen to what the LORD says … Hear the LORD’s accusation, you mountains, you enduring foundations of the earth … the LORD has a case against his people (6:1–2). The Hebrew word is rib, a lawsuit, a formal complaint brought before witnesses; and the LORD summons the everlasting mountains and the foundations of the earth to sit as the jury while He brings His case against His own people. We might expect the divine prosecutor to open with a thunderous list of charges. Instead He opens with a question so tender it could break a heart of stone. My people, how have I wronged you? How have I wearied you? Answer me! (6:3).

The form of this opening would have been unmistakable to Micah’s first hearers. The prophets sometimes cast the LORD’s dealings with His people as a rib, a covenant lawsuit, in which God appears as the wronged party bringing suit against a faithless partner and summons the permanent features of creation (the mountains, the hills, the foundations of the earth) to serve as witnesses, since they have stood watching since the covenant was first made. Moses had done the same at the end of Deuteronomy, calling heaven and earth to witness against Israel. The lawsuit form itself tells us something precious: God does not deal with His people arbitrarily, on a whim of power, but within a covenant, a sworn relationship with terms and a history. He has bound Himself to them, and a lawsuit is only possible between parties who are bound. The very fact that the LORD will argue His case, rather than simply strike, is a token of the covenant love that refuses to let the relationship go without a hearing.

Hear what God is doing there. He does not begin by accusing; He begins by putting Himself in the dock and inviting His people to accuse Him. How have I wronged you? How have I wearied you? Answer me! It is the voice of a wounded love that cannot understand why it has been abandoned, the voice we first heard in Hosea crying How can I give you up, O Ephraim? (Hosea 11:8). And then, instead of charges, the LORD recites kindnesses. In fact, I brought you up from the land of Egypt; I delivered you from that place of slavery. I sent Moses, Aaron, and Miriam to lead you (6:4). He reminds them how He turned the curse of Balaam into a blessing, how He carried them from Egypt to the promised land, so you might acknowledge that the LORD has treated you fairly (6:5); the Hebrew speaks of “the righteous acts of the LORD.” The whole indictment, when it comes, rests on this: not that God has failed His people, but that His people have wearied of a God who never gave them anything but good.

With What Should I Enter the LORD’s Presence?

The people (or the prophet speaking for them) answer the LORD’s case with a question of their own, and the question reveals everything about the human heart’s instinct in the presence of God. With what should I enter the LORD’s presence? With what should I bow before the sovereign God? Should I enter his presence with burnt offerings, with year-old calves? Will the LORD accept a thousand rams or ten thousand streams of olive oil? (6:6–7). Notice the assumption buried in the question: that the way to deal with God is to bring Him something, to find the price that will satisfy Him, to pay the account down. And notice how the offer escalates, frantically, as if more might do what less could not: not one ram but thousands, not a jar of oil but ten thousand streams of it.

That question, with what should I enter the LORD’s presence?, is the question of every religion mankind has ever invented, and it is worth seeing how deep it runs. Strip away the particulars, and all human religion is finally a transaction: the worshiper brings something (sacrifices, rituals, good deeds, self-denials, pilgrimages) and hopes thereby to secure the favor of the divine. It is the religion of the merchant, the religion of the ledger, the attempt to put God in our debt. And it is precisely here that the gospel stands opposed to every religion on earth, including the religion that hides inside the church. For the gospel does not answer the question with what should I enter? with a better price; it abolishes the question altogether, by announcing that God has already done the coming, and the giving, and the paying, in His Son. The whole movement of these two chapters is the movement from the religion of bringing to the gospel of receiving: from what shall I give? to Who is a God like you? Who forgives sin?

And then the offer reaches its terrible climax: Should I give him my firstborn child as payment for my rebellion, my offspring … for my sin? (6:7). When rams and oil seem not enough, the logic of works-righteousness drives all the way to the unthinkable: the sacrifice of one’s own child, the most precious thing a man has, flung onto the altar in a desperate bid to buy peace with God. This was no idle thought in that world; the nations round about Israel really did burn their children to their gods, and Israel had sometimes followed them into that darkness. But mark the trajectory, for it is the trajectory of every religion of human achievement: it can never be sure it has given enough, and so it gives more and more and more, until it is offering the very thing dearest to it, and still trembling. The question with what should I enter the LORD’s presence? has no answer that will ever satisfy a guilty conscience, because there is no quantity of our own giving that can cover the debt of the soul. The harder we try to pay, the deeper the terror grows.

What the LORD Requires

And into that frantic escalation the LORD speaks one of the best-known verses in all the prophets, and one of the most badly misused. He has told you, O man, what is good, and what the LORD really wants from you: He wants you to carry out justice, to love faithfulness, and to live obediently before your God (6:8). The Hebrew verb behind really wants is the word for seeking or requiring, and older versions render the last line “walk humbly with your God.” We must read this with great care, because it is constantly quoted as though it were the gospel: a kindly lowering of the bar, God saying in effect, never mind all those sacrifices; just be a decent person, be fair, be kind, stay humble, and we are square. Read that way, it becomes a recipe for salvation by good behavior, a manageable little checklist that lets us close the account with God on easy terms. That is precisely what it is not.

To read 6:8 as a lowering of the bar is to mistake the very nature of the law. The law of God has more than one office in our lives, as the Formula of Concord teaches (FC VI). It serves as a curb on outward wickedness, restraining the worst of human cruelty for the sake of society; and for the believer it serves as a guide, showing the shape of the life that faith gladly begins to live. But its deepest and most necessary work, which the Smalcald Articles call the law’s chief office (SA III.2), is to serve as a mirror: to show us, with merciless clarity, what we truly are. And that is the office 6:8 is doing here. Held up as a mirror, carry out justice, love faithfulness, live obediently before your God does not flatter us; it condemns us, for it shows us at a glance that we have done none of these things as God requires. The mirror is not given to make us proud of our reflection, nor to provide a checklist we might tick off; it is given to drive us, undone, away from the mirror and toward the Savior. A man who looks into 6:8 and walks away pleased with himself has not understood the verse at all.

For look at what is actually demanded. Not the outward act of sacrifice, however costly (God brushes aside the rams and the streams of oil), but the whole inward man: to carry out justice in every dealing, to love faithfulness (the Hebrew is hesed, that covenant-faithful love we met in Hosea, not a flicker of kindness but a settled, loyal devotion to the good of others), and to live obediently before your God, walking humbly with Him through the entirety of one’s life. This is not less than sacrifice; it is infinitely more. A man can bring a ram to the altar while his heart stays cold; he cannot do perfect justice and love steadfast faithfulness and walk in true humility unless his very heart is right with God. The verse the moralists use to lower the bar in fact raises it clean out of reach. It demands not our hands but our hearts, not our gifts but ourselves, and measured against it, not one of us stands. Carry out justice, and we have all dealt falsely. Love faithfulness, and we have all been hard and faithless. Live obediently before your God, and we are proud and self-willed to the bone. Micah 6:8 is the law in its purest, most searching form, the mirror that shows us we have failed the one thing required. It was never meant to be the answer to the LORD’s case against us. It was meant to drive us, in despair of ourselves, to the answer that comes only at the end of the book.

And there was One, and only One, who ever looked into that mirror and saw a perfect reflection. The Lord Jesus carried out justice in every dealing of His life, loved faithfulness with a love that carried Him to the cross, and walked humbly and obediently with His God all the way down to a death He did not deserve. He alone fulfilled the requirement of 6:8, not as a checklist He completed, but as the very texture of a sinless life lived in our place. This is what the old theologians called His active obedience: that the Lord Jesus did not merely die the death we owed, but first lived the life we should have lived and failed to live, keeping the whole law in our stead. And the gospel is that this perfect obedience is reckoned to us, credited to the account of those who have failed every clause of the requirement. We do not bring God our justice and our faithfulness and our humility; we are given His. The requirement that crushes us when we look in the mirror has been fulfilled by Christ, and His fulfilling of it is the very righteousness in which we stand.

When the Godly Have Disappeared

If anyone doubts that no one actually meets the requirement of 6:8, the seventh chapter opens with a lament that settles the question. Woe is me! … Faithful men have disappeared from the land; there are no godly men left. They all wait in ambush to shed blood; they hunt their own brother with a net (7:1–2). Micah looks around for someone, anyone, who carries out justice and loves faithfulness and walks humbly, and he cannot find a single one. The best of them is like a thorn; their godly are like a thorn bush (7:4). Even the finest specimens of this society draw blood when you lean on them. The corruption has eaten down to the foundations of human trust itself: Do not rely on a friend; do not trust a companion! … a man’s enemies are his own family (7:5–6). When the rot is complete, you cannot trust your closest friend, your companion, even your own family.

That last line the Lord Jesus took up and made His own. For I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, and a man’s enemies will be the members of his household (Matthew 10:35–36). He was not endorsing the corruption Micah lamented but describing its mirror image: that the coming of the gospel, like the corruption of Micah’s day though for the opposite reason, would divide the closest households, setting those who received the word against those who refused it. In both cases the deepest bonds are torn, whether by the universal sin Micah saw or by the dividing word the Lord Jesus brought. And the point for us is the same Micah was making: the world as it is, left to itself, cannot produce the godly man that 6:8 requires. The diagnosis is total. There is no one righteous, not even one.

This is the verdict the apostle Paul would gather up and lay over the whole human race. Marshaling verse after verse from the Psalms and the prophets, he concluded that There is no one righteous, not even one … there is no one who shows kindness, not even one (Romans 3:10, 12), so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world may be held accountable to God (3:19). The point of the verdict is not despair for its own sake; it is to silence every claim we might make to bring God our own righteousness, so that we will at last receive His. For no one is declared righteous before him by the works of the law, Paul says (3:20). Micah looked for the godly man and could not find him; Paul declares that he never will be found, in any nation or any age, by the works of the law. And both prophet and apostle drive to the same conclusion: if we are to be saved, the righteousness must come from outside us, as a gift, for there is none to be found within.

And so, at the bottom of the lament, the prophet does the only thing a man can do when he has looked for righteousness in himself and in his neighbors and found none anywhere: he looks up. But I will keep watching for the LORD; I will wait for the God who delivers me. My God will listen to me (7:7). There is the great pivot of the whole book, the hinge on which it swings from law to gospel. When every human resource has failed, when the requirement stands unmet and the godly man is nowhere to be found, faith turns away from itself and toward the LORD, and waits. I will keep watching; I will wait. Not I will try harder, not I will bring more rams, but I will wait for the God who delivers me. Out of the despair that the law produces, the Spirit brings forth, in the next breath, the watching that lays hold of the gospel.

He Will Defend My Cause

What faith looks for, in the dark, is a vindication it cannot supply for itself. My enemies, do not gloat over me! Though I have fallen, I will get up. Though I sit in darkness, the LORD will be my light (7:8). Here is the confidence of faith under the cross: not that the believer will not fall, but that when he falls he will get up; not that there will be no darkness, but that the LORD Himself will be the light in it. And the ground of that confidence is a courtroom scene that turns the LORD’s case of chapter six entirely around. I must endure the LORD’s fury, for I have sinned against him. But then he will defend my cause and accomplish justice on my behalf. He will lead me out into the light; I will witness his deliverance (7:9).

Sit with the astonishing logic of that verse, for it is the gospel in the grammar of a lawsuit. In chapter six the LORD was the prosecutor and the people the accused; now the believer confesses he has indeed sinned and deserves the fury, and then says he will wait until the LORD will defend my cause. The Judge who had every right to condemn becomes the Advocate who pleads for the guilty. And the verdict the believer waits to hear is not “I shall be shown to be righteous” (he has just confessed he is not). Where the NET says I will witness his deliverance, the Hebrew says “I will see His righteousness” (tsedaqah): the saving righteousness of God, by which He sets the guilty right. Read in the full light of the gospel, the righteousness in which the sinner finally stands is not his own but God’s, reckoned to him, a righteousness from outside that covers a man who had none. This is justification as the Scriptures teach it and as the Reformation recovered it: not a slow self-improvement until we are good enough, but a verdict declared over the guilty, the Judge becoming our Advocate, defending our cause, accomplishing justice for us instead of against us, and bringing us forth into the light clothed in a righteousness that was never ours to earn. The believer who has failed 6:8 completely is brought to behold, and to be covered by, the righteousness of God.

The apostle John would name this Advocate openly, and in the same courtroom language. My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the Righteous One, and he himself is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for our sins but also for the whole world (1 John 2:1–2). There is the gospel in a single picture: the believer stands accused at the bar of God’s justice, with sins he cannot deny; and there steps forward to defend his cause, not a hired defender who must argue the prisoner innocent, but the righteous Son of God Himself, who pleads on the ground of His own blood already shed for the very sins charged. He does not argue that we did not do it; He answers that He has already paid for it. The Judge is His Father; the Advocate is His Son; and the cause, pleaded on the merits of the cross, cannot be lost.

And so the book that opened with a question hidden in the prophet’s name (Micah, who is like the LORD?) closes by answering it, and the answer is a doxology of sheer amazement at the mercy of God. Who is a God like you? Who forgives sin and pardons the rebellion of those who remain among his people? Who does not stay angry forever, but delights in showing loyal love? (7:18). Who is like this God? The gods of the nations demanded streams of oil and the blood of children and were never satisfied; this God forgives sin and pardons rebellion freely, of His own mercy. And mark the ground of it: He delights in showing loyal love. The Hebrew states it as the reason, “for He delights in hesed.” He does not forgive grudgingly, as a reluctant concession wrung out of Him; He delights in it. Mercy is not God’s last resort but His joy. There is no other god like this in all the religions of mankind, and the prophet can only stand back in wonder.

Linger on that one clause, for it overturns the picture of God that fear paints in every guilty heart. Who does not stay angry forever, but delights in showing loyal love. The natural conscience imagines a God who forgives, if at all, reluctantly: a stern Judge whose arm must be twisted, who pardons grudgingly and keeps the offense on file. Micah says the opposite: God delights in loyal love. Forgiving is not a concession wrung out of Him against His inclination; it is His joy, the thing He most loves to do. We heard the same heart in Ezekiel, where the LORD swears He has no pleasure in the death of the wicked but rather that he turn and live; and we will hear it again from the lips of the Lord Jesus, who said there is joy in the presence of God’s angels over one sinner who repents (Luke 15:10). The God of the Bible is not a reluctant pardoner who would rather condemn. He is a God whose deepest delight is to forgive, and who went to a cross to make the forgiving just.

Then comes the image that has comforted guilty consciences for more than twenty-five centuries. Who will once again have mercy on us? Who will conquer our evil deeds? Who will hurl all our sins into the depths of the sea? (7:19). The NET carries the wonder of verse 18’s questions on into verse 19; in the Hebrew these lines are bold promises: He will again have compassion on us; He will subdue our iniquities; You will hurl all their sins into the depths of the sea. Consider each verb. Conquer our evil deeds: our sins are enemies He conquers for us, not foes we must defeat ourselves. And then He takes those conquered sins and hurls them into the depths of the sea: not sets them on the shore where the tide might bring them back, not buries them in a shallow grave, but hurls them into the deepest trench of the ocean, where they sink beyond all recovery. The God who forgives does not merely overlook our sin; He removes it, drowns it, puts it where it can never again be brought up against us. This is the totality of the gospel’s pardon: sins not merely pardoned but abolished, sunk in a sea from which there is no retrieval. And we know now where that drowning happened: at the cross, where the Lamb of God took away the sin of the world, bearing it down into the depths so that it should never surface to accuse us again.

Scripture loves to find new ways to say how completely God removes the sin He forgives, and they are all worth hearing together. As far as the eastern horizon is from the west, so he removes the guilt of our rebellious actions from us (Psalm 103:12). You removed all my sins from your sight, sings Hezekiah (Isaiah 38:17); the Hebrew says that God cast them behind His back, out of sight forever. I remove the guilt of your rebellious deeds as if they were a cloud (Isaiah 44:22), and I will forgive their sin and will no longer call to mind the wrong they have done (Jeremiah 31:34). And here, Micah’s image: hurled into the depths of the sea. Each picture presses the same comfort against the doubting conscience that keeps trying to drag its old sins back up for inspection. The sin God has drowned in the depths is not floating just offshore; it is gone, sunk past all recovery, and the God who put it there will not go diving for it again, nor will He let our accuser do so. For the believer plagued by the memory of forgiven sins, this is the word to cling to: what God has hurled into the sea, no one (not the devil, not the law, not our own restless conscience) has any right to fish back up.

Loyal Love to Abraham

The very last words of the book ground all this mercy in something older and surer than the people’s worthiness: the sworn word of God. You will be loyal to Jacob and extend your loyal love to Abraham, which you promised on oath to our ancestors in ancient times (7:20). Why will God pardon iniquity and hurl sins into the sea? Not because His people have earned it (the whole book has proved they have not) but because He swore an oath to Abraham, and He will perform it. The gospel does not rest on the shifting sand of our performance; it rests on the bedrock of a promise God made and bound Himself by oath to keep. Loyal love to Abraham: the Hebrew is hesed again, the covenant-faithful love, and it reaches its fulfillment in the Seed of Abraham, the Lord Jesus, in whom all the families of the earth are blessed.

And it is the oath that makes the gospel sure. The writer to the Hebrews dwells on exactly this: that when God made His promise to Abraham, He confirmed it with an oath, swearing by Himself because He could swear by no one greater, so that through two unchangeable things, since it is impossible for God to lie, we might find strong encouragement, and have this hope as an anchor for the soul, sure and steadfast (Hebrews 6:18–19). Micah ends his book on that very ground: your loyal love to Abraham, which you promised on oath to our ancestors in ancient times. Our assurance does not rest on the strength of our feelings, or the steadiness of our faith, or the quality of our repentance, all of which waver. It rests on the sworn word of a God who cannot lie, given to Abraham, kept across the centuries, and fulfilled at last in the Seed. When the conscience trembles and asks whether the pardon will hold, the answer is not look at how you feel but look at what God swore. The oath is the anchor, and it was dropped in Bethlehem.

And it is fitting that these closing words of Micah should echo among the first notes of the New Testament. When the father of John the Baptist found his voice again and prophesied over his newborn son, he sang of the God who had visited and redeemed His people to show mercy to our ancestors, and to remember his holy covenant—the oath that he swore to our ancestor Abraham (Luke 1:72–73). Luke does not cite Micah by name, but Zechariah’s song echoes Micah’s last verse almost phrase for phrase: mercy, the ancestors, the oath sworn to Abraham. The loyal love to Abraham, sworn in ancient times, that Micah saw hurling sins into the sea: that mercy was at that moment growing in a virgin’s womb, soon to come forth in Bethlehem. Micah’s book ends with an oath unfulfilled and a question hanging in the air; the Gospels open with the oath being kept and the question answered in the flesh. Who is a God like you, who forgives sin? There is none; and His name, the name in which the pardon comes, is the Lord Jesus.

Gathering the Threads

Micah’s last two chapters are a lesson in law and gospel rightly divided, set out in two facing panels. In the first, the LORD brings His people into court with the tenderest of complaints (how have I wronged you?), and the people answer with the instinct of every false religion, asking what they might bring, what price might satisfy, escalating from rams to streams of oil to the blood of their own children. And the LORD answers with the requirement in its purest form: carry out justice, love faithfulness, live obediently before your God. That verse is not the gospel and not a manageable checklist; it is the law raised to its full height, demanding the whole heart, and the seventh chapter proves no one meets it, for the godly have disappeared from the land and there is no one upright. The requirement stands unmet; the diagnosis is total; and the only thing left to do is what the prophet does at the bottom of the lament: look up. I will keep watching for the LORD; I will wait for the God who delivers me. That watching is itself the work of grace, the one thing the law could never give: not a renewed effort to climb, but the empty hands of a beggar lifted at last toward the only One who can fill them.

And what faith finds, when it looks up from the wreckage of its own righteousness, is the answer to the question hidden in the prophet’s name. Who is a God like you? A God who turns from prosecutor to Advocate and defends the cause of the guilty; who clothes the sinner not in his own righteousness but in His; who delights in loyal love, conquers our evil deeds, and hurls all our sins into the depths of the sea, beyond recall. And He does it because He swore it: the loyal love to Abraham, sworn in ancient times, performed at last in the Seed of Abraham, the Lord Jesus, who carried our sins down into the depths Himself so that they should never rise to accuse us. The book that began with a lawsuit ends with a doxology, and the whole distance from the one to the other is the distance from the law that crushes to the gospel that saves. Who is a God like you? There is no other. And He has hurled our sins into the sea, and hung over the water a sign that reads: no fishing here.

For Discussion

These questions are for the group or for your own reflection. They press at the text, at the law and gospel it teaches, and at the Christ it shows forth. Keep your Bible open as you work through them.

The LORD opens His lawsuit not with charges but with a question, My people, how have I wronged you? (6:3), and a recital of His kindnesses. What does it reveal about God that He puts Himself in the dock and invites His people to accuse Him? How is this the voice we first heard in Hosea?
The people’s offer escalates from rams to streams of olive oil to the firstborn child (6:6–7). Why can the question With what should I enter the LORD’s presence? never find an answer that satisfies a guilty conscience? How does every religion of human achievement drive toward giving more and more, and still trembling?
Carry out justice … love faithfulness … live obediently before your God (6:8) is constantly quoted as a gentle, manageable recipe for being right with God. Why is this a serious misreading? How does the verse, read rightly, raise the bar out of reach rather than lower it, demanding the heart and not merely the hands?
At the bottom of the lament, when no godly man can be found, the prophet says, But I will keep watching for the LORD; I will wait for the God who delivers me (7:7). Why is this the great pivot from law to gospel? What is the difference between I will try harder and I will keep watching for the LORD?
In 7:9 the Judge becomes the Advocate who defends the sinner’s cause, and the believer waits to see God’s righteousness (the NET’s his deliverance), not his own. How is this the gospel in the grammar of a courtroom? Why does it matter that justification is a verdict declared over the guilty, not a slow self-improvement until we are good enough?
Who is a God like you? … Who does not stay angry forever, but delights in showing loyal love? … Who will hurl all our sins into the depths of the sea? (7:18–19). What does it mean that God does not merely overlook sin but drowns it beyond recovery? How does grounding all this in the loyal love to Abraham promised on oath in ancient times (7:20), fulfilled in the Lord Jesus, make the gospel sure?

Looking Ahead

From the God who hurls sins into the sea we turn to a book that sits in deliberate, uncomfortable tension with the one we have just left behind. Jonah saw Nineveh repent and the LORD spare it; Nahum, a century or so later, sees the same city ripe for judgment at last, and pronounces its fall. The two books are meant to be read together: the mercy that spared Nineveh under Jonah, and the justice that destroys it under Nahum when that mercy is finally spurned. In the next session, “The LORD Is Good, a Stronghold in Trouble,” we will hear Nahum hold the jealousy and the patience of God together in a single breath (The LORD is slow to anger but great in power, 1:3) and find, planted in the middle of an oracle of doom, one of the loveliest gospel verses in the Twelve: The LORD is good—indeed, he is a fortress in time of distress, and he protects those who seek refuge in him (1:7). Even in the book of Nineveh’s downfall, there is a stronghold for those who trust Him.

Before the next session, read the short book of Nahum: the LORD slow to anger and great in power, the announcement of Nineveh’s fall, and the good news of the feet upon the mountains of the messenger who proclaims peace (1:15). Recall Jonah, and hold the two books side by side: the same city spared under one prophet and judged under another. Then read Romans 10:15, where Paul takes up the same picture of the feet of those who bring good news (in words closest to Isaiah 52:7, which Nahum’s verse closely parallels) and applies it to the preaching of the gospel. Ask what it means that the patience of God, long despised, at last comes to an end, and where the gospel still sounds even in a book of judgment.

Closing Prayer

O LORD, who is a God like You? We have no answer to Your case against us. You ask how You have wronged us and wearied us, and we can name nothing but kindness; You require of us that we carry out justice, love faithfulness, and walk humbly before You, and we confess that we have dealt falsely, been hard of heart, and walked in pride. We have looked for a godly man within us and found none. We bring You no streams of oil, no offering that could ever cover the debt of our souls.

But we bless You that You do not deal with us according to our offerings, but according to Your own delight in loyal love. We thank You that the Judge who had every right to condemn us has become our Advocate, defending our cause, clothing us in a righteousness that is not our own, and bringing us forth into the light. We praise You that You have conquered our evil deeds and hurled all our sins into the depths of the sea, where no accusation can ever fish them up again, and that You did it in Your Son, our Lord Jesus, the Lamb who bore our sin down into the depths, the Seed of Abraham in whom You have kept the loyal love You swore in ancient times. Who is a God like You? There is none. Keep us watching for You, and waiting for the God who delivers us; through the same Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.