The Word Underneath "Mercies" Lamentations 3:22

There is an old story I keep coming back to.

A man drove to the nursing home every morning to have breakfast with his wife. She had Alzheimer's, and the year came when she no longer knew his face. A friend finally asked him why he still went, since she had no idea who he was. He said, "She doesn't know who I am. But I still know who she is."

I think about that man a lot. Because whatever that love is, it isn't a feeling. Feelings don't get you to the nursing home in the dark. That love is a promise with a man still inside it.

The Bible has a word for that kind of love. And our English has been struggling with it for about five hundred years.

You'll find it in one of the saddest books in Scripture. Jeremiah wrote Lamentations after he watched Jerusalem burn. The temple was rubble. The king was in chains. Everything the covenant could point to was ash. Five chapters of grief. And right in the middle of them, he sets down this line:

"It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not."- Lamentations 3:22

Mercies. In our English, "mercy" lives near a courtroom. A judge shows mercy. A debt gets forgiven out of mercy. It's a good word, but it leans toward pity, and pity is something the strong feel for the weak when they happen to be moved.

That is not the word Jeremiah wrote.

The word he wrote is hesed. And here is the honest truth about it: English has no word for hesed. When the first English translators met it, they had to build one. That's where "lovingkindness" comes from — Miles Coverdale coined it back in 1535 because nothing on the shelf would carry the weight. Hesed is covenant love. Love that has given its word, and is still there long after the feeling has anywhere left to stand.

Read the verse again with the word restored. Jeremiah isn't saying God pitied the survivors. He's saying the promise held. The city could burn, and the promise could not, because the promise was never kept in the city. It was kept in God. And every morning the writer woke up still breathing was another delivery of it — new that day. "They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness."

I don't know what's burning in your life this morning. But I know the trap, because I fall into it too. We measure God's love by how the week is going, and the week will lie to us every time. This verse hands you a different measure. You are not consumed. The fire you were sure would finish you did not finish you. That wasn't luck, and it wasn't pity. He gave His word, and this morning, before you were even up, He kept it again.

I wrote a longer word study on hesed over at VerseVoices, my new devotional publication where I sit with a single Hebrew or Greek word and let it open the verse back up. If this one stirred something, you can read what "mercies" really means in Lamentations 3:22 there. Every entry is free.