Ex 34:6, Then the Lord passed by in front of him and proclaimed, "The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness and truth
	 We are losing ourselves in the glorious revelation that The Lord God declared to Moses. To know that God is absolutely …the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness and truth… is magnificently worthy of all the worship and adoration that is within us. There is all of eternity ahead of us which will be insufficient in which to come into this full reality. Everything that God has done, from before the eternal ages even began, is summed up in this truth of Who He is in even the smallest details of what He has put into place in the history of humanity. 
	We have looked at the Old Testament prophets who were given glimpses into the heart of God as manifested in His just and righteous and perfect dealings with those whom He had chosen unto Himself, the people whom He had rescued from the slavery of Egypt. Now we want to spend some time in the New Testament as the Apostles of Jesus give voice to what had been revealed to them by the Lord Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God. He showed them and us the obvious truth of what the Lord declared to Moses concerning His Divine Nature and Perfect Character. 
	We will begin with Rom 2:1-4, if you would please open to the Apostle Paul’s Letter to the Church at Rome. Keep your Bibles open to this letter as we have a number of passages in it on which to dwell. Rom 2:1-4, Therefore you are without excuse, every man of you who passes judgment, for in that you judge another, you condemn yourself; for you who judge practice the same things. And we know that the judgment of God rightly falls upon those who practice such things. And do you suppose this, O man, when you pass judgment upon those who practice such things and do the same yourself, that you will escape the judgment of God? Or do you think lightly of the riches of His kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that the kindness of God leads you to repentance? 
	…Or do you think lightly of the riches of His kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that the kindness of God leads you to repentance? Notice how the very nature of God brings us to the point of facing the truth about ourselves. When we see the holiness and the righteousness of God displayed in the …riches of His kindness and forbearance and patience… it causes us to see our sinfulness and our defilement and our corruptness and our selfishness. It makes us want to repent of all that this human nature presents of itself. We ask the Lord to forgive us our trespasses and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. His displayed brilliant beauty shows forth the full measure of our evil ugliness and brings light into the darkest recesses of our beings.
	This was the reason that Jesus Christ was so much a threat to the religious leaders of Jerusalem. They saw in Him what they wanted for themselves and never could have of their own feeble efforts and dogmatic practices. Because of this, in jealousy and fear, they plotted to rid themselves of this One Who showed forth the brilliance of what life in communion with God was always intended to be from the very beginning. Jesus was the light that shined into the darkness and caused those who would turn to God and repent of their evil ways to find everlasting life.
	This was detailed by the Apostle Paul in Rom 5:20+21. Rom 5:20+21, And the Law came in that the transgression might increase; but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, that, as sin reigned in death, even so grace might reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. 
God’s grace was visibly displayed for all in the death and resurrection of the Only Begotten Son of God. And this is a promise for us through the fact that God is …compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness and truth. Sin can never overcome His grace. As much as we might find ourselves despairing because we see things seeming to be getting worse and worse, we can hold firmly to the fact that where sin abounds, grace much more abounds. The corruptness of this world power will never be able to overwhelm the One Who has dealt with sin and death for you and for me forevermore. 
	The other aspect to this passage is that it details what the just and righteous and holy Law of God showed forth in His creation. The Law manifested the truth that mankind could never save himself. No matter how good a person might be, he or she will never be able to fulfill the just requirements of the Law. It is impossible! Only Jesus could deal with it in its totality without any fault or transgression. Only He could pay the righteous price for the redemption of those who were so lost in sin and transgression and death. By His crucifixion and resurrection, we are now freed from the legal and righteous punishment that we deserved. By the abounding grace of God, we are now covered by the righteousness of The Only Begotten of the Father, slain for you and for me. His blood, perfect and innocent, has paid the price of our sin for all of eternity. 
	This then flows right into Rom 9:14-16. Rom 9:14-16, What shall we say then? There is no injustice with God, is there? May it never be! For He says to Moses, "I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion." So then it does not depend on the man who wills or the man who runs, but on God who has mercy. 
	This passage details the fact of Who God is as the Sovereign Lord God of Heaven and Earth. He is the One by Whom everything else has come into existence. He spoke and it came into being. Since He is the Only Omniscient and Omnipotent and Omnipresent One, He knows what resides in the heart and mind of each person whom He created from Adam and Eve to the final child to be born in this realm. He, Alone, is just and true and holy and righteous altogether. Therefore, He, Alone, is the One to decide to have mercy on those on whom He will have mercy and compassion on those on whom He will have compassion. 
	This is a great dilemma for humanity. We try to gauge everything in terms of fairness as we determine fairness, and justice as we define justice. Our limited scope of understanding and defiled sense of the importance that we each present to one another deceives us. It causes us to think that we can earn some kind of standing before God if we are doing those things we consider to be good in this world. We often try to establish our own sense of goodness by lining up the right that we do as opposed to the mistakes and the wrongs that we have committed and think that if we do more good than bad, we will be OK before God. 
What we fail to realize is what was written earlier in this Letter to the Romans Chapter 3, verses 9-12 as the Apostle Paul was showing that neither the Jew nor the Gentile have any standing on their own merits before God. Rom 3:9-12, What then? Are we better than they? Not at all; for we have already charged that both Jews and Greeks are all under sin; as it is written, "There is none righteous, not even one; There is none who understands, There is none who seeks for God; All have turned aside, together they have become useless; There is none who does good, There is not even one." 
    	No matter who we are or what we do, we are not able to right the wrong of the sin under which we were born. None of us are righteous in our own means. None of us are useful in our self-seeking demeanor and behavior. As much good as we think we might do, we are still sinners before God apart from His Beloved Son. We do not fully comprehend that even the minutest stain of sin is anathema in the presence of God. We may have tried to do more good, but when we are in the presence of God there will be only two things fully evident in our beings. The first is that we are absolutely unworthy to have any grace poured out upon us. In the light of His glorious presence, our smallest indiscretion will be a blaring condemnation of our core essence as we have all turned away from fellowship with God. It will be vastly evident that we deserve to suffer the eternal death that is the holy and just punishment for sin, all sin, any sin, seemingly large or small.
	The other reality will be that the holiness of God is far, far more glorious and awesome than we will ever have imagined. Who He is will be so tremendously and awesomely in evidence in the truth that God so gave His Only Begotten Son for those whom He chose to be His own adopted children. We will see that it is only by the grace and the compassion and the mercy of God that any are redeemed. The reason that He saved you or me may never be ours to understand, but the fact that He had compassion on those upon whom He chose to have compassion will be the choral anthem of eternity. He chooses according to His righteous and compassionate and holy Nature, and it will all be perfect and just and honoring and only adding to the praise and the glory and the adoration that He, Alone, deserves.
	The Apostle Paul continues this truth in verses 21-26 of this third Chapter of Romans. Rom 3:21-26, But now apart from the Law the righteousness of God has been manifested, being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets, even the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all those who believe; for there is no distinction; for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus; whom God displayed publicly as a propitiation in His blood through faith. This was to demonstrate His righteousness, because in the forbearance of God He passed over the sins previously committed; for the demonstration, I say, of His righteousness at the present time, that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. 
	Again, the glorious and tremendous nature and character of God, …compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness and truth… is highlighted in the fact that because there was no way in which any human being, born under the curse of sin and death could ever find a means to supply his or her own salvation, God made that provision. The truth of the matter is that God would have been rightly justified to simply carry out the righteous punishment of His Holiness and condemn everyone of us to eternal death. But, because He is God, because He is so characterized as we have been describing, He chose to take the full force and fury of the punishment upon Himself for our sakes. He chose to love us unto Himself and this He did through the death and resurrection of the Only Begotten of the Father. Jesus Christ is Our Savior and He is Our Only means of salvation. To think that there is any other way to the Father is to demean and to disparage and to refuse to acknowledge the full cost of the curse of our sin that He chose to bear for us. 
	Finally, for this morning, please turn to Rom 15:1-7, where we read how we are to treat each other in the manner in which Christ so treated us. This is not a matter of doing good for the sake of making ourselves somehow worthy to be loved. It is the fact that we are now called to serve Christ and in service to the One Who saved us, we also lay down our lives for the sake of each other. We do not do this to earn anything! We do this because we love God and are thankful for the great love with which He loved us unto Himself. His nature and character is to find some manner of expression in the lives of those whom He indwells by His Holy Spirit. 
	Rom 15:1-7, Now we who are strong ought to bear the weaknesses of those without strength and not just please ourselves. Let each of us please his neighbor for his good, to his edification. For even Christ did not please Himself; but as it is written, "The reproaches of those who reproached Thee fell upon Me." For whatever was written in earlier times was written for our instruction, that through perseverance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope. Now may the God who gives perseverance and encouragement grant you to be of the same mind with one another according to Christ Jesus; that with one accord you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Wherefore, accept one another, just as Christ also accepted us to the glory of God. 
	How we treat one another expresses the truth that we are coming into a greater understanding of Who God is and how our lives are no longer our own. We belong to Him and we willingly offer ourselves as a sacrifice for the sake of bringing honor unto Him in the every course of our walk on this earth. We reflect, in a most assuredly imperfect and less than adequate measure, the fact that God has changed our lives completely and made us to be His own people. Therefore, we glorify Him as we learn to love and to practice compassion and mercy and grace within the Body of Christ. So be it!
Then the Lord passed by in front of him and proclaimed, "The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness and truth; Amen. 

This morning’s benediction is 2 Sam 22:31. "As for God, His way is blameless; The word of the Lord is tested; He is a shield to all who take refuge in Him. Amen.