Commentary
The church of God is like Moses’s bush, burning, yet not consumed; whatever hardships it has met with, or may meet with, it shall continue in the world to the end of time. It is persecuted of men, but not forsaken of God, and therefore, though it is cast down, it is not destroyed (2 Co. 4:9), corrected, yet not consumed, refined in the furnace as silver, but not consumed as dross.
Here are mercies in the plural number, which shows the abundance and variety of those mercies. God is an inexhaustible fountain of mercy, the Father of mercies. We all owe it to the sparing mercy of God that we are not consumed. Others have been consumed around us, and we ourselves have been in the consuming, and yet we are not consumed. We are out of the grave; we are out of hell. Had we been dealt with according to our sins, we should have been consumed long ago, but we have been dealt with according to God’s mercies. We are must acknowledge it to his praise.
God’s compassions do not really fail, not even when in anger he seems to have shut up his tender mercies. These rivers of mercy run fully and constantly, but never run dry. No, they are new every morning. Every morning we have fresh instances of God’s compassion towards us; he visits us with them every morning (Job. 7:18); every morning does he bring his judgment to light (Zep. 3:5). When our comforts fail, God’s compassions do not.
(Adapted from Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible.)
A Thought to Keep
If we need proof of God's mercy, we only have to look around. We're alive and given grace upon grace, even though we don't deserve it.
(Taken from the Beyond Sunday weekly devotional)
-Sandra Iliev