Dumpster Diving Date

One day, my husband and I were having a date walk along the Mississippi River, when he saw some office chairs in a dumpster behind a hotel. "I'm gonna get one of those chairs," he declares. I look at him like he has lost his mind. This is the man who has never bought an office chair, because not a single chair in all the stores has been able to satisfy him. I had begun to think that the chair didn't exist that would meet his criteria. And yet, here he was excited about a chair in a dumpster! I was flabbergasted. There was a reason this chair had been rejected. How could he know, with just one glance, that this chair would be good enough to meet his standard? I was so confused; his excitement seemed totally inconsistent with his previous behavior. I was frustrated; I wondered if I really knew this man I had been married to for 25 years, if it would ever be possible to understand him. Asking him to explain himself while actually listening to his reply, I learned something I had never understood about him before.
He was being consistent to a value he had held all his life, that is, if he spends money on an object, any amount of money (even as little as 50 cents), that object must be subjected to a rigorous evaluation of worth, but if that object costs zero money to him, it is instantly free of his strict scrutiny, worthy of whatever it takes to recover it.
Let me tell you, trying to understand my husband through my own set of values will always fail.

Most people assume they understand the values of God in the Old Testament, that He is driven more to seek retribution on the wicked, and therefore assume the He is different from the God of the New Testament.
Are there essentially two different Gods, with two different sets of values? Does He act so inconsistently from one age to another? Could we be trying to understand Him through our own value system? Could it be that we don't really know Him as well as we think we do?

God is holy, and being holy, He must judge sin.
But God is also love, and in His great love, He restores the sinner.
This is not inconsistent behavior, nor has God acted inconsistently in history. This is true of my God in both the Old and the New Testaments. Has God judged the wicked in the past? Absolutely! Will He make a final judgment for the wicked in the future? You can be sure of it.
Just as He has done throughout all time, God willingly forgives the sinner who turns to Him, whether he comes at the beginning of his life or in the very last second.

Manasseh, son of Hezekiah and Hephzibah, became king of Judah at 12 years of age. He would eventually take Judah into an age of more wickedness than the nation had ever known, more even than all the nations around them. Manasseh would make his sons walk through the fire in the valley of Ben-hinnom. Reigning 55 years, he filled Jerusalem from one end to the other with innocent blood. Their evil so angered the Lord, He said, "I will wipe Jerusalem as one wipes a dish, wiping it and turning it upside down." Why did the Lord let him reign that long!
If you were to only read Manasseh's story in 2kings21, you would conclude that such an evil man would never repent, and you would be wrong. There is another record of his life in 2chronicles33 that tells us, what I consider to be, the most amazing story of restoration in the Bible.
Manasseh so stubbornly rejected the Lord's words, that He sent the king of Assyria to haul him off by a thong in his nose all the way to Babylon. Did that get his attention? Can the most evil king Judah has ever known receive mercy from God? Does that much mercy exist?
Manasseh did humble himself before the Lord, finally turning to Him as he should have long before. The Lord heard his prayer, and was moved by his pleas to bring him back to Jerusalem.

"As I live!" declares the Lord God, 'I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked".
If the righteous man turns to evil,
all his righteousness will not save him.
If a wicked man turns from his sin,
he will live and his sins will not be counted against him.
Now, Israel, you say to this, "the way of the Lord is not right", then "I will judge you according to your ways," the Lord says.
(ezekiel33:17-20)

There is a final day coming when our works will be judged. According to 1corinthians 3:13-15, each man's works will be tested with fire. These are the works of the man who has built his foundation on Jesus Christ, but even if his works don't survive the fire, he will be saved, because he is already justified apart from his works. God does not decide whether to declare us right by observing and keeping account of each of our individual acts of good or bad, as if we were harvesting a crop, where each piece of fruit is examined and credited to our account, or where we are judged based on which basket outweighs the other. He desires to show compassion, to give His mercy to whomever He chooses. But the quantity of His mercy comes in buckets the size of oceans, an inexhaustible supply. If you wish to have Him switch to using thimbles and be stingy with His grace, if you want Him to only give as much as you deserve, if you prefer to have Him live by your standard of measurement, then....well, I pity you. Be careful of what you seek.

 "Jacob I loved, Esau I hated" (malachi1:2f)
Is God right in doing this? Is it okay with you that He chooses to love one and hate the other? There is no injustice with God.
Is there??
"Never", Paul would say and here is his argument in Romans9:
The Lord said to Moses, "I will have mercy on whom I have mercy and compassion on whom I have compassion." (exodus33:19)
It doesn't depend on the will or actions of man, but on God who has mercy. Does the thing molded say to the molder "why have you made me this way? The potter has the right to make something common or make something honorable out of the same piece of clay.
So, what if God, fully willing and right to show His power by destroying vessels of wrath, chooses, through great patience, to hold back the wrath and instead show the great riches of His glory on vessels of mercy.
Our Lord is consistently righteous in all He does, and at the same time, richly merciful to the unrighteous.

I've thought about compiling, from both the Old and New Testaments, all the evidence backing up this claim, and giving it to you here, but, the truth is, it would take up the space of a whole additional book to do that. And then I thought, "silly you", the book has already been written, it's called the Bible. This is not a cop-out statement on my part; this is a challenge for you. I challenge you to read it through, jotting down all the evidence of God's compassion, all the windows into His desires and values. Not only will you come to know Him better, you will learn to trust Him completely.