The Immutable God: Mercy-grace is constant, has a purpose
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I had an intern at the church last spring. It was great not only to have the help, but also to learn from his perspective. One aphorism I shameless lifted from him, which he stole from one of his professors, was, “rules without relationship lead to rebellion.”
I found this to be most true when I applied the wisdom of the saying to the way I discipline my children. Instead of being strict, I found that if I let my children believe they deserved punishment for things like lying or disobedience or general nastiness, then gave them some mercy from time to time when they were caught, their behavior would improve.
For a while, my oldest developed a habit of lying almost compulsively. Every time I caught her in a lie, we would have the same conversation.
“Is lying a good work or a sin?”
“Sin.”
“What do you deserve?”
“Punishment.”
“Why do we punish?”
“To teach me not to lie.”
At this point, her sentence would normally begin. But after my intern shared his pithy little saying with me, I told her, “I love you. I want you to learn to tell the truth because I love you and God loves you. I forgive you for lying. Can we tell the truth from now on?”
She broke down into tears, gave me a big hug and told me how sorry she was. Looking back, that marked the turning point in her relationship with telling the truth. Grace and mercy are the best tools for changing hearts, and thus behavior.
I’ve been writing about how God’s nature, character and goals are the same from the first page of the Bible to the last. In both the Old and New Testaments, God is the same eternal, triune creator whose character is perfectly holy, righteous, just, merciful, gracious and above all loving. In both testaments, he acts to judge, bless and redeem all of creation. In both the Old and New Testaments, God demonstrates grace and mercy toward all people who will accept it so that they would learn to love, obey and glorify him.
When the Bible refers to mercy, it refers to the compassionate attitude of a superior to an inferior. It leads the superior to spare the inferior from unfavorable circumstances. The first time the word is used in the Bible is in Genesis 19:19, when Lot is talking to the angels that rescued him from Sodom. He describes their actions as “your mercy by which you have shown me by saving my life.” Without their compassion toward Lot, he would have been caught in the city when it was destroyed, and he would have died with everyone else.
Grace, on the other hand, refers to the active and giving favor of a superior to an inferior. In Hebrew, there is a stress on the subjectivity of the favor. Esther received grace from King Ahasuerus because he liked her more than the other women. “Why?” is an irrelevant question. He just liked her because he did. In Greek, it refers to the favor that results in the free giving of resources and help. Often, that favor is completely undeserved.
The typical “Sunday School explanation” of the two concepts is that mercy is withholding the bad we deserve while grace is giving the good we don’t deserve. They are two sides of the same coin. Mercy and grace are different expressions of the same substance. Therefore, I like to talk about mercy and grace as one thing: mercy-grace. And mercy-grace pervades the whole Bible.
While God is often criticized for ordering the death of the Canaanites, God showed them mercy for over four centuries. He delayed giving the land to Abraham and his descendants, thus withholding the extermination of the Canaanites, because God has “no pleasure in the death of the one who dies,” even the wicked (Ezekiel 18:23), and he is “not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance.” (2 Peter 3:9) In the Old Testament and the New, we see the same God and the same mercy.
God’s unmerited favor also runs through the whole Bible. In one of his parting messages, Moses told the people of Israel, “The Lord did not set His love on you nor choose you because you were more in number than any other people, for you were the least of all peoples; but because the Lord loves you” (Deuteronomy 7:7-8) God also saves people from their sin for the same reason, “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.” (Ephesians 2:8-9) In the Old Testament and the New, we see the same God and the same grace.
But God’s mercy-grace is not completely arbitrary. Mercy-grace has a purpose. Moses went on to tell Israel, “Therefore you shall keep the commandment, the statutes, and the judgments which I command you today, to observe them.” (Deuteronomy 7:11) The very next verse in Ephesians says, “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works.” (Ephesians 2:10)
Mercy-grace is God’s tool for heart transformation. He uses it to equip us for serving him. Without mercy-grace, we cannot love him. Without mercy-grace, we perish. But through mercy-grace, “His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who called us by glory and virtue.” (2 Peter 1:3) So respond as God intends. Instead of taking his mercy and grace for granted, respond with love, obedience and good works because of how God so mercifully keeps us from the bad we deserve and gives us such good things we do not deserve.