Troublesome Topic: GOD CHOOSES MERCY OVER JUDGEMENT

There is a balance between God’s holy standard and His mercy, however, I am convinced that it is not a perfect 50/50 balance. I believe it is slightly weighted toward mercy although I will not attempt to assign a percentage to it. Whenever possible God chooses to show mercy and He waits to punish until it is unavoidable.

God punishes sin because He must; it would be a violation of His character to ignore sin. However, God’s character is also very gracious and merciful, so it would be a violation of His character if He punished sin without first offering every possible opportunity to repent. God does punish, but only when we have given Him no other option, when have rejected all his overtures of mercy.

Eric Ludy says it this way: “God’s answer for us is mercy. If we reject his mercy, we get more mercy. If we reject his mercy again, we get more mercy. More mercy. More mercy. But if we reject him up until our dying breath, then we get punishment. But what have we been getting all along?  Mercy.” (From Eric Ludy’s podcast entitled “Romanticizing Dillinger.”)

If you have gone through or are going through what seems like a harsh punishment from God, please remember this. Unless it causes your death, the harshness that has come to you may be a wake-up call. It may be God trying to get your attention. The level of harshness needed to get your attention is probably equal to the level of your stubbornness in resisting His earlier attempts at getting your attention.

While God seems to favor mercy over holiness by a small degree, He seems to want us to favor holiness over mercy because it is usually harder for us to learn how to live in holiness than how to accept God’s mercy. The exception to that may be those who are always beating up on themselves; they need learn to accept God’s mercy and grace toward them, and as they do so they will learn to see God’s balance between holiness and mercy.

GOD’S HOLINESS AND HIS MERCY ARE NOT OPPOSITES

Ezekiel chapter 36 includes an extremely interesting passage. In verses 16 through 21 God tells the children of Israel that they had profaned His holy name while living in the land He had given to them, so He removed them from their land and sent them into captivity. Yet in captivity they continued to profane His name and did not honor Him in the eyes of the nations to whom they were sent. Daniel shows concern for this same problem in his prayer recorded in Daniel chapter 9. In verse 22 and 23 of Ezekiel 36 God said that He would take action, but not for their sakes, rather for the sake of His holy name. He said He would honor His holy name and show Himself as holy to the nations through the children of Israel i.e. through how He treated them.

Then in verses 24-38 He describes the action He would take – but they are acts of kindness and mercy, not judgement! He would bring them back from captivity, rebuild and resettle their towns, bless their crops and put a new heart within them.

In this case God uses His mercy to show His holiness! They are not opposites!

Holiness means “other, different” for He is different than we are in our natural, sinful state. Mery is part of that “otherness.” Thus we can say that God’s holiness and mercy are the same thing, or two parts of the same thing. Or we could say that mercy is part of God’s holiness; it is one of the ways that He shows He is different than we are.

The Bible uses the imagery of balance because we struggle to balance those two key issues in our lives, and because, from our perspective, it looks like holiness and mercy are opposites, pulling in different directions. But passages like this one, and the entire life of Jesus, show that holiness and mercy are not opposites at all. We need to maintain a balance in the way we live them out in our lives, while remembering that they are not opposites, they are closely tied together.

A REAL-LIFE SITUATION WHERE THE BEST BALANCE IS SLIGHTLY OFF CENTER

The cargo and passengers of a commercial airliner should be loaded with a distribution that places the center of gravity of the plane slightly aft (slightly toward the back of the plane) not in the very center of the plane. If the weight distribution in an airplane places the center of gravity in the exact middle, the plane will be hard to take off, hard to control, and hard to land. If it is too far forward it is likely to cause a deadly accident. However, if the center of gravity is too far back, the plane will be difficult to control as well. In airplanes, the desired balance is found when the center of gravity is slightly aft from the physical center-point of the plane’s body.

The empty weight of the plane and the weight of the fuel are almost constant quantities, but the weight of the cargo (which includes passengers, their luggage, and other cargo) varies for every flight. Therefore, the luggage/cargo is weighed, and the weight of the passengers is estimated according to a carefully prepared formula. Computers are used to formulate a plan for how the passengers and luggage should be distributed in order to attain that perfect balance, which is actually an offset balance.

REFERENCES ABOUT MERCY OVER PUNISHMENT

Ps 30:5 For his anger is but for a moment, and his favor is for a lifetime. ESV

Ps 103:10-14 He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us. As a father shows compassion to his children, so the LORD shows compassion to those who fear him. For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust. ESV

Isaiah 54:8  “In an outburst of anger I hid My face from you for a moment, But with everlasting favor I will have compassion on you,” Says the LORD your Redeemer.  NASB

Ez 33:11 “Say to them, As I live, declares the Lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways, for why will you die, O house of Israel?” ESV

Jonah 4:2   He prayed to the LORD and said, “O LORD, is this not what I said when I was still in my country? That is why I ran to Tarshish, because I knew that You are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and great in lovingkindness, and [when sinners turn to You] You revoke the [sentence of] disaster [against them]. (Amplified Bible) Jonah did not want the people of Nineveh to repent because he knew God would accept their repentance. They were his enemies and he wanted only to see them punished. He knew the character of God but he did not want to mirror it. God saw to it that this story was included in the canon of scripture because it shows God’s heart for sinners and foreigners, as well as the place that mercy plays in His character.

Matt 5:7 Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. ESV

Jn 8:11 Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on, sin no more.” ESV

James 2:13 Mercy triumphs over judgment. ESV

GOD DID HIS BEST TO GET THEIR ATTENTION BEFORE SENDING PUNISHMENT

When I said earlier that God gives every opportunity for repentance before sending punishment, it was actually an understatement; God is not waiting passively for someone to repent, rather He is actively trying to get the sinner’s attention. Here are some of the things God commanded the prophets to do in order to get the attention of a people who had become numb to His message:

Isaiah  20:2-4  The hairy robe, or sackcloth, was both the sign of morning and the “uniform” of a prophet, and was worn instead of a proper cloak. It was worn over the undergarment, but it still would have produced some itching and irritation at some points. It was this hairy robe or sackcloth that Isaiah was told to remove. When he did so he was experiencing the condition of a captive, some of whom would be taken away as slave in their “underclothes” and some of the warriors would be taken away with their buttocks showing and with feet bare, while the prominent captive men would have had their beards cut off. The word “naked” meant “uncovered” i.e. “partially naked or only wearing the undergarments.” The point is that it was a great shame to be uncovered in this way. God told His prophet Isaiah to go around shamefully “uncovered” for a period of 3 years to show the people what was headed their direction if they relied on Egypt to protect them from disaster instead of relying on God.

Ez 4:4-8  Ezekiel was told to lay on his side to demonstrate the immobility that would come with captivity. He was told to lay 390 days on his left side, and 40 days on his right side, tied with ropes.

In Hosea chapters 1 and 2 – Hosea was told to marry a prostitute and then, after she left him, he was told to buy her back from the slave traders. All of this was a picture of the way God had already shown mercy to the people of Israel who only deserved punishment. Despite their rejection of God, He was willing to pay the price to buy them (and us) back.

WHAT ABOUT PUNISHMENT THAT CARRIED OVER TO FUTURE GENERATIONS?

First of all, we dare not forget that God’s mercy extends much longer and to many more people than does His punishment.

But people still want to know, “Why does He punish the children at all? It seems unfair to punish people who did not commit the offense.”

Here is what I think is going on in those cases. I think God is still punishing the fathers with extended consequences that carry on for a long time. One of the prices of leadership is that consequences are far reaching in the number of people they touch and the length of time they endure. Kings and presidents have consequences that carry on long after they are gone. As the first representatives of the human race, Adam and Eve received consequences that are still in effect today. All of us live under the consequences of sin. The difficult circumstances brought on by those consequences are intended to make us think about such things as consequences for our actions, the reality of right and wrong, our purpose in life, and eternity.You may not like that answer, but that is what I think is going on.

There is a grave responsibility that comes with leadership.

One of the reasons God has given leadership in the home to the husband and father is that men naturally sense the gravity of leadership; and the tendency of many men is to shrink back from it. They know there are serious consequences, and they are not sure if they can do a good job of leading. There are a few men who thrive under that kind of pressure. In contrast, many women are willing to push forward and take the lead. 

SUMMARY AND APPLICATION TO LIFE

In summary, God prefers to show His holiness through mercy more than through punishment. He will punish when He must, but He prefers mercy which demonstrates that He is very different than we are.

God wants us to be a reflection, a miniature picture, of who He is and what He is like. In order to properly reflect Him, we need to understand His character and the unity of holiness and mercy is a key part of His character.

We need to ask ourselves these questions:

What am I reflecting? Do I reflect the world or do I reflect God’s character?

In what areas do I need to grow in order to better reflect God’s character?