College Study #47: "God's Mercy"

‘Behold, the Lamb of God’

ide o amnos tou theou

College Study

47^th teaching

8.12.2013

 

“God’s Mercy”

 

 

 

          Introductions.

Project Scriptura:

          Announce next week’s topic (God’s Holiness), challenge each person to find ONE Bible verse about this attribute of God to share next week, you may use any resource as long as you find just one verse.

Review:

          What attribute of God did we study last week? God’s Justice. What’s a good and simple definition for Justice? To make it right. In the Bible, what other word is used as a synonym for Justice? Righteousness. Why can God be the Perfect Judge? What other attribute of God puts His Justice into action, motivating His Justice? There are two variations of God’s Justice, what are they? Punitive and Merciful. What would be an example of God’s Justice as punishing the guilty? What would be an example of God’s Justice as merciful? Which historical figure, a member of the Reformers, had some confusion about the righteousness of God? What was his confusion about? So we understand then that God’s Righteousness, His Justice, His making things right, includes not only punishing the guilty, but also in making right, or justifying, the repentant sinner.

          End Review

 

         

          Turn to the Book of Lamentations Chapter 3.

          Lamentations is known in ancient Hebrew by a word that signals the beginning of a song of wailing. It is a poetic book, written by the Prophet Jeremiah, in which he reflects upon and mourns over the destruction of Jerusalem and his country, a place in which he had preached his warnings of coming judgment from God. Now that the judgment has come, Jeremiah grieves over the destruction. He wrote this poetic Lament which we have now as the book of Lamentations.

          To summarize the content, Jeremiah writes “Jerusalem has sinned grievously, therefore she has become vile.” “Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Behold and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow, which has been brought on me, which the LORD has inflicted on me in the day of His fierce anger.” “The LORD is righteous, for I rebelled against His commandment.” “How the Lord has covered the daughter of Zion with a cloud in His anger.” You get the idea that Lamentations is here illustrating everything that we’ve been talking about as a group for the past few weeks: God’s wrath was enflamed by the unrepentant sin of His people and His city, Jerusalem, and so His wrath motivated His justice to act.

          Though the prophet writes “I am the man who has seen affliction by the rod of His wrath…” note his hope, in Lamentations 3, beginning in v.19: “Remember my affliction and roaming, the wormwood and the gall. My soul still remembers and sinks within me. This I recall to my mind, therefore I have hope. Through the LORD’s mercies we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness. ‘The LORD is my portion,’ says my soul, ‘therefore I hope in Him!’”

          Despite the raging and rampant, and justified, destruction brought about by the sentence of God’s Justice, the Prophet places His hope in the Mercy of the LORD. He saw mercy in the face of God’s punitive justice, because his people were not entirely destroyed. God still spared. God still had mercy.

          Did He need to? No. The people who had long rejected their God deserved what was coming to them. They even had prophets sent to them warning them that this day would come. But the fact remains that though God has this quality of Justice within Him, He also has this moral attribute of Mercy within Him as well.

          And you see this pattern in Scripture continually: the people sin and arouse God’s wrath, He warns them, then judges them, while at the same time sparing them and having mercy upon them.

          We could do an entire study of the book of Judges and see this spiral, this pattern of sin, wrath and justice, repentance, then mercy and deliverance. The people did what was right in their own eyes and turned from God, then God became angry and judged them by sending in enemies against His people, then they repented and He had mercy and delivered them by the hands of a cultural hero: a judge.

          Throughout the Old and New Testament, the pattern that brings about God’s mercy is clear.

          *Though many see mercy and justice as virtues that are opposed to each other, which conflict one another, the truth is that in God these attributes of mercy and justice form a kind of perfect cycle. Even wrath and mercy are both attributes in God which, rather than destroy one another, complement each other.

          As the priest-philosopher Thomas Aquinas said: “God acts mercifully, not indeed by going against His justice, but by doing something more than justice… It is clear that mercy does not destroy justice, but in a sense is the fullness thereof.”

          Now of vast importance is the fact that we already covered the attributes of God’s Wrath and His Justice specifically before we begin to look at Mercy. We could talk about the good and wonderful things all we want, we could talk about Mercy till we’re blue in the face, but it means nothing without the foundation of Wrath and Justice. Note, Mercy is meaningless without Justice.

          Why? Simply because without Justice or Wrath, Mercy has nothing to save us from. If there is no punishment, if there is no discipline, if there is no Hell at the end of this life, then the Mercy of God is a totally senseless and pointless attribute. You need a punishment first if you are to have mercy shown to spare you that punishment at all.

          It was the beloved author C.S. Lewis who wrote: “A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line.” In other words, it’s meaningless to call something crooked unless you know what straight means. You cannot have any meaning for the word ‘light’ unless there exists some contrast, which we call ‘darkness’. And in exactly the same way, we cannot know what Mercy is unless it is set against the backdrop of Justice.

          To put it in visual terms, think of a diamond. A jeweler will set that brilliant diamond up against black velvet, the blackest velvet ever. Why? So that the diamond seems all the purer, all the brighter, all the more brilliant.

          Mercy is just like that. And we shall have no value for God’s mercy, God’s love, God’s grace, God’s salvation unless these teachings are set against their proper counterparts. Unless there is a pending judgment to escape from, then Mercy without Justice is meaningless.

          So then, realizing that we’re building upon what we’ve learned, tonight we study “God’s Mercy”.

          We have several points to address:

1.   What is Mercy?

2.   An Ancient Artifact

3.   Biblical Basis for Divine Mercy

4.   The Objects of God’s Mercy

 

 

1.   What is Mercy?

          You may have heard it said, as this is the popular phraseology of our day, that Grace is getting what you don’t deserve and Mercy is not getting what you do deserve. In essence, that’s it. And that’s incredibly simple. And being simple, it is not the entire picture.

          Mercy is also defined as “lenient or compassionate treatment, forbearance, benevolence, compassion shown toward someone whom it is within one’s power to punish or to harm”.

          In Scripture, the first mention of the word mercy comes from Genesis 19, in which the LORD judges the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. It says that the LORD was merciful to Abraham’s nephew, Lot, and brought him out of the city before he destroyed it. So you definitely get the idea that, biblically, the term mercy refers to preserving someone from harm, really from punishment, since that is what was coming down upon Sodom in Lot’s time. The very first time mercy is mentioned, it is alongside punishment and wrath and being spared from them.

          *I read an interesting story today about the man who almost shot the father of America: a British marksman named Patrick Ferguson during the Revolutionary War abided by several personal rules. The biggest rule was to never shoot a soldier who was unaware of his presence. Being a marksman, this personal rule meant that Ferguson could never truly be a sniper. He couldn’t bring himself to shoot someone unless his target knew he was there. He certainly couldn’t shoot someone in the back.

          In September of 1777, Ferguson and his men saw the approach of two officers on horseback. He ordered his men to crawl up the hillside and ambush them. But when the officers passed by, Ferguson stood up and made his position known to them.

          Seeing the marksmen, the officers turned and galloped off, in fact giving Ferguson the clearest shot at them. In Ferguson’s own words, he said “I could have lodged half a dozen balls in or about him, before he was out of my reach”. It turns out that his own rule against shooting a man in the back prevented him.

          Ferguson later discovered in a field hospital that one of the two officers he could have shot was General George Washington. The British sharpshooter had preserved the life of the first president. It was in his power, certainly, to do harm, but he withheld that and showed a kind of mercy there on that battlefield.

          I like that story, but what it does not necessarily contain is the concept of personal crime against another man. What makes mercy even more powerful is when the offender is shown mercy by the same one that has been personally offended. True, Patrick Ferguson was British and Washington would be American, and they were involved in a war. But Washington had never done harm strictly in a personal sense to Ferguson.

          The concept of a personal offense and personal mercy brings up what is in fact a synonym for the word mercy, as found in the Bible: the Word of God also uses the word Forgiveness. Forgiveness and Mercy are really closely related in meaning. To forgive is to show mercy.

          And since God forgave our sins, if you have believed in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ for your sins, then He has shown you mercy, in you having escaped the punishment due your sins in eternal hellfire. That’s the gospel in a nutshell, and mercy, turns out, is central to the good news of the gospel.

          This New Covenant, this new relationship that all believers have entered in to with God has as its slogan Hebrews 8:12, “For I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and their lawless deeds I will remember no more.”

          That’s forgiveness. That’s mercy unlocked by the Cross of Christ. The New Covenant is a relationship of mercy. He took our just punishment and we have been mercifully spared.

2.   An Ancient Artifact

          Now to get a better handle on what God’s mercy is like, we need to look at an ancient relic, a mysterious artifact. Here is a picture. What is this?

          It is the Ark of the Covenant, also known as, the Ark of the Testimony. It served as the only object within the Holy of Holies, the innermost room of the ancient Jewish tabernacle, and later the temple. Today, nobody really knows where it is.

          Instructions on how to build it were given to Moses in Exodus 25. It was to be a lidded box made of wood and overlaid inside and out with gold. It was to be carried by the priests by poles inserted through loops in the sides of the ark, since no one was allowed to touch it. Whenever they carried it, the Ark would be wrapped in a veil of animal skins and a blue cloth, carefully covered so that even the priests who carried it could not look upon it. Probably so that they wouldn’t have their faces melted off like certain Nazis in certain films.

          Inside the ark they stored the two Tablets of Stone on which the Ten Commandments were inscribed. It also carried a jar of manna, Aaron the first high priest’s rod and the first scroll of the Law as written by Moses.

          Of particular interest to our study tonight is the cover of the Ark. The cover had the two iconic cherubim, angelic beings, made out of hammered gold and positioned at either end, facing the center of the lid and looking down upon the lid. The wings of the cherubim, it says, were to be stretched above, covering the lid with their wings.

          This cover, this lid in Exodus is identified by the name of “mercy seat”. They called it the mercy seat. Exodus 25:22, God says “And there I will meet with you, and I will speak with you from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubim which are on the ark of the Testimony…”

          The cover, the mercy seat, then was a symbolic representation of the throne of God, where the presence of God would speak to Moses the prophet and Aaron the priest.

          In Hebrew, this cover of the ark was known as kapporeth. Kapporeth comes from the Hebrew word which means cover, the literal meaning is wipe out. This implies that kapporeth means an object that wipes out or cleanses. Kapporeth is a word that means covering. And in the Hebrew mind, atonement (as in atoning for your sins?) was a word that meant to cover, to cover over your sins.

          Another translation of the word kapporeth: Propitiation. Considering we just studied propitiation, this is astounding. Propitiation means a sacrifice which appeases the wrath of a god. The New Testament says that Jesus Himself is the propitiation for our sins and the sins of the world.

          The crazy thing is that propitiation is an idea linked to this covering, this lid upon the Ark of the Covenant. There on the mercy seat, where God would meet with His people, once every year on the Day of Atonement the priest would sprinkle blood on the cover to show that the sins of the people were “covered”. How very similar to the final propitiation when Jesus Christ, God Himself, there on the cross met with the people of the world by living among us, once for all of history on the Day of Passover sprinkled His own blood so that the sins of the people would be not only covered but removed.

          What a picture this ancient relic gives of the ultimate fulfillment in Jesus Christ. But we might ask just why the lid was called the mercy seat.

          Consider that the mercy seat was a cover, and that it did cover things. What did it cover? I already told you that one of the things it covered was the Law, the twin Tablets of Stone, the Ten Commandments, the demands of God’s holy Law which said “do this and live” or “do not do this and die”. Those two stone tablets were physical objects representative of God’s own attribute of justice. And it is the mercy seat which covers over the stone of God’s justice.

          Isn’t that profound? Do you think maybe God had this picture in mind when He gave the blueprints for the Ark to Moses? Of course! The Ark of the Covenant, among other things, symbolized God’s Mercy covering His Justice, God’s mercy following His judgments.

          We need ask for no further description of what true mercy is than in looking at the mercy seat, the place in which God met with His people, the bloodied lid which covered over the righteous demands of justice in the Law. God’s mercy covers over our sins. Colossians 2:13-14 says “And you, being dead in your trespasses and the circumcision of your flesh, He has made alive together with Him, having forgiven you all trespasses, having wiped out the handwriting of requirements that was against us, which was contrary to us.” God forgives us our sins when we repent and believe, and wipes out the requirements the Law has against us: the punishment for our sins. He wipes it out, He kapporeth’s it, wipes it out.

          Truly James 2:13 says “Mercy triumphs OVER judgment.” I don’t think that positional term of being OVER judgment is out of context.

          So we see that this artifact, the Ark of the Covenant, symbolized what eventually occurred at the cross where blood shed in God’s mercy would cover over and satisfy the demands of justice.

3.   Biblical Basis for Divine Mercy

          As far as biblical content, there is no shortage of verses which describe God as merciful.

          Let’s look at Exodus 34:1. Remember the story? Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the original Ten Commandments on two stone tablets to find that even as he had been receiving the Law, his kinsmen were already breaking it. As Moses descended, Joshua his servant heard a noise coming from the camp of Israel, and says to Moses “There is a noise of war in the camp”. But Moses said, “It is not the voice of those who shout in victory, nor is it the voice of those who cry out in defeat, but the voice of those who sing that I hear.”

          And sure enough, when Moses and Joshua reach the camp, they find the people dancing around the statue of a golden calf, worshiping it. Moses gets furious. It says “So Moses’ anger became hot, and he cast the tablets out of his hands and broke them at the foot of the mountain. Then he took the calf which they had made, burned it in the fire, and ground it to powder; and he scattered it on the water and made the children of Israel drink it.”

          That’s a hardcore solution for idolatry, because it’s pretty difficult to worship something that would come out in your own dookie.

          But anyways, that’s how Moses broke the first two tablets of stone, and now in Exodus 34, he has to go back up the mountain to get another pair of the Commandments.

          34:2-9, herein it says is the name of the LORD proclaimed before Moses. And notice that the name, this identification of who God is, comes out in the form of a description of His attributes. His name is that He is just, certainly, also gracious and patient and good and true (that’s veracity), and also merciful.

          So a key characteristic of who God is, even a description which God once proclaimed as His very name, was that He is merciful. This is central to the character of God. If you were to ask who God is, mercy would need to be a part of the answer. God is merciful.

          What verses did you find?

 

         

4.   The Objects of Mercy

          Do you remember how we learned that God’s wrath has its objects? What or whom are objects of God’s wrath? The unrepentant sinner.

          We learned that God’s wrath is not merely explosive, but that it has direction. God is the ultimate reasonable and rational Being, and therefore God does everything with a rational purpose.

          I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Ezekiel 14:23 says this. In regards to the LORD punishing His people for their sins, He says “…and you shall know that I have done nothing without cause…”

          So since God does nothing without cause, His wrath does not vent without cause. Rather, His wrath is provoked by sin and aroused by the unrepentant. Therefore, the targets of His wrath and anger are the unrepentant sinners. As Psalm 7:11 says “God is angry with the wicked every day.”

          Now while the wrath of God has its objects: the unrepentant, so too the mercy of God has its own objects. But first we need to clarify something.

          There exists something known as common grace, something we could refer to as “general mercy”. See the Bible says in Psalm 145:9, “The LORD is good to all, and His tender mercies are over all His works.” Acts 17:25 says that God “gives to all life, breath, and all things.” Matthew 5:45, “…for He makes His sun rise on the evil and one the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.”

          So there is a very real sense in which God shows a kind of general mercy to all of creation and all of humanity by sustaining and providing for everything.

          But on the other hand, there is a special kind of mercy which is shown to a special group. To discover what or whom those specific objects of mercy are, turn to Luke 18.

          Luke 18:9-14. Not coincidentally, this is our theme picture for tonight.

          You see that the objects of God’s mercy are the repentant sinners, not the unrepentant sinner and not those who delude themselves into thinking they aren’t sinners at all. The Pharisee was all into himself and his own righteousness. He wasn’t thinking about mercy. Why should he? In his own eyes, he was a good and religious man.

          And yet beside him stood a sinner who realized what he was and realized his need for the mercy of God. Of the two men, the words of Jesus Christ Himself tell us that the tax collector went home justified, right with God, rather than the Pharisee.

          The humble man who comes to God in repentance and in acute knowledge of his own sin will be the one who receives mercy. But the proud man who comes to God as this Pharisee did and prays thus with himself (kind of funny, seems like he was just praying all by himself to himself, with God not hearing at all), that man will be resisted.

          As Scripture says “God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble” (James 4:6).

          But see, here’s the human condition. We have a problem with concepts like pride and humility. More often than not, we put ourselves first before others.

          Whenever someone cuts me off in traffic or speeds past me, I think that they have every right to go ahead of me because their life is more important than mine… said no one ever.  No one even remotely ever thought that someone else is more important than them when they’ve been cut off in traffic.

          We often think of ourselves in terms of humility but then we look at the pride in others and are quickly disgusted. Let me tell you: the more disgusted you are at another human’s pride is a good gauge of how prideful you yourself are.

          Pride is that selfish human heart within us that wants to be noticed above all others, cherished above all else, praised above all things. Pride is what drives us to enslave ourselves for fame. Pride is what caused the Devil to fall.

          C.S. Lewis, the man of many quotes, once said “As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down you cannot see something that is above you.”

          The question then is: Are you coming to God for mercy like you need it? Or is God resisting your pride?

          We’ve all known Christians who are indifferent toward church and the Bible and the things of God, Christians who lack passion and drive to know anything more about God. Maybe that describes you or I. But I think one of the underlying problems beneath symptoms of indifference when it comes to Christians today is this issue of pride.

          Why come to God to be made righteous, if we already feel ourselves to be good persons? Why come to God for forgiveness, if we don’t think that we’ve done anything that’s really that wrong? Why come to God to be made new, if we like how we are already? Why beg for His grace, if we think we have everything we already need in our selfish and independent selves?

          Why do you think it startles us and embarrasses us and provokes us to make excuses that this was an old and far-removed culture of primitive people when we read about men and women crawling on hands and knees in the olden days to the pulpit to ask how they might be saved when they heard of God being angry at their sin?

          It’s all because of a heart-problem, a problem of pride. Pride is diametrically opposed to mercy, and the God of mercy is opposed to pride. He resists pride. Do you wish Him to resist you?

          Or is His mercy something you consciously know that you need, not superficially, but profoundly need; not just verbally saying that you need mercy, but knowing that you deeply need it?

          Realize that we need His mercy, desperately. And His mercy is universal. His mercy is available. His mercy is accessible to all through the cross of Christ. The objects of His mercy are not the proud nor the unrepentant, but the repentant. The ones who recognize their sin and come to Him for salvation are those who receive His mercy. And any man or woman may do that. His mercy is available to anyone.

          The LORD says in Exodus 33:19, “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.”

          And note that this mercy, this compassion is available in Christ. It is right there, accessible by faith. Take it. You need it.

          Charles Wesley penned the words of this hymn:

Depth of mercy! Can there be
 Mercy still reserved for me?
 Can my God His wrath forbear,
 Me, the chief of sinners, spare?

I have long withstood His grace,
 Long provoked Him to His face,
 Would not hearken to His calls,
 Grieved Him by a thousand falls.

I have spilt His precious blood,
 Trampled on the Son of God,
 Filled with pangs unspeakable,
 I, who yet am not in hell!

I my Master have denied,
I afresh have crucified,
And profaned His hallowed Name,
Put Him to an open shame.

          Yet Wesley concludes his hymn with themes of redemption, forgiveness and mercy. If you forget anything else about God’s mercy remember only that His mercy is not particular about how great or how small the sin or how great or how small the sinner.

          His mercy is available.