Have mercy upon us, O Lord, have mercy upon us, for we have had more than enough of contempt. (Ps 123:3)
Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. (Ps 51:1)
Lord, hear our prayers. We come to You broken and hurting. Heal our wounds. Apart from Christ, we have sin on our heads. Forgive our sin. Thank you for the Cross that heals and brings forgiveness. And thank you for a mercy that is infinite.
Have you ever seen suffering? Maybe a woman dying from cancer or a man sitting in jail for doing the right thing, or a woman whose husband has left her, or a nation going through famine or war. All these experiences are Earth. Ever since Genesis 3, suffering has been the normal experience of the human race, and sometimes this suffering makes people question God’s goodness. Sometimes people throw the sufferings of Earth into the face of a Christian and say, “Where is your God of love, now?”
Of course, one way to address this accusation is to point out that the human race isn’t exactly the pinnacle of virtue. But today, I don’t have time to flesh out that idea. I want to focus on a different response to suffering.
I want to talk about the mercies of God. The Bible could not be clearer. Our God is a merciful God, and His mercy is tied up with His love. Mercy is an expression of love. Peter said “love covers a multitude of sins.” (I Pet 4:8) In the Scriptures mercy entails a tender-hearted compassion and expresses God’s care for His hurting creatures. When the psalmists frequently cry out for God’s mercy, they are not asking primarily for forgiveness of sins but for relief from oppression. Evil men pursue David to take his life, and he cries out for God to have mercy. An invading nation slaughters God’s people, and they cry out to God for mercy. In drought, in famine, in war, in disease, in danger, in childlessness, and much more, God’s people ask their God to show them mercy. They want a God who has compassion, and this compassion is a common thrust of the Biblical words for mercy. God feels for those who hurt; He has an infinite compassion on them. But this is only one aspect of the mercy of God.
The same words for mercy also often refer to forgiveness. God’s shows His mercy by forgiving our sins. God’s mercy, thus, has this double meaning: 1) God has compassion on His creatures, and 2) God will forgive their darkest sins. This is news beyond our grandest desires. The one who truly grasps it must admit that he cannot grasp it. Sing Christian! God sees your sufferings and will address them! And God forgives!
The reason mercy entails both these meanings is that suffering and sin go together. God’s mercy deals with the entire package, not just one element of the problem. Mercy is holistic. When the people lowered the paralyzed man through the roof, they wanted Jesus to show mercy and heal the man. Jesus responded with mercy and said, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” (Mk 2:5) Sometimes we just want relief from our pain when what we really need is a clean soul. We want the depression to go away, but we forget to ask for the sin to go away. We want the tumor to be healed but don’t think about having our sins wiped away. We want relief from the symptom without dealing with the cause. But God’s mercy deals with the cause. Praise God. He heals tumors … and depression. He deals with our pain, and we can trust Him when we hurt. But He wants to do more. His mercy is bigger than we think. He nails our sin to the Cross. He says to us, “Come to me, my child. Be mine.” He gives us Himself and grants us an eternal inheritance that far outweighs our “light and momentary afflictions.” (II Cor 4:17)
That’s right. Make no mistake. Glory is mercy. We often look only to Earth for our mercy, and God does often grant us physical relief or material blessing here and now. When He does so, it is grace. But it is also true that sometimes we suffer many years till we die. Sometimes people suffer at the hands of injustice. When that happens, we must see that our lives are but a nanosecond in the grasp of eternity, and it is the glory of that eternity that makes up for our nanosecond of suffering. God will show His people mercy one way or the other and sometimes both ways.
But the mercies of God are not just in eternity or in the Cross. We must understand that the oxygen we breathe is mercy. The water we drink is mercy. The food we eat is mercy. The home we live in, the sun we enjoy, the rain that brings the crops, the clothes we wear, the friends we have, the car we drive, the music we like, the very life we live — all of this and more is mercy. We take these things for granted and somehow think that sinful creatures deserve pleasures. We don’t deserve any of these things. But we do enjoy them, and we do so because our God shows mercy.
A full treatment of our sufferings and of God’s mercy deserves more space than this blog can give, and I may have raised as many questions for you as I have answered. That’s OK. But we have got to see the mercy in God. It is part of His character, and it is everywhere we look. Now and for eternity.
