Hi everyone.
I'm going to talk about mercy and justice.
To start off I want to talk about an ancient heresy that occasionally comes up again.
It's the heresy of believing that the Old Testament God is a vengeful God while the
New Testament God is a forgiving God.
This is actually very wrong.
In both the new and the old testament you see both mercy and justice both very prominent
in both.
Also, Thomas Aquinas argued that every act of God, every single act of God, is both an
act of mercy and an act of justice.
Let me give you some examples.
Let's start with the Old Testament.
In the time of Moses where we know there was a lot of God's wrath at that time we have
this quote here.
"So the LORD passed before him and proclaimed: The LORD, the LORD, a God gracious and merciful,
slow to anger and abounding in love and fidelity" So, besides that I went an did a word count
on the word mercy and merciful in the book of Psalms.
I found 137 just in the book of Psalms.
I also looked for the phrase "His mercy endures forever" or something along those lines in
Psalms.
That is found 35 times in the book of Psalms.
Most of those are in chapters 118 and 136.
Then there is the New Testament.
If you read Jesus, if you look carefully you will probably discover that Jesus talks about
wrath a lot more than you probably remember.
Here's just one example.
Jesus said, "I tell you, it will be more tolerable for Sodom on that day than for that
town."
Sodom is one of the two cities, Sodom and Gomorrah, that were destroyed by God way back
in the book of Genesis for their sin.
Jesus is talking about these towns, what they will face if they reject the word the he sent
his disciples to them to preach.
Besides that, if you are not convinced that there is wrath in the New Testament, try reading
the book of Revelation.
You'll be convinced then, if you weren't before.
So, the question might come up, "Why does it seem like the Old Testament is wrathful
while the New is forgiving?"
That's is probably because we need to know God's wrath first before we can understand
God's mercy.
If we were to receive God's mercy first, it would look to us like permissiveness, like
God doesn't care that we sin.
But if we know God's wrath first, then we can know that, we can understand God's mercy
when we see it.
So that's why is was important for us to know God wrath first.
If you notice the central act of Jesus in all the Gospels, what was it?
It was his death on the cross.
And that act was principally an act of mercy.
In other words God mission at his first coming was a mission of mercy.
However, we know that when he returns, he will act in justice. We know this for a number
of reasons, but I want to show one little passage to you from the book of Deuteronomy.
This is a law that God gave about what they must obey when they are conquering a city.
And it goes, "When you draw near a city to attack it, offer it terms of peace."
So, if we take this and look at what Jesus did in his first coming, he is offering us
terms of peace.
We need to decide if we are going to accept it.
Then at the second coming, comes the actual act of conquering.
Those who agreed to God's terms will be saved.
Those who disagree, you know, there will be consequences.
Let's, however, look at the mercy side of this.
There is a quote from Jesus.
It's on of the beatitudes.
He said, "Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy."
So, we see here that if we want to receive mercy, it requires that we ourselves are merciful.
For this reason we have to practice mercy in order to receive it.
One of the areas that we need to remember to practice mercy is in the making of laws.
So the idea in making a law is the idea should never be to ruin the person, because if the
idea is to ruin a person, that is justice devoid of mercy.
So, we should always seek the redemption of others, not the ruin of others when we impose
justice.
Another area I need to point out is, in the case of raising children.
When we threaten punishment for doing wrong with our young children we should always follow
through with that.
That's necessary because we need to teach discipline.
Of course we should never punish something too severe.
But when the children grow older and have learned discipline, then we can show them
additional mercy when they repent.
This follows what I said before about how God had to show us wrath first before He could
show us mercy.
Another side of this that I want to point out about is what Jesus said about turning
the other cheek.
Here's a quote from Jesus.
These are two quotes from two different Gospels.
The first one goes, "But I say to you, offer no resistance to one who is evil.
When someone strikes you on your right cheek, turn the other one to him as well."
This is from Luke, "To the person who strikes you on one cheek, offer the other one as well,
and from the person who takes your cloak, do not withhold even your tunic."
So, we see this twice in the Gospels, so it is a very clear commandment from Jesus.
But the key to this, you have to understand, the key to this is love.
When you turn the other cheek, it has to be out of love.
I've seen people try to follow this and turn the other cheek and it's not out of love and
it doesn't end well.
It's sometimes like they are trying to turn the other cheek as in trying to have a higher
moral ground or something like that.
That's not what Jesus said.
He said to turn the other cheek and it's implied that it should be with love for that
person.
It turns out that when you do it out of love, the response is much better.
The final point I want to go over is the importance that we don't judge.
Justice and mercy is important but we need to remember that judging belongs to God and
to whom God gives authority to judge.
For example a court judge is somebody that God has given authority to judge but that
authority is limited to that particular judges station.
For example he can't pass sentence on somebody that passes on the street.
But he can pass judgement in the court room.
In the same vein, parents have authority to judge if their underage children should be
punished.
That's authority given to them by God, but that authority also has limitations.
But, we have to remember that we don't have authority to judge someone, such that we would
get even with them as if we were their judge.
If they wronged us, we don't have the ability, the authority to judge that person and get
even with that person, because we judged that they are guilty.
So this goes back to the rule that we must always turn the other cheek, and leave the
judging to God.
So, in the next section I'm going to talk about something related to mercy and justice
which is forgiveness.
May God bless you.
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