Thursday, August 8, 2019

The Justice in Mercy

Friday, August 9, 2019

The Lord, the Mighty One, is God, and he has spoken; he has summoned all humanity from where the sun rises to where it sets.  From Mount Zion, the perfection of beauty, God shines in glorious radiance.  Our God approaches, and he is not silent.  Fire devours everything in his way, and a great storm rages around him.  He calls on the heavens above and earth below to witness the judgment of his people.  “Bring my faithful people to me—those who made a covenant with me by giving sacrifices.”  Then let the heavens proclaim his justice, for God himself will be the judge.  Psalm 50:1-6

Everyone from a small child to an old man understands (to varying degrees) the concept of right and wrong; we know there is judgment, and that someone is in charge.  Scripture declares that Someone in charge is the Lord.
Scripture also informs us that the God of justice, overseeing judgment for wrong, prefers to extend mercy to those who repent:

But you, O Lord, are a God of compassion and mercy, slow to get angry and filled with unfailing love and faithfulness.  Psalm 86:15

Compassion and mercy towards those deserving judgment is the epic story of God’s desire to be in relationship with all His creation.  Our sin portends guilt and judgment; God looms, and man cowers, repents, and is forgiven because of God’s merciful nature; or we reject mercy and are condemned.  It’s a formula as old as the universe, the cosmic struggle between good and evil for the souls of humans.
Now, that formula, God’s lovingkindness and forgiveness, which always follow repentance, is unchanged, as is the refreshing of the cleansing work God does in our souls when He forgives and restores us to His favor. 
But there is a nuance of modern-day unbelief that has put respectability in the culture for those who choose to reject God’s offer of grace.  What’s chic, or “in” is to hide the traditional shaking the fist towards heaven in defiance, by declaring God as inconsequential.  Those who choose to twist what Scripture says, in order to take judgment off the table, do so thinking they take the sting of sin out of God’s righteousness.  That thinking is something like:  If there really is a God, then he’s all love and everything is ok.  The problem with that is, if everything’s ok, how come this world is so messed up?  You cannot have it both ways; we are either sinners in need of a forgiving God who tempers justice with mercy…or we are alone in the universe and bound to destroy ourselves; evil is just too real to think otherwise!
It isn’t a wise idea to try to cast God off to one side or another.  Choosing to not think about something does not make it disappear.  That would be a kind of madness, especially when it is eternity hanging in the balance.  C.S. Lewis once wrote “Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance.  The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.”[2]
For You Today
For anyone thinking to negate the judgment of God it would be wise to first figure-out if there is such a thing as judgment at all…as in whether your finger will burn if you stick it in the fire.
You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day.

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[1] Title Image:  Courtesy of  Pixabay.com
                          Unless otherwise noted, Scripture used from The New Living Translation©
[2] C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock



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