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.