This is the second post in a series based on LOVE.
Recently, I've been working on a series about LOVE. This post isn't as focused on love specifically, but is in keeping in the same vein. In this post however, we're going to talk a little bit about mercy, God's mercy, and unsanctified mercy.
First of all, it's necessary to understand exactly what mercy is. For the Christ follower, this is relatively simple. For us, the definition of biblical mercy, that is God's mercy is the sparing and/or rescue from judgment. In regards to our eternal salvation, this is easily understandable. In regards to the confrontation of sin however, many Christians struggle with the mercy issue.
From the New Testament we learn of God's amazing mercy toward us. In Matthew we read about the shepherd who leaves the 99 sheep to pursue the 1 who wandered away. In Titus we read that it is not by our own works of righteousness that we are saved, but only by His mercy. The modern day church has experienced an ABUNDANCE of mercy lacking - the stories would fill volumes and volumes of books. We as humans can be an unmerciful lot to be sure. But the opposite end of this spectrum is the exceptional tolerance of a person's sin without regard to a complete understanding of mercy.
What do I mean? Well, lets look at a few more scriptures. Ezekiel 33:11 says this; "As surely as I live, says the Sovereign LORD, I take no pleasure in the death of wicked people. I only want them to turn from their wicked ways so they can live. Turn! Turn from your wickedness, O people of Israel! Why should you die?" While clear that the Lord is addressing Israel, are we not all Israel in our sin? Of all the scripture regarding mercy, these words exude power coupled with mercy. God is desiring that His children repent of their wickedness, their sin, and return to Him for mercy. Isaiah writes, "Let the people turn from their wicked deeds. Let them banish from their minds the very thought of doing wrong! Let them turn to the LORD that he may have mercy on them. Yes, turn to our God, for he will abundantly pardon." (Isaiah 55:7) Again, we read about God's longing for us to return to Him, seeking His mercy rather than judgment. He is yearning for a people who will rebuke the very thoughts of wrongdoing.
There is an absolute necessary act of sacrifice required for the mercy of God. In the Old Testament, people brought their sacrifices to the temple in order to obtain mercy for their sins. We know that Christ Himself became the sacrifice for our sin, but we have forgotten a vitally important element to receiving mercy. Mercy is not a one time deal, it's an ongoing relationship. It is not enough that we seek out the Savior for mercy from death and eternal damnation. We must regularly pursue mercy. . .mercy is applied to our sin, and we are rescued from judgment. But we must act upon our need for mercy in order to receive it.
The sacrifice then is our humbling of self to approach the throne with repentence in our hearts for our sin. I am absolutely astounded at the number of Christians who do not understand that all sin is first and foremost perpetrated against God, and then only secondly toward man. I can't tell you how many times I've heard, "God doesn't care about this. It's just a big deal to you." Our sin is what separates us from God - He very much does care. The Adamic nature of mankind is sinful, which is why we needed a Savior to begin with. But it doesn't release us from the expectation of accountability for our sin nature. The approach we make to God in our sin is what moves Him to mercy. The strolling in attitude of, "Well God you know I'm screw up so here I am again, let's get this done b/c I have things to do" is an abomination and grieves our Lord. The absence of repentence can bring about a hardening of the heart when the Christian does not "feel" as though they are receiving mercy from God.
So now in understanding the need for repentence in the seeking out of mercy, let us address the danger of unsanctified mercy. To sanctify something means to set apart or declare holy. So putting together these two definitions, we can deduce that sanctified mercy is a holy sparing or rescue from judgment. Therefore, unsanctified mercy is an unholy sparing or rescue from judgment. This is a dangerous place from which to operate in our faith because it opens the Christian up to attacks from the enemy. Many Christians today have entered into a "total tolerance" for people. They embrace the misunderstood system of loving sinners. I have heard over and over, "love the sinner, hate the sin." While loving the sinner is visited throughout the Word of God, nowhere are we instructed to love the sinner but hate the sin. We are called to abhor all things sinful. Did Jesus distinguish b/t the sin and the sinner in Matthew 23 when He addressed the Pharisees and called them a brood of vipers? Or how about Psalm 4:5 where David says, The foolish will not stand in Your sight; You hate all workers of iniquity." This seems that those who work in sin defile the very mercy of God. This does not mean that God does not love the repenetent sinner, not at all. These verses address the very real issue of those who are aware of their poor choices, and yet choose to remain in their sin. As I said, it's a very dangerous place to be if you're unrepentent, and more so for those who either cannot see this lack of repentence or simply do not care.
Only real love can express real mercy. This is how mercy ties in with love. Jesus was a living example of this in His seemingly upside down theology of the time. Embracing a tax collector but openly rebuking the religious leaders; embracing a whore and chastising His own friends; healing the soldier who aggressed Him and correcting His disciple who defended Him. These are all issues of mercy with very different finales. The differences b/t those upon whom He emoted mercy and those He judged was the issue of the heart. . .the genuine repentence rather than the justification of deeds.
So which camp are you in? Do you seek to simply "love everyone" and extend mercy to everyone? Are you being led by the Holy Spirit in this or is it possible that you're beliefs regarding these issues could use a little sharpening. I'm by no means saying begin to reject people b/c they are sinners - we're all sinners. But are you practicing sanctified mercy or are you enabling sin by allowing the belief system of unsanctified mercy to drive your faith.
Hi Holly,
ReplyDeleteI know you don't know me, but I saw that you posted this on Frank's wall and well, he's my big brother in Jesus, so I read your post. I have to tell you that I really appreciated your thoughts. Yes, God is a God of love AND He's a God of righteousness/holiness. You nailed it and said it so eloquently. If we only focus on His love, then sin becomes "not that big of a deal", but if we only focus on His righteousness, then we're operating out of a religious spirit, which is the very spirit that crucified Jesus. It wasn't atheists and agnostics who killed Him, it was the religious people. So yeah, there MUST be balance and the way you explained it was just perfect, so thanks...thanks for taking a risk in speaking the truth in love. It's what I like to call "bold humility" and we say, "AMEN!!!"
Hey Holly! Good post. I do have a few thoughts:
ReplyDeleteFirst, where we see God addressing Israel, particularly in the OT Prophets, he's telling them to turn back *to* something; that something was the covenant. Their entire content of their wickedness is specifically their turning away from it. As we say a lot at RHVC, behavior wasn't really the problem. It was the symptom of the problem. Their hearts were sick. They were a selfish, self-centered people who worshiped other gods. God is not threatened by other gods; that's not the sin in idolatry. The sin is that we become like what we worship. That's the part that God hates, that we become like all the non-God things we worship, and that makes us much less than he intends us to be.
If it seems like I'm saying that God cares less about our behavior than he does our hearts...well, that is exactly what I'm saying. Loving God is not about behavior modification or sin management. He's way deeper than that. Let's stay in the OT: over and over God has to tell Israel that it doesn't matter what they do if they don't love justice and mercy. Israel comes back from exile a very different people than when they left, presumably sanctified over their aggregate 170 years or so in Assyria/Babylon. They tried even harder to obey all the stipulations to their covenant with God, not because they were legalistic literalists, but because they fervently wanted to please him...and they fell off the horse on the OTHER side. They became exclusive; instead of building a community which was a light to the Gentiles, they emphasized building thick religious walls that kept everyone else out. In the act of trying to be really good Jews, they managed to miss the point of the covenant completely. I think the modern Church does that all the time...especially us Evangelicals.
Which brings me to Matthew 23. We have to be careful with context here. Who is Jesus talking to? The Pharisees. Again, American Protestants have the tendency to paint them as evil people who followed the Law and not God, but that's really very far from the historical truth. They were the best Jews around. They had all the right identity markers, and subscribed to all the right doctrines and values. If we were to imagine them today, they'd be the very best Evangelical Christians around. Also, be careful with the Psalms. They're really not designed to be employed on a doctrinal basis, and the reason is pretty simple: they're poetry. Just because it's poetry in the Bible doesn't mean we treat it any differently when we interpret it. Poetry does not benefit from a rigidly literal interpretation, does it? I had a professor who used to say this: if you treat poetry too literally, you'll kill it; if you treat a cookbook too metaphorically, it may kill you. Understanding what genre you're working from, especially in the OT, is very important. After all, are you really trying to say that God hates people? If you are, then you have a dozen other scriptures that say exactly the opposite. What David is saying in that Psalm is that God really, really doesn't like it when we sin. God doesn't hate anyone, no matter what they happen to be doing at the moment. Otherwise we have a God who loves us sometimes and doesn't love us at other times. That's much more dangerous than anything else we can think of.
Does Jesus tolerate sin? That's a tough question, because it really seems like he does. There's the woman at the well in John 4. For some reason the Evangelical Church has it set in its mind that the woman went away changed forever. We don't know that. She's obviously pretty excited about what happened to her (because she tells her whole village), but there's nothing in the passage that implies that she changed her life at all. Culturally, she had few options. As a woman, she needed a man in order to survive, and no respectable man was going to marry a woman who'd been "married" five times previously. Jesus knew that, not because he was God (though he was), but because he was an observant Jew living in Palestine. He knew his culture. How about the tax collectors and sinners who came to him? What evidence to we have that they changed their lives after their encounter with Jesus? None. In Luke 2 we see John baptizing people, answering the question "what should we do in order to be saved (recognized as covenant-abiding)?" The answers have nothing to do with life change; as a matter of fact, the assumption is exactly the opposite. He tells the tax collector to only take the tax that's due. He doesn't tell the Roman Soldier, the brutal, vicious occupiers of God's land and oppressors of God's covenant people, to leave and never return. He tells the Roman Soldier to be nice. Incredible.
ReplyDeleteWhat is his response? Sometimes he tells a person to "go and sin no more," and sometimes he doesn't. Jesus seems to be very aware of the whole context. Back to tax collectors: they were the biggest sinners in Israel. They were more hated than the prostitutes. The only reason people didn't kill them on sight is that the Romans made it illegal to do so, punishable by crucifixion. We only see one tax collector leave his profession in response to an encounter with Jesus, yet the Gospels imply that he eats with them all the time. Why does the Bible not record a mass exodus from the tax collecting business? Because Jesus apparently didn't require it. How about the woman in John 8? He tells her to go and leave her life of sin, AFTER he tells her that he doesn't condemn her. Importantly, it's JESUS who says this to her; that's the whole point of the story. See, the crowd wanted her dead because she disgusted them. Do you think she chose prostitution? Of course she didn't. She was probably forced into it after her husband died, or because she was sold into slavery by her relatives to pay off a debt (quite common in the first century). The point I'm making is that there's a story there. There's history there. Nobody does anything for no reason. Jesus knew this. She has Jesus' non-judgemental acceptance; only then can he issue the instruction to leave the life she's living. What a powerful example for us. How about the woman who washes Jesus' feet in Luke 7:36-47? The religious people Jesus is eating with are disgusted by her. They know her reputation, and wonder if Jesus does because he's not treating her the way he ought to. Instead, Jesus tells them a story about the way forgiveness works for God, that it is indeed based on behavior, but works exactly the OPPOSITE way you'd expect it to. The more stuff there is to forgive, the more abundantly forgiveness flows. The harder a person is to love, the more God loves him or her. The catharsis? He says, "your sins are forgiven." Not "change your life so God will love you." His parting words: "go in peace; your faith has saved you."
Does Jesus distinguish between the sin and the sinner? I think he does. Importantly, he saves his most withering criticism for the religious elite, who he seems to view as being in much greater danger than the sinner, the tax collector or the prostitute. Jesus seems to work differently than most of us do; he has great love and patience for the most profoundly broken people all around him, and very little tolerance for the most observantly religious, precisely because they are intolerant and exclusive. They've turned God's covenant people into a exclusive holiness club for only a select few. God had already made his choice, and the emphasis was on who was "in" and who was "out." That's EXACTLY what we do in our churches right now, and the result is that many, many of God's beloved never experience a relationship with him.
ReplyDeleteThis has been a long response, I know. I'm sure people are going to disagree strongly, and that's okay. It's a necessary discussion. The thing about mercy is that it's not intuitive. You'll never get it by just thinking hard about how to do it right. It's like quantum mechanics. In Newtonian physics everything makes sense, right? Objects stay at rest unless acted on by a non-zero force. Force itself is equal to mass times acceleration. Actions and reactions are equal, opposite and collinear. Then Einstein screwed it all up with Special Relativity, in which he postulated that the speed of light is the same for all observers in all frames of reference. How can that be true? It is. He postulated that mass increases, time dilates and length contracts at speeds approaching light. How can that be true? It is. Mercy is like that. It's always given to those who don't deserve it. The "not deserving" part is the sole requirement of receiving it; it is the sine qua non. Paul takes up this very issue in Romans 5:8, where he says that "while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." Our behavior can never stand between us and God; the Good News is better than that. Our hearts can stand between us and God for sure, but that's a whole different discussion than sin management, isn't it? Yes it is. Then we have to love people as we find them. We have to encounter the pain and brokenness that motivates bad behavior with grace, knowing that God alone knows the whole story.
My litmus test for the Good News? That it's better than anything I can conceive of. That I need a revelation from the Holy Spirit to get it, because I'll never get my feeble mind around it. It seems totally unfair and includes all the wrong people. That's when I know that it includes me too. Only God could conceive of a grace so profound that it would include me.