The Quality of Mercy

The prophet came to the King of Israel and said, "Strengthen your position and see what must be done, because next spring the king of Aram will attack you again."--1Kings 20:22

I have the hardest time understanding mercy. By its very nature, mercy implies the principle of subjection: I cannot show mercy unless the other party is under my power. I know that You are merciful, gracious and compassionate, and slow to anger (Joel 2:13). I know You save men purely on the basis of your mercy (Titus 3:5) and you delight in doing so (Micah 7:8). I also know that You command me to demonstrate mercy to others (Micah 6:8, Luke 6:36, Matthew 5:7). But, then, there are those times....

Like in 1Kings 20, when you commanded Israel's King Ahab to attack the blasphemous King of Aram and he did, but then showed mercy to him at the end. Ahab recognized the attacking king of Aram as his brother, sympathized with him, and You punished him for it. And You certainly did not show mercy on the Pharisees in Matthew 23. You called them every name in the book, Your book, condemning them for their own blasphemous behavior. You did not immediately destroy the pharisees, but the Romans did about thirty years later, when they destroyed the temple, leaving only the rabbis. These two instances of withheld mercy tie the Old Testament to the New Testament, bridging the old law and the new, the supremacy of the law to the gospel of grace. I have to find some common ground here.

I think your lesson in the application of mercy lies here: Both the King of Aram and the pharisees denied God's power: the King in words, the pharisees in action. That was bad enough, but they had something else in common. They also both held positions whereby they each wielded authority over others and, if they went unchecked, would continue to harm them. The Tanach, my Hebrew Old Testament, says this: "Mercy to the evil is in itself a manifestation of cruelty, for the surviving evildoer will cause others to suffer." This is the principle you define in 1Kings 20:22 above when Your prophet tells Ahab that, if he doesn't eradicate the evil before him, it will return.

If this idea had remained confined to Old Testament judgement, I might not consider it so compelling, but it didn't. You continued to demonstrate it in the New Testament when you specifically accuse and condemn the pharisees for corrupting those under their care (Matt 23:15). Like Ahab, I also recognize my brotherhood with some who blaspheme your Name. Mercy, however, belongs to You and my sympathy and feelings for someone against whom You send me to war cannot supersede Your clear instruction. Mercy comes from and belongs to you.

I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion."--Exodus 33:19 and Romans 9:15.

Caught

Many years ago, when my youngest son was a toddler, he fell down the stairs. The stairway was a short one, only seven steps, but a long and dangerous enough way for a little one. When it happened, I was standing at the bottom talking to someone with my back turned but, as he teetered over the edge, I turned around just in time to see him, reached out both arms, and scooped him up in mid-air, before he had a chance to hurt himself. I have thought of this often since then, as an allegory for my relationship to You, and am thinking about it again today.

Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?--Psalm 139:6

Listen to me, O house of Jacob, all you who remain in the house of Israel, you whom I have upheld since your were conceived, and have carried you since your birth.--Isaiah 46:3

You have carried me since my birth, and even before. You, who are mighty, created me, and before I was flesh, created the idea of me. You, who know the end from the beginning, declared men good, and watched as our ruin unfolded, carry us as children and catch us before we hit bottom.

Remember the former things, the things from long ago. I am God and there is no other. I am God and there is none like me. I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times what is still to come. I say, my purpose will stand and I will do all that I please.--Isaiah 46:9-10

Yes, you catch me. In fact you have always caught me, still catch me, will always catch me. I am simultaneously falling through mid-air and lying safe in your arms because time, the linear progression of events, occurs for me but not for You. You live in eternity, where time has no meaning, where events exist side-by-side, all equally in the present. You have always created. You have always declared yourself God. You have always provided rescue. You always return in glory. The beginning and the end occur simultaneous in Your sight.

This is one of the ways I know You are God. Your timelessness is incomprehensible to me. For me, life unfolds, but for You, it is always full present as seed, as emergent plant, in bud, in full-blown flower, and as withered remains. I sometimes express this as faithfulness, but this concept infers that you wait for some event, then act. For You, the precursor, the event, Your action, and its result occur at once without beginning or end. In reality, Your actions, from before creation until after your return full of glory, exist eternally beside all Your deeds through what we know as history, above, around, and through time. You will do all you please because You have already done it.

This is how I can rest in You. My future already exists in Your hands. For good or ill, You already know it, have worked it into your plan. Since You either will or allow all events, You surround me like air. You not only catch, but propel. I can close my eyes, pretend You are not there, and leap into the frightful darkness, but why? You own that wilderness, too. I am never outside your sovereign power.

Yes, I am caught, caught in the only place I can rest.

Glad Thorns

One of Your gifts to me is to show me my sins. As I am getting older, my physical limitations increasingly show themselves, but whether these rise to attention or not, my desire to do wrong remains. Part of Your mercy lies in the revelation of my weakness in the face of Your holiness. I think so often that Your mercy lies in rescue, but today I am not so sure. Today I think that a great deal of your mercy lies in Your constancy and in reminders that I am a human and You are God.

Every morning, I measure my new day against You. You are not in unflagging desert heat. You are not in the friendly sun. Cool clouds like today's do not bring You. You show Yourself only in startling fire, in thunderous rolling clouds. I stretch out relaxed flesh under sweet, mild days and in those times, am fully human, but You come only in ferocity of Spirit.

To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassing great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my side, a messenger of Satan, to torment me.--2Cor 12:7

Paul said that the thorn in his side was a messenger of Satan, but it also came as a gift; he knew torment because it brought him to his all-too-human knees before You in constant humility. I don't like that, either. I want to stand before You, to recall my supremacy on earth, my rule over creation. You want me to kneel and acknowledge You, Creator of all, and supreme over all You made, including me.

When You made Adam and gave him dominion over all other creatures, you put him in direct conflict with Satan, to whom you had already given power on the earth. You always knew that Satan's resulting temptations would reveal man's most repulsive parts and thereby show Your greatness in sustaining and forgiving. All in Your plan. It was always all in Your plan.

So I glory in my weakness. Every time I hurt, I recall You do not. Every time I sin, I know You do not. Every time I miss the mark, I remember where to look to aim better next time. Every time the storm comes, I remember Your glory and ferocity in it. In the end, I do not want You to be like me. I want You strong and powerful, but once I acknowledge that You are, that difference lasts for all time. I will always be weak before you, but my condition's corollary is that I know You as You truly are. My thorns become my allies in this.

The Possibility of Perfection

I've been thinking about getting a new car. In doing this, my eye rarely travels to the middle of the pack, but to either end, where the eco-friendly transportation resides on the one end, and the whiz-bang, go-fast roadster revs up on the other. But I will not buy either, not only because they are both too expensive, which they generally are, but because they are both basically flawed, designed to fail. The one has batteries as an integral part, which will inevitably need to be replaced before the car, and the other has turbos, which also have a short life relative to the machine they are designed to power. In the middle, the boring middle, sits the car I will eventually buy. I know instinctively that obvious flaws do not result in wise choices. If I can find it, I want a perfect car.

So do You.

Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.--Matthew 5:48

You gave no wiggle room in this. You made us to be perfect and when we proved our failure, You came wearing our own flesh both to re-make our perfection and to show us what it looks like. You have proven the perfect man so that we follow you back into it.

For those God foreknew He also predestined to be confirmed to the likeness of His Son so that He might be the firstborn of many brothers.--Romans 8:29

You came as a perfect human and if I have been called, my first calling lay in living like You did. You sympathize with my weakness and forgive when I fail, but do not share those weaknesses and do not accept when I yield to them. You show me that I can live without sinning.

We know that in all things, God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose.--Romans 8:28

Life without sin--this is the good, this is the purpose to which You call me. You do not expect me to be a perfect spirit, like You. You do expect me to be sinless man, the man you created in Eden. The desire to achieve this and the actions that follow it define love and You help and support me as I work toward it.

So, I cling to You and the sweet helps You have provided--Your Word, prayer, humility, obedience, and all the rest. As I take steps toward You, You reach out to me from the cross, affirming with Your own flesh and blood that I am worth the effort. Though perfection seems impossible, it's not that complicated. Much simpler than either a Prius or a Jaguar that taunt me in spite of their flaws.

My Father's Gifts

My dad is gone now, but when I was a girl, he taught me to delight in beauty and adventure. He could turn a perfectly ordinary day into an event simply by offering to take us for a ride. We always knew what that meant--he had a plan to transport us to one of the world's treasures. He had found a garden in extravagant bloom, or a grassy hillside perfect for juvenile tumbling, or a hidden cabin, or a valley falling away from a blue mountain. Part of his charm lay in that he never revealed our destination ahead of time but, when we arrived, he simply flung his arms as though he conducted this private symphony for us alone saying, "Here it is. I made this just for you. Isn't it wonderful?"

Of course, Dad never made any of those destinations. You did. He did show me something important about You in the process, however. You continually give. You lay something in my lap every day, something I never imagine even existed. And then I do the same thing to Your gift as I did to Dad's; I take if for granted. I underestimate it. I shrug it off. I sometimes even ruin it. I never value it as highly as it deserves. You continually do what Dad did on a grand, universal scale. You give perfect gifts to broken men. You, however, have additional instructions.

Each one should use whatever gifts he received to serve others, faithfully administering God's grace in its various forms.--1Peter 4:10

So I get these wonderful gifts from you--life, the ability to love, skills, knowledge, health, strength--and I have to give them away to other broken men. Have You seen the mess we make of them? You love me perfectly, but I cannot love anyone else perfectly. I give my pitted and tarnished love to someone else, they add their own measure of imperfection, then pass on the increasingly marred product, and so on. Entropy in its saddest form.

I don't want to give anything away. I can't see any possible result but hurt and disappointment. I am stuck in my own skin, able to experience nothing except from my own perspective. My own experience is the only one I can ever completely know, but You want me to crawl out of myself and walk in someone else's shoes. You want me to share myself completely with someone I know will disappoint. You give me gifts and tell me to count each one for the sole purpose of sharing it.

Do not think of yourselves more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment in accordance with the faith given you. In Christ, we who are many form one body and each member belongs to all the others.--Romans 12:3,6

This, I think, is one of the truths in this: believers share a basic identity in one another. You have ordained this. I cannot divorce myself from other believers when they disappoint me because we are joined in You and by You. My husband, Dave, says that we all tend to think ourselves better than we are. This is true. We also expect other believers to be better than they are. You know this, too, of course, and have provided for it.

So, like my dad, you pour gifts into imperfect, ungrateful vessels. Then, you tell me to pour them into other imperfect vessels with the promise that, if I do so faithfully, You will not only continue to give, but You will renew and replace what we have lost or ruined in our imperfection. Your gifts came perfectly from You and are transferred among us in ever perfect condition, not because we made them so, but because You do.

Creation's Prerequisite

Some days feel like Eden, thick and pulsing richly with life, dripping with dew, heady with flowers. Creation feels new on these days, and I feel like I could still walk side by side with You, experiencing what it means to be created in Your image. You even gave me my own dominion, a hierarchy of creation that mirrors Yours. My flesh bears evidence of Your Spirit. You made me a fleshly replica of what exists in the heavens, gave me rule over a hierarchy of beings existing side by side with another hierarchy, one of pure spirit, but both ruled absolutely by You.

I look like You, but I am not You. I am like You as my own reflection is like me. Image without essence, my flesh a powerless reflection of Your Spirit. All the parts are present, but they don't function independently. Even my own dominion exists only to reflect Your vast one. Did Adam and Eve, when they walked with you in Eden, recognize their resemblance to You? Is that when it all began to go wrong?

This may be why You created wisdom before anything else, the same wisdom of which fear of You is the beginning. Without fear of you, I will take my own kingship too seriously, raise myself too high. I look like You, and intellectually know that I am not You, but practically, when I survey the vast kingdom You have given me, and the strength and intellect, I forget who You are. That is when I sin.

Still, You gave me life and want me to live it and, on days like this, physical life seems a richer creation than spirit. I do not imagine that spirits smell or feel or taste. You made a day like this for tasting, but I need wisdom to put this life in its intended context. You did not make me human, the crown of creation, to deny life. The life You made in me is good; You said so. You did, however, make me to deny sin.

When I consider the heavens, the work of your hands, the moon and the stars that you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him? You made him a little lower than the angels and crowned him with glory and honor. You made him ruler over the works of your hands. You put everything under his feet.--Psalm 8:3-6

Does not wisdom call out? "The Lord brought me forth as the first of his works, before his deeds of old; I was appointed from eternity, from the beginning, before the world began."--Proverbs 8:1,22

Time Enough

We are so completely in Your hands. I am old enough to look at my life from a distance, to see it as a tableau I played out like Shakespeare's player who "struts and frets upon a stage." I can see each place where the road forked, and each time I chose, well or poorly, and I see the results of those choices only now, from a distance. Too often, they hurt the track of my own life, but the deepest regrets come from new sight into the instances where my choices have hurt the lives of others.

Yesterday, while tucking a young boy into the mothering place under my arm who still wears the sweetness that wells up during ages in single digits, I learned that I missed something precious. As quiet dawn brought us words about Your creation and his own purpose before you, I saw small flashes of first understanding. I saw in that new day the rising of your truth in the boy's face.

I taught my own sons a little about numbers and letters, and I told stories, but I never told them about You. Never. Not in the fragile early morning or tender bedtime. Never when petting a puppy or planting a flower. Never when throwing a ball or giving a bath. How much more the wonder of your immense plan than Dr. Seuss or Tom Sawyer! And, as a result, my sons' eyes focus earthward rather than heavenward. Kind eyes, but so limited.

Still, You knew all of this from before time began. You knew I would fail my sons. You knew they would flounder in their blindness regarding You. You could have called me so much earlier, led me to take them into that sweet place where even hens gather their chicks, and showed me how to sing them Your sweet song. But You didn't.

You did call me, however. Much later. And now I see what we all missed, the transfer of holy knowledge from generation to generation, the ignition of faith before the taint of vast regret. Still, I know You and I know there is still time enough. In You, there is always time enough. And in You, I know what I must do, even now.

Before I was afflicted, I went astray, but now I obey your word. It was good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn your decrees.--Psalm 119:67,71
In Him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of Him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of His will in order that we, who were the first to hope in Christ, might be for the praise of His glory.--Ephesians 1:12.