Grace and Mercy

We love grace. It’s unmerited favor. It’s kindness received from God that we did not deserve. In simplistic terms, it’s God being nice to us when we don’t deserve it. We like that. And mercy is pleasant, too. It’s the other side of the same coin. If grace is receiving favor we don’t deserve, mercy is receiving forgiveness instead of the punishment we do deserve. It’s the mirror image, so to speak, but equally nice. So, we stand here on this side of receiving both grace and mercy and we’re glad. What we don't seem to do is understand the negative connotations of grace and mercy.

Paul said, “But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works, otherwise grace is no longer grace” (Rom 11:6). Grace is not earned. “Now to the one who works, his wage is not credited as a favor, but as what is due” (Rom 4:4). So the point of grace is that we don’t earn it. God doesn't owe us His kindness. “We maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the Law” (Rom 3:28). Not earned because we can’t earn it. That’s a somewhat unexpected and even harsh reality. We cannot earn it. Left to our own devices we’re incapable. Grace is unmerited which makes it grace and despite our popular ideas about being “good enough,” we cannot be. The very existence of grace is an indictment of our own abilities to save ourselves.

Mercy carries a similar indictment. Mercy is compassion, leniency, or restraint in imposing punishment shown to an offender. Mercy presupposes we are offenders. Mercy assumes there is a need for justice and if mercy is not applied, we will rightly face punishment. “There will be tribulation and distress for every soul of man who does evil, of the Jew first and also of the Greek” (Rom 2:9). Mercy assumes we’ve earned it. When Paul wrote, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom 3:23), he was explaining the nature of sin. Sin falls short of the glory of God. God’s glory is hidden in our sin. It is, according to Paul, the reason that God is righteously angry with us (Rom 1:18-19). Mercy is necessary because we’ve incurred God’s wrath, a wrath that requires appeasement (Rom 3:25; Heb 2:17; 1 John 2:2; 1 John 4:10) .

We love grace and mercy, and we should. But their goodness is rooted in the reality that we need them desperately. We cannot earn His favor, and we have earned His wrath. If you're going to claim we have earned His kindness and we haven't earned His wrath, you have no need for grace or mercy. Forgetting that reality turns grace into something cheap and mercy into something casual. Worse, it leads us back to the same self confidence and self righteousness that stirred His anger in the first place. As people who stand only because of His grace and mercy, we ought to remember why they are so good.