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A God of Mercy or a God of Vengeance: Which would You Choose?

This was originally posted in my Yahoo! 360 blog, Oct 16, 2006:

I want to talk about mercy in my blog today, and to do that I want too relate a story that didn't get much coverage in the news. In Iraq, a country that the USA is currently still trying to help become a democratic nation – maybe even against their own will, a little known murder took place last week. A Greek Orthodox priest was kidnapped and found three days later with his head severed from his body. The reason given by the merciful Muslims that did the kind and compassionate act upon an obvious infidel, was the Pope's recent comments about the need for more dialog between religions. If you will remember, the Pope quoted a 12th century Emperor's statement to a Muslim scholar that he was debating. Obviously this evil priest was responsible for the Pope's statement, and therefore his compassionate kidnappers had every right to behead him for not preventing the Pope's thoughtless comments. Oh yea, and the $350,000 US will obviously assuage the anger of Allah.

Hopefully you are not fooled by my sarcasm. I fail to see much in the way of mercy ever exercised by Muslims. They seem to always be filled with rage about something, and killing – the more gruesome the better – seems to be their first thoughts. Now I know that there are moderate Muslims out there (somewhere), but it was the moderates that you see protesting and threatening Christians on a daily basis. It was the moderates that had proverbial cows over the Mohamed cartoons. It was the so called moderates that were torching Christian churches and terrorizing Christians three months ago when it was a story. 50,000 Christians have been murdered in Darfu, does anyone care? No! Its just a bunch of African Christians and the media conveniently omits that little tidbit of information. (the media and the general public would care even less if they knew these people were Christians) If Islam is a religion of peace, I'm still wanting to see examples of it somewhere in the world. As I continue to investigate Islam (from an apologetics perspective) I continue to see more and more examples of Islam's so called peace being exercised, and way too much of it never reported.

If you really want to understand mercy, you need not look any further than the Amish response to the murderer that executed 5 young children, having intended to rape them first, but didn't get the chance (thank you, Jesus). It was their understanding of God's mercy that helped them to be able to respond to to this horrific event with a forgiveness that can only come from God Himself. Allah would have never permit this. He would have demanded vengeance, and the murderer's wife and children would most likely have been murdered as a 'justifiable action', like somehow these poor people were responsible.

So just what exactly is 'mercy'? If God is merciful, what does that really mean? The theological definition is that God withholds the punishment that our sins deserve. It assumes need on the part of the person that receives mercy. It also assumes that some one has done something so terrible and that they simply cannot make amends for the wrongs that they have done.

The mercy of God is His goodness and love shown to mankind even when mankind does not deserve such treatment. Mercy stresses the faithfulness of God despite man's lack of faithfulness. God's mercy is free of obligation and is given according to His sovereign choice.

Rom 9:15-16 says,
For he says to Moses, "I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion." It does not, therefore, depend on man’s desire or effort, but on God’s mercy.
God sovereignly withholds the punishment that our sins deserve, relieves us of the misery caused by sin, and provides us with that which we don’t deserve.

Duet 4:31 says,
For the LORD your God is a merciful God; He will not abandon or destroy you or forget the covenant with your forefathers, which He confirmed to them by oath.
Mercy requires that God not abandon us to ourselves. We may for get Him, but He will never forget us! And then Ps 103:10 says of God,
He does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities.
We don't deserve the treatment that God extends to us. Eph 2:4-5 says,
But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved.
Undeserving, God reaches out to a people that rejects Him on a continual basis. He extends an unmerited grace to an undeserving people. And finally Tit 3:4-7 says,
But when the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, He saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of His mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out on us generously through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that, having been justified by His grace, we might become heirs having the hope of eternal life.
This is God's mercy towards the people whom He made and the people whom He loves.

There are two rather obvious consequences to God's mercy. First, His mercy is our source of salvation. Salvation is impossible without God's mercy being first extended to us. Without His mercy, we do not have the ability to reach out to Him nor would He accept us is our current state of sin if we could. God is holy and He cannot have sin in His presence, so why would He accept us? He wouldn't, unless of course, His desire from the beginning was to reach out to us first. And isn't that the way we are as parents? When our kids do wrong, isn't in our hearts to extend them mercy and forgive them, even before we correct them and / or they repent for their sin? The point being that its already in our hearts to forgive them long before they repent.

And I've already stolen the thunder for the second consequence which is that God first loves us while we are sinners, long before we realize that we need Him. First and foremost, God is a God of love and not vengeance. If He was a God of vengeance then none of us could stand before Him, ever! He would never be able to forgive us because our sin would always need to be punished first, and that punishment would require our lives.

But because God is a merciful God, He withholds the punishment our sin demands, and extends to us a way out of our current state of separation from Him. Why, because He has chosen to have a relationship with the people whom He created, even though they do not deserve it.
Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need. (Heb 4:16)

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