Every Blessing is Yours

Years ago I went with my parents on a trip to visit my oldest sister and her family in Dallas, Texas. When it was time to come home, my brother-in-law gave us directions for a “short cut” through town to get to the interstate faster. What a fiasco! I forget all the details now, but the abbreviated version is that it took a whole lot longer to take the short cut than it had taken to come the long way. I was driving and my frustration was building. When we finally got to the highway, I was ready to move. Traffic was light and I was cruising along at seventy-five or eighty miles per hour. I crested a hill, and there was a cop. I slowed down but his lights in my rear view mirror told me I had been nailed. As I recall, I made no excuses -- you just don’t do that when your Dad is sitting next to you. I don’t know what motivated him (perhaps seeing my parents in the car with me and knowing we were from out of state) but he only gave me a warning. This is mercy: not receiving what you obviously deserve.

This is God’s basic disposition toward humanity. We are fallen creatures who are not only born with a sin nature but who also actively carry out the desires of that sin nature. We deserve punishment. God is holy and cannot look upon sin. His justice demands that all sin be punished. His love motivated the mercy that sent Jesus Christ into the world to live as a man, yet without sin, and go to the cross, taking the punishment we deserve. God’s raising Jesus from the dead signaled His acceptance of that sacrifice as full payment for sin, vindicating God’s righteousness in accepting as His own those who put their trust in Christ.

“Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy” sounds like just another version of “what goes around comes around.” And there are certainly other Scriptures that corroborate that thought. The first verse most of us learned in Sunday School, the Golden Rule found in Matthew 7:12 comes to mind: “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” In other words, if you want people to be merciful toward you, then you should show mercy to them.

But the fact is that mercy has already come around to us, and it is that mercy toward us that prompts us to be merciful to others. Why, then, would Jesus say, “Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy”?

I believe it is because of the practical outworking of what mercy means. To not get what we deserve is to be forgiven. If we deserve judgment, that means we owe someone something. It may be restitution if you’ve defrauded someone. It may be time in the penalty box if you’re a hockey player. It may be a fine if you’re caught speeding. If they let us off the hook, like when the cop gave me a warning instead of a ticket, that means they have forgiven us. They have cancelled the debt. This is what God did through Jesus Christ. He forgave us the debt we owed Him for our sin. It is the ultimate “pay it forward” event of all history. Jesus Christ paid the bill for all sin for all time so that whoever might accept His offer would be set free from the debt.

After Jesus gave the Lord’s Prayer as a pattern for how to pray, He said, “For if you forgive others for their transgressions, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, then your Father will not forgive your transgressions.” This seems a bit like a tit for tat situation, another example of “what goes around comes around.” God won’t forgive us if we don’t forgive others. This seems out of character for a God of love and mercy.

What we must remember is that judgment belongs to God. Paul admonished the Romans, “Never take your own revenge, beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, ‘Vengeance is Mine; I will repay,’ says the Lord.” When we fail to forgive, we keep for our own what rightly belongs to God. Do we really think we can do a better job of correcting someone who has offended us than God can? Do we somehow imagine that the grudge we hold punishes them or reproves them? When my children were approaching their teen years, they seemed to fall into this trap when they would have their adolescent spats. I told them the very best thing they could do if they felt their sibling wasn’t treating them right was to forgive because that released God to work in their lives. As long as they were reserving judgment for themselves, they were tying God’s hands from working His best into their sibling. An elder in our church once said that refusing to forgive was like eating rat poison and then wondering why the rat doesn’t die.

After the resurrection Jesus said to His disciples, “If you forgive the sins of any, their sins have been forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they have been retained.” What this appears to say is that if I don’t forgive someone, God won’t forgive them either. But God does not forgive nor withhold forgiveness because we do. All forgiveness by God toward men is based solely on the shed blood of Jesus Christ. Someone who offends me can be forgiven by God whether I forgive him or not. A person’s forgiveness for his own sin is between him and God. If I don’t forgive, the sin that is retained is my sin of unforgiveness. I am still holding on to the debt that is owed to me.