“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.” (Matthew 5:7)
This beatitude is again one that seems rather obvious. God is merciful and so human beings are to be merciful. If they are merciful, then other humans will show them mercy and God will reward them with mercy. However, this is simply not the meaning of this beatitude. That interpretation means that people only receive mercy because they show mercy which is another way of saying that God rewards people according to their works. There is an element of truth that merciful people do receive mercy from others, but we must be careful how far we take that too. Jesus was perfectly merciful and yet He was persecuted in life and killed while thousands mocked Him. Perhaps we have lost the idea of what mercy really is.
The standard of mercy is God’s mercy, especially as shown through Christ. We learn about that mercy in Scripture and then as we see it worked in and through true believers, which means it is an expression of the mercy of God. We need to go to Scripture to get at the main idea of mercy. “For He says to Moses, “I WILL HAVE MERCY ON WHOM I HAVE MERCY, AND I WILL HAVE COMPASSION ON WHOM I HAVE COMPASSION.” 16 So then it does not depend on the man who wills or the man who runs, but on God who has mercy. 17 For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, “FOR THIS VERY PURPOSE I RAISED YOU UP, TO DEMONSTRATE MY POWER IN YOU, AND THAT MY NAME MIGHT BE PROCLAIMED THROUGHOUT THE WHOLE EARTH.” 18 So then He has mercy on whom He desires, and He hardens whom He desires” (Romans 9:15-18).
It is obvious from Romans 9:15-19 that mercy is an act of God that comes from Himself and is not based on the qualifications that one must obtain. God shows mercy on whom He will have mercy. In the context Paul is showing why God could love Jacob and hate Esau before they had done any good or bad. His argument is that God will show mercy on whom He will have mercy. In other words, mercy is not something that God be obliged to show or it would not be mercy. God has mercy on those He desires which is to say there is no obligation on God’s part to show mercy. He shows mercy because He is merciful and He shows mercy at His sovereign pleasure.
Another part of the sovereignty of God in this is to show that God hardens whom He desires. We have to wrestle with these hard issues in the biblical text or we are not being faithful to Scripture and will never understand mercy. The hardening of hearts and showing mercy are both the acts of God based on His own pleasure and desire. Why did God harden Pharaoh? In order to demonstrate His own power and that His name would be proclaimed. This is a very hard teaching, and yet it is as clear as can be in Scripture. Why does this need to be taught and stressed? Simply because it is in Scripture and because there will never be a true understanding of mercy apart from it. This teaches us that mercy is the sovereign prerogative of God and this is clear from the fact that He would be just to harden those He has mercy on. God shows mercy at His mere pleasure and for no other reason at all. That is what Romans 9 teaches us. Mercy is not mercy but justice if we can do something to deserve mercy from God.
We can also learn about mercy from Ephesians 2:1-10. Without quoting the whole section, verses 1-3 teach us that human beings are by nature children of wrath and are dead in trespasses and sin. Verses 4-7 gives us the contrast to that: “But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, 5 even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), 6 and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, 7 so that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.” We must notice that sinners are spiritually dead and deserve wrath. The contrast is with what people deserve and what God does. Verse 4 starts off with the word “but” which is a contrasting word between what has gone before and what is about to be said. Despite what human beings are, God makes them alive together with Christ. That is a shocking statement if we understand how much God hates sin.
How can God take sinners like that and make them alive together with Christ? It is not because the sinners are worthy, but because He shows mercy. Take note again that God does not save sinners because they are worthy or because of what they have done, but rather He shows mercy despite of what they deserve and despite what they have done. God saves because He is rich in mercy. But why is He rich in mercy? It is because of His great love with which He loved them. Notice that the text does not say that He loved them because of anything in them, but because of His great love with which He loved us. God loves sinners because God loves God. It is with this great love which flows within the Trinity that God loves sinners. God’s love is moved within Himself and for Himself rather than the merit of human beings. It is because of that He is able to love sinners and show mercy to them.
I John 4:7-8 points out something that is a fairly obvious but still much neglected point. There is no love apart from that which comes from God. “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. 8 The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love.” Verse 8 tells us that God is love, or in other words God exists in love. We know that God is triune and so the fact that God is love points to the fact that love flows between the members of the Trinity. Since God is self-existent His love flows within Himself and does not need any other energy or motive other than Himself. He is love. Verses 7-8 also tell us that no human being has true love other than those that know God. Only those that are born of God and know God have true love. That is utterly shocking to some people as they see how nice some unbelievers are, but niceness and love are not the same thing. A person can be very nice out of self-righteous motives and out of self-love. But true love is shown only because of the God who lives and works in His people.
With the Scriptures above set out and somewhat explained, we can now draw a few conclusions about mercy.
- Mercy is a sovereign act of God
- God is perfectly just to show mercy or to harden hearts
- Mercy cannot be earned in any way or to any degree
- There is utterly no obligation upon God to show mercy
- Mercy flows from the love of God
- Love is also sovereign dispensed by God
- No one who deserves the wrath of God deserves the smallest bit of the love and mercy of God
- No human being can show true love or mercy apart from being a child of God
In light of the truths above, we need to go back and examine our beatitude. “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy” (Matthew 5:7). We can know for sure that people are not blessed because they are merciful in the sense that they are given blessings because they run around showing mercy to others. The interpretation of this verse that postulates that heresy makes salvation out to be a work. What we must gain from studying the character of God is that human beings can only show true mercy if it is out of a true love for God and our neighbor. No human being has any true love and true mercy unless that human being has been born of God and knows God.
What we must also see is that in our day mercy ministries are seen as relieving the plight of those without certain physical items. That may indeed be a part of mercy, but anyone can do that whether believer or atheist. Mercy is seen in its highest form in the spiritual realm. It matters little of a person’s financial status, all are dead in sins and are by nature children of wrath. It is no mercy to a person if we give them food and clothing and hide the true nature of God and of the Gospel from them. The social gospel is still alive and well in its activity. Professing believers do run around and think that they are doing Christian ministry simply because they are giving people without much income things to help them. Again, that may have a place, but without the true Gospel we are not helping people in the long run. We must be like Jesus in this regard. After he healed a man, He told him this: “Behold, you have become well; do not sin anymore, so that nothing worse happens to you” (John 5:14).
Mercy is the attribute of God by which He helps those who cannot help themselves and no one else can either. By definition mercy is helping the helpless or those who are without other help. It is the aspect of love that reaches the helpless. Men and women are truly helpless since they are dead in their sin and trespasses. They are wandering around in spiritual darkness living as without God in the world. True mercy addresses their spiritual state. True mercy will tell them what the true mercy of God is. Anything less is, well, merciless. Unless we tell people of their true spiritual state and of the nature of true mercy, we are being merciless to them. According to our text, that would be demonstrative evidence that we are without true mercy ourselves. How blessed those are that show true mercy as it reflects the mercy of God.
God Loves... Himself 
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