Chapter Six: Merciful
MERCIFUL
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.
MATTHEW 5:7
I was sitting in our city’s downtown library reading a book while I waited for my wife, who was attending a meeting. As I sat there, homeless men began to come in, apparently looking for a warm spot on a cold, windy night. All of them were unkempt and, yes, a bit smelly. My reaction was, What are these dirty, smelly men doing in our nice middle-class library?
I was not merciful that night. In fact, I was unmerciful.
The first four character traits of the Beatitudes —poverty in spirit, mourning, meekness, and hungering and thirsting after righteousness —all address our internal character and our relationship to God. Here in this Beatitude, “Blessed are the merciful,” Jesus began to address our relationship with other people.
There are three words that are very close in meaning, in both Greek and English. The English words are mercy, pity, and compassion, and they seem to be used somewhat interchangeably. However, the word Jesus used in Matthew 5:7, translated as merciful in our English Bibles, is stronger than pity or compassion; it denotes not only feelings but action.
We see this in Jesus’ familiar parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30-37). In answer to a lawyer’s question —“And who is my neighbor?” (verse 29) —Jesus told this parable about a man who had been beaten and robbed. In the parable, a priest and a Levite ignored the beaten man, but the Good Samaritan “had compassion” (verse 33). He then went on to put his compassion into action (verses 34-35):
He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, “Take care of him, and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.”
After telling the parable, Jesus asked the lawyer, “Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” (verse 36). The lawyer answered, “The one who showed him mercy” (verse 37).
Note the subtle distinction between compassion and mercy. The Samaritan had compassion and then showed mercy.
Mercy expresses itself in two general areas: In the temporal sense, mercy seeks to meet the physical needs of others, as the Good Samaritan did in Jesus’ parable. The second way mercy expresses itself is granting forgiveness to those who have sinned against us. This is an important expression of mercy, and we will address it, but first let’s consider what the Bible says about showing compassion and mercy to those in need.
Provision for the poor was part of the Old Testament law. Leviticus 19:9-10 says,
When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap your field right up to its edge, neither shall you gather the gleanings after your harvest. And you shall not strip your vineyard bare, neither shall you gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard. You shall leave them for the poor and for the sojourner: I am the LORD your God.
Psalm 41:1 says,
Blessed is the one who considers the poor!
In the day of trouble the LORD delivers him.
Again we see concern for the poor addressed in Isaiah 58:7, 10:
Is [fasting] not to share your bread with the hungry
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover him,
and not to hide yourself from your own flesh? . . .
If you pour yourself out for the hungry
and satisfy the desire of the afflicted,
then shall your light rise in the darkness
and your gloom be as the noonday.
The apostle Paul addresses this principle in Galatians 6:9-10:
And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up. So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith.
The most significant section of Scripture on the subject of giving is 2 Corinthians 8–9. When we teach on the general subject of giving, most of us use these two chapters as foundational passages on both the motivation and practical expressions of giving. While we often apply these principles to giving to our church or mission organizations, Paul actually wrote these chapters to encourage the Corinthian believers to give to people they had never met: the poor saints in Jerusalem who were suffering persecution because of their trust in Jesus.
We see, then, that there is abundant evidence in both the Old and New Testaments that we are to be merciful and compassionate to those in need, whether at home or abroad. So when Jesus said, “Blessed are the merciful,” surely He would have had in mind mercy to those who are physically poor or needy.
But what about the spiritual needs of the poor and needy? Suppose we were able, by the generous giving of all Christians, to raise multitudes of men, women, and children out of abject poverty into a livable and decent standard of living. If we were to do that to the neglect of their eternal destiny, we would have done them a fatal disservice. As Jesus said, “For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? For what can a man give in return for his soul?” (Mark 8:36-37).
During a number of years in the early to mid-twentieth century, there arose an unnecessary dichotomy between the physical and the spiritual needs of people. Many liberal churches abandoned the biblical gospel in favor of what was called the “social gospel,” or meeting the physical needs of the poor and needy. Unfortunately, many evangelical churches, fearful of drifting in that direction, abandoned all efforts to meet the physical needs of people. Clearly the Bible does not support such distinctions. Rather, we are to address both physical and spiritual needs.
Peter and John are good examples of this. On their way to the temple they encountered a man, crippled from birth, who asked alms of them. Peter responded,
“I have no silver and gold, but what I do have I give to you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk!” And he took him by the right hand and raised him up, and immediately his feet and ankles were made strong.
ACTS 3:6-7
Peter’s response has become a well-known and classic statement through the centuries. Some have misused his words as a rationale for meeting only the physical needs of people; but the fact is, although Peter did heal the man’s feet and ankles —meeting his most apparent physical need —he did it in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Later in the temple, he used the man’s healing as an occasion to preach the gospel (Acts 3:11-26). For Peter and John, there was no separation between the true gospel and the physical needs of the crippled man.
The greatest expression of mercy is God’s forgiveness of our sins and bringing us into His kingdom. We saw in chapter 4 that Paul describes us as having been spiritually dead, slaves, and objects of God’s wrath (Ephesians 2:1-3). We were not just undeserving of God’s favor. We were ill-deserving. We justly deserved God’s wrath.
Then Paul uses one of his favorite words of contrast: “But God, being rich in mercy” (Ephesians 2:4). God is described as a merciful God in numerous Old Testament Scripture passages (see, for example, Exodus 34:6; Nehemiah 9:31; Psalm 103:8; 145:8). These expressions of God’s mercy are all in the context of our sin and God’s judgment. And we are to show mercy in the light of God’s mercy to us.
I promised in chapter 4 that we would address the classic passage on forgiveness as an expression of mercy. That is the parable of the unmerciful servant, Matthew 18:23-35. The occasion of the parable is Peter’s question to Jesus, “Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?” (verse 21).
Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy-seven times” (verse 22). Essentially, as often as you are sinned against, you are to forgive.
Then Jesus tells the story of a servant who owed his master ten thousand talents (about 6 billion dollars today). The servant was not able to pay, and out of pity, the master forgave him that debt. But when that servant went away, he saw a fellow servant who owed him a hundred denarii (about $12,000 today). The fellow servant pleaded for patience from the first servant, but that servant refused. Now $12,000 is not a little sum, but compared to $6,000,000,000, it is a trifle.
The point of the parable is that we are all ten-thousand-talent debtors to God. Not a day passes without each of us sinning many times a day, either in thought, word, deed, or motive. The reason we do not recognize this is that we think of sin only in terms of the flagrant sins out in society. We do not see our impatience, our short bursts of anger, or our verbal put-downs of other people as sin.
Moreover, the magnitude of our sin is not measured by its effects on other people but by its assault upon the infinite majesty and holiness of God. However grievous another person’s sin against us is, or how often they sin against us, we are to forgive because we have been forgiven such an enormous debt of sin by God. Furthermore, as Jesus said at the end of the parable (verse 35), we are to forgive from our hearts —not superficially but genuinely —as we consider how much we have been forgiven.
Note the consequences of not forgiving in the parable. The master was angry with the servant, in fact calling him wicked, and delivered him over to the jailers. This is a parable, and not every detail can be likened to real life, so we cannot describe what being delivered over to the jailer might have looked like in real life. But it does teach us the seriousness of not forgiving those who sin against us.
This parable raises the question, what does it mean to forgive? Consider the following Scriptures:
I, I am he
who blots out your transgressions for my own sake,
and I will not remember your sins.
ISAIAH 43:25
For I will be merciful toward their iniquities,
and I will remember their sins no more.
HEBREWS 8:12
“I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more.” Where there is forgiveness of these, there is no longer any offering for sin.
HEBREWS 10:17-18
The common thought in all three Scriptures is that God no longer remembers our sins. He blots them out, and He never brings them up again.
This is what it means to forgive. We do not remember the sins against us. Someone has pointed out the difference between forgetting and not remembering. We unintentionally forget lots of things —where we put our car keys, and other things like that —but we choose not to remember. We can choose not to replay in our minds the sin of someone else against us. We can choose not to bring up that sin again —either to ourselves, to another person, or to the person who sinned against us. To bring it up again indicates that we have not truly forgiven, or else that we are still struggling to forgive and need to continue working on it, asking God to help us.
Forgiveness usually is not simply an event at one point in time. Even if we have said, “I forgive you,” we often struggle to forgive. Usually the hurts which necessitate forgiveness don’t go away so easily, and we must keep choosing not to remember them.
There is another truth we need to see in order to understand forgiveness. When the master in the parable forgave that enormous debt of ten thousand talents, his net worth was immediately reduced by about 6 billion dollars in today’s currency. The cost to God of forgiving us cannot be measured by money; it is measured in the death of his Son on the cross to pay for our sins. It is an immeasurable cost.
Forgiving costs us. It means we let go of our hurt and resentment and never bring it up again, even to ourselves. And if the offending person is a believer, this means we pray for them, for Jesus said, “But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44). If the offender is an unbeliever, we should pray for his or her salvation.
We have seen the importance of being merciful in both the physical and spiritual realms. How do these two expressions of mercy show humility in action?
Remember my reaction to the homeless men in the library. I was prideful. How dare these men invade our nice, middle-class space? Humility would have genuinely said, “There but for the grace of God go I.” Humility would have thought, Is there anything I can do to help these men? Humility would have recognized that it is the Lord who makes some poor and some rich (or in our case, middle-class). It is the Lord who brings low and who exalts (1 Samuel 2:7). If I am any better off economically or socially than these homeless men, it is all due to the grace of God.
God did convict me of my unmerciful attitude, and I began to think of how my wife and I might show mercy to them. Since at my age I do not have the physical ability to get directly involved, we began to contribute significantly to our local rescue mission, which provides shelter and meals to the homeless in our city.
But the real expression of humility in action comes in forgiving others when they have sinned against us in some way. To forgive others means we regard ourselves as ten-thousand-talent debtors. It means we extend mercy because we have received mercy from God (see Matthew 18:33). Again we see that merciful people are those who are poor in spirit, recognizing that they are not better (and perhaps even worse) than those who sin against them. So as I have said earlier, humility in action begins with being poor in spirit. All the succeeding character traits flow out of that one.