Praise be to the LORD,
for he showed his wonderful love to me
when I was in a besieged city.
In my alarm I said,
“I am cut off from your sight!”
Yet you heard my cry for mercy
when I called to you for help.
(Psalm 31:21-22)
I’ve been thinking a bit over the weekend about mercy. About how the way God meters it out doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense, and about how I think we so often don’t account for it or expect it.
I was reading 2 Samuel 24, where David has sinned by taking a census of the number of fighting men available. It’s not the most cheery story, but I was struck by a number of things in it.
Firstly, it struck me that God’s mercy didn’t depend on the Israelites not messing up. That seems like an obvious thing to say, but so often I think we fall into the trap of thinking that God will be merciful if we somehow manage to convince him that we are worthy of it. So often my prayers for mercy come from a place of ‘God, I’ve done all you said, now please help me.’ It’s like God is some fluffy, yet unpredictable figure who needs me to put on a good front. God in this passage is so not like that. We’re told his anger burns against Israel, he sends a plague where 70,000 people die. He doesn’t skirt round their sin and even though he acts in mercy, there are still consequences. Even in this mess, David still affirms a key truth – ‘Let us fall into the hands of the Lord, for his mercy is great, but do not let me fall into the hands of men.’ It seems that, even in his wrath, David knows that God is ultimately just and righteous. At the end of the story, David prays and humbles himself and takes responsibility for the sin. God hears his prayer and stops the plague.
In some senses, the story leaves me with more questions than it answers. Why did God wait until 70,000 people had died – that doesn’t strike me as particularly merciful? Surely counting some men isn’t that bad (after all, we all like to know how far our resources will stretch, don’t we?) And what would have happened if David hadn’t done the repenting thing? Surely decimating his chosen people was going to create problems down the line?
As I was musing over all of this, I thought about situations today. In many of them, we’ve been taught that we have a loving and merciful God, but the evidence doesn’t seem to back that up. Maybe we haven’t lost 70,000 mates to a virilent plague, but there are so many situations where we cry and we plead for mercy and yet those cries seem to go unheard. Even more frustratingly, often there isn’t even a traceable reason for this, unlike in David’s story. And then, we hear about people becoming Christians on their deathbeds, after lives of crime etc. Surely we’d be justified in the odd ‘that’s not fair.’
I was musing about all of this, and I kinda came to the conclusion that I’m glad it doesn’t make sense to me. I’m so aware that I can only ever see a situation from a 2-dimensional perspective, whereas God has the whole picture, the whys and hows and whens. He sees all the possible outcomes. On reflection, I’m not sure I’d like that role.
Trusting that he is merciful is hard, especially when it seems we’ve been waiting in that beseiged city for a long time. But if we don’t have that hope, what do we have? What’s the point in keeping going at all?
It’s at times like this that I remember one of my favourite verses in Hebrews:
“Now that we know what we have—Jesus, this great High Priest with ready access to God—let’s not let it slip through our fingers. We don’t have a priest who is out of touch with our reality. He’s been through weakness and testing, experienced it all—all but the sin. So let’s walk right up to him and get what he is so ready to give. Take the mercy, accept the help.” (Hebrews 4:14-16 MSG).
I guess we just have to work the rest out as we go along?
