This Book: Justice v Mercy - Exodus 20:1-7

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Before we go any further in this series, we need to address the elephant in the room: many of us really don't like the Old Testament, or even the God of the Old Testament. 

So far, these are some of the things we have seen our holy God do:  

• Banished Adam and Eve from Eden.  
• Sent Cain into exile.  
• Nearly wiped out humanity in a flood.  
• Blasted out of existence the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.  
• Challenged Abraham and Isaac to perform a sacrifice that is going to lead one of them to death.  
• Sent 10 plagues of suffering on the nation of Egypt, climaxing with the death of the eldest son in every family. 
• And in the final heart-rending scene of the Pentateuch, Moses dies just this side of the finish line, because God has forbidden him to enter the promised land.  

We can get hung up in these legitimately challenging acts of God, or flip past it all until we get to the book of Matthew and go, “Oh, thank goodness Jesus is here. Jesus is nice. We like Jesus.” 

Jesus is loving and kind. The Old Testament God looks harsh and uncompromising. Sometimes we think that the New Testament is all about mercy and grace, and the Old Testament is all about justice. Sometimes that justice makes us very uncomfortable.  

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There has always been injustice in our world. (OK, there was like 5 good minutes at the beginning.) Today, we have unprecedented access to everything that is wrong. We can see in almost real time sudden, violent, undeserved death. We can look on our screens straight into the eyes of someone who is simply lying. And we know they're lying. And they must know that we know that they're lying, but they just do it anyway. We live at arm’s reach from bullies, and ideologues, and power brokers who don't care about anything but winning. Their end justifies their means.  

Worse, these days, we far too often hear public figures using the name of Christ to justify their behaviour. 

We want ‘karma’ to catch up with the wrongdoers. For the universe to even out the scoresheet and call them to account. But it seems like karma has taken the year off. So we cry out for systems to be fixed, for people to smarten up, to repent.  

Meanwhile they keep getting away with it.  

We have to look beyond... To God—to God's justice—and understand how God enacts justice, and why.  

Not necessarily an easy answer.  

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God always enacts his justice for the sake of the relationship that he offers us within his covenant.  

The Lord said to Abram, leave your native country, leave your relatives, leave your father's family, go to the land that I will show you. I will make you into a great nation. I will bless you. I will make you famous. You will be a blessing to others. I will bless those who bless you. I will curse those who treat you with contempt and all of the families on earth will be blessed through you. Genesis 12:1-3 

When God made that covenant with Abraham, it was the first puck drop in the first overtime period of a looooooooong game.  

Our world is broken. Humanity is broken. Our relationship with God is broken. What God is committing to do through Abraham and his family is to, in the end, heal. To heal creation, to heal humanity, to heal our relationship with God.  

The covenant God made with Abraham is rooted in a relationship that began on the first pages of your Bible, in the first verses of Genesis, in a relationship between us and our God in the garden of Eden.  

That relationship never ends. We are—for eternity—you and me and one holy God. It is inevitable that the people who break, or who oppose, God's covenant run up against God's justice.  

• Adam and Eve were exiled because they broke their covenant with God.  
• Cain was exiled because he polluted the earth with blood spilled in revenge against his brother and against God.  
• Noah's neighbours died in that flood because they had exhausted the patience of the Holy Spirit who had been pleading with them for long enough.  
• The cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were wiped out because they caused the earth to cry out to God against their rejection of all that was good.  
• Abraham and Isaac had to make that sacrifice because they had to know that they were all-in in their relationship with God.  
• Pharaoh and the people of Egypt experienced those plagues, suffered those deaths, because they stood in the way of God moving his covenant forward.  
• Moses did not enter the promised land because, in the words of the text, he “did not trust God enough to demonstrate his holiness” (Deuteronomy 32:51-52) to God's covenant people.  

God never, ever starts with the big guns. First he invites us to get it right, and provides the information we need to get it right. 

When we choose to go wrong, that's when he acts.  

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What is mercy? The word that usually gets translated in our English bibles to ‘mercy’ is a Hebrew word: chesed. It gets translated different ways by different people in different contexts in the Bible—sometimes as ‘goodness,’ sometimes as ‘kindness,’ sometimes as ‘faithfulness,’ and sometimes as the compound word, ‘lovingkindness.’ 

In each of these ‘justice’ moments, we also see ‘mercy.’ 

• Moses died without entering the promised land, but he did not die alone. God himself scooped out some earth and laid Moses' tired body to rest. He gave the Israelites time to grieve before moving forward (Deuteronomy 34). That was an act of mercy.  
• Egypt’s plagues were harsh and awful, but God gave Pharaoh nine chances before pulling down the final judgment. Then, God took only one person from each Egyptian family. He could have wiped them out like he had Sodom and Gomorrah, but he did not. As difficult as that was, there was mercy there. 
• For Abraham and Isaac, that sacrifice (“Go and kill your son, your only son”) had to happen for these two men to acknowledge their full commitment. But God spared them, and provided the lamb for the sacrifice (Genesis 22:12-14). That was an act of mercy. 
• Sodom and Gomorrah had to be dealt with. The earth was crying out against them to the heavens (like some of us are doing these days, saying, “God, what are you going to do about this? This can't continue!”). When God came to judge the cities, he said, ‘You know what? If I can find ten just people—just ten—I won't destroy the city.’ He could only find four. For those four, God made a way of escape (Genesis 18-19). That was an act of mercy.  
• The great flood was a consequence of our violence and our corruption. We had polluted the earth to the point where the Spirit said, ‘I give up. They won't listen to me.’ So God, in his mercy, confirmed his covenant (Genesis 6:18). He kept that family together and brought them through the storm. He kept them going with little glimpses of hope every now and then.  
• Cain had to face justice for murdering his brother. It's interesting, isn't it, that Cain's great fear following that act was that somebody was going to do the same thing to him. How human is that? But God, in his mercy, protected Cain from that one thing (Genesis 4:15).  
• Adam and Eve had to live with the result of their disobedience. God, in his mercy, provided them with clothing, and protected them from making it worse by separating them from the Tree of Life. When they went out into the world, they did not go alone. God went with them and he met them every step of the way (Genesis 3:21-22). That was an act of mercy.  

Every one of these acts of mercy is God making it possible for us to participate and to continue in the promise that he has made through us to all of creation: that he is going to heal everything, and he's choosing to do that through us (and in spite of us and for us). 

God's mercy makes it possible for us to continue walking towards that beautiful, healing end.  

His justice serves the purpose of filling his covenant. His mercy serves the purpose of filling his covenant.  

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Even still, it feels like the Old Testament God was ‘justice’ and Jesus was ‘mercy.’ Jesus was nice. Jesus changed water into wine. Jesus sat on the floor with the kids. Jesus stood up for people who were being bullied. We like Jesus. 

Every week my church speaks together the Lord's Prayer.  

Our father in heaven, may your name be kept holy. May your kingdom come. May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven... Matthew 6:9 

In teaching us to pray these words, Jesus is teaching us to pray for God's justice and God's mercy.  

To accept God's justice. To remember that he is holy, that he has a plan, that he will do what he will do to fulfill that plan. What he does may not be easy and it may not be what we want, but it is right.  

To live God's justice. To speak truth, to behave in right ways, to submit our bodies and our minds to the work of the Holy Spirit, to submit our voices to the work of the Holy Spirit.  

To offer God's mercy. To reach out to the wounded because they don't deserve it, to embrace the abandoned, however difficult or inconvenient that may be. He is telling us to make God's good happen around us.  

Teaching us to accept God's mercy. To let his light shine on whatever in me needs illuminating, whatever I am trying to hide so I can hang on to it. He's teaching us to let the Spirit do the work that only the Spirit can do to make me holy.  

We are made in God's image. We are made for justice. We are made for mercy.  

If we are waiting for karma to fix the world, we're going to wait forever.  

If we are waiting for God to fix our world, we will wait... but not forever.  

If we are waiting for God to fix us... that can start today.