‘Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy’ (Matthew 5:7)
The Beatitudes describe the character of those who will receive divine blessings, and they also indicate what the blessings are. In this Beatitude, we are told the characteristic – it is merciful, and we are told what the blessing will be – it is mercy. So we can look at those two details.
What does it mean to be merciful?
The obvious point to make here is that a merciful person is Godlike. There are numerous references to the mercy of God in the Bible. Usually it is mentioned in regard to forgiving sinners, but it is not limited to that. God shows aspects of his mercy in providence to numerous people who never hear the gospel. It happens every day through his expressions of common grace. Anything that is undeserved is an expression of mercy, although at times it is temporal, lasting only a short time..
Primarily, the reference is to the pardon of sin. It is an interesting observation that this divine attribute would have remained hidden if we had not sinned. This does not mean that committing sin automatically revealed that God is merciful. When the devil and his followers rebelled against God, divine mercy was not revealed to them. But when Adam and Eve sinned, they were informed of God’s mercy. So we can see that divine mercy is connected to divine sovereignty. God has mercy on whom he will have mercy.
The Bible also tells us that God’s mercies are over all his works (Psalm 145:8-9: ‘The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. The Lord is good to all, and his mercy is over all that he has made’). Our God is an active God, fully involved in everything that occurs. There are many ways in which we can think about his involvement. Take the growth of a flower – the Lord enables it to grow at every stage. We can extend that illustration to everything. When we think of the activities of God, we may wonder which one he estimates as most important. The psalmist praises God by saying that his mercy is over all his works. Mercy is highly esteemed by God because it reveals him in his glory.
This does not mean that he uses his mercy as a way of ignoring or bypassing his other attributes. Rather, he shows mercy because it fits in with all his other attributes. There is no internal conflict in God. His mercy is in line with his justice as well as his love. His divine plan is an expression of all his attributes, and whatever he does is consistent with who he is. That is why we can say that the Lord is a righteous judge and a merciful God. The outworkings at times will have different effects in the experience of his creatures. He delights however to show mercy. It brings him great delight and joy. He overflows with expressions of mercy.
A merciful person is Christlike
It is an interesting question to ask: ‘What impression would we get of Jesus if we were reading the Gospels for the first time?’ Many would reply and say that what strikes them is the compassion of Jesus. Compassion is an expression of mercy. Often Jesus used his power to show compassion. He provided for the needs of large crowds, and there is no hint that those expressions of mercy were limited to those who trusted in him for salvation. We can think of his mercy expressed through the miracles of the feeding of the five thousand and the other feeding of the four thousand. When he healed ten lepers, only one of them thanked him for his mercy.
Jesus showed his mercy to people whom others condemned. We are familiar with his interaction with the woman of Sychar. She was a social outcast. Her race, her lifestyle and her religion ensured that no-one would interact with her. But one day she met a merciful man who wanted to interact with her and who in the process brought her to understand her real need and how he could meet it. He informed her that he was the Messiah and he changed her life by his mercy.
Jesus showed his mercy to those who asked for his help. A centurion asked Jesus to heal his servant. The centurion showed great faith because he believed that Jesus could heal the servant without seeing him. The faith of the centurion brought great delight to Jesus and led him to speak about the future gathering of people in heaven. Yet the interaction began with a soldier asking Jesus to show mercy to a sick person.
Jesus showed mercy to one of the men who came to arrest him in the Garden of Gethsemane. Peter was not too keen on showing mercy at that time and in the process of waving his sword he managed to cut off a person’s ear. Jesus healed the individual, and there is no hint that the healed person did not participate in the arrest of Jesus. Since we know that his name is Malchus, he may have become a believer later. It would not be surprising if that happened.
After his ascension to heaven, Jesus showed mercy to Saul of Tarsus during his crusade to obliterate Christians from the earth. Jesus confronted Saul as he neared Damascus to deal with the Christians there. Later on, when describing what had occurred, he explained it by saying that he obtained mercy: ‘I thank him who has given me strength, Christ Jesus our Lord, because he judged me faithful, appointing me to his service, though formerly I was a blasphemer, persecutor, and insolent opponent. But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief, and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus’ (1 Tim. 12-14).
There are many other examples of Jesus’ focus on mercy. We could think of his parable about the tax collector who asked the Lord to show mercy to him. Or we could read the parable of the Good Samaritan, which is an explanation of how real neighbours behave towards one another. It makes clear that neighbours in a biblical sense are not just those who live next door; instead they are people we meet day by day.
Mercy and us
We experience mercy in both spiritual and providential ways. An obvious aspect of God’s mercy in providence was us being placed where we could hear the gospel. We may have been born into a Christian family or we may have worked alongside someone who shared the gospel with us. Being close to the gospel in one way or another is an expression of divine mercy.
God’s mercy was also shown when we were converted. Each conversion is unique in some ways, but all of them have similar aspects, such as repentance from sin and faith in Jesus. But it was all covered by divine mercy. Some of us had sung Psalm 103:8 many times before we could sing it with meaning:
The Lord our God is merciful,
and he is gracious,
Long-suffering, and slow to wrath,
in mercy plenteous.
I recall being in a church shortly after being converted and they sung the hymn that includes the lines:
Mercy there was great, and grace was free,
Pardon there was multiplied to me,
There my burdened soul found liberty,
At Calvary.
Calvary becomes the most beautiful place in the world to those who have discovered the amazing mercy of God in Christ. People speak about various sites they have visited and the wonders they saw in such places, but none of them, indeed all of them together, come nowhere near the beauty and the wonders of Calvary.
One effect of tasting the mercy of God at the cross is to cause us to value his mercy at all times. There are several examples in the Bible. When Epaphroditus recovered health, Paul connected the recovery to the mercy of God: ‘Indeed he was ill, near to death. But God had mercy on him, and not only on him but on me also, lest I should have sorrow upon sorrow’ (Phil. 2:27).
Paul speaks of another individual whom he loved dearly, a man called Onesiphorus. In 2 Timothy 3, he speaks of this man and mentions the idea of mercy twice. ‘May the Lord grant mercy to the household of Onesiphorus, for he often refreshed me and was not ashamed of my chains, but when he arrived in Rome he searched for me earnestly and found me— may the Lord grant him to find mercy from the Lord on that day! —and you well know all the service he rendered at Ephesus’ (2 Tim. 1:16-18). We can see from Paul’s description that Onesiphorus was a dedicated Christian, not ashamed to identify with Paul in his imprisonment. Moreover we can see that Paul wanted the family of Onesiphorus to experience divine mercy, by which I assume he means expressions of mercy in this life. What would dedicated and loving Onesiphorus need on the great Day? True, he will receive a reward, but it is not connected to merit. Instead it will be given him through divine mercy.
John Calvin commented on this desire of Paul for his friend: ‘This prayer shows us how much richer a recompense awaits those who, without the expectation of an earthly reward, perform kind offices to the saints, than if they received it immediately from the hand of men. And what does he pray for? “That he may find mercy;” for he who hath been merciful to his neighbours will receive such mercy from God to himself. And if this promise does not powerfully animate and encourage us to the exercise of kindness, we are worse than stupid.’ Indeed, as Matthew Henry says, this is the best thing we can pray for others.
Another effect of the discovery of the gospel is to turn those who accept it into merciful people. James tells us that mercy is a feature of the wisdom that is from above: ‘But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere’ (James 3:17). This means that Christians should be seen as merciful. They remember the verse in Micah 6:8, which says: ‘He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?’
Christians have compassion on the poor – this has been a feature of the Christian church. They are merciful towards those who fail as Christians. They recognise that other Christians have weaknesses, which may seem irrational and strange, but they are merciful with them. They recognise that other Christians are often sad, and sometimes their sense of assurance is very weak, but they are merciful to them.
Christians should not have hard hearts. When they have to speak the truth, they speak it mercifully. Moreover, since they are merciful, they will forgive in the way that God forgives – fully.
Why is a true disciple of Jesus merciful? One reason is that he has been forgiven himself; another reason is that he knows he is still imperfect and needs God to show mercy to him all the time; only a self-righteous person forgets to be merciful. Spurgeon commented on one occasion, A Christian ‘judges sin by a much sterner rule than other men do, but he always thinks kindly of the sinner.’
In what ways do they receive mercy?
They receive it in providence because the Lord rewards them in that way. This is what David says in Psalm 41:1-3: Blessed is the one who considers the poor! In the day of trouble the Lord delivers him; the Lord protects him and keeps him alive; he is called blessed in the land; you do not give him up to the will of his enemies. The Lord sustains him on his sickbed; in his illness you restore him to full health.’
They receive mercy from other Christians who forgive their faults and love them still. And they will receive mercy from the Lord on the great Day of Judgement. Although their lives were godly in the main, they were imperfect. Yet on the Day of days, they will hear their Saviour give them a great reward because he is merciful.
As we close
Bunyan in his second volume of the Pilgrim’s Progress describes the journey of Christiana to the Celestial City. Overall, she seems to have an easier journey than that of her husband whose journey is described in the first volume. One reason why her journey was easier was because one of her companions was called Mercy. The way to glory is more comfortable when we have a sense of mercy in our hearts – God’s mercy to us and God’s mercy through us to others.
We can also ask ourselves this question: ‘how do unforgiven people see Jesus in us?’ They probably will not see it in our commitment to our beliefs. They probably will not see it in our criticisms of what is wrong, although we have to make those criticisms. They may not even see it when we tell them the gospel, which we have to tell them. But they are likely to see something interesting in a consistently merciful person, a characteristic that makes them wonder where it comes from.