God acted sacrificially to meet our needs at the very moment we deserved His help the least. He deals mercifully with our sin out of His great and perfect love for His people. Romans 5:8 says, “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
It would be easy for God to deal with us only according to our sins and not according to His mercy. It would be fair for Him to make us pay for our own sins. We incurred the debt and surely we should be responsible for what we have done. That would be fair.
The intense hatred shown to His Son on the cross didn’t make our situation any better. When Jesus was suffering in our place, the response of His people should have been gratitude, but it wasn’t.
- His disciples denied him.
- People mocked Him and spit upon him.
- He died a humiliating and painful death. We deserve God’s wrath. That would be fair.
However, the immensity of the hatred shown toward Jesus was out-matched by the intensity of God’s love for lost people like you and me. It’s not that God turned a blind eye toward sin. Mercy is not oversight or forgetfulness. Mercy sees a need and sacrificially acts to meet that need – especially when the recipient is undeserving of help.
When the mob came to arrest Jesus on the night before His crucifixion, He could have turned them away. In Matthew 26:53 he asked, “ Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?”
When the chief priests and rulers arrested Jesus, they put Him on center stage. He had an audience with powerful people in a public forum. Jesus could have avenged himself, but He held His tongue. He willingly went to the cross because we needed Him to pay for our sins.
Jesus knew the evil deeds of the people around Him and occasionally exposed those deeds. Yet, He showed mercy to them. He wasn’t trying to win favor or gain popularity. He was genuinely acting in their best interest. In His mercy, He was acting on His perfect love for imperfect people.
His death on the cross was a testimony of the excruciating consequences of sin and, at the same time, it was a display of Jesus’ victory over sin. Jesus paid the debt we had incurred. He paid for it with his own life. Jesus didn’t ignore sin. He saw the full extent of our deficiencies before God and willingly paid the price for us.
In doing so, He opened up a new conduit through which God’s mercy might flow through to us. God did pour out his judgement on our sins. He just didn’t pour it out on us. He poured it out on His Son, Jesus. Romans 5:9 says, “we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God.” At the cross, judgement and mercy are perfectly intermingled.
It is the cross that makes mercy available to us and the cross that makes it possible for mercy to flow through us.
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