Lord, Have Mercy!

“That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster. Therefore now, O LORD, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.” (Jonah 4:2-3)

“Lord, have mercy on him!” How many times have we said this? And yet, mercy is a funny thing, isn’t it? You cannot legislate mercy. When mercy becomes an obligation, mercy becomes a law. What makes mercy mercy is the freeness of the act. Hence, when a poor Southerner raises their voice to the heavens: “Lord, have mercy!”, it comes as a solemn plea from the God of all mercy. God does not have to be merciful. When Adam and Eve ate the fruit, God was within His legal rights to smoke their bacon that very instant. This displays to us the immensity of God’s mercy. Adam plunged every single one of His descendants who came to descended from him in the ordinary way into an estate of sin and misery, into a spiritual death. Billions upon billions affected by Adam’s sin, and God showed mercy.

Mercy is a wonderful thing; however, that solemn plea for mercy by one poor soul breeds resentment in another. Jonah is a prime example. The Ninevites were known for brutality, leading their captives away like fish on a stringer and impaling those who resist. This act was done to Jonah’s own kinsman. You could say that Jonah was bitter, but his bitterness turned to wrath when he saw God’s mercy. Jonah knew of the immensity of God’s mercy, but Jonah forgot an important truth – the immensity of his own sin. Jonah failed to realize how indebted he himself was to the free mercy of God! God’s mercy caused Jonah to be born in a godly land, God’s mercy caused Jonah to pursue a godly calling, and God’s mercy purchased for him a heavenly home.

Before we cast Jonah overboard, we would do best to look at our own hearts. In an increasingly polarized and perverse age, do we not show the same anger as Jonah? When the wicked and wayward begin to show an interest in Christ, how do we respond? Do we pray for an outpouring of God’s righteous indignation or a display of God’s free and abundant mercy? We often act as if Jesus shed a few drops of blood for us but gallons for others. And yet, the mercy of God placed us within the hearing of the gospel and protected us from a world of evil. The mercy of God brought Jesus to die for us, and the mercy of God will bring us to Jesus. When we see just how indebted we are to mercy, then we will stop saying, “Lord, have mercy on him!” and start saying, “Lord, have mercy on us all!”