God is a God of mercy. In fact, mercy is so much a part of his character that he expects his children to reflect him in this.

Just as God shows mercy to those who don't deserve it (us), he commands us to do the same. Jesus tells us to do good to and pray for those who hate and mistreat us. He concludes by saying:

"[L]ove your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. (Luke 6:35-36)

What kind of logic is this? This isn't the way the world works. It's divine wisdom, the "logic" of grace that doesn't make sense. As God showed mercy to us, he wants us to do likewise. This way, we'll reflect his character to the world around us and prove that we are his sons, because we'll be showing the family likeness.

This is so impossible and so contrary to human nature, that it can only be done by Jesus living in us. As we know his grace and forgiveness, we are freed to show the same lavish, undeserved kindness to those who hurt us.

What if I don't want to?

Well, there's a sobering and serious incentive to do so.

Jesus tells us how to pray in the so-called Lord's Prayer, which includes the petition: "Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors." Nice sentiment, right? Not quite. Jesus elaborates:

"For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins." (Matthew 6:14-15)

Elsewhere in Scripture, it's put like this: "[J]udgment without mercy will be shown to anyone who has not been merciful. Mercy triumphs over judgment!" (James 2:13)

God is so serious about mercy, that he won't forgive us our sins if we withhold forgiveness from others.

Why?

Because we don't actually have the right to judge our brother, or to hold a grudge against him for what he has done to us. God is the only one who has the right to judge or to avenge. "Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God's wrath, for it is written: "It is mine to avenge; I will repay," says the Lord. (Romans 12:19) Evildoers aren't getting away with it. They will face God's judgment—that is, if they don't repent. However, if we truly have God's heart, we would rather they repent than be judged. That's largely the point of showing mercy:

"On the contrary: 'If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.' Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good." (Romans 12:20-21)

Our kindness serves the purpose of shaming the wrongdoer, softening his or her heart, showing him God's heart for him, and hopefully bringing him to repentance. But even if he never repents, we have still fulfilled our calling, and we know that he faces a far more serious penalty than we could ever deal out.

However, this can't simply be a show of kindness for the purpose of demonstrating what good, obedient Christians we are. God makes it clear our forgiveness must be real.

Jesus told a parable about a servant who was forgiven an unimaginable debt by his kind master. This servant then found a fellow servant who owed him a small amount of money, choked him, demanded he pay him back, and threw him into prison. The furious master then "turned him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed." (Matthew 18:34) Jesus appended this brief explanation: "This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart." (v.35)

This is hard. This is really, really hard. All we (I) can do, is to pray for God's grace and the ability to see as he sees, love as he loves, and show mercy with his strength. Repent when we are guilty of unloving, unmerciful thoughts or actions, and seek by God's help to be true sons who live out his heart. There's no other way, if we are to be followers of the living God.

My recent job situation has got me thinking a lot about topics like justice, grace, mercy, and law. Don't ask me why, because it would take too long, and I won't go into it here.

But today I was thinking about justice and mercy. Specifically, I was thinking about those things in terms of God.

What I was thinking was this: what if God was the kind of God who kept track of all of your faults? What if he made a record of them, brought them up to your face when you tried to approach him, and refused to forgive you? What if he forced you to live with all the consequences, both in this life and eternally?

I'd be screwed, that's what. In the face of God's perfect justice, we'd all be screwed.

One of the Psalmists knew this fact thousands of years ago:

"If you, O LORD, kept a record of sins,
O Lord, who could stand?" (Psalm 130:3)

The answer is: no one. No one could stand.

Much later, quoting another Psalm, the apostle Paul wrote, "there is no one who does good, not even one." (Romans 3:12)

Not only that, there's no escaping God's justice:

"Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows." (Galatians 6:7)

So what then? I'm really, really glad that the flipside is that God is not only a God of justice, he's a God who delights in mercy. That Psalmist went on to say:

"But with you there is forgiveness; therefore you are feared." (Psalm 130:4)

God has the right to condemn everyone to hell. He'd have the right if he wanted right now to send the whole world up in flames—whoosh—like a sort of cosmic pyrotechnics show. But he doesn't. Why?

Because he'd rather show mercy.

The whole giant, great, grand, good news of the gospel, which I am so grateful for because without it I would be screwed, is that God chooses to show mercy. To people who don't deserve it. To people who scorn, mock, and reject it. To people like us.

Probably the best-known verse in the Bible is this: "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him." (John 3:16-17)

That's it. Case closed. We can pack up and go home. That's everything, in a nutshell.

Why? Why did God do it?

If you've been a Christian for a long time, and/or grown up in a Christian home, it's really easy to take it for granted. To view it as a sort of divine obligation, a kind of religious of-course. Well yes, we're sinners, and we deserve hell, but God sent his Son and he died on the cross and...

It's mind-bendingly astonishing that the God of the universe chose to send his only Son as a man to live among us, suffer, and finally die bearing the full penalty for the things we'd done wrong against HIM, things we fully deserved to die for. All so we could be reconciled back to God and have relationship with him and live with him eternally.

Another sort of nutshell verse puts it like this:

"God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." (2 Corinthians 5:21)

There's nothing more astonishing than that. There's nothing more gratitude-inducing, more praise-inspiring, more worship-worthy, more give-your-life-worthy, than that. We'll spend all of eternity praising and worshiping God for it.

That justice thing? You can still have it. If you want it. All you have to do is to refuse God's mercy. All you have to do is not believe it. All you have to do is walk away from it and refuse to accept it. You'll get his justice.

But he'd rather you had his mercy.

Peter says,

"The Lord....is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance." (2 Peter 3:9)

In the face of his mercy, all we can do is humbly accept. All we can do is drink it in like rain. All we can do is admit our inability to get it right ourselves, and accept his forgiveness.

This verse hit me really strongly today:

"If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness." (1 John 1:9)

That's a shining light to walk by.

Anyone who knows me well knows that one of my favourite places in the entire world is the Royal Ontario Museum, aka the ROM. Anyone who knows me well also knows that one of my favourite activities in the world is knitting.

Last Friday, those two things combined in a most excellent way.

I have a new friend who is a PhD student at the ROM, and is able to get a guest in for free. He (yes, he) asked me to teach him how to knit, so we agreed to meet for a knitting lesson at the ROM. After grabbing a quick bite to eat in the cafe, we navigated to a corner of India, where we settled into a pair of comfy armchairs next to Buddha, who was in the process of enlightenment, according to his card. My friend picked up knitting in no time, and we sat and happily knitted away while ROM visitors wandered by no doubt wondering what in heck we were doing there.

We've decided to make knitting at the ROM a regular institution. This time we're heading for the top floor, where I think we might knit in Textiles, which seems appropriate. I would love to knit in Dinosaurs, but dinosaurs apparently don't go in much for armchairs.

Knitting, at the ROM, with a guy, seems like a trifecta of awesomeness which simply cannot be topped. I'm pretty stoked about it.

So, on Friday I quit my job. Handed in my two-weeks' notice, to be more precise. It got to the point where I realized that was my only choice. In most respects the job was ideal, but the one that wasn't was becoming unbearable. So, we'll see what's next. It's an adventure, again. I don't seem to ever be able to get too settled...we'll see what God has next.