The Balance Between Justice and Mercy

God’s call to the Church in the twenty-first century is this: to be a balanced Church, a Church that can address the needs of this culture, so complex and so skeptical of the Church of Jesus Christ and of Christians, and so suspicious of our motives and our sincerity, in a way that is understandable, full of grace, and appealing, and that leads people to consider the promises and claims of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

And we have said that one of the qualities this Church must have is the ability to blend mercy with holiness, grace with truth. It is the ability to maintain what I call a bipolar mindset, one that, on the one hand, emphasizes holiness and the call to integrity and to conduct worthy of the Gospel, but, on the other hand, can also understand that the Christian walk, the believer’s journey, is a journey of continual and gradual sanctification, of continually drawing closer to the image of Jesus Christ.

And we need churches and leaders, and laypeople, and pastors who have a pastoral heart and are keenly aware of that journey of struggle, of zigzagging, of getting up and falling down and getting up again, of always falling short at the end of the day and having to come once more to the Lord’s feet and ask for mercy and grace.

And we need to be able to live in a place where, on the one hand, we have a great appetite for holiness and an awareness that we serve a holy God who requires of us conduct worthy of His Glory and His Holiness, but who, on the other hand, is also a God of goodness and mercy, a loving Father; as we said before, He remembers that we are dust. He knows our condition and has compassion on us as a father has compassion on his child.

And so, as you can see, there will always be tension between those two positions; we will never have a perfect balance. Sometimes it will seem that we are veering to one side, and at other times it will seem that we are veering to the other.

There are two passages in Scripture that I was thinking about a moment ago that help us see this combination. I see that throughout the Scriptures, the Word calls us to see our God as a God who combines the two qualities I am talking about, justice and mercy: one side strong, stern, and demanding, and the other tender, merciful, and compassionate. And we have to imitate Him in that twofold stance if we are to be churches that truly reflect God’s balance.

In Psalm 85 there is a verse that tells us, verse 10 of Psalm 85: “Mercy and truth have met; righteousness and peace have kissed.” It is a very poetic and lovely image, isn’t it? What it is saying here is that in the Kingdom of God and in the order of the Kingdom of God, these two qualities meet and, as it says here, kiss, in the sense that they come together in a very profound way, and we have to do the same.

Our churches—and if we are parents, for example, our way of being fathers or mothers—must reflect that. If we are friends and brothers and sisters in Christ, the way we treat one another has to reflect that twofold way of bringing mercy together with truth.

So when the Bible says that mercy and truth have met, it is saying that the way to treat the sinner, the way to treat our brothers and sisters when they offend us, when they make mistakes, and the way to treat ourselves when we ourselves violate God’s law is to bring the two together.

Sometimes we think that, to be able to put up with ourselves and love ourselves, we have to hide the truth, hide our faults or blame others, or pretend that we did not make a mistake, because we think that if we admit the truth, then we will condemn ourselves and suffer. But it does not have to be that way.

I believe we can be honest with ourselves, honest in seeing the faults of the people we love, but at the same time we can also be merciful to ourselves and know that we are in a process, that we will fall and that is the human condition, that we will offend the Lord, that we will fall short, and that we have a God full of mercy who is always willing to forgive us and say to us: Hey, keep going. I know you’re doing the best you can. Take My Hand again and let’s keep going, because I am with you, right?

We have to be people in whom righteousness and peace kiss, and the same must be true in our churches, in our ministries, and in our fatherhood and motherhood. People whom others know to be people of integrity and holiness, but also people of mercy and goodness.

There is another passage about the character of Jesus Christ in John chapter 1, verse 14, where it says: “That Word, Jesus, became flesh and dwelt among us, full of Grace and Truth.” Again, the same thing, that balance. In the character of Jesus, grace and truth came together, and that is what we see continually, what we have already seen on previous occasions: that perfect combination in Christ, a man and God of integrity and holiness, but also of extraordinary mercy. And we have to do the same in our lives.

May the Lord bless you, and we will continue later.