Mercy
Mercy is not confined to withholding punishment. God’s mercy meets guilt, suffering, weakness, vulnerability, and need with compassion directed toward genuine good. It can forgive, restrain judgment, heal, protect, restore, and care for those who cannot help themselves.
Divine mercy is often understood as God withholding punishment from the guilty. But mercy is much more. Mercy can also be the Lord’s tender treatment of orphans and widows, His healing of the sick, and His call to provide justice for the oppressed.
Seems simple enough, right?
Not so much.
What does God’s mercy look like when Bob oppressed John, John suffers because of it, and his suffering places a demand on God’s justice?
Scripture Overview
One of the key verses on mercy is Psalm 78:38–39. It reveals what mercy means in terms of God’s actions, what those actions required of Him, and why He chose to extend mercy in the first place.
Yet he was merciful;
he forgave their iniquities
and did not destroy them.
Time after time he restrained his anger
and did not stir up his full wrath.
He remembered that they were but flesh,
a passing breeze that does not return.
Psalm 78:38–39
Another passage showing God’s mercy—His compassionate treatment of His children—is Psalm 103:8–13. This one is important because it shows how God’s mercy extends forgiveness while also emphasizing God’s compassion toward human weakness.
The Lord is compassionate and gracious,
slow to anger, abounding in love.
He will not always accuse,
nor will he harbor his anger forever;
he does not treat us as our sins deserve
or repay us according to our iniquities.
For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
so great is his love for those who fear him;
as far as the east is from the west,
so far has he removed our transgressions from us.
As a father has compassion on his children,
so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him.
Psalm 103:8–13
I love Micah 7:18–19 because it reveals that mercy is not an obligation God reluctantly fulfills. It is something He delights in.
Who is a God like you,
who pardons sin and forgives the transgression
of the remnant of his inheritance?
You do not stay angry forever
but delight to show mercy.
You will again have compassion on us;
you will tread our sins underfoot
and hurl all our iniquities into the depths of the sea.
Micah 7:18–19
Luke 6:36 calls God’s children to imitate Him: “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (Lk. 6:36).
Taken together, these passages establish mercy as forgiveness, restrained anger, compassion, and remembrance of creaturely weakness—merciful actions God does not merely tolerate but delights to perform.
The Gospels widen the picture even further. Again and again, Jesus responds compassionately to people in need (Matt. 9:36; 14:14; 20:34; Mk. 1:40–42). He shepherds the helpless, heals the sick, restores the suffering, and even raises the dead.
These are tangible examples of mercy as compassion in action.
Mercy Is More Than Withholding Punishment
As we have seen in the Scripture review, mercy is commonly associated with God's restrained anger and forgiveness of His people. But that is only one form mercy can take.
We understand this in everyday life. If I can’t open a jar, my husband has mercy on me and opens it for me. If my child is struggling to do his homework, I can have mercy on him and help him. When we learn about a form of human suffering that needs monetary support, we can have mercy on those who are suffering and give.
In each case, the situation is different. There is no punishment being withheld. No guilt has to be forgiven. Someone simply has a need, and compassion moves another person to respond.
That is why the Bible’s many scenes of God helping the weak, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and protecting the vulnerable belong in a discussion of mercy just as surely as His forgiveness does.
Mercy is not confined to the courtroom.
Mercy Sees Misery and Responds
After healing the centurion’s servant, Jesus visited a town called Nain. When He arrived, He noticed a crowd carrying out a dead man. This man was the only son of his widowed mother. “When the Lord saw her, his heart went out to her” (Lk. 7:13), and He resurrected the widow’s son.
This is a beautiful account because Jesus does not wait for anyone to entreat Him for help. He does not first require anything from the widow. He simply gives her back her son, alive and well.
There are other accounts similar to this where Jesus takes the initiative to provide care without first being asked. He does this because mercy belongs to His character. Compassionate acts are a natural extension of who He is, and compassion does not always need to wait for an invitation before extending kindness to those in need.
Mercy and Justice Are Not Opposites
It is easy to believe that if mercy is extended, then justice is not satisfied. But in God, justice and mercy do not cancel each other out.
God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith. He did this to demonstrate his righteousness, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished—he did it to demonstrate his righteousness at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.
Romans 3:25–26 (emphasis mine)
I think this passage is a powerful explanation for how justice and mercy interact. God can forgive the guilty without treating their guilt as though it never mattered, because Christ bears the judgment sin deserves.
In the Old Testament, God sometimes extended mercy instead of immediate punishment. A good example of this is David and Bathsheba. According to the Mosaic law, both should have been put to death because of the adultery (Lev. 20:10). However, God extended mercy and allowed both to live (2 Sam. 12:13).
If God simply ignored that guilt forever, then mercy would come at the expense of justice. But that is not what happened.
God entered the human story Himself and died on the Cross for the sins of the past (Heb. 9:15) as well as those who would later be sanctified through His sacrifice (Heb. 10:10–14).
That takes us back to Bob and John. Extending mercy to Bob does not require God to pretend John was never harmed. Mercy for the offender does not erase the victim’s claim to justice. The Cross allows God to deal seriously with the guilt while still opening a path of mercy to the guilty person.
Mercy Does Not Always Remove Consequences
While mercy allows for both forgiveness and restoration, it does not immediately follow that mercy erases consequences.
Let’s look again at David and Bathsheba.
God forgave David and spared his life, but He still established serious consequences.
“This is what the Lord says: ‘Out of your own household I am going to bring calamity on you. Before your very eyes I will take your wives and give them to one who is close to you, and he will sleep with your wives in broad daylight. You did it in secret, but I will do this thing in broad daylight before all Israel…The Lord has taken away your sin. You are not going to die. But because by doing this you have shown utter contempt for the Lord, the son born to you will die.’”
2 Samuel 12:11–14
To help illustrate what God did here, I can give an example of consequences instead of punishment from my own life.
One early morning, around 4 a.m., I could not sleep and got out of bed only to discover that I wasn’t the only one awake. My 11-year-old son was awake as well, watching videos on his iPad.
My son and I had an agreement. If he woke up before 5 a.m., he had to stay in bed until 5. If he still wasn’t able to fall back asleep, he could grab his iPad and play chess. He did not have permission to watch YouTube.
I confronted him, and I was satisfied with his chagrined response, so I did not implement a punishment. I obtained an agreement to follow the rules and sent him back to bed.
I forgave my son, but I still wasn’t satisfied with the situation. My husband and I talked, and we decided to put a parental lock on the iPad that lasted until 5 a.m. We would also closely monitor his YouTube usage, and if we caught him breaking the rules again, we would change the parental block to last until 8 a.m., when everyone is awake. He would lose his privilege to play chess if he woke up earlier than the rest of the family.
If I wanted to punish my son, I would have confiscated the iPad completely for a set amount of time. Instead, I chose to extend mercy because I understood how frustrating sleeplessness can be. That did not mean there were no consequences. He now had a lock on his iPad that he did not have before.
David’s situation is far more extreme than this, but the iPad scenario helps illustrate how punishment and consequences do not have to be the same thing.
When Mercy Doesn’t Look Merciful
If God has compassion on the suffering of His people, why doesn’t He remove suffering? That is a loaded question. And while it is entirely relevant to mercy, it deserves an essay of its own.
What I can establish here is narrower: the presence of suffering does not, by itself, prove the absence of mercy.
I would, however, like to give a case study of a situation in which God appeared to cause more suffering in the name of mercy.
Abijah was the son of Jeroboam, a wicked king who did “more evil than all who lived before” (1 Kgs. 14:9). Abijah fell ill, and Jeroboam sent the boy’s mother to inquire of the prophet Ahijah. The prophet told her to go back home and that the moment she set foot in her city, her son would die.
“All Israel will mourn for him and bury him. He is the only one belonging to Jeroboam who will be buried, because he is the only one in the house of Jeroboam in whom the Lord, the God of Israel, has found anything good.”
1 Kings 14:13
Yikes.
At first glance, it may seem like God is actually punishing the child for having goodness within him. But the text presents the opposite. Abijah is singled out for an honor that the rest of Jeroboam’s house will not receive: he will be mourned and properly buried because God found something good in him. The rest of Jeroboam’s house would later be destroyed, with none left alive (1 Kgs. 15:29).
Abijah’s earlier death spared him from the violent destruction that later consumed the rest of his family.
We may ask why God did not spare his life and protect him from the murder spree. I think it important to ask whether that outcome would necessarily have been more merciful. The boy would have been the sole survivor of his entire family and potentially left living in the aftermath of their destruction. Some may argue that is a fate worse than death, and I would be the first to do so.
Consider Job’s shock when he lost nearly everything he loved; he preferred never to have been born (Job 3:1–16). That does not tell us exactly how Abijah would have experienced such a loss, but it reminds us that continued life is not automatically the least painful outcome.
We know the favorable distinction God made for Abijah because the text tells us. We can also reasonably infer that his early death spared him from the later destruction of his family. What we cannot know is every reason God chose that particular form of mercy.
We don’t actually know all of God’s reasoning in Abijah’s case. What the text does tell us is that God distinguished this child from the rest of Jeroboam’s house and treated him with a mercy the others would not receive.
That gives us a useful way to think about circumstances in which mercy appears unmerciful and suffering seems unnecessary. What looks from our perspective like the harsher outcome may exist within circumstances we cannot fully see.
I think the Bible reveals enough of God’s interactions with mercy to show that He is oriented toward the ultimate good of His people. And if we can believe that, then we can trust that His sovereign decisions are not without good reason, even when the reasoning behind them remains hidden from us.
Where That Leaves Us
I've heard it said that the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament appear to have two different personalities. The Old Testament God is trying to kill everybody. The New Testament God is trying to save everybody.
Such an observation is understandable, but inaccurate.
The Old Testament shows the same God as the New Testament extending mercy to adulterers, barren women, nations, judges, kings, and priests. Likewise, in the New Testament, God extends just wrath upon a husband and wife, a king, and the many nations and peoples in Revelation.
“I the Lord do not change.”
Malachi 3:6
The God of justice is the same God who extends mercy.
All Scripture quotations are from the New International Version (NIV).