Today's promise: God is merciful to us
Have you received God's mercy?
Praise the Lord, I tell myself; with my whole heart, I will praise his holy
name. Praise the Lord, I tell myself, and never forget the good things he does
for me. He forgives all my sins and heals all my diseases.
He ransoms me from death and surrounds me with love and tender
mercies.
Psalm 103:1-4 NLT
Pardoned
The essential act of mercy was to pardon; and pardon
in its very essence involves the recognition of guilt and ill-desert in the
recipient. If crime is only a disease which needs cure, not sin which deserves
punishment, it cannot be pardoned. How can you pardon a man for having a gum
boil or a club foot? But the Humanitarian theory wants simply to abolish
Justice and substitute Mercy for it. This means that you start being "kind" to
people before you have considered their rights, and then force upon them
supposed kindnesses which no one but you will recognize as kindnesses and which
the recipient will feel as abominable cruelties. You have overshot the mark.
Mercy, detached from Justice, grows unmerciful. That is the important paradox.
As there are plants which will flourish only in mountain soil, so it appears
that Mercy will flower only when it grows in the crannies of the rock of
Justice: transplanted to the marshlands of mere Humanitarianism, it becomes a
man-eating weed, all the more dangerous because it is still called by the same
name as the mountain variety.
C. S. Lewis in God in the Dock
Quoted in The
Quotable Lewis edited by Wayne Martindale and Jerry Root (Tyndale House)
p 426
Content is derived from the Holy
Bible, New Living Translation and other publications of Tyndale Publishing
House
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