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
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