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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