On Mercy: Part 2 of 3

God’s Dispensation, God’s Discretion

 Aren’t paradoxes fun?  If you’re a Christian, you might as well make your peace with the paradox.  Mercy, and its dispensation, is one of the great mysteries that hang up the believer and the unbeliever alike.  Is not God a merciful God?  Must not He act in accordance with that nature?  And yet mercy is not rationed out like social security.

So, how can we get in on it?  Well on the one hand, we can stop worrying, because there’s no way to get in on it.  In Romans 9, Paul is clear on the method of God’s choosing; He “has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy.”  That sits uneasily with, probably, everybody.  Here, Paul refers to salvation, but how often do we question God’s choices in our daily lives?  Why does one mother’s child have to die in a car crash for another’s to receive a set of lungs?  And even if we are reconciled to trust His judgment, we might be tempted to worry all the more when we realize that mercy has never meant the absence of trials.

So maybe we can conclude that this “stumbling stone” is set here intentionally (9:32).  We need to grapple with our sense of injustice, and come to a place where we recognize our perspective as myopic, and therefore our outrage as misplaced, or conversely, to a place where we validate our feelings and deepen our resolve against truth.  God will “harden whom he wants to harden,” and this is one way he chooses to do that, through his sovereign dispensation of mercy.

Our innate sense of the wrongness of this world and its tragedies gives us cause to wrestle inwardly.  It is a fork in the road where, at God’s propulsion, we either interpret that sensibility as an indication of God’s cruelty, impotence, or nonexistence, or we recognize it as the vestige of His image in us.  We then see ourselves as merely a reflection, made not to orchestrate, but to wonder at his divine machinations.