How often have you heard those words?
More than 2,700 years ago the prophet Micah was sent by God to reprove the nation of Israel for their hypocrisy in religiously bringing their sacrifices to Him while carrying out gross injustices. His message included these words:
“[The LORD] has shown you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8).
What God was demanding of the people was not some arbitrary standard. It was what was ‘good’ – good for all. And, leaving aside for a moment the last of the requirements (“to walk humbly with your God”), most would agree that the world would be a better place if there were true justice partnered with appropriate mercy, because, if all of humanity lived by that, the result would surely be peace and safety for all.
But is this really possible?
The first thing to note is that God never expects from His creatures a standard higher than He Himself exhibits. Throughout the Bible, God is seen to be just and yet merciful, and He holds these two traits in complete harmony.
In the early pages of Scripture, the patriarch Abraham, who knew God well and was later described as “the friend of God” (James 2:23) says this about Him in connection with the punishment of Sodom, the wicked city, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” (Genesis 18:25). Yet, at the same time, when Abraham’s nephew Lot lingers in Sodom, as it is about to be destroyed, angels sent by God grab hold of him and his family and rescue them, “the LORD being merciful to him” (Genesis 19:16).
Then, in Scripture’s final pages, believers sing about God: “Great and marvellous are Your works, Lord God Almighty! Just and true are Your ways, O King of the saints!” (Revelation 15:3). Yet, citing scoffers who suggest that judgement will never come, Peter states, as the reason for the apparent failure of God to keep His promise, that He is mercifully patient: “the present heavens and earth have been stored up for fire. They are being kept for the day of judgment, when ungodly people will be destroyed. But you must not forget this one thing, dear friends: A day is like a thousand years to the Lord, and a thousand years is like a day. The Lord isn’t really being slow about his promise, as some people think. No, he is being patient for your sake. He does not want anyone to be destroyed, but wants everyone to repent” (2 Peter 3:7b-9 NLT).
But unlike God, in whose image we are made, we humans seem to see a tension between justice and mercy and tend to favour one or the other. Depending on the people involved, we scream for justice, neglecting any thought of mercy on the one hand, or we beg for mercy and throw justice to the wind on the other.
Abraham, it appears, had got hold of it. God says about him, “he will direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just” (Genesis 18:19 NIV). But when God arranges the rescue of Lot we’re told that “God remembered Abraham, and sent Lot out of the midst of the overthrow” (19:29). Abraham seemed to know how to be just, yet how to show mercy as well.
How had he reached that point? Although Micah’s words would not be spoken until many centuries later, was it that Abraham had grasped the spirit of that last of God’s requirements – “to walk [i.e., live your life] humbly with your God”? We are told that God specifically instructed Abraham: “walk before me and be blameless” (17:1), and we can judge by the way that God did not hide from him His plan to destroy Sodom (18:17) that Abraham had heeded that instruction. There’s evidence, too, in the reverence Abraham showed for God (17:3; 18:2), that it was a humble “walk”.
Is that our problem then? We want to do our own thing. We don’t see any need for God at all, let alone to humble ourselves before Him. Rather, if He does exist, we feel confident we can justify ourselves in front of Him. The fact is that anyone in the Bible who came to know God recognised not only their need of Him, but also that they deserved nothing but His wrath. They relied on the fact that, as the prophet Habakkuk pleaded, “in wrath” God does “remember mercy” (Habakkuk 3:2), that He is “a just God and a Saviour” (Isaiah 45:21).
So how are God’s justice and His mercy reconciled? There’s a big clue in a parable told by Jesus about the approach of a tax collector as he prayed to God in the temple. Most translations record his words as something like, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner” (Luke 18:13). It was without question a humble and earnest appeal to God, but more literally it would read, “God, be propitious to me a sinner.” To put that in simpler words, the tax collector was humbly appealing to God for mercy on the basis of sacrifice. He knew that he deserved to come under God’s wrath (as we all do) because of his flawed life, but that, even while he prayed, sacrifices were being offered in that very place and innocent animals were dying. The tax collector understood that, for God to be true to His just character, the only way in which he could be shown mercy was on the basis of one of those sacrifices.
Those sacrifices, of course, had no intrinsic value. The animals themselves could not satisfy God’s justice. Their value was in the fact that they pointed forward to the one supreme sacrifice that would be offered on a cross outside Jerusalem when Jesus Christ, the holy Son of God, gave His own life, shedding His own blood. At the cross, mercy and truth, righteousness and peace, love and justice, would all meet.
On the basis of that sacrifice, God can remain just and at the same time show mercy to guilty sinners who humbly submit to God, repent and trust in Christ to save them.
It is not without significance that Christ condemned the religious leaders of His day for neglecting “the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith” (Matthew 23:23), and we see the awful consequences of that neglect in western society in our own day. The time is yet to be when the world will see mercy shown and justice done to perfection, namely, when Jesus Christ returns to this world to reign for 1,000 years (Jude 14; Revelation 20:4). But, as individuals, we are called on, right now, to first exhibit true faith by repenting of sin and trusting in Christ. Then, we are summoned to heed Micah’s words and to look to God for help in our personal lives, and collectively as God’s people, to “do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with [our] God”.
