Is there unrighteousness with God? Certainly not! For He says to Moses, 'I will have mercy on whomever I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whomever I will have compassion. For the Scripture says to the Pharaoh, 'For this very purpose I have raised you up, that I may show My power in you, and that My name may be declared in all the earth. God forbid. He will have mercy on whom He chooses to have mercy on, compassion on whom he chooses to have compassion.
This is hard to accept. In 1 Peter 1 Peter [12] Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened to you: [13] But rejoice, inasmuch as you are partakers of Christ's sufferings; that, when his glory shall be revealed, you may be glad also with exceeding joy.
Instead, his point to the recipients of his epistle was: " Expect it. Satan is the god of this age 1 Corinthians 1 Corinthians For I know nothing by myself; yet am I not hereby justified: but he that judges me is the Lord. He has been given control over the earth for a time. I say this frequently, but our life consists of three parts. We live our second life for about 80 years on earth. We live our third life forever in Heaven. To God, the third life is most important, because it lasts forever.
I am sure that within hours there would be mass suicides all over the earth, because every bit of glory would be removed from life, every bit of joy, every bit of gladness, all those moments that we delight in when the family gathers around and gives us a sense of security, of warmth and joy together. All this would be gone. For these blessings come from God's activity among men, from God at work redeeming, reaching out, seeking to arrest the attention of men and women and boys and girls all over the earth.
If all that suddenly ceased, life would become incredibly dull and drab and dreary. Now, life teaches us that there are times when God does temporarily withdraw his blessing from life and his goodness from us, and invariably life then turns impossible to live. I was in Newport Beach this week and a woman there was telling me about her neighbor who came across the street one day to talk with her. He was in utter despair, and he sat there with his head in his hands and a cup of coffee steaming untouched in front of him.
And he cried out in an agony of spirit, "God, but I'm bored! Life is utterly dull, drab, lonely, and miserable. Why is that? Well, the apostle Paul tells us that this is the result of the condition into which we are born. And the only thing which alleviates it is the mercy and the grace of God. It would always be that wayevery moment of life would be that way were it not for God's goodness poured out upon us, to the just and the unjust alike, in his attempt to reach us and arrest us.
So these words come through to us with great meaning: "But God The Apostle is very careful to inform us immediately of what it is that moves God to act, and he focuses on that: "But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead through our trespasses But God began to move.
What moved him? The first thing, the Apostle says, is his mercy And there is a difference between mercy and grace. It is true that God's grace reaches out to man also, but it does so for a different reason than his mercy does. I wonder if you know the difference? It is the guilt of man which draws forth the grace of God. When God looks at us and sees us as guiltyas actually having made choices and done things which were deliberately wrong when we knew them to be wrongit calls forth his compassion, expressed in grace.
Even though we deserve it, he still doesn't want to leave us in our guilt. So his grace is aroused and he reaches out to find a way to set aside the demands of law and to relieve us from the due punishment of our guilt and to set us free. And he has done that. It is the grace of God which has dealt with our guilt. But it is our misery which calls forth his mercy.
You parents know how this is. If you have a child who is suffering from a severe coldhis throat is sore, his eyes are watering, his nose is running and all stuffed up so that he can hardly breathe, he is aching in every joint, and he is miserable and all he can do is throw his arms around your neck and crywhat does that do to you as a parent? Why, it awakens your pity, and you reach out and try to relieve this condition in some way if you possibly can, because his misery has called forth your mercy.
That is what Paul says has awakened the mercy of Godthe misery of man. We are corrupt, decaying, and life is on a downward slant. He reminds us that we are molded by the world around us, we are gripped by this passion for conformity, and we find it very difficult to break away from the established trend. We don't want to be different, we are forced to conform in attitudes, in ways of reacting mentally, as well as in clothing and standard of living.
And this holds us in bondage. We can't be the independent people we would like to be. And further, you remember, we are controlled by Satan. There is a spirit which works in us, Paul says, which prompts us to disobey.
Our first reaction to any demand almost invariably is one of belligerence. Why should I do this? We learn to cover it over, we learn to smile and to be sweet, but inwardly we feel resentment at having to conform to someone else's desires.
That is the spirit of disobedience which is constantly at work in humanity, making us strike out at one another and injure each other. Finally, there is that whole realm of life which the Apostle gathers up in the phrase "fulfilling the lusts of the flesh"these impulsive urges within us which lead us to desire certain things, or to hold certain attitudes, or to insist upon certain modes of action.
We don't stop to reason them out. If we did we would see that they are wrong. But we rationalize them, we find excuses for them, and when our mind is able to invent a reason we act on it.
The result, again, is that we injure each other and we destroy peace in a household, or in a family, or a company, or a nation. And this creates the heartache, the despair, the rejection, the discontent, the disillusionment, the sense of disenchantment, the boredom, the routine, the monotony, the frustration of life. That is why we spend so much of our time in this conditionthe tragic sense of life.
We are so aware of all this with regard to what others do to us, and so little aware of how we are doing the same thing to them. Isn't that amazing? Our image of ourselves is always so much better than what we actually are. It is so easy to forget the nasty little things we say, the sharp and caustic remarks we make, and the irritated attitudes we come to breakfast with.
After awhile we forget about all of these, and as we look at ourselves we see what we love to call "beautiful people" with just a slight taint here or there that a good resolution would clear up.
God doesn't see us that way. But we see ourselves that way and we can't understand, then, why life doesn't smooth out, why there is so much frustration and boredom in our experience, why we are always being so injured and hurt and cut.
But God sees all this realistically and he says, "That is what is making you miserable. It is shared with the rest of mankind. God sees the misery and heartache caused by itthe tears, the disappointment, the crushing sense of frustration, of weakness, of inadequacy. He sees the misery, the abject misery of human life. And more and more this is becoming apparent to us as well, isn't it? But this is what calls forth God's mercy. It awakens his love to reach out to us.
He wants to do something to relieve the misery of man. That is what Paul says is happening Paul is saying, "God loved us and he did something about it. He came here. He was touched with our misery and he came and he wept and he suffered. He became the poorest of the poor, he felt the pinch of poverty. He was rejected, he felt hurt, he was frightened, he felt all the trials which come into our lives.
And when he had fully identified himself with us he went out and, in the indescribable anguish and pain of the cross, for no reason in himself, he bore our sins. Of course, Paul doesn't mention that specifically at this point; it comes in later in the epistle.
But it is the background, the necessary groundwork, for what follows here. It is gathered up in the great idea of the love of God, reaching out to us.
And he did it, says the Apostle, when there was nothing in us which could help him in the least degree, when we were dead in our trespasses. We have done nothing to break through this pattern of human misery. I hope we all understand that very plainly. This is the biblical view of life, and it is accurateit fits history.
This is the reason why you can go back through history and read about all the struggles of men in the pastin the Middle Ages, at the time of our Lord, in the Golden Age of Greece, back in the Persian Empire, as far back in history as you can goand you will find that men and women then were struggling with exactly the same problems and feeling the same hurts and the same abject miseries, and were living in a dull, gray world governed by human hatred and fratricide and war, all exactly the same, exactly the same, as today.
We hear the prophets of our day who say that man has learned so much, that we have had an explosion of knowledge, that we now have technological possibilities which men never even dreamed of before, and that with all this vast knowledge we ought to be able to solve the problems of life much more readily. But the truth is that we have not learned one thing about relieving human misery and hurt. Our cities today are largely great pools of human misery, stirring with hatred and strife, and ready to break out in riot and revolution at a moment's notice.
That is how much all the knowledge that humans have gathered through the centuries has meant in relieving, in actually breaking through this human condition. When we were dead, when we were absolutely hopeless, then God did something. This is what the Apostle wants us to see.
God took action. God broke through. And what he accomplished did break the spell of evil, and began to set us free. All of this, as you know, becomes available to us when we believe in Jesus Christ.
Stedman, "But God The very special news about God is His willingness to walk through our trials in life--with us. This is the secret of Psalm 77 which Ray Stedman unfolds in his wonderful study. Are his promises at an end for all time? Has he in anger shut up his compassion? What god is great like our God? Evil was defeated on that first Easter, and one day it will be removed altogether.
How do you fix a story that is broken? We all have our stories. Some of them seem beyond fixing. The Christian faith says you fix a broken story by embedding it in a much bigger story in which good wins, and evil loses.
One day there will be justice. One day all suffering will end. One day there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain and God will wipe away every tear from our eyes.
This is an extraordinary description of the tenderness of God and of his plans to put right all the wrongs in this world. God does not always offer us answers. In this life, we might never really understand why some things have happened. But God always offers us himself.
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