Mercy and justice living together

“He shall have judgment without mercy, who hath shewed no mercy; and mercy rejoiceth against judgment.” (James 2:13).

Mercy is not contrary to justice. It works with justice; they cooperate. Both principles form the basis of God’s character. They both work together to balance each other; together, they demonstrate what love does and is.

The simplest pastime children love is for two kids to hold each other’s hands and then, with feet together, lean back and spin around in circles. They do this with shrieks of glee until they usually fall down, laughing. This is the way mercy and justice work. They hold hands and spin around each other; and unfallen creation rejoices.

We also see this in the heavens. Our sun is a star, a single star. But in the universe there exist dual star combinations where two stars are bound together by gravity, yet spinning at such a rate that centrifugal force keeps them from colliding into each other. In the perfect balance of gravity and centrifugal force the two stars remain together but separate. And though two, at a distance, they look like one throbbing star.

Is mercy superior to judgment? Is this why the above statement was written? Was James unbalanced, or the Holy Spirit who inspired him to write it? The answer is an obvious No when one reads the whole book of James. Much of what he wrote concerned the Ten Commandment Law of God, and works of righteousness, truth, and justice.

If the reader looks at what James wrote, he sees that James was writing to balance misunderstandings concerning what Paul had written of the gospel. Some Christians were in danger of taking mercy out of context with justice and going to the extreme with it. So the Spirit of God commissioned James to counteract that unbalanced view before it became fanatical. Looking closely at the churches to which James wrote we can see how destructive such an idea was to them. A gospel of only mercy didn’t prevent dead half-heartedness (Ja. 1:6,7;4:8), or favoritism (2:3,4), bitterness and strife (3:5-18), making self-indulgent requests to God (4:3), or the wealthy taking advantage of the poor (5:4).

Mercy is not mercy without the authority of law against it; neither is it love. The principle of justice works against irresponsible mercy.

Justice is not justice without the authority of grace against it; and neither is justice alone love. The principle of mercy works against abusive justice.

True and just mercy rejoices in forgiveness. And true, merciful justice rejoices in judgment. Just mercy produces revival. Merciful justice produces reformation.

Dispensing with justice and leaving only mercy has always been Satan’s cheap antinomian substitute for love. Self-sacrificing love cannot exist without either of these two counterbalances, mercy and justice working together. Mercy alone is not true love, even if it appears to be. Downplaying justice leads to presumption and laziness. The tonic of truth is gone, the salt has lost its savor, and soon there is no law and order. Justice’s protection for the weak is dismissed and then mercy ceases to exist.

Thus if justice is taken away, mercy soon leaves in its wake. And Satan succeeds in the lawlessness and misery he so much desires to breathe on us. Lawlessness through mercy—how ingenious of the devil! The extinction of justice through mercy ends in the extinction of both! By Satan abolishing God’s Law and removing His authority to correct, he destroys the knowledge of God’s grace.

Its not that God wants to control us or play cat and mouse with our emotions by His ordaining justice to keep us balanced. He doesn’t want to use the fear of judgment to destroy our freedom of choice. In reality, our freedom of choice is preserved through retaining both mercy and justice, Law and grace. It is in loving obedience to His commanding government that we are safe from Satan, and that our freedom of choice is protected from the evil one who would devour us if he could.

Sin and the tempter have misguided us from seeing justice and mercy properly. We interpret justice as punishment and mercy as reward. Satan inspires us to view mercy as good and justice as bad. Thus, he leads almost the whole world to believe that God’s grace is good and His Law is bad.

But it is love that operates them. With love, they are both good; and love unites them together, always and for ever. The absence of love causes their union to dissolve; without love, they are both used for evil, always and ever. And because Satan knows no love, he uses them both—his loveless mercy and his loveless justice—to his advantage.

He abuses us with his loveless justice by accusing us unmercifully in our conscience and before God. It is he who “ruled the nations in anger,” who “smote the people in wrath with a continual stroke.” (Is. 14:6). “And He shewed me Joshua the high priest standing before the Angel of the Lord, and Satan standing at his right hand to resist him.” (Zech. 3:1). As the moon appears to be the same size as the sun only because it is closer, and because of this is able to eclipse the sun, so does our adversaries, the devil and his helpers, work to come between man and God by appearing as God and through speaking as the Spirit of God to our conscience.

Heaven’s mercy is good enough for the blackest sin. Our heavenly Father reaches down to uplift every suffering soul and bring it to repentance and forgiveness. If we could only know the heaviness sin has caused Him, His pain from seeing sin play out in the destruction of His beloved children. Where sin abounds, His grace much more abounds.

But if we have become victorious over the Lord’s adversary there, and have gotten past the dense cloud of confusion he made to prevent us from seeing the cross of Christ and obtaining justification with God, then the wily one resorts to leading us into presumption upon God’s mercy.

The arch rebel knows very well the power of God’s grace to irresistibly draw the sinner home, and so the blasphemous beast twists the promises of God’s mercy to undermine His Law. He tempts us to believe that under a government of grace, we can never do wrong. In our still weakened character and corruptible nature, and our not fully trained understanding of righteousness he subtly appeals to us with false notions of a God who loves so much that He would never correct nor punish us. And then, as with David, after the Lord has created such a beautiful salvation of a soul that was lost in sin, that same soul throws it all away for a worthless counterfeit spit out of the printing presses of hell.

If we really understood God’s love, we would see the wisdom in His arrangement of justice and mercy, and would never come to resent correction and law, or fear justice and judgment. We would be OK with all His demands. If He is our Friend and Lord, we will do whatever He asks; if we love Him, we will keep all of His commandments. If we knew the love of God, we would be satisfied with anything He required of us, because, as creatures, being loved by the Creator is all that matters.

And loving is always the natural by-product of being loved.