Theopedia

Mercy of God

— The LORD is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

Psalm 103:8

Definition

Mercy is God’s goodness turned toward the miserable: his readiness to relieve those who are suffering the consequences of sin, whether or not they deserve any relief.1 It is not the same as grace. Grace meets guilt and forgives it; mercy meets misery and pities it.2 Scripture names the two side by side without collapsing them into one attribute (Eph. 2:4-5), and the Hebrew and Greek words behind “mercy,” chesed, racham, and eleos, all carry this same sense of tender compassion toward one in distress.1

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession names mercy among God’s attributes in the same sentence that lists his other perfections: God is “every way infinite, most holy, most wise, most free, most absolute; working all things according to the counsel of his own immutable and most righteous will for his own glory; most loving, gracious, merciful, long-suffering, abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin; the rewarder of them that diligently seek him, and withal most just and terrible in his judgments, hating all sin.”3 The Westminster Confession and its Larger and Shorter Catechisms follow the same pattern, listing mercy alongside God’s other perfections rather than singling it out for its own chapter: this is the wider Reformed confessional family’s shared way of naming the attribute, not a distinctively Baptist formulation.

Biblical Basis

God proclaims his own mercy to Moses as part of his name: “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” (Exod. 34:6), and ties the exercise of that mercy to his own sovereign will rather than to anything in its recipients: “I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy” (Exod. 33:19). Paul quotes that same declaration to ground God’s freedom in election, answering the charge of injustice by pointing to mercy’s sovereignty rather than to any human claim on it: “So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy” (Rom. 9:15-18). The psalmist celebrates mercy as inexhaustible: “he does not deal with us according to our sins… as a father shows compassion to his children, so the LORD shows compassion to those who fear him” (Ps. 103:10, 13), and Jeremiah’s lament finds mercy renewed daily even in judgment: “The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning” (Lam. 3:22-23). Christ commands his own disciples to imitate this same attribute: “Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful” (Luke 6:36). Paul names mercy as the ground of salvation itself, set against any work of the sinner’s own: “he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy” (Titus 3:5), and Peter traces the new birth to the same source: “According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope” (1 Pet. 1:3).

Historical Development

Reformed scholastic theologians derived mercy, along with love, grace, patience, and longsuffering, from a single divine propensity to do good, distinguished from one another only by their object. Petrus van Mastricht (1630-1706), in a chapter treating all five together, wrote that this one “benevolent and beneficent propensity” is “called benevolent when considered intrinsically and beneficent when considered extrinsically. In itself generally considered, it is love; insofar as it is independent, free, and is not owed, it is grace; insofar as it considers the creature as miserable, it is mercy; insofar as it considers the offending sinner whom it endures, it is patience… insofar as it also does good to him, it is clemency and beneficence.”4 On this account mercy is not a separate divine faculty alongside God’s goodness but that same goodness viewed under one particular aspect: misery in the object it meets.

Stephen Charnock (1628-1680) drew the same line from the opposite direction, distinguishing mercy from the wider goodness it belongs to rather than from grace: “goodness extends to more objects than mercy; goodness stretcheth itself out to all the works of his hands; mercy extends only to a miserable object… The grace of God respects the rational creature; mercy the miserable creature; goodness all his creatures, brutes, and the senseless plants, as well as reasonable man.”2 Working through the same catalogue of terms Moses heard at Sinai, Charnock located mercy precisely within it: “when it confers happiness without merit, it is grace; when it bestows happiness against merit, it is mercy… and when it pardons a penitent person, it is mercy.”5

John Gill (1697-1771) devoted a full chapter of his Body of Doctrinal Divinity to the attribute, opening from the same distinction: mercy “supposes its objects miserable, and so fallen,” where love “pitched itself originally on objects… as unfallen.”6 Gill set out mercy’s properties in turn: it is natural and essential to God rather than a passion or “affection… attended with grief and sorrow,” since God is “free from all passion and perturbation of mind”; it is uncaused, since “the misery of a creature is not the cause of mercy in God”; and it is infinite, eternal, and immutable, belonging equally to Father, Son, and Spirit, and displayed to sinners only through Christ.6 He then distinguished mercy’s objects: a “general mercy of God” extended to “all creatures,” even “the brute creation,” and a “special mercy” reserved for the elect, who alone are called “vessels of mercy” (Rom. 9:23).6 Against this, Gill noted that “the Socinians deny that mercy is essential to God, supposing that mercy and justice are opposite,” a position he rejected: “a man may be just, and yet merciful, merciful and yet just.”6

Archibald Alexander Hodge (1823-1886) distinguished mercy from three neighboring terms in a single question: benevolence “embraces all his creatures,” the love of complacency is God’s “approving affection” for his own perfections reflected in his creatures, while “God’s mercy… is the divine goodness exercised with respect to the miseries of his creatures, feeling for them, and making provision for their relief, and in the case of impenitent sinners, leading to long-suffering patience.”7 Herman Bavinck (1854-1921) drew the same distinction in a single sentence: “the goodness of God, when shown to those in misery, is called mercy,” naming it alongside steadfast love, forbearance, and grace as one more way God’s single goodness manifests itself toward his creatures.8

Objections and Responses

If God’s mercy is infinite, does justice require that punishment never be everlasting? Mastricht addressed an objection raised by universalists in his own day: that eternal punishment for sins committed in a finite life is repugnant to God’s infinite mercy, and that all must therefore eventually be saved. His response was that mercy and justice are not rivals competing for the same ground: “the divine attributes, mercy and avenging justice, by no means fight among themselves,” so that Scripture’s own declarations of avenging justice are not set aside by God’s mercy.9 Nor is mercy owed to every sinner simply because it is infinite in God’s own nature: “although the mercy of God is infinite and natural to him, such that he can have mercy on whom he wills, yet his dispensation of it depends upon his most wise choice: he has mercy on whom he wills and also hardens whom he wills.”9

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1969), 59: mercy is “the goodness or love of God shown to those who are in misery or distress, irrespective of their deserts.” The Hebrew chesed and racham (“tender mercy”) and the Greek eleos all designate this attribute. ↩ ↩2

  2. Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, ed. William Symington, 2 vols. (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1853), vol. 2, “Discourse XII: On the Goodness of God,” 218. ↩ ↩2

  3. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 2, “Of God, and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 1. ↩

  4. Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, Faith in the Triune God, ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), chap. 17, “The Love, Grace, Mercy, Longsuffering, and Clemency of God,” 387. ↩

  5. Charnock, Existence and Attributes of God, vol. 2, “Discourse XII,” 220. ↩

  6. John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity; or, A System of Evangelical Truths, Deduced from the Sacred Scriptures, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book I, chap. 14, “Of the Mercy of God.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  7. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 8, “Attributes of God,” Q. 67, 158-159. ↩

  8. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 8, “The Living, Acting God,” sec. “Goodness”: “the goodness of God, when shown to those in misery, is called mercy.” ↩

  9. Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, chap. 17, 414-415. ↩ ↩2