Understanding Divine Mercy

As a whole, Western Christianity gets forgiveness alarmingly wrong.

King David committed horrid crimes. We read in 2 Samuel 11-12 of his adultery and murder. On the one hand, he was the king of what was then a very powerful kingdom. On the other hand, the Law of Moses prescribed execution for his crimes. If you read things in terms of Western legalism, it looks like serious corruption. Most Westerners ask: Why didn’t God enforce His own laws?

He did, of course, but it requires first understanding God and His concept of enforcement. We have to understand that God is not fair and balanced in the Western sense of things. Our Western arrogance teaches us to condemn, if not God Himself, then the Hebrew way of looking at things. “They didn’t know God as well as we do.” This is taught in a very wide range of mainstream Christianity. It’s not as if God was unable to correct things according to His tastes. But Western minds stumble yet again in thinking that the innocent son of this adulterous affair is the one who paid. And while they might connect how this crime resulted in Absalom’s Revolt, Western Christians still get it all wrong.

God is the definition of justice. What He does is justice. It remains for us to understand as much as possible. And I remind my readers that the Hebrew cultural viewpoint was shaped by God’s own hand; they were not some poor benighted intellectual backwater bumpkins. He didn’t struggle to reveal Himself to ignorant barbarians as a placeholder until He could get things going on the right path with Western Christianity. Rather, folks like Abraham and Moses were His closest human servants, His very real friends on this earth and men who understood Him better than any human at that time. They grasped His character far better than most humans today. Jesus did not set out to create Western Civilization; He strove to resurrect the ancient Hebrew viewpoint against a growing resistance from God’s own people. Western Civilization is largely the result of that resistance still active today. The viewpoint of the ancient Hebrew people is about as close to reality as we can get, in the sense that it was Jesus’ own viewpoint.

David was a skirt-chaser and in that way a fairly ordinary man. His tastes were far different from anything we know of today, but he surely loved the ladies. David was also a man God said was “after My own heart” (1 Samuel 13:14). The two ideas are not incompatible. Westerners have an incredibly twisted and perverted understanding of human sexuality when judged by Hebrew standards. It takes whole books to explain this. We don’t understand how God can simply pass over David’s adultery, so we come up with all kinds of idiotic Western Christian teaching about it.

The primary issue in the Law of Moses was always social stability. Jesus said the lawful penalty for adultery (execution by stoning) required a just community first. Adultery is a threat to social stability; it rubs raw the wiring of how we interact. Despite our fallen nature and vast ocean of lustful desires, we cannot possibly move toward redemption if we tolerate that kind of marital looseness. But the legal penalty is not absolute. In Hebrew culture, laws are stated as the personal character of the Lawgiver, not as propositional truth standing out there in some imaginary intellectual ideal. The apex of applying legal penalties is head of household who represents God to the members of the household. The penalty is best exercised by someone who is up to his ears in the context because that is the strongest restraint against overdoing it.

Tolerance, mercy and forgiveness were a vital necessity for human survival, and a vital element of God’s character. Western minds keep reading that out of their understanding of the Bible. The words are not the problem, but the context that gives the words meaning is where we fail. How penitent was the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32)? Nobody says you can just whitewash sin, but someone who genuinely repents is not the same as someone trying to cover up or excuse their sin. David was the highest ranking chief of tribes, clans and households; he was Israel’s acting Big Daddy. Who could execute the Chief Executioner? When David confesses after the prophet accuses him, we sense David was ready to pay the full price. In that case, God Himself was handling the investigation and trial, so we have no standing to question David’s sincerity. There were consequences, and we can be sure God entertained David’s appeal for the boy’s life, but decided it was best to bring that boy home to Heaven instead of allowing a life to flower on the ground of such a grave mistake. Yes, innocent children go straight to heaven, a far better place than this world, so the child didn’t lose anything.

In the Hebrew mind, human life in this fallen realm is not sacred in itself. Rather, life under divine justice is sacred. It is sacred regardless of the length or lack thereof, and sacred because it shines the light of glory on the Lord. David opened the door for demonic influence in his own household and his reign was shaken. The people of Israel joined in paying the price for David’s sin. That’s how it works. God had no trouble mitigating individual suffering for His faithful servants, but He does not simply disconnect everyone in full from the fallen context just because they didn’t do anything in particular to bring upon themselves that suffering. Such thinking does not represent His viewpoint and it is upon our shoulders to correct our thinking to match His. That means we are obliged to adopt the Ancient Hebrew thinking that He designed as the means to reveal Himself. You cannot know Him any other way.

God plays favorites in various ways, but the full details of His plans are seldom visible to any human or group of humans. Lots of stuff happens to us as background noise and we are obliged to bear with it. Some people appear to get off easy while others are crushed for no apparent reason. Get over it. You can ask, but God owes you no explanations, nor is He accountable to your reasoning and logic. All the more so if your logic is shaped by a culture that rejected Him outright, as the Greek philosophers did. Yes, those famous Greek thinkers knew about the Hebrew people and their God, but their hearts were asleep and unable to point them to the truth. They preferred to trust their own logic, the very essence of the Fall itself.

King David was essential to God’s plans. There was surely a better way of getting the proper mixture of DNA for God’s choice of heirs for David. God can remake anything and everything in the universe on His whims. Whatever God had in mind, it was David who took the wrong path. If nothing else, God’s choice to raise up Solomon as the second son of this weird marriage indicates how completely He can forgive sin. We have no excuse for the bitter and resentful way we do things, particularly in the Pharisaical legalistic way Western churches do it. Western churches pretend to be balance, fair and just, but only from the Western bureaucratic point of view, despite Orwellian abuse of biblical family language. Christ meant for His churches to be the moral equivalent of extended family households in His Kingdom, families after the style of genuine Hebraic households. Seems to me Church History is replete with examples of how completely we missed that.

Don’t just ignore sin, but learn divine justice and learn how God forgives.

Addenda: Offline question asks about the phrase in Galatians 2:6 that “God is no respecter of persons.” This is a Greek phrasing of a Hebrew idiom, as happens quite often in the New Testament. The closest English phrase is “God takes no one at face value.” You can be a legalistic butthead about the wording, but the context is obvious. God is not impressed with man’s sense of importance, so your human political standing does not automatically translate to a similar standing with God. It does not mean God is impartial in some absolutist legalistic sense. Rather, it means God plays favorites according to His own standard, as any eastern potentate would do. If He thinks you are a man/woman after His own heart, He will display distinct favoritism in some ways consistent with His character. In God’s revelation, everything is personal.