Biblical mercy has been held hostage for too long

Doug Wilson is working with the word mercy at Blog and Mablog. He is trying to untangle it from the culture so that we will think of it in the biblical fashion that God intended. Mercy has been hijacked by the Oprah's of the world and most Christians are pretty comfortable with her understanding of it. These have been from the last couple of weeks.

Mercy and No Mercy
...Biblical wisdom always remembers the antithesis, and places it where God has placed it. Forgetting the antithesis frequently consists of selecting a biblical virtue, absolutizing it, and using it to contradict or "balance" other biblical virtues. This is the basic (and very serious) error of the pacifist. The problem is not what he affirms so much, but rather what he denies...

The unbelieving response is to privilege one set of verses over the other, and, as time goes by, to forget about the neglected set of verses entirely....

God judges according to His own nature and character, and so this means that when He is merciless and throws merciless sinners into Hell, He is not violating any internal standard....

Bankrupt Mercy an Oxymoron
We have established that without justice and righteousness, mercy cannot be mercy. Those who universalize mercy are therefore adversaries to true biblical mercy, and are simply apostles of sentimentalism....

Justice, mercy, and faithfulness are the weightier matters of the law (Matt. 23:23). This means that we cannot say that every attribute that God has can be given equal weight or importance. He is the Holy One of Israel, and not an isocoles triangle....

Mercy and the Divine Warrior
...God's justice is not leaning one way with His mercy leaning another, with Him trying to keep His balance on the high wire of the highest heaven.

"Justice and judgment are the habitation of thy throne: mercy and truth shall go before thy face" (Ps. 89:14). This is a package; it is not an "on the one hand" and then "on the other" kind of thing. God is not merciful to His people in spite of being a warrior. He is merciful to His people because He is a warrior....

We don't understand biblical mercy because we don't understand the antithesis, which is another way of saying that we do not know that the kingdom of God is in a state of perpetual war with the ungodly. We read a passage like this, and our sympathies are immediately extended to Pharaoh and his host, famous kings, not to mention Sihon and Og. What about mercy for them? But this is not a question that Scripture teaches us to ask. The fact that we have learned to ask it means that we are letting somebody else teach us when we shouldn't....

Topsy Turvy Judgments
In his book on the psalms, C.S. Lewis commented on the difference between the Jewish view of judgment and the Christian view. The Christian, he said, thinks of judgment as a criminal trial with himself in the dock. The Jewish mentality thought of it as a civil proceeding, with himself as the plaintiff. This explains why the Christian instinct is to avert judgment, to seek a solution for it, which of course is ultimately found in the cross. The Jewish instinct is to pray for judgment to come, for God to intervene, and the sooner the better.

Because we are not Marcionite, we don't have to choose between these -- they are both in the Bible, and they are both in the Bible for us to emulate, each in their place. It is all there for a reason. Because Christians, for the last century or two, have greatly neglected the singing of the psalms, the "Christian" perspective has gotten dangerously out of whack, and we need to learn how to pray for God's judgment to come and vindicate us....