Sermon: The Merciful

A Reflection of God's Mercy
#1661
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 09-Jul-22; 81 minutes

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Please begin turning in your Bibles to Matthew the ninth chapter. We will read verses 9-13 to begin today. This is Matthew's account of his own calling.

Matthew 9:9-13 As Jesus passed on from there, He saw a man named Matthew [he is called Levi elsewhere] sitting at the tax office [that is where he worked]. And He said to him, "Follow Me." So he arose and followed him. Now it happened, as Jesus sat at the table in the house, that behold, many tax collectors and sinners came and sat down with Him and His disciples. And when the Pharisees saw it, they said to His disciples, "Why does your Teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?" When Jesus heard that, He said to them, "Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. But go and learn what this means, 'I desire mercy and not sacrifice.' For I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance."

Matthew uses here an incident that occurred just after his calling to illustrate a very sharp contrast between Jesus and the Pharisees. The Pharisees, of course, were the dominant religious figures in Judea and Galilee, particularly Galilee. It was important as he went through his gospel here that he began showing how much difference there was between Jesus and the religious leaders of the day.

Now we find elsewhere in one of the synoptic gospels that Matthew himself had actually thrown this dinner. Probably none of us have ever had an experience where, hey, we are called out of the world and immediately we give a dinner for our God. It was a unique occasion here. And it is undoubtable that he had invited many of his coworkers and friends to this dinner with Jesus because he wanted to give them the opportunity to meet Jesus, just as he had, and perhaps be called.

It is very clear from this passage that our Savior had no qualms whatsoever about dining with Matthew and his tax collector friends and all the other sinners that were there at his feast. These tax collectors and sinners, you will find in many places in the gospels, are considered to be the dregs of Judean society. And the Pharisees thought them to be the most inveterate sinners of all. They are just the lowest of the low in society. They were considered completely unclean because of their sins, particularly by the Pharisees.

We can assume from what we see here and Matthew's inclusion of this in his gospel, that these religious leaders' attitude toward him and his kind, seen in the question that they ask about, "Why does your Teacher dine with these terrible people?", was deeply offensive to Matthew. It was hurtful to him to be considered that way by his fellow Jews. So, he makes a point of including it in his gospel for discussion here and he brings out a lot of very interesting points, many of which I will point out here.

Jesus' reply in verse 12 to this question, "Why does your Teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?" is very insightful, and it is also very sarcastic. Jesus had a bit of a sharp tongue at times, and He usually used it on the Pharisees—and they deserved it. He says here in verse 12, "Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick." So He gives a parallel to what they were talking about using doctors and sick people, or to turn it around, those who are in need of help and the doctors, the physicians, that would give them help.

Remember the real topic here is Jesus and sinners, not doctors and the sick. But we are talking about Jesus and sinners through this illustration of the sick and the doctors that tend them. You see, doctors go where they are needed, they go where the sick are; they do not spend their days with the healthy, they spend their days with those who are sick. If they spent their days with the healthy people, they would have nothing to do. They would not have any way to make any money in their case because they would be just twiddling their thumbs with healthy people. Maybe they go out golfing. That is what they do today, even though they are trying to tend the sick. But doctors do not stay with the healthy, they go where the sick are and they provide what help they can to alleviate pain and nurse those sick people back to health.

And it this simple fact that Jesus is trying to get across to the Pharisees about Himself. He, of course, is the Physician. Sinners, of course, were those who were sick. So Jesus did not come, He tells the Pharisees, to rub elbows with the righteous, those who did not need His help. He came to give aid to sinners. And so He needed to be there with them in their iniquity to nurse them toward righteousness, if you will.

Obviously, the Pharisees thought when He talked about the righteous that he was talking about them. But of course, Jesus did not by any stretch of the imagination consider the Pharisees to be truly righteous. Perhaps a slender minority of the Pharisees tried to live God's way. They were what might be called sincere Pharisees. They were really trying to do what is right, but even they were likely compromised or contaminated by Pharisaic tradition and their worldview, we could say their system of religion. So when He includes them among the righteous, it is a sarcastic way of telling them that they should both be sitting down among the sinners, which was their true place, and doing their share of serving sinners to bring them to righteousness. But the Pharisees thought they were too good for that. Remember they considered themselves the righteous.

Well, Jesus does not leave it with this parallel between physicians and the sick, and Himself and sinners. In verse 13, after He says this, He gives them a task to do, hopefully that would help them understand what was going on a little bit better. So He says, "But go and learn what this means: 'I desire mercy and not sacrifice.' For I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance." Now, knowing what I know about the Pharisees in Jesus' time, I doubt that they went back and thought about it. They probably thought, "Who is this bum to give me a task like this." Well, let us go back to Hosea 6 because this is where Jesus found what is said here. He is talking about Israel's sin.

Hosea 6:6 "For I desire mercy and not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings."

He only quoted the first line of this couplet. "For I desire mercy and not sacrifice," but "the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings" is a parallel to it. So mercy and the knowledge of God are parallel to one another. And of course, sacrifice and burnt offerings are parallel to one another. I am sure they thought, these Pharisees, that they did not need to be taught the Old Testament by the sinner lover, as they saw Him, because He was unclean by His interactions with them. They considered Him as much a sinner. You know, they accused Him of being a glutton and a lush, a drunk, because He ate and drank with them, and evidently He ate to the full and He drank enough that they noticed. I am not saying He got drunk, I am not saying He was a glutton, but they considered Him to be over the top in the way He interacted with these sinners.

When He said this to them back in Matthew 9:13, "Go and learn what this means," I am sure they thought, "Who is this guy quoting Scripture to me? What can He possibly teach us that we don't already know?" I mean, many of these Pharisees, I am sure the apostle Paul was one of them, had memorized Scripture. They knew the whole Book. They knew exactly where this came from, this quotation, and here Jesus was telling them that they needed to go back and rethink this scripture. They needed to understand it better. I mean, were they not the doctors of the law in Israel? Were they not the experts? And this hick from Nazareth, unlearned, who had not gone through the rabbinical schools, was telling them that He knew better than they about this scripture.

Besides, they knew what mercy was. It was their own language that He was quoting to them, their own Hebrew, they knew what the word there was for mercy. They knew what the word for sacrifice was. They understood how to put it all together. And besides, I am sure they thought, what do mercy and sacrifice have to do with Jesus eating with sinners?

Now, I went through all this, kind of acting this out, because this is exactly the way the Pharisees were. Let us go back to Luke 18, just to the attitude in this Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector. I am just going to read verses 10-12. Jesus teaches here about the difference between the Pharisees as they were caricatured, the way they actually probably were, versus this sinner.

Luke 18:10-12 "Two men went up to to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. [same group of people here in this parable] The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself: 'God, I thank you that I am not like other men—extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this tax collector. I fast twice a week, I give tithes of all that I possess.'"

That is what they thought of themselves. How proud they were of their good works, of their learning, of how well they knew the law. I will not go into what the tax collector said and his manner there, his posture toward God. But these couple of verses show a group of people who were so proud and so self-righteous that they thought they had it made. They were God's chosen ones. God certainly considered them to be righteous [they thought]. They were upholding all the law and doing everything that the law said that they should do.

Let us think about this. Remember what Jesus said, "Go and learn what this means, 'I desire mercy and not sacrifice.'" He said this to the Pharisees, but He meant it for us. He meant it for His disciples to think this through and that is what we are going to do here for just a little bit. We need to take this command from Jesus very seriously so we understand the difference between mercy and sacrifice. What He was trying to get at by giving us this assignment.

So, what does it mean, "I desire mercy and not sacrifice." His quotation from Hosea 6:6 puts mercy and sacrifice in opposition to each other. One is good, that is what He desires. One is bad, that is what He does not desire. Or we could put it in maybe less black and white terms. He would prefer mercy over sacrifice. And then in the second part of the couplet Hosea contrasts the knowledge of God to burnt offerings. I mentioned that before. So it is clear that mercy and the knowledge of God contrast to what scholars call the Levitical cultus, or what we would probably call in our more simple language, the Old Covenant sacrificial system. Those are all the rituals required by God in the worship that He set up in the Tabernacle and in the Temple.

I just want to add here as kind of an inset to this, that the apostle Paul later said that this sacrificial system, this Levitical cultus was put in place as a tutor or as a guardian to lead the way to Christ. Let us go look at that. It will just take us a minute in Galatians 3.

Galatians 3:24-25 [He says] Therefore the law [he is talking about the sacrificial system here] was our tutor to bring us to Christ, that we may be justified by faith. But after faith has come, we are no longer under a tutor.

What he is saying here is that God designed the sacrificial system to point the way to Jesus Christ. It is, as we have said in many sermons, the symbols and the actions that are in the sacrificial system all do, describe, comment upon, signify Christ and the things that He has done, the way He is. I gave a sermon series on even the furniture or the furnishings of the Tabernacle and the Temple. All of them have something to do with Christ and bringing us to the Mercy Seat, to God Himself. Dad did one on the sacrifices. They all talk about things that Jesus did as a perfected work to bring us justification, sanctification, salvation, glorification.

Those things are there in type, but once the reality has come, which is Jesus Christ and the full work that He did, those sacrifices and all those those rituals that were to be done are no longer necessary. And as part of the Old Covenant they are, in a way, ready to pass away, they are not something that is absolutely necessary. But we still see them as teaching devices so that we can understand better what Christ has done for us.

And those things will be brought back in the Millennium. There will be a Temple in the Millennium and the people of Israel will see these things enacted once again. They will have just as much effect as they had back then because the blood of bulls and goats cannot take away sin, but they will have the example of those things so that they could see how Christ fulfilled them. And so they can see then what God has done to bring them to the point of their calling, conversion, and eventual salvation.

So Paul says here, then, kind of to sum up in verse 25, that once faith has come, that is, he is talking about the system that Christ came with to, if you will, supersede the sacrificial system, then the old way is no longer necessary. Those sacrifices are purely as, let us say, illustrations, teaching vehicles, but the real way to God is through faith and not through any kind of sacrificial system of taking animals to an altar and having them bleed out. That is not the way that anything really worked. It was always through Jesus Christ and His sacrifice that sin was forgiven and He took the sin away.

Now let us get back to to what we are talking about here. What He is saying here by going back to Hosea 6:6, is that mercy is plainly superior to sacrifice. God desires mercy, not sacrifice. Many of us like Psalm 51. Let us go back there. David understood this way back when, about 1000 BC. The Pharisees were way far behind. Here, he has just been praying for God's mercy. We see that in verse 1, "Have mercy upon me. O God, according to Your lovingkindness; according to the multitude of Your tender mercies, blot out my transgressions." He knew where to go for the forgiveness of sin. It was directly to God.

Psalm 51:16 [he says] For you do not desire sacrifice, or else I would give it; You do not delight in burnt offering.

Wow, would you not know it? Those are the same two things that Hosea 6:6 mentions, the sacrifices of God. Now notice this twist he puts on it or this explanation he gives for the true sacrifices that God wants to see.

Psalm 51:17 The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and a contrite heart—these, O God, You will not despise.

What he is telling us here is that there is something greater than the sacrifices that God desires. And that is mercy, if you will, as Jesus kind of sums it all up. It is these internal attitudes that He wants to see. So David here, a converted man who was pleading for God's forgiveness and mercy, says that the true sacrifices that God wishes to see are all internal attitudes: a broken spirit, a contrite heart. So in combination with Matthew 9:13 and what Jesus says there, this suggests very strongly that these sacrificial attitudes replace animal sacrifices as sweet smelling savors that please God. That is what He wants to see. What does Paul tell us in Romans 12:1? He tells us to be living sacrifices.

And so, in His own way, Jesus is telling the Pharisees this very thing. That the sacrifices are soon to be passe. It had not happened yet that He had done his work. But He was on the road to that end. He was going to replace the sacrifices of the Old Testament with His own perfect sacrifice that more than fulfilled all of those and all of their types. What He wanted to see, then, from them was mercy.

We are far from finished here because this gets into a lot of things that is important for us to understand about what the difference is between mercy and God desiring it, and sacrifices and Him not desiring it. Because "sacrifices" is also a kind of broad term that has a lot else in it. It is not just the burnt offering. It is not just the sin offering, it is not just the peace offering. It is not just animal sacrifices alone. There is a lot more that comes under this major heading of sacrifices. Just as a lot comes under this major heading of mercy. See He is using these two words to mean a whole lot more than just the specifics of mercy and sacrifice.

What He is telling us as converted Christians is that God's desire is for religion to be internal rather than external. There is some externality to it, but mostly what He wants to see is internal. Remember, God looks on the heart. So He is looking at that, first of all. What He wants is for us to be self-compelled (if that is even a word; if not, I just coined it). He wants us to be self-compelled in doing good rather than constrained by rigorous external codes, even ones like the Ten Commandments. He wants our actions and our attitudes to come from within now. In actuality, they do. But Jesus says from out of the heart spewed all those works of the flesh that He mentions there. He wants that totally replaced so out of our heart comes mercy.

Now you noticed a minute ago I said that He does not want us constrained by rigorous external codes, even ones like the Ten Commandments. That is a true statement. Remember, under the New Covenant, the law, the same law that is written on the Ten Commandments is put in the mind and written on the heart. It is the same Ten Commandments. It is the same law. But God wants that law to be in us and compelling us to do good, rather than seeing it on a page or on tablets of stone and being guilted into doing it from the outside—because if we do not do it, we sin. There is a big difference there. Let us just go to Jeremiah 31. Probably a scripture we all know.

Jeremiah 31:33-34 But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: "I will put My law in their minds, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. [Notice the next verse:] No more shall every man teach his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, 'Know the Lord,' for they shall all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them, says the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more."

At the very end, ultimately, there will not be people having to tell each other what to do because everybody will have it written in their hearts and there will not be any need for any external reminder. It will all come from within.

Let us go to kind of a commentary on this from the apostle Paul in II Corinthians 3. He says,

II Corinthians 3:3 Clearly you are an epistle of Christ, ministered by us, written not with ink but by the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of flesh, that is, of the heart.

And he goes on to talk about how under the New Covenant, under the Way, under the gospel of Jesus Christ, those tablets of stone cease to exist because it is written on our heart. He talks about the veil that is put on the people of Israel because they do not have the Holy Spirit, they cannot see. But now we see that veil is lifted and the law is being written upon us, upon our minds, in our conscience. And so we are free then is what he gets to at the end here. He says verse 17,

II Corinthians 3:17 Now the Lord is the Spirit [He is the one that comes and lives with us and puts these things in our heart]; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.

Now we are free to do the law because it comes from within us. It comes out of God's love in us. And we are, in verse 18, then working toward the same image and the same glory of God by that Spirit that is within us.

So the system that we are under now is far superior to the one that the Pharisees had to work with. They were just being guilted all the time into obeying the law by this outside, external series of commandments. Actually I should add to that. Not just those, but all kinds of manmade commandments that have come down through their traditions—the oral law that they were keeping—that had very little to do with the truth. Many of the things that they said in their oral law were not supported by Scripture, but they had become venerated down through the centuries and given a place of of honor, and they kept those things even though there is nothing in the Bible said that they needed to.

I think I have explained this before that all those ceremonial washings and everything that they did, you cannot find them in the Old Testament applied to normal people, everyday people. Most of the things that they said that they should be doing and made everybody else around them do—and tried to make Christ do—were the things that the Levite and the priest had to do when they were serving before God in the Temple. They were not commandments of God, not for the people. But they arrogated to themselves the positions of the priests and Levites and thought that those things were incumbent upon them—and they were not. They actually handcuffed themselves from the freedom that is in the law. That is neither here nor there. I have just come to think that the Pharisaical system is one of the most horrid, harsh religions that has ever been.

What does Jesus say about them? That they bind horrible burdens on people and they do not lift a finger to remove them. This is what Jesus had to face, all these people, these Pharisees, and all the Jews who were following them. He had to face all these people who thought they were right and they were willing to go to the nth degree to maintain their ritual purity when it meant nothing.

So what I was trying to say there is that the Ten Commandments is still in force, obviously. It is the same law in the Old Testament on the tablets of stone as it is in the New Testament on our fleshy hearts and in our minds. God's law abides forever. It is not like the antinomians that Craig [Sablich] talked about today, like Martin Luther who tried to get rid of the law because they think it is oppressive. They just do not understand the law. They do not understand it in the least and what it is supposed to be used for. Martin Luther assumed that the law was used for self-justification, justification by works, but that was never the purpose of the law.

The law is a guide. The law is there to put into words the character of God. And we are supposed to keep that law in our endeavor to become more like God, to put on God's image. We are not slavish obedience to the letter of the law, especially without the Holy Spirit, is shown in the pages of our Bible to be a dead system. That is why He has to bring in this idea of mercy and the idea which He brings in through the Sermon on the Mount of the spirit of the law.

I am not going to go into all that today. Actually, this is just my introduction to the Beatitude, but it is something we need to understand. What God wants, what He was trying to teach the Pharisees in this, that the law is still very much in force, but it is not enforced externally by a tablet, by a writing on some sort of physical thing, whether a rock or a piece of paper or parchment or what have you. But instead that law is gladly pursued and obeyed from within because it is an expression of the character of God, who we want to emulate in every way so we could build godly character.

In context, Jesus says that the Pharisees' approach, their letter of the law approach with their addition of all of these traditions and such, opposed God's desire. That is what He means when He says that if you understood this, "I desire mercy rather than sacrifice." He is saying, "Your way stinks. Your way does not produce the character of God. Your way will not allow a person to enter the Kingdom of God because you're in opposition to God and God's desire."

I am probably repeating myself, but I want to make sure you understand this. Their basic approach to Israel's religion given by God—all the correct things that are there in the Old Testament and the things that they had added later on—was strict adherence to the letter of the law, with special emphasis on performing all the rituals, both in Scripture and in their traditions, whether the Old Testament supported them or not. They, in their pride, were quick to point out and punish any variation or deviation from their ritual law, their oral law. To them, it was cut and dried.

Read their books, read what they say. You shall not carry more than three barley corns or whatever it is on the Sabbath. And if you do, you have broken the commandment. You may not carry a needle on the Sabbath day, because carrying a needle means that you are working. You may not walk more than 5/8 of a mile to do anything, because if you do, you have gone farther than a Sabbath day's journey. Find that in Scripture, find any of those things in Scripture. The Sabbath ones are easiest to point out because they were so particular about things—and down to three barley corns! Oh, you could take some string, but not the needle because the needle was a tool. And if you were carrying a tool you were obviously intending to do work. Crazy, crazy things.

I am sure you have heard them before, but that is how meticulous they were about their determination of what sin is. What if you only carry two barley corns? Can you get away with it? What if you went 5/8 of a mile and one step? That is how meticulous they were. Worse was their attitude toward that. That if they found somebody who was disobeying those things, they pounced! They hauled him up before the council or whatever it was, the Rabbi or the local supposed leaders of the synagogue, and they hounded people. And if it was egregious enough—and who knows how bad it would have to be to be egregious. It might not seem all that bad at all. You know, maybe four barley corns. But they would kick people out of the synagogue for what we would consider to be very minor iniquities, if you want to even put that, transgressions of their traditions.

I may be doing this a little bit too much, exaggerating a little bit too much. But it is the caricature of these things that helps us to understand how they were, how they thought. They were like this. I mean, just look at Matthew 23 and the things that Jesus accused them of, castigated them for. Things like saying, This money, Corban, goes to the Temple. So mom, dad, I am sorry, maybe you thought that we were going to support you during your old age. But no, we have already sent that money to the Temple, so sorry. Where love for their parents was overshadowed by their love for trying to actually do like the Catholics did and pay their way into eternal life or into heaven.

It was a harsh religion, so harsh that it gladly served up the promised Messiah to Roman crucifixion because He tried to show them a better way. And we can describe Pharisaism as mechanistic, systematic, and unfeeling. It had no give, it was quick to condemn, to punish, to ostracize sinners, to keep itself "pure." Their religion was a product of the Pharisees' super-righteousness. The thing that Solomon warned about in one of its forms. Remember, he said, "Do not be overly righteous." This was one of its forms because what it actually did, their over-righteousness actually turned to sin through their pride and the way they treated other people. And by Christ's day they had become so married to strict observance of the rituals that they placed them above the revelation of the God they purported to worship.

Let us notice Micah 7. This is the God that they were supposedly serving but they got Him all wrong.

Micah 7:18-20 Who is a God like You, pardoning iniquity and passing over the transgression of the remnant of His heritage? He does not retain His anger forever, because He delights in mercy. He will again have compassion on us, and will subdue our iniquities. You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea. You will give truth to Jacob and mercy to Abraham, which you have sworn to our fathers from days of old.

That is what God wants. He wants us to imitate Him and He is a God of mercy—He delights in mercy. And even though His people degenerated religiously to where the Pharisees were in the days of Jesus, He still wants to give them mercy and forgiveness. They are going to have to come a long way to understand His way in the way He wants them to, but He still holds it out there to those who are uncalled and unconverted when they come up in the resurrection.

So to sum up this first part of the sermon, in His inimitable way, Jesus tells them, the Pharisees, that they were doing religion wrong, completely wrong, completely opposite of God's desire.

Now the beatitude that we are going to go into today has a lot to do with this because it is the fifth of them: "Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy," which is Matthew 5:7. And here is another beatitude (as I found out in studying for these things) that seems simple on first reading but contains far more depth than meets the eye. This beatitude contains only one word that we need to define in any way or explain. And that is the word merciful, "Blessed are the merciful."

The word mercy that comes at the end of the beatitude is just the same Greek word in the future verb tense. It roughly translates as "shall have" or "shall obtain" or "shall receive" or "shall be shown" mercy. That is easy enough to understand.

But merciful is the Greek adjective ele-emon. It is Strong's 1655 and it is only used twice in the New Testament Greek. The other one is at Hebrews 2:17 where Christ is called a merciful and faithful High Priest. Ele-emon means simply "merciful." It is not that difficult. "Full of pity" is another way of putting it or "compassionate." Now, that is the Greek term, ele-emon. It does not, however, describe just the feeling of pity or compassion, that is, the inward recognition of another's need. But it also describes its outward, active manifestation. What I mean here is that ele-emon is not just sympathy for someone who is suffering, but extending aid and relieving whatever burden is on that person or otherwise help to alleviate the suffering or plight of another person. In fact, as Jesus uses the word and its cognate words throughout the gospels, the major implication of this word, ele-emon, is the second one. That is, the outward, active manifestation of aid or compassion to others.

Now, as we have seen in the other beatitudes, God has little use for attitudes and emotions that do not resolve into positive action. He wants those attitudes, He wants the emotions that are good. But if they just stay inside they do no one any good. He wants to see them come out in aid, service, sacrifice, help of some sort to the other person. It is like what James said back in his epistle about seeing someone and just saying "be warmed and filled," when they actually need food and they need clothing.

Also remember the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats. Jesus says that the people who are on His right hand are those who did these things. They saw Me when I was naked and they gave Me clothes. They saw Me when I was hungry and gave Me something to eat. They saw Me when I was thirsty and they gave Me something to drink. They saw Me in prison and they visited Me. I am sure those people that were on the left had some of those feelings of pity and sympathy for people, but they never did anything with them. And so they were relegated to the wrong side, if you will.

Jesus wants to see not just the attitude and the feeling of being compassionate. He wants to actually see action. He wants to see help. He wants to see aid. So just like repentance is not complete until it results in changed behavior and putting on some of the image of Jesus Christ, mercy is not fully accomplished until something positive is done to help the suffering person. There always has to be an attitude followed by an action.

Let us go to Luke 10. If you know your chapters, you know where things are in those chapters, you will know that Luke 10 contains the Parable of the Good Samaritan. We will read the whole thing. Now, I want you to notice (this is my literary side coming out of me), how this parable and this whole passage is constructed because it is very important. These things were not put in Scripture just haphazardly. Luke has a method for what he is trying to get across. Obviously, God inspired this.

Luke 10:25-37 And behold, a certain lawyer stood up and tested Him, saying, "Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" He said to him, "What is written in the law? What is your reading of it?" So he [the lawyer] answered and said, "'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind,' and 'your neighbor as yourself.'" And He said to him, "You have answered rightly; do this and you will live." But he [that is, the lawyer], wanting to justify himself, said to Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?"

Then Jesus answered and said, "A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, who stripped him of his clothing, wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a certain priest came down that road. And when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. Likewise a Levite, when he arrived at the place, came and looked, and passed by on the other side. But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was. And when he saw him, he had compassion.

So he went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine, and he set him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. On the next day, when he departed, he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said to him, 'Take care of him; and whatever more you spend, when I come again, I will repay you.' So which of these three do you think was neighbor to him who fell among the thieves?" And he said [the lawyer], "He who showed mercy on him." Then Jesus said to him, "Go and do likewise."

I hope you were thinking about the structure of this as we went through. It begins with a question about how a person can inherit eternal life. How is it that a person trying to obey God, trying to do what is right can achieve the Kingdom? Put it another way, what must he do? And Jesus, not wanting to just blurt out an answer because oftentimes that is not the easiest way to learn, Jesus understood that it would be far better for the lawyer to think it through himself and give an answer.

So He turns the question back on the questioner, who was a lawyer, he was an expert in the law. That is what it means in most cases. And especially in the gospels. When someone is called a lawyer, it is not a person like we think of as a lawyer, a solicitor who helps either prosecute or defend somebody in a court of law. A lawyer in this time was an expert in the law, the Old Testament law, and in most cases among the Pharisees and the scribes and such, the oral law too. So this was somebody who knew what the religion required of them.

He gives a solid answer, this lawyer. He obviously knew his scriptures, and he said, "Love God, love neighbor." He gave the two great commandments right back to Jesus. And Jesus said, Alright, that is a great answer. You do this. You have got it. You understood. That is the heart and soul of godly religion, of the true religion—these two great commandments, love God and then love your neighbor.

But then the lawyer trips over his pride and asked a snarky question. I mean, he went from the heights of Jesus applauding him to the depths of disappointing Jesus at this time by asking "Who is my neighbor?" He did this because he wanted to justify himself because under the law, as they understood it, his definition of neighbor was limited to just a small circle of people that were judged worthy. This would be the priest, the Levites, people who were specially marked out by God. And of course, those who were following all the dictates of their law. That would have been about the extent of it.

They might have included some other Israelites in there. But it excluded a lot more people. All the Gentiles were right out. They were unclean, unless they were proselytes and maybe you could give them a little bit of break because now they were trying to keep the Jewish law. Samaritans. Oh boy. They were probably on the bottom of the Gentiles the way the Jews looked at them because they were just plain idolaters and counterfeits. They had their own temple up on Mount Gerizim and they tried to do everything that the Jews were doing and they were just hypocrites, as they saw them. And of course sinners like tax collectors were also right out.

But Jesus' parable, when He gives it in response to this, "Who is my neighbor?" question, just exploded this lawyer's self-righteousness because He showed within the parable that the people he held in such high regard, keeping the law as they saw it so fastidiously, were the ones that were the most guilty of not being a neighbor, of not loving other people. It was the hated Samaritan, the lowest of the low, who showed himself to be the one who showed love and mercy to his neighbor. I have always thought it really hilarious in a very negative way that the lawyer, when Jesus asked him the question back to him, "Who's the neighbor?", he does not say the Samaritan. He did not want even that word to pass his lips because he probably thought it would defile him. He says the one who showed mercy. It is a euphemism in a way. It is a true euphemism. It does say who the person was, but he does not even speak the ethnic title of the Samaritan.

But think about what the Samaritan did. Here he was a hated person among the Jews. He was walking in Jewish territory. Remember this happened on the road going from Jerusalem to Jericho so he was right in the midst of Judea here. But it is the Samaritan, rather than the priest and the Levite, who did not just see the man's distress and feel pity for him, but he also took the actions that made his mercy real and complete. He alleviated the man's pain, he bound his wounds, he nursed him, he paid for his upkeep throughout his recovery. It was the Samaritan that made the sacrifices and went the extra mile for a man who was probably a Jew and despised him. His mercy is not just a feeling, it is not just an impulse or an attitude or a promise, but actual help, aid, succor, service, sacrifice. And Jesus, our God, tells the lawyer, "Go and do likewise."

It was said to the lawyer, but it was meant for us. "Go and do likewise." Go, and not only have compassion, but be compassionate. Do not just have pity. Help the poor person. Do not just feel that you wish that he had mercy. But actually give mercy, show mercy.

Let us return to the beginning of the passage because there is more here to dig out. Remember how it starts. It starts with the two great commandments. The parable's conclusion ties the two great commandments to mercy. It begins with love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself and showing mercy—"Go and do likewise." These are the two ends of this whole situation, this whole circumstance in the parable. I think this is purposeful, as I mentioned, and it is very simple: Love for God and love for neighbor must be present first before mercy can spring from them. Romans 5:5 says (Mr. Armstrong quoted this all the time), "For the love of God has been poured out in your hearts by the Holy Spirit" or the way he did said it, using the King James, "The love of God has been shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit." That comes first.

The mercy of Matthew 5:7 is the kind that only God's chosen children can show, can do. If the love of God and the love of neighbor must be there, and we can actually perform that only because God's Spirit is poured out in our hearts, this mercy is exclusively a true Christian's duty. Only they can really do it. It starts with God. That is what I am trying to say.

Let us go back to Psalm 86. I am not going to fill in all the places. But do you remember the scripture that says we love God because He first loved us? So we can only show the love for God in the first great commandment after He has shown love for us. And this is why I say that it begins with Him and His love and mercy for us. I am going to read all of Psalm 86. My Bible heads it, "Prayer for Mercy, with Meditation on the Excellencies of the Lord." It is a pretty good description of the whole psalm. David here is in trouble. He needs help, and what he does is to compose a psalm here that remembers God's mercy to him, to the people of Israel. And he comes to conclusion that basically, God is mercy. This is one of the excellencies, one of the great qualities of God, that He is full of mercy. So let us just notice this.

Psalm 86:1-17 Bow down Your ear, O Lord, hear me; for I am poor and needy. [he is the one that needs compassion] Preserve my life, for I am holy [who are God's holy ones? His saints] You are my God; save Your servant who trusts in You! [he is telling God that he has faith] Be merciful to me, O Lord, for I cry to you all day long.

Rejoice the soul of Your servant, for to You, O Lord, I lift up my soul. [as the margin says, make me glad or make the soul of your servant glad] For You, Lord, are good, and ready to forgive, and abundant in mercy to all those who call upon You. Give ear, O Lord, to my prayer; and attend to the voice of my supplications.

In the day of my trouble I will call upon You, for You will answer me. [That is God's impulse. He knew God would answer one of His holy ones, His saints who had faith in Him and trusted in Him.] Among the gods there is none like You, O Lord; nor are there any works like Your works. All nations whom You have made shall come and worship before You, O Lord, and shall glorify Your name.

For You are great and do wondrous things; You alone are God. Teach me Your way, O Lord; I will walk in Your truth [I will walk the path that You have given to me. I will walk in Your image, is what he is saying.]; unite my heart to fear Your name. I will praise You, O Lord my God, with all my heart, I will glorify Your name forevermore. For great is Your mercy toward me, and You have delivered my soul from the depths of Sheol. [or from the grave]

O God, the proud have risen against me, and a mob of violent men have sought my life, and have not set You before them. But You, O Lord, are a God full of compassion, and gracious, longsuffering and abundant in mercy and truth. Oh, turn to me, and have mercy on me! Give Your strength to Your servant, and save the son of Your maidservant. Show me a sign for good, that those who hate me may see it and be ashamed, because You, O Lord, have helped me and comforted me.

David here, in this psalm, shows the abundant mercy of God, who has shown mercy before and is ready to give it at need. He chose us as His people because He loves us and He gives mercy repeatedly along the way to help in whatever our need happens to be. And David shows here that he knew he could rely on God's love and mercy to help him whenever he got into a jam that he himself could not get himself out of.

What we see here, what I am trying to get at, is that we see mercy as a byproduct of God's abounding love for us poured out upon us. And we reciprocate by showing our love to Him in gratitude, and because we are growing closer to Him and understanding Him better—but also in obedience by pouring out our love and mercy on others after His example.

I have mentioned this man before, Dr. Richard Trench. He was the former archbishop of Dublin and wrote a lot about words and linguistics as it had to do with the Bible. But he wrote about this beatitude, "According to the view given in Scripture, the Christian stands in a middle point between a mercy received and a mercy yet needed."

We can look at this in two ways and both of them are true. The first way, remember he says we stand between two mercies here. We stand between God's mercy to us in our calling, which is implied in the beatitude. And on the other side, are other people's needs to whom we are to show mercy. So we stand between God who has given us mercy and those who need mercy, our mercy on them.

Now, the second way we can put this is that we stand between God's mercy to us and God's continuing mercy in our sanctification and ultimately our salvation and glorification, which is the promised reward in this beatitude. So this is different. The second way, that is, we stand between God's original mercy toward us and all the mercies that He is giving us along the way, which in the end, is in our change, into our being given glory as His children. Those are the two mercies, the original mercy and the continuing mercies and the ultimate mercy. I do not think we need to choose between them. They are both correct.

But we can never forget that it all begins with the love of God. He is always the source of righteous character. He is always the source of righteous deeds. Without God's love as the source of those things, and our guide, our merciful good works as we see them are suspect. If they do not have God as the source then we cannot trust them to be truly good. Remember the Pharisees? That is why I took such a long time on them because they are what Jesus gives us as the contrast to what He wants. They did their good works for selfish reasons. Just look at Matthew 6 in the first several verses and what He says in Matthew 23. They did their works to be seen by others. They did them hypocritically. They did not do them actually to help. Maybe that was a minor thing. They did them so that others could say, Wow, what a righteous dude that guy is. And Jesus calls them what they were—hypocrites.

Conversely, the mercies of God are untainted by this idea of "what can doing this get for me," because the love of God is the agape love, it is selfless, it is divine sacrificial love that gives, not for return, but because it is good and it is right to do so. So the structure of this beatitude back in Matthew 5 implies a reciprocal relationship between the merciful God and the converted Christian. It is a covenant relationship like the agreement between a lord and a vassal, bound by oaths and promises.

Here, the agreement is that God has given mercy and that obliges the Christian to show mercy to others, and God then will continue to give mercy. Both God and the Christian fulfill their roles, not out of the person's Christian sense, trying to get something, get salvation or to earn salvation, it is done out of love. It is done because it is good. It is done because that is what pleases God and what helps other people.

Now, while the word is not present in the beatitude, the structure that I just mentioned of this idea harkens to a pervasive Old Testament concept found in the word hesed. Or sometimes it is spelled chesed. It means covenant loyalty. It means loyal or steadfast love. It is frequently translated in the Old Testament as favor and lovingkindness or kindness, goodness, or mercy. Because we have made a covenant with God for the purposes of being molded into His image, we have vowed through our baptism to uphold this idea of hesed. It is the covenant and we have vowed, we have gone through saying essentially that we will keep the covenant, the New Covenant, and in this beatitude, Jesus is reminding us that our covenantal agreement requires us to show mercy just as God has shown mercy to us.

Let us notice Deuteronomy 7. This is to Old Testament Israel but applies just as well to us in the type.

Deuteronomy 7:6-10 "For you are a holy people to the Lord your God; the Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for Himself, a special treasure above all the peoples on the face of the earth. The Lord did not set His love on you nor choose you because you were more in number than any other people, for you were the least of all peoples. But because the Lord loves you [it started with God's love], and because He would keep the oath [there is the covenant] which He swore to your fathers, the Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand, and redeemed you from the house of bondage, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt. Therefore know that the Lord your God, He is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and mercy for a thousand generations with those who love Him and keep His commandments. And He repays those who hate Him to their face, to destroy them. He will not be slack with him who hates Him; He will repay him to his face."

So we understand that God does not always respond with mercy. Sometimes He has to respond with justice. And the same with us. There will be times when we have to make the choice between mercy and justice, but He wants our impulse to fall on the other side, where He starts, which is mercy.

Deuteronomy 7:11-13 "Therefore you shall keep the commandments, the statutes, and the judgments which I command you today to observe them. Then it shall come to pass, because you listen to these judgments and keep and do them, that the Lord your God will keep with you the covenant and the mercy which He swore to your fathers. And He will love you and bless you and multiply you [etcetera]."

That is what we have gotten ourselves into. That is what we have vowed to do under God. But now it is the New Covenant, not the Old. But the same things apply. It starts with the love of God. He granted us mercy. It is now our job as junior members of the covenant to love God back and to extend that love in mercy toward others because we want to be in the image of God. You might want to write down Psalm 1:1-3 and then verses 7-8. I will not go there. But I will pick up Proverbs 21.

Proverbs 21:21 He who follows righteousness and mercy finds life, righteousness, and honor.

I will read Colossians 3, verses 12-14. I think we may have read this the week after Pentecost. I know for sure I read the similar passage in Ephesians 4 on Pentecost.

Colossians 3:12-14 [he says] Therefore, as the elect of God [that He has chosen us], holy and beloved, put on tender mercies [that is the first thing he tells us to do], kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering [it is like he is talking about these beatitudes that we have been going through]; bearing with one another, and forgiving one another, if anyone has a complaint against another; even as Christ forgave you, so you also must do. [forgiveness is a part of mercy and because Jesus Christ showed us the way in forgiving us as sinners, sitting there with Matthew amongst the other sinners, then we are required to show mercy and forgiveness to others]. But above all these things put on love, which is the bond of perfection. And let the peace of God rule in your hearts.

Let us finish in Luke 6. I will not have any commentary on this because I think these verses in Luke 6 basically summarizes my sermon quite well.

Luke 6:32-36 "But if you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. And if you lend to those from whom you hope to receive back, what credit is that to you? For even sinners lend to sinners to receive as much back. But love your enemies, do good, and lend, hoping for nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High. For He is kind to the unthankful and evil. [Notice this conclusion] Therefore be merciful, just as your Father also is merciful."

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