Summary
New Mercies
In the middle of the Bible's most sorrowful book rises one of its most luminous promises: "The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness" Lamentations 3:22-23. Lamentations is a carefully crafted book—five poems mourning the destruction of Jerusalem, each chapter built around the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, with chapter three tripling that pattern in sixty-six verses. Out of this precise, grief-soaked poetry, hope breaks through.
To grasp what that hope actually is, three words must be kept distinct: justice, grace, and mercy. Justice is getting what you deserve. The penitent criminal beside Jesus confessed as much: "We indeed have been condemned justly, for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong" Luke 23:41. Grace is getting what you do not deserve. When Gabriel greeted Mary as "favored one" Luke 1:28, she had done nothing to earn that calling; she was an ordinary sinner chosen by God to bear the Messiah—pure grace. Mercy is not getting what you do deserve. When Joseph's brothers stood trembling before the brother they had sold into slavery, he could have executed justice. Instead he forgave and provided. That is mercy.
Mercy in Lamentations carries even deeper freight. The Hebrew word is sometimes translated compassion, and it derives from the word for womb—evoking the tender, instinctive care of a mother for her child. Mercy is not merely a feeling of pity that stays in the heart; with God, it is always sympathy and compassion in action. He sees, He stoops, He acts.
What is mercy born of? Love. Paul makes the chain unmistakable: "But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved" Ephesians 2:4-5. Love gives birth to mercy, and mercy gives birth to grace. Grace and mercy are two sides of the same coin: not getting what we deserve, and getting what we never could have earned.
The cross holds all three together. We do not want God's justice—we cannot survive it. So God satisfied His own justice by laying the punishment for sin upon His Son. In "New Mercies", this is the heart of the gospel: at Calvary, Christ bore what we deserved, so that out of mercy we are spared, and out of grace we are given forgiveness, reconciliation, and the life claimed for us in the waters of Baptism, where the victory of the cross and the empty tomb is applied to us.
And the mercies do not stop there. They are new every morning. As "New Mercies" 5-2-21 underscores, every day God puts His sympathy and compassion into fresh action—guiding, directing, exercising His sovereignty over every detail of our lives, renewing His commitment to us without end. Mercy upon mercy upon mercy. Great is His faithfulness.
Video citations
- "New Mercies" — Let's open up our Bibles, please, to the book of lamentations for our study today. Lamentations the third chapter. We're continuing this sermon series, simply entitled new, which is a celebration of…
- "New Mercies" 5-2-21 — Let's open up our Bibles, please, to the book of lamentations for our study today. Lamentations the third chapter. We're continuing this sermon series, simply entitled new, which is a celebration of…