Today’s Romans chapter causes us to think about God’s mercy and its relation to grace and to being set free from the Law. Grace is related to mercy; both are experienced by those who are freed from serving under “the law of sin and death.” Both are also dependent on what God sees in the hearts of those who seek his mercy and grace. Paul told the Athenians that in the one true God “we live and move and have our being.” [Acts 17 v.28].

Now that only happens if we really possess a genuine spiritual attitude, or to use the words we read yesterday in Romans, “all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons (& daughters) of God” [8 v.14]. Those who truly possess this spirit “are more than conquerors through him who loved us ...” [v.37], they constantly sense His oversight of their lives.

Paul then pours out his heart in today’s chapter about the tragedy of his race, the Jews and their continuing blindness to the ongoing the work of God despite the fact that “to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenant, the giving of the law, the worship and the promises.” [v.4] But, notice what he then writes, “it is not as though the word of God has failed” [v.6] How come? Well, blended in with God’s word is God’s mercy, in its own way the twin brother of grace. We cannot define this in terms of the operation of law; the operation of mercy is above and beyond the Law. God’s natural children are to ultimately experience his grace.

“I will have mercy on whom I have mercy and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion. So it depends not on human will or exertion but on God who has mercy” [v.15-16]. We saw this in God’s attitude to David’s great sin and there is an interesting contrast in today’s reading about David.

David would have had compassion on Absalom, his heart cried out for this. [2 Sam 18 v.33] But human emotion lacks the insight of God into the human heart and our acts of compassion are sometimes misplaced. No-one will deserve to be in God’s Kingdom, those who obtain that wondrous experience will be there because of his grace and mercy.