THE PRINCIPLED THING:
Justice, Mercy, and Humility PART TWO
By Ricardo Graham
“H
e hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” (Micah 6:8, KJV). The second of the trilogy of requirements as found in Micah 6:8 is to love mercy. First we need to understand what mercy is. A couple of definitions may be helpful. One dictionary entry defines mercy as “compassion or forgiveness shown toward someone whom it is within one’s power to punish or harm: the mercies of God.” The Seventh-day Adventist Bible Commentary tells us that mercy (from the Hebrew word chesed) is “a word describing a wide range of qualities as indicated by its various translations, such as ‘goodness,’ ‘kindness,’ ‘loving-kindness,’ ‘merciful kindness’” (vol. 4, p. 1028). So, if we are reading and understanding this correctly, mercy includes all of the above. Mercy means, basically, to be compassionate, kind, and good to others. Why does God require mercy, along with justice and humility? I would suggest that it is because of who God is: Merciful, with a capital M. He is the epitome of mercy, and He requires His people to reflect and duplicate on our human level what He is on the divine level.
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PA C I F I C U N I O N R E CO R D E R
The Creator wants—requires—His creation to be like Him. And He demonstrates it in the history of the world as recorded in the Holy Bible. I remember a commercial several years ago when basketball legend Michael Jordan was at his prime. The commercial showed the basketball phenom performing his signature moves, scoring against opponents. The voiceover sang, “I wanna be like Mike.” God wants us to be like Him. To be like the archangel Michael of Scripture should be our goal. All human agents, including and especially this writer, can safely aspire to be like the Michael of the Bible, Jesus Christ the righteous Redeemer. To be like Jesus is to be merciful. Our goal must be that, as an act of altruistic love, we will extend mercy. Who is in the need of mercy? Well, every human being is. We are all guilty of transgressing the law of God. When God passed by Moses and revealed Himself, He self-disclosed: “And the Lord passed by before him, and proclaimed, The Lord, The Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth” (Exodus 34:6, KJV). Mercy is resident in God’s being; it is in His personality. I believe that mercy is a by-product of His nature of love. “He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love” (1 John 4:8, KJV). I accept as true what John wrote: God is
