God is carrying out a campaign to show his mercy to all of us and the centre of his campaign strategy is Jesus, giving his life as a sacrifice for us. We deserved punishment, but we got a sacrifice instead. That is mercy.
The Bible is one long coherent story. The sad pattern repeated through most of this story is that humans disobey or ignore God, he punishes them, he shows mercy by giving them a second chance and they fail again. They don’t learn from judgement, or if they do learn anything, it doesn’t last.
Jesus breaks that pattern. His mercy is not like the old mercy, giving people a second chance after their punishment. Instead the new mercy of Jesus actually prevents the punishment from falling on us. He pays our fine. He serves our jail time. He even serves our death sentence.
Before Jesus, humanity had never seen mercy like that, not even from God. But in Jesus we get to see it. Mercy Season celebrates it. Jesus is our High Priest and he presents his own blood as the sacrificial blood that offsets our punishment and grants us a pardon.
Of course, that isn’t saying we didn’t do anything wrong. We did, but we aren’t going to pay for it.
God’s campaign strategy for our era is to spread his mercy across the world through us who have received it from Jesus. We forgive others and point them to Christ as the source of ultimate forgiveness.
When we accept Jesus’ sacrifice on our behalf, it is exhilarating.The deeper the hole we were in before, the more exhilarating it is to be lifted out of it. If we think we have done things so terrible that God could never forgive us, we have to think again. Sin is man-made. Jesus’ sacrifice is God-made. The man-made problem cannot outweigh the God-made solution. No sin is too big for the mercy of Jesus.
On the other hand, we may think we have been a pretty good person with just a few sins here and there. We might be thinking of God as a scorekeeper who has told humanity the rules of the game and now is keeping a tally of our good acts and our bad ones. We may think that when our life is over, he will judge us by our total net score.
Jesus laid down his life to kill that idea and replace it with the truth. God isn’t in the scorekeeping business. He is on a mercy-spreading campaign. Anyone who joins his campaign team becomes a mercy spreader, a mercy agent. That’s what the team is for–to fill the world with mercy, to show the world what it looks like and feels like.
Does that mean God has become soft-hearted? Does it mean the good news of Jesus is, ‘Hey, world! You can get away with anything now?’ No, that is totally out of sync with Jesus’ intentions when he made his sacrifice. He never intended his sacrifice as a permit to do evil. He was showing us mercy that would motivate us not to do evil any more and not to retaliate against people who do evil to us.
The grace period means punishment is postponed. We have time to get in sync with his mercy, to welcome it, to ponder it, to let it go to work on us and in us. As it does, it turns us into mercy agents. We explain the grace period so that everyone can take advantage of it before it expires. We urge everyone to say to Jesus, ‘sync me with your mercy!’
We see ourselves in Christ as mercy agents, showing his mercy and urging people to take advantage of the grace period. We live in sync with Christ’s intentions when he presented his own blood as a sacrifice.
Our message as mercy agents is summed up in Romans 5.8: ‘God put his love on the line for us by offering his Son in sacrificial death for us when we didn’t deserve it at all.’ (authors’ paraphrase)
When we sync with the Messiah, we see ourselves as mercy agents. We realise that what Jesus intended when he sacrificed himself is coming true in us. His mercy is solving our sin problem, taking over our lives and turning us into forgiving people. We get connected, healed and blessed. This is exactly what is supposed to happen during the grace period.
It is supposed to happen for everybody, but not everybody knows that yet. People are living as best they can without knowing what the mercy of Jesus looks like, how it works and how we get it. If we know that mercy, our ‘cause’ in life is to help everybody discover it. We are caught up in that cause, energised by it and delighted every time we see even a small sign that the mercy is spreading.
If you don’t know that mercy but you do want a better world, please realise that is why God sent the mercy—to connect, heal and bless the world. Nothing improves the world more or quicker than forgiveness, and there is no better source of transformative forgiveness than the self-sacrifice of Jesus. Why not join his campaign instead of starting your own or joining some other campaign that can’t forgive like Jesus can?