The Owner of Mercy

“For he says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.” So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy.” -Romans 9:15–16

Perhaps Paul’s initial argument against the charges of injustice from God seem cold and shallow—i.e., is there injustice on God’s part? By no means!—but in defense of his assertion, he recalls Moses’s intercession to God on behalf of Israel after they sinned in the wilderness by making golden calves in Moses’s absencence (Exodus 33:12-19).

God’s reply to Moses is “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.” Paul elaborates on God’s response to Moses, explaining that the perception of injustice directed at God in the matter of election is an error in the accuser’s understanding regarding the nature of mercy.

It is God who owns the corner market, so to speak, on mercy. All mercy belongs to him. We, who are condemned in our trespasses and sins have no say in matters of mercy. We are justly condemned because we have sinned. And if God, in praise to the glory of justice, determines to allow one to receive what justly belongs to him, he is not unjust for doing so. And, if God chooses of his own good pleasure to distribute mercy to one who is condemned, it is his to do with as he pleases. 

See Jesus’s parable of the laborers in Matthew 20:1-16.

Ultimately, Paul is arguing for his readers to manage their expectations according to reality and not according to an inept sense of justice, perverted by a fallen nature. As Kruse notes in his commentary on Romans, “Paul establishes God’s justice in the light, not of human standards, but of God’s own revelation of himself. There is no higher standard to which the apostle could appeal.”

Further, the codifier of the Protestant Reformation, John Calvin notes, 

Monstrous surely is the madness of the human mind, that it is more disposed to charge God with unrighteousness than to blame itself for blindness. Paul indeed had no wish to go out of his way to find out things by which he might confound his readers; but he took up as it were from what was common the wicked suggestion, which immediately enters the minds of many, when they hear that God determines respecting every individual according to his own will. It is indeed, as the flesh imagines, a kind of injustice, that God should pass by one and show regard to another.

Once we have, in humility, adjusted our expectations regarding who is the “owner of mercy,” we can happily recall Paul’s earlier proclamation, that “…the same Lord is Lord of all, bestowing his riches on all who call on him. For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”” -Romans 10:12–13