Guardrails of gravity and mercy

Circumstances in my life have forced me to take a closer look at Jesus’ teaching on the brother who sins against us and what to do about it (Matthew 18:15-20). To be sure, there are offenses we do better not to fuss over but to simply overlook:

“Good sense makes one slow to anger, and it is his glory to overlook an offense” (Proverbs 19:11).

But for more serious matters, overlooking can be indifference and not love. Also, for a person like me who would rather be busy doing just about anything other than dealing with a potentially time-consuming personal spiritual matter, overlooking can be a sign of lack of faith too. How? Because if I choose my pressing to-do list over dealing with a fellow Christian’s spiritual state (which my flesh tempts me to do), am I not really believing that it is more profitable to get my list done than to obey God? Am I not figuratively deposing God and appointing myself Chief Control Freak of the Universe?

I need to have the same sense of gravity about sin that God has. For God, addressing a brother’s sin is not an option:

“If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone” (Matthew 18:15).

No wiggle room here. Just do it. Take the time. Even if it means the matter gets dragged out with the involvement of a witness or two, or the church (verses 16-20).

So the gravity of God is greater than the gravity of men tends to be. I would rather skip the whole thing and let bygones be bygones. God, having higher goals than my laundry, wants sanctification to come out of the process.

On the other hand, the mercy of God is also greater than man’s mercy tends to be. God knows that human frailty too, and so He gives us another kind of principle in His Word, to keep human anger from becoming vindictiveness. In the church of Corinth, the Apostle Paul finally got the church to muster some collective gravity about a sexual sin that would have been a cancer on the congregation. But, evidently, once they got on board with chastising and disciplining, they didn’t know where to stop. The old carnal nature, having tasted blood, will want its pound of flesh.

So Paul, having been first to be angry about the heinous sin at Corinth and to exhort the church to more gravity (1 Corinthians 5), now had to be first to call for an end to punishment. Having found it necessary to stir up the cavalier church to take sin seriously, he now had to hold them back from the opposite extreme of showing no mercy and no end to wrath:

“… this punishment by the majority is enough, so you should rather turn to forgive and comfort him, or he may be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow” (2 Corinthians 2:6-7).

How wonderful is our God. How perfectly balanced His virtue. Though He hates sin more than men do, yet He also loves mercy more than men do too. His wrath against sin, more deeply felt than we can ever feel, yet does not spill over into inordinate punishment. The measures He gives in His Word are guardrails for us, preventing both indifference on the one hand and cruelty on the other.