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Teallaura's Baby Blog

Justice and Mercy

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by
Teallaura
, July 8th 2012 at 08:39 PM (550 Views)
Tonight's blog, brought to you by my tiny brain and the letter A, we begin with a question. If justice without mercy isn't justice then is mercy without justice mercy?

No, not just being pedantic. Can there be true mercy with no justice? For some reason we hang up on mercy for the individual but totally neglect it in the aggregate - the dead opposite of how we tend to view justice. We want to show mercy to the individual, but we forget the victims, past and future.

On a less esoteric level, if mercy can exist without justice, how do we explain the Cross?

Those are the questions I'm considering - next time I'll start work on the answers.
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  1. Thoughtful Monk's Avatar
    Short answer: I think you are trying to merge two different items into one. Mercy and justice may be closely related like a brother and a sister but they are two different items. Otherwise, Micah 6:8 "He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God." (NIV) is being unnecessarily redundant.
  2. Teallaura's Avatar
    No, they are clearly individual concepts but I do think they are so closely related to one another that trying to do one minus the other misses the point in either case.
  3. roadwalker's Avatar
    If you rob from Peter to pay Paul, then yes, this is mercy without justice. But anyone can be merciful, and it does not have to rob justice. For example, if you do an act of service (say, helping an arthritic neighbor move furniture) then you have provided mercy , but where is justice robbed?
  4. Teallaura's Avatar
    It wasn't robbed - it was upheld. It's just as true when being upheld as when being denied - it's just easier to see the case for denial.