"May mercy, peace, and love be multiplied to you."
I don’t know about you, but when reading the epistles, I often breeze over the salutations, thinking them to be merely form and not much substance. Sort of like reading a letter that has "Dear . . ." and "Regarding" at the beginning.
Except . . . each salutation at the beginning of the New Testament epistles is different . . . and these are books Spirit-breathed. In other words, this isn’t just Jude writing to the Church; this is God the Father writing. These are the things that He wants to say to us and His words are never form without substance. They are always substance.
• May mercy be multiplied to you.
• May peace be multiplied to you.
• May love be multiplied to you.
Mercy . . . peace . . . love.
I believe that not only the words themselves but the order has significance for our lives, so why mercy first? Why not love first? And why peace after mercy and before love?
Mercy
Mercy is God’s patience at work. It is His understanding that we are sinners desperately in need of salvation and unable of obtaining it ourselves. It is His willingness, because of the death of the Lord Jesus on the cross, to extend forgiveness instead of judgment to us.
Vine’s Dictionary explains it like this:
"eleos is the outward manifestation of pity; it assumes need on the part of him who receives it, and resources adequate to meet the need on the part of him who shows it. It is used of God, who is rich in mercy, and who has provided salvation for all men."
I am a sinner. There can be no equivocation about that. If there is even once in my life where I wasn’t loving, kind, generous, patient, or self-controlled (and there are many more than one instance), I have demonstrated my sinfulness. And the "wages" or natural consequence of sin is death (Romans 6:23). It is only because of God’s mercy—His compassion—toward me, His fallen creation, that I have a chance for life. And that chance has been provided through the death and resurrection of my Savior, the Lord Jesus.
Salvation must come before anything else. Without it—when I am in a state of spiritual death—God cannot interact with me. Sin cannot come into His presence. And only He, through His sinlessness, could make a way to remake me into a sinless being. Thus, God sees me through the perfect sinlessness of the Lord Jesus. This transformation must occur before I can have any other communication or relationship with God. Thus, mercy must come first.
Peace
As Westerners, we have a very different idea of peace. Our concept of peace is almost always about the freedom from something else . . . the freedom from discord, the freedom from conflict, the freedom from distress. The Jewish concept of peace, in their word "shalom," is entirely different. It means freedom with . . . and the "with" is God. Shalom means freedom or peace between me and God. It is the resolution of the conflict that occurs, but this peace isn’t about resolving circumstantial conflict. It is about resolving the conflict between me and God due to sin. Thus, this peace is about salvation, about the ability to come into His presence boldly because I have accepted the saving act of the Lord Jesus on the cross.
Mercy . . . then peace. We cannot have peace without mercy and we cannot have peace first. We cannot be reconciled to God without recognizing that we first desperately need His mercy—His salvation—in order to then have peace between Him and us.
Love
While God’s love is always present, we cannot experience it without first being reconciled to Him. Romans 5:10 tells us that prior to salvation we were God’s enemies. We can’t have God’s love while we are His enemies. His friends—His children—experience His love. His enemies experience His judgment.
This is why it’s wrong to state that all people are children of God. Until we are saved, until we are adopted into His family, we are His creation, but not His children. We only become His children once we are saved.
God loves all people all the time. "While we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:10). But we cannot experience that love until we are reconciled to Him. And we can’t be reconciled without first experiencing His mercy and His peace. It is only then that we can understand and experience God’s love for us.
Multiplied
When Jude writes that he wants us to have mercy, peace and then love multiplied, he is recognizing that we are habitual sinners who need over and over again God’s forgiveness and His reconciliation with us. Not only that, but the word also means increased. Jude wishes that our experience, our relationship with God increase each day. When we are fully willing to recognize our sin, to confess it, and to understand that we are desperately in need of forgiveness, it is only then that we can embrace the mercy, peace, and love that God is instantly willing to give to us through the sacrifice of the Lord Jesus on the cross.
© 2014 Robin L. O’Hare. All Rights Reserved.
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