19. Rich in Mercy

Ephesians 2 starts bluntly: "And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked." Not sick. Not struggling. Dead. A dead person cannot clean up for a visit, make a better case or take one step toward the door. Whatever happens next has to come from outside.

Ortlund pays attention to how Paul describes two kinds of people. One is the reckless rebel, easy to spot, "following the course of this world." The other is the careful person who keeps the rules and looks respectable. You might expect the careful person to be in a different category. But verse 3 gathers everyone together: "among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind." Notice "and the mind." The flesh is not only wild appetite. It also works through the thinking, planning, self-protecting, self-justifying parts of us. Both kinds of people are described by the same word. Both are "by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind." If you tend to see yourself as basically well-behaved, this is uncomfortable. If you tend to see yourself as the worst case, it is a relief that Paul does not rank the deadness.

Then two small words turn everything: "But God." Everything before has been about us. Now the subject changes. "But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ." Look at the timing. He loved us "even when we were dead." Not after we revived. Not after we showed promise. The mercy did not wait for a pulse.

The phrase "rich in mercy" is also worth sitting with. Rich means plenty in reserve. A person who is rich in money does not worry about one more expense. Ortlund argues that mercy does not run out on God's children because mercy is not a limited amount he is rationing. It is part of who he is. Paul adds that this has a purpose that stretches forward: "so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus." The future is not a reckoning where he finally tires of us. It is ages of display.

So what evidence does even the lowest person have of this mercy? Look at the verbs: made alive, raised, seated. If you are reading this, caring about God at all, and sensing any pull toward him, that stirring is itself something the Bible would credit to him, not to your own effort.

Today, instead of asking whether you have earned your place, trace how mercy got to you first.