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What is Mercy and Where Do We Find it? (The Mercy Files)

Posted Tuesday, February 10th, 2026 Start the Conversation

What is mercy?

Where do we find it? Why does it seem in such short supply these days?

What is mercy and why do we crave it?

I have a good, beautiful, creative, gracious friend seeking to be light for Jesus in our times (and succeeding!). She photographs beauty. Speaks and writes about the Bible. She encourages faith.

This week, she did a shout out over social media about her extreme sadness and frustration over the division, bickering, and chaos of our times. She cried out for mercy and the best answer most friends could provide was for her to shut off the noise this week, back away from social media and the news, to rest.

That’s an indication no one is expecting her to find what she seeks.

Search the online definition of mercy and you’ll find: “compassion or forgiveness shown toward someone whom it is within one’s power to punish or harm.”

A working definition of biblical mercy could be “God’s compassionate kindness, His withholding of deserved punishment and offer of unmerited favor.”

God is so full of mercy, He cites it in His description of Himself to Moses in Exodus 34:6, “The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness,” (ESV)

The Hebrew here, for those who care, is raḥûm, meaning compassionate. The Living God is merciful and gracious. He is full of mercy. Our God is a God of compassion. Not so much we humans.

The Exodus passage occurs not long after God had delivered His people out of slavery, rescued them from Pharoah, and parted the Red Sea for them to cross, only to have them melt down their gold and form an idol to worship rather than the God who gave them bread in the desert. This displayed a shocking lack of gratitude and reverence for their holy and loving God and yet, when Moses asks to see more of Him, this is what God reveals. His is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness.

We humans– not so much.

Years later, David was under pressure to pick a punishment out of three options offered him by God through the prophet, Gad, in 2 Samuel 24:14. Here was his reply, “Then David said to Gad, ‘I am in great distress. Let us fall into the hand of the Lord, for his mercy is great; but let me not fall into the hand of man.'”

In other words, David would rather receive punishment from God than be left to the mercies of other humans. David probably had a prophetic vision of the invention of social media!

Oh, we love mercy when it’s ours to receive but offering it to those we deem “undeserving” is a great offense to us. And yet, God’s mercy is FOR the undeserving (that’s all of us, by the way). It is unmerited compassion. It is Him withholding punishment we deserve.

Whenever I hear someone say, “She doesn’t deserve mercy.” I reply, “Exactly.” If she deserved it, it wouldn’t be mercy.

Jesus was exactly like His Father. Matthew 9:36 reads “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” (ESV)

These were the same crowds who would cry out for Pilate to release a criminal and crucify the Son of God who had healed them instead. I am in that crowd. I require God’s mercy and all who have chosen to follow Jesus have acknowledged the they, too, stood in that crowd.

Where do we go for mercy? We go to God the Father who loved us so much, He sent His only Son. God is merciful and so, Jesus came to live as one of us, to suffer and die for our sins, and to rise again to eternal life. He is the pathway to God’s mercy for us. Stop looking for it on Facebook.

His mercy runs through Jesus. Some of you who read the Bible daily are aching for me to include the rest of the sentence from Exodus 34. Verse 7 finishes God’s thought, “keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.” (ESV)

God in His mercy does not tell us our sinfulness is “okay” or “no big deal” or “don’t worry about.” He tells us it so serious His Son had to suffer and die to pay the debt we could never repay. The ONLY way to mercy is through His Son, Jesus. He is the remedy. He is the cure. He is the Way to God’s mercy.

Mercy doesn’t begin when humans sit together and talk.

Mercy isn’t found by declaring the whole world “okay” and deserving and good when we know otherwise.

Mercy isn’t an outcome of more time spent swapping memes on social media.

Mercy begins with Jesus. He is where we start. He is where we abide. He is where we rest. He is how we act. He is the voice we learn to hear. He is the path to mercy.

What is your strategy for staying informed and yet not becoming overwhelmed? We all need to share ideas.

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