Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers

by Dane C. Ortlund

Nowhere else in the Bible is God described as rich in anything. The only thing he is called rich in is: mercy. What does this mean? It means that God is something other than what we naturally believe him to be. It means the Christian life is a lifelong shedding of tepid thoughts of the goodness of God. In his justice, God is exacting; in his mercy, God is overflowing.

Ephesians 2:4 says, “God, being rich in mercy . . .” Being, not becoming. A statement like that is taking us into the inner recesses of the Creator, into heaven’s Holy of Holies, behind the inner veil, disclosing to us the animating center of God’s very being and nature.

“He is the spring of all mercy . . . it is natural to him. . . . It is his nature and disposition, because when he shows mercy, he does it with his whole heart.”2 This is why he delights in mercy (Mic. 7:18). This is why David acknowledged in prayer to God that the mercy shown him was “according to your own heart” (1 Chron. 17:19). He is a fountain of mercy.

If mercy was something he simply had, while his deepest nature was something different, there would be a limit on how much mercy he could dole out. But if he is essentially merciful, then for him to pour out mercy is for him to act in accord with who he is. It is simply for him to be God.

And as love rises, mercy descends. Great love fills his heart; rich mercy flows out of his heart.

Mercy and love are rather vacuous concepts, after all. They sound nice but what do they actually mean in my own Monday blues, my Wednesday discouragements, my Friday night loneliness, my Sunday morning boredom?

We not only lived in sin; we enjoyed living in sin. We wanted to live in sin. It was our coddled treasure, our Gollum’s ring, our settled delight. In short, we were dead. Utterly helpless. That’s what his mercy healed.

I’ve been decent to my neighbors. But look at what Paul says: “. . . among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh.” Surely not. This is Paul the former Pharisee, the law keeper to end all law keepers, “a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless” (Phil. 3:5–6). How could he include himself among those who were devoted to the passions of the flesh?

We can be immoral dead people, or we can be moral dead people. Either way, we’re dead.

He doesn’t withhold mercy from some kinds of sinners while extending it to others. Because mercy is who he is—“being rich in mercy”—his heart gushes forth mercy to sinners one and all.

Perhaps the notion of heavenly mercy seems abstract; but what if that mercy became something we could see, hear, and touch? That is what happened in the incarnation. When Paul speaks of the saving appearance of Christ, he says, “When grace appeared . . .” (Titus 2:11). The grace and mercy of God is so bound up with and manifested in Jesus himself that to speak of Christ appearing is to speak of grace appearing.

If God sent his own Son to walk through the valley of condemnation, rejection, and hell, you can trust him as you walk through your own valleys on your way to heaven.

That God is rich in mercy means that your regions of deepest shame and regret are not hotels through which divine mercy passes but homes in which divine mercy abides.

It means the things about you that make you cringe most, make him hug hardest.

Those moments of self-knowledge are indeed gifts of grace and not to be ignored. But they are only the visible tip of an invisible iceberg. They are surface symptoms. Law-ish-ness, of-works-ness, is by its very nature undetectable because it’s natural, not unnatural, to us. It feels normal. “Of works” to fallen people is what water is to a fish.

In other words, the end-time judgment that awaits all humans has, for those in Christ, already taken place. We who are in Christ no longer look to the future for judgment, but to the past; at the cross, we see our punishment happening, all our sins being punished in Jesus.

In the gospel, we are free to receive the comforts that are due us. Don’t turn them off. Open the vent of your heart to the love of Christ, who loved you and gave himself for you. Our law-ish hearts relax as his lavish heart comes home to us.

We are now sinning “against light,” the Puritans would say; we know the truth, and our hearts have been fundamentally transformed, and still we fall. And the shoulders of our soul remain drooped in the presence of God. Once again, it is a result of projecting our own capacities to love onto God.

To say the same truth backward: Jesus didn’t die for us once we became strong (5:6); he didn’t die for us once we started to overcome our sinfulness (5:8); God did not reconcile us to himself once we became friendly toward him (5:10).

He didn’t simply leave heaven for me; he endured hell for me. He, not deserving to be condemned, absorbed it in my place—I, who alone deserved it. That is his heart. And into our empty souls, like a glass of cold water to a thirsty mouth, God poured his Holy Spirit to internalize the actual experience of God’s love (v. 5).

Paul is saying that it is impossible to be truly justified at conversion without God looking after us right into heaven. Conversion isn’t a fresh start. Conversion, authentic regeneration, is the invincibilizing of our future. We were enemies when God came to us and justified us; how much more will God care for us now that we are friends—indeed, sons? As John Flavel put it, “As God did not at first choose you because you were high, he will not now forsake you because you are low.”

While we were still . . . He loved us in our mess then. He’ll love us in our mess now. Our very agony in sinning is the fruit of our adoption. A cold heart would not be bothered. We are not who we were.

But reject the devil’s whisper that God’s tender heart for you has grown a little colder, a little stiffer. He is not flustered by your sinfulness. His deepest disappointment is with your tepid thoughts of his heart. Christ died, placarding before you the love of God.

God has already executed everything needed to secure your eternal happiness, and he did that while you were an orphan. Nothing can now un-child you. Not even you. Those in Christ are eternally imprisoned within the tender heart of God. We will be less sinful in the next life than we are now, but we will not be any more secure in the next life than we are now.

You have often left him; has he ever left you? You have had many trials and troubles; has he ever deserted you? Has he ever turned away his heart, and shut up his bowels of compassion? No, children of God, it is your solemn duty to say “No,” and bear witness to his faithfulness.

But reflecting on what we feel toward, say, the perpetrator of some unthinkable act of abuse toward an innocent victim gives us a taste of what God felt toward Christ as he, the last Adam, stood in for the sins of God’s people. The righteous human wrath we feel—the wrath we would be wrong not to feel—is a drop in the ocean of righteous divine wrath the Father unleashed.

What is physical torture compared to the full weight of centuries of cumulative wrath absorption? That mountain of piled-up horrors? How did Jesus even retain sanity psychologically in absorbing the sum-total penalty of every lustful thought and deed coming from the hearts of God’s people—and that is one sin among many? Perhaps it was sheer despair that broke him down into death.

This was what loving to the end meant. Passing through the horror of the cross and drinking down the flood of filth, the centuries of sin, all that is revolting even in our eyes.

One way we glorify God is by our obedience to him, our refusing to believe we know best and instead trusting that his way is the way of life. The Bible calls us to live in an “honorable” way among unbelievers “so that . . . they may see your good deeds and glorify God” (1 Pet. 2:12).

It means that as we stand there, we will never be scolded for the sins of this life, never looked at askance, and never told, “Enjoy this, but remember you don’t deserve this.” The very point of heaven and eternity is to enjoy his “grace in kindness.”