Daily Manna · Day 251 · September 8
Rich in Mercy
“But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us, Even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved.)”
Many of us keep a running score on ourselves. You may not call it that, but you know the number, and when the house is quiet you know which side it comes out on.
Paul wrote this letter as a prisoner. In the next chapter he calls himself "the prisoner of Jesus Christ for you Gentiles." He was writing to believers in Ephesus, a city whose whole way of life ran through the temple of the goddess Diana. Many of them had grown up in a religion of keeping the gods happy: you gave a god something so that the god would give you something back.
Into that world Paul writes a sentence with no bargain in it anywhere. He calls them neither weak nor struggling; he says they were "dead in sins." A dead man adds nothing to his own rescue, and that is exactly why Paul chose the word. Then come the words the whole letter turns on: "But God." God is "rich in mercy," and He acted "for his great love wherewith he loved us." Paul cannot even finish the sentence before the reason breaks in, in brackets: "by grace ye are saved." He says it there, three verses before he stops to explain it.
Look at the order of the sentence: God's rich mercy, His great love, and His rescue, all coming while we were still dead. None of it waited on your score, and none of it depends on your score today.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 251 is Great Babylon (Daniel 4:35).