NOTES for Psa 50:3

An appeal to God's mercy is a commonplace of many psalms. But what does it mean practically? A hope that God will close His eyes to human sins? But will a person be better off because of that? Sin destroys a person's soul and poisons his heart just as disease poisons and destroys the body, and indulging sin is the same as letting a disease run its course. But another thing is also true: if only the spiritually healthy are needed for the Kingdom, then none of the people born in the fallen world will see it. God's mercy is needed precisely in order to resolve this seemingly insoluble contradiction. It, of course, does not presuppose indulgence toward sin. But it makes forgiveness of the sinner possible.

It would seem that if a person sincerely repents of what he has done and asks forgiveness, forgiving him is not so hard even for a person, let alone for God. But in reality everything turns out not to be so simple: every sin committed by a person, every evil he has done, has its consequences, with which, according to the laws of our untransformed world, nothing can be done. The ancients, especially in the East, did not accidentally speak of karmic connections, which a person, while remaining within the fallen world, cannot break: causes and effects here exist inseparably, and every attempt to change anything for the better, to correct the evil committed, gives birth only to new evil, binding the person trying to free himself from evil still more tightly to the bad infinity of sinful life. Only God's direct intervention in the situation is able to change the state of things radically.

But what can such intervention be? If God gives each one according to his deserts, no one will receive anything good: there are no "ideal," or in biblical language, sinless people in the world. Therefore all that remains is to count on God giving each of us something that we not only have not deserved, but because of our nature corrupted by sin will never be able to deserve, even with the most sincere and strongest desire. Of course, desire is important: it is useless to offer an alternative to someone who is satisfied with the world in its present state. But the very possibility of an alternative in this case must run counter to the fundamental laws of the fallen world, in particular, to the law of cause-and-effect relationships, which does not presuppose reverse action. This possibility of an undeserved miracle is the practical manifestation of God's mercy.

Of course, if God wanted simply to abolish the law of cause-and-effect relationships, He would perhaps have to create the world anew. But He finds another way: to give the world the Kingdom, where this law operates differently than in our untransformed world. And He entrusted the bringing of this Kingdom into the world to the One who was free from sin from the beginning. Thus God's mercy opens the road into the Kingdom to everyone seeking salvation.