NOTES for Ион 2:8
At first glance, hardly the God of Abraham and Moses will seem to somebody, merciful, especially if we focus on His image of the Old Testament. But do we understand correctly what is this mercy, about which speaks the prophet? By mercy we imply mostly a certain indulgence, the readiness to forgive to somebody his weaknesses not by love for him, but from indifference to the sins that he committed, maybe in the secret hope that one day our sins and our weaknesses shall also be indulgently "forgiven" to us. The God of Israel is not like that: He is demanding and, according to the word of the Holy Scriptures, "jealous", not because He needs the worship of whoever it maybe, but because otherwise, if the man does not surrender into His hands completely, without reserve and without looking behind, He cannot purify and sanctify such a person, and therefore cannot also join him to the new life, to the life of His Kingdom.
This task is of course incompatible with mercy, as we understand it quite often. But in this sense, in which the word "mercy" is used in the biblical books, our understanding of the mercy has nothing common. The mercy in the Bible is the readiness to do to someone more than what requires the law or the contract, more than what is required to do. Such readiness is also possible when it comes to relations between men; it was often for those receiving the help a real salvation in difficult and sometimes critical situations. When it concerns God, His mercy is for man the only hope.
The only because after the fall man lost any rights for any future strictly human, being much closer to the animal kingdom, than to the God, in Whose image he was created. In the less global scale, having in mind only the history of the people of God, we could say that these people lost the right on all that was due to them according to the alliance concluded on Sinai: because the conditions of the union concluded in that period were violated by the people more than once.
One could only hope that God will forgive His people and will still give them a chance to start everything if it is not from the beginning, then at least, on a white leaf. This God's readiness to forgive and to give again another chance is His mercy. Of course, the gods of the heathen could also be sometimes merciful to their fans, but merciful in particular in the human sense of the word. There is nothing surprising here: because these gods were created by man for himself in his image. Here is only, in a critical situation, when help was needed, they couldn’t help at all. Quite as cannot help a man the "mercy" pushing him to his sins and vices.