Joe Biden’s mercy is not like God’s mercy. Whether or not the President should have pardoned his son, Hunter, is a question for others. 

Either way, this episode helps us to think about mercy and justice – and helps us to see just how different our human understandings of those things are to God’s.  

It was telling in the statement which accompanied the pardoning that Joe Biden believes his son did nothing wrong: ‘No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than [that] Hunter was singled out only because he is my son.’ 

How should we think about this as Christians? It’s right and true that we readily talk about God’s mercy and compassion. But what of God’s fierce and righteous justice? 

Exodus 34:6–7 tells us that God is ‘slow to anger and abounding in love and faithfulness’, but it goes on to say he will ‘by no means clear the guilty’. 

God’s mercy is held together with his perfect justice. Why? Because if God let sin slide – if he overlooked the evil in the world and left Satan’s lies about him unchallenged – then the essence of who he is would be at stake (Romans 3:24–26). 

Biden’s mercy isn’t like God’s mercy. It’s not the full and free forgiveness of evil but instead the pretence that it never happened – the denial of its existence. God’s mercy doesn’t pretend because our God never ‘clears the guilty’.  

Whether we’re parents, the President, lawyers, MPs, pastors, teachers, office workers, or street sweepers, this means different things for us all. But for all of us, it means we must bind both mercy and justice together. Forgiveness of a family member who’s hurt us, a colleague who’s annoyed us, or a criminal who’s broken the law, means so much more. 

Mercy only means anything when we acknowledge that wrong has been done. Compassion and clemency can only come in that context. Let’s be those who call evil what it is, not sweeping it under the carpet and branding it ‘compassion’. 

To do otherwise – to deny the justice of God – is also to deny his mercy. To ignore sin and say it never happened is not forgiveness, but foolishness. 

Joe Biden let off his son, by all accounts a criminal, denying he did anything wrong. God sent his son, by all accounts a sinless man, to die a criminal’s death so we, the guilty, might be pardoned.  

Lachlan Rurlander 

Lachlan previously worked for a Member of Parliament and a research consultancy. He now works for a tech start up seeking to bridge the gap between talent and opportunity.