Hezekiah is inviting all of Israel to return to the Lord for the Passover. He sends messengers saying: 'The Lord your God is gracious and merciful. If you return to Him, He will not turn His face away from you.' There's a promise of acceptance conditional on return.
What gets me is the specific pairing - gracious and merciful. Grace is God giving you what you don't deserve. Mercy is God not giving you what you do deserve. Together they mean: you can come back, and what you'll find is not judgment but acceptance.
I have a friend who abandoned her faith entirely for years. When she finally started considering coming back, the thing that terrified her was that God might not want her back, that she'd been gone too long, that too much had happened. I read her this verse. She said: 'That's the only way I can come back. If it's not gracious and merciful, I can't do it.' She came back. That's the whole point of grace - it makes returning possible.
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