‘Behold, the Lamb of God’
ide
o amnos tou theou
College Study
46th teaching
8.5.2013
“God’s Justice”
The Great Equalizer
Introductions.
Project
Scriptura:
Announce next week’s topic (God’s Mercy), challenge each person to find ONE Bible verse about
this attribute of God to share next week, you may use any resource as long as
you find just one verse.
Review:
Which attribute of God did we just complete a two-part
series on? What question did we ask about God’s wrath last week? So is it a
biblical teaching that the wrath of God was satisfied in Christ’s crucifixion?
How do you know? What does propitiation mean?
End Review
This is an image of a Colt 1851 Revolver.
There’s an old saying that goes “God made men, but Sam Colt
made them equal”. Samuel Colt was an American inventor and industrialist who
made mass-production of the revolver commercially viable for the first time in
history. Since that time, the gun has been touted as ‘the great equalizer’. You
might be a puny weakling standing next to the biggest, toughest giants, but if
you’re packing heat, ‘bigger and tougher’ means nothing.
Even the 40th President of
the United States, Ronald Reagan, said: “The gun has been called the great
equalizer, meaning that a small person with a gun is equal to a large person,
but it is a great equalizer in another way, too. It ensures that the people are
the equal of their government whenever that government forgets that it is
servant and not master of the governed.”
On another note, education has been called
‘the great equalizer’. Horace Mann, a politician of the 1800s, once said:
“Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great
equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance-wheel of the social machinery”.
He argued that universal public education was the best way to turn the nation’s
unruly children into disciplined, judicious [quote] republican citizens. Poor
man’s probably rolling in his grave today.
On yet another note, I have even heard
death identified as ‘the great equalizer’. And surely, this is probably the
truest of any of these claims so far: more so than any gun, more so than
education, death makes all men equal, rich or poor, strong or weak, big or
small, famous or obscure, long-lived or short-lived, regardless of gender,
culture, ethnicity, birth or language.
“The glories of our blood and state
are shadows, not substantial things; death lays his icy hand of kings; scepter
and crown must tumble down and in the dust be equal made with the poor crooked
scythe and spade”, the lines of a poem by James Shirley, 1646.
An even greater poet once wrote: “It is the same for all, since the same event
happens to the righteous and the wicked, to the good and the evil, to the clean
and the unclean, to him who sacrifices and him who does not sacrifice. As the
good one is, so is the sinner, and he who swears is as he who shuns an oath…
For the living know that they will die…” Solomon, King of Israel, Ecclesiastes 9:2, 5.
But may I suggest to you that while
the Colt revolver, while Education and while Death are each themselves
equalizers of humanity, that God Himself alone is truly the worthy of this
title.
Tonight’s study is entitled: “God’s
Justice: the Great Equalizer”.
Turn to Daniel
Chapter 5.
Here in this classic Bible story of the Writing on the
Wall, you certainly see justice. An immoral king profanes the once holy vessels
of God’s temple and God’s justice intervenes. This was King Belshazzar’s great
awakening. He realized too late that God is a just Judge, who will enact justice.
Yet another unpopular attribute of God, we are presented
tonight not with God’s mercy or His grace or love, but with the cold, hard fact
of His justice. We would be wise to learn that God is just not too late, as
Belshazzar did, and to teach others just how just the Lord is.
So we have FIVE points to hit tonight:
1. What is Justice?
2. Justice as Punitive
3. Justice as Merciful
4. Biblical Basis for Divine
Justice
5. The Righteousness of God
1.
What is Justice?
As always, we want a
clarification of terms. Just what is justice anyway?
Though we now have an extremely complex system of justice
in our country, defining the word justice is simple, while enacting justice is
hard. Justice simply means rightness. Wikipedia identifies justice as “a
concept of moral rightness based on ethics, rationality, law, natural law,
religion, equity or fairness, as well as the administration of the law, taking
into account the inalienable and inborn rights of all human beings and
citizens…”
Justice is conformity to truth, fact or reason, the quality
of being just or fair, the maintenance of administration of what is just or
right or correct, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary.
It’s been said that Justice is simply “making things
right”. I think that’s probably the best and simplest reason. So while deciding
how to deal out justice might be sometimes difficult, the idea of what justice
actually is is actually simple: it is making things right.
This is an icon of justice: the scales of justice. A
personification of justice, Lady Justice, is often depicted with a sword and
balancing scales. The scales symbolize the measure of case’s support and
opposition, a measuring of the facts.
Note that well before the Greeks began making statues with
balancing scales, God in Daniel 5, as we read, said that He
measured Babylon and the scales were tipped against it, Babylon was found
wanting. So scales are an icon of justice, balancing the facts.
An interesting synonym for justice is the word
righteousness. Righteousness means “just dealing or right action or conformity
to rightness”. When you see the words righteousness and justice appear in
Scripture, they can often times be used interchangeably. So you see these have
very similar meanings.
In fact, there is a Greek word known as dikaios. When used in the New Testament,
dikaios is sometimes translated just
and justice, sometimes as righteous and innocent. As far as the Bible is
concerned, these are synonyms.
Thus when we approach this as an attribute of God, we may
call this God’s Justice or God’s Righteousness. Given our definition of what
justice and righteousness are, we find that this attribute of God means that
God not only does just things but is just Himself, that He makes things right
and is right Himself. God essentially has both perfect ethical conduct (He is
just) and He judges the guilty (He does justice).
We’ve just seen a Greek word on this subject, but the
Hebrew word tzedek helps to
illuminate the idea. Tzedek can mean
righteous and justice, yes, but it can also mean integrity. That speaks of
personal goodness, personal ethicality. That points to a God that not only
enacts justice but who is totally just Himself and thus justified in doing
justice.
Now this is an important point because as we know recently
there have been a couple of court rulings which were seen as controversial. And
while we might bring into question the integrity or clear-thinking or bias of
the judge (his rightness), or while we might call into question his actual
decision (his justice) whether it really was correct or not, we cannot do the
same thing with God. And this is what makes God the perfect Judge.
With God there is no bias, there is no partiality (Romans 2:11). God is no respecter of
persons (Acts 10:34). God can’t be
bought off with bribes. God is not swayed by cultural beliefs. With God, there
can be no lack of facts, no incomplete knowledge of anyone’s case. He sees all
things (Psalm 33:13). These things
make God out to be the perfect Judge, the Great Equalizer, the Lord who will
judge with fairness and perfect equity and equality.
It’s important to clarify something that we touched on some
time ago in this study, that God’s attributes are not univocal or equivocal,
but analogical to human attributes. What this means is that God’s attributes
are not univocal, they’re not entirely
the same as our attributes; His justice is not entirely the same as our
human justice, otherwise God’s justice would be just as corrupt and misled as
we complain that human justice is. On the flip side, God’s attributes are not
equivocal, entirely different, than ours; if His justice were entirely
different than our idea of justice, then how could we call it justice at all?
But God’s attributes are analogical, similar, to our attributes; thus His
justice is similar to our justice in that we can understand what it is, but not
so similar that it shares in the downfalls of human justice, rather it is
similar to human justice but far better and purer than human justice.
Notice three things about God’s justice:
a. God’s
justice is infinite and immutable.
God Himself is metaphysically infinite and immutable, by nature in His essence
He is infinite and unchanging. Therefore, by extension, His moral attributes
are infinite and unchanging and thus His justice is infinite and unchanging.
Why is that important? Because it means that there will always be a standard
with God that does not change. Whereas with human beings, certain things fall
in and out of popularity, certain countries may have slightly differing views
on justice, and certainly cultures shift on varying views of what is right and
wrong. But since God is infinitely and unchangeably just, there is always an actual right and an actual wrong. That leads us to the next thing we want to notice
about God’s justice…
b.
God’s justice makes Him the
Ultimate Standard. Remember
the arguments for God’s existence? One of them we know as the Moral Argument.
The Moral Argument for God’s existence states that laws imply lawgivers, and
since there exists a universal moral law in human hearts, there must exist a
universal Moral Law-Giver. Now if this Being is the Giver of the moral law, we
can see the implication that He Himself must be moral. And we know from God’s
attributes that this is the case. And since God is perfectly moral and justice,
we find in Him the ultimate standard for what justice is and for what morality
is.
c.
God’s justice is the action of
His wrath. Last
week, we completed our survey of God’s attribute of wrath. We learned that His
wrath is what motivates His justice. God, being wholly good, is opposed to sin.
In fact, His wrath is aroused by sin and His justice stemming from His wrath is
what kicks in then, and works to judge the sin. So justice is a very active
quality of God, especially in this punitive sense of punishing and judging sin.
Before we move on to point two, here’s something
to consider:
I remember sitting in a classroom in Bible college. The
teacher up front relates that He was talking with someone and they said “All I
want in this world is justice”, to which that teacher responded: “No you don’t.
What you want is mercy, not justice.”
The peculiar thing about people is we all want mercy for
ourselves and justice for everyone else. The book of Psalms is known as one of
the most human books in the Bible, because you look into real conditions of
real human hearts struggling with concepts like depression, hope, trust,
failure and all of those kind of things. One thing you also see a lot of in
Psalms is the psalmist praying for justice for his enemies and mercy for
himself. We all act like that. We all pray for blessing and forgiveness for
ourselves. How often do we pray that God would forgive someone else or bless
someone else?
We are always quick to make value judgments about others,
but all we want for ourselves is mercy to cover our flaws.
Interesting, when you get a speeding-ticket, do you think
of that as justice? It is. It’s not the cop being a snob. It’s not just that
you’re unlucky. It is simply that you broke traffic law and that a ticket is
your just reward. It is justice.
We don’t think of it that way, because we’re getting the ticket. But what happens when someone races by
you on the road and cuts you off, then you see them pulled over a mile down? You get a feeling of satisfaction!
You’re happy that the unsafe breaker of the law is getting what they deserve.
But not so when it happens to you.
2.
Justice as Punitive
What I’d like to do know is show two different
sides of God’s justice. Firstly, we’ll look at how God’s justice is portrayed
in Scripture as punitive, that is, punishing the wicked. Then we’ll look at
God’s justice in Scripture as merciful.
For God’s justice as punitive, Scripture says in Romans 2:5-6, “But in accordance with your hardness and your impenitent heart you are
treasuring up for yourself wrath in the day of wrath and revelation of the
righteous judgment of God, who ‘will render to each one according to his
deeds’…” This is justice as punishment, justice that is distributive,
making things right by giving the guilty what the guilty deserves.
I can think of a couple great examples. Among them, the
Flood stands out.
Turn to Genesis
6:5-7. God saw that the world was full of wickedness and that wickedness
aroused His wrath and His wrath motivated His justice, the removal of
wickedness through judgment. That judgment took the form of the worldwide
Flood. And this judgment wiped the earth clean of its corrupted life.
Genesis 7:23, “So He destroyed all living things which were
on the face of the ground: both man and cattle, creeping thing and bird of the
air. They were destroyed from the earth. Only Noah and those who were with him
in the ark remained alive.”
You see clearly that this judgment as an extension of God’s
wrath was sent to punish and judge a world that had become desperately wicked.
This is God’s punitive justice. And this is probably what we most often think
of as justice: justice being punishment.
But this idea of justice as punishment
dominates our concept of justice. And it is true that justice that distributes
punishment is in fact just. And this is what should inspire awe and fear in us:
that it is a holy God of justice we have offended.
Thomas Jefferson is credited as having
said: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his
justice cannot sleep forever”.
Let this be a warning and a reminder
to us: God is just and He has every right to judge sin. In the realm of His own
children, that means discipline and punishment just the same, because a good
Father disciplines His children.
However, biblically, God’s justice and
righteousness has another, secondary meaning than just being punitive. His
justice is also aligned with mercy.
3.
Justice as Merciful
God’s justice and righteousness is
repeatedly aligned with concepts of deliverance and salvation. A few examples:
Psalm 31:1 says “Deliver me in Your righteousness.”
Psalm 103:6, “The LORD executes righteousness and justice
for all who are oppressed.”
Isaiah 51:4-5, “Listen to Me, My people; and giver ear to
Me, O My nation; for law will proceed from Me, and I will make My justice rest
as a light of the peoples. My righteousness is near, My salvation has gone
forth, and My arms will judge the people…”
Isaiah
61:10, “I will greatly rejoice in the
LORD, my soul shall be joyful in my God; for He has clothed me with the
garments of salvation, He has covered me with the robe of righteousness.”
The idea you get from these verses and
others is that God’s justice does not just involve punishing, but that it
involves deliverance, salvation, mercy, protecting the poor and oppressed,
doing what is right and making people right.
The 13th century priest and
philosopher, Thomas Aquinas, said this: “God acts mercifully, not indeed by
going against His justice, but by doing something more than justice; thus a man
who pays another two hundred pieces of money, though owing him only one
hundred, does nothing against justice, but acts liberally or mercifully. The
case is the same with one who pardons an offense committed against him, for in
remitting it he may be said to bestow a gift. Hence the Apostle calls remission
a forgiving: ‘Forgive one another, as Christ has forgiven you’ [Ephesians 4:32]. Hence it is clear that
mercy does not destroy justice, but in a sense is the fullness thereof.”
Does the Bible agree with Aquinas’
assessment? Certainly. James 2:13
seems to hint at that when it says that “Mercy
triumphs over judgment.”
Thus while there’s a part of God’s
justice that is punitive and an outworking of His wrath, there is similarly
another part of God’s justice that is merciful and an outworking of His love.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the
example of the Cross. Last week, we discovered that the cross not only
demonstrates God’s love toward us, as according to Scripture, but that the
cross also demonstrates God’s wrath toward sin, according to Scripture. Thus
the cross forms the intersection where love and wrath meet.
The cross also displays the fullness
of the dual meanings of God’s justice. You certainly see His wrath being poured
out and satisfied, you certainly see the judgment of sin as Christ becomes sin
for us. You certainly see punitive justice at the cross.
But you similarly see merciful justice
there as well: providing for and protecting the poor and the oppressed sinner,
giving salvation and deliverance from sin through faith.
God’s justice was satisfied in that
the punishment was dealt and His righteousness is given to those who come to
Jesus in faith.
And God was not unjust in punishing
Christ in our place. This is one of the complaints against Christianity, that
it is unjust for an innocent person to suffer in place of a guilty person.
That is true, but that is not the
whole picture. Sometimes you hear evangelists use this metaphor to describe
what happened at the cross: you have a debt to pay, you go to court and the
judge sentences you to prison because you cannot pay your debt, when a stranger
walks in and says “I will pay that debt in your place”.
This metaphor, while good, doesn’t go
far enough. In reality, it should be like this: you committed crimes and broke
nearly every law, you are a thief, a murderer and a liar. When you come in to
court, you discover that your punishment is capital. You are going to be
executed. But then the judge himself, representing justice, steps down himself
to take your place and be executed. And the people whom you stole from come
down to take your place and be executed. And the parents of the child you
murdered come down to take your place and be executed. And the husband of the
woman you raped comes down to take your place and be executed. And the manager
of the restaurant you burned down comes down to take your place and be
executed.
There’s a better analogy. For it is
the very Judge of all the Earth Himself that we committed crimes against as
sinners. He is the victim and the
Judge simultaneously. And He voluntarily chose to take the punishment that you
deserved, which punishment was for your crimes against Himself. Is that not
true mercy and beyond justice? You cannot call that unjust. This is not taking
some random innocent and punishing him in your place. No, the cross is not just
an innocent person, but the victim of the crimes Himself standing up to take
punishment in your place. The One who demanded the penalty and against whom the
crime was committed was the One who paid the penalty Himself.
The Christian apologist Norman Geisler
puts it this way: “…while it is unjust to charge
another person for my crime, it is not unjust for them to voluntarily pay the fine. Christ was not charged by
God with our crime—He paid it for us,
but it was our crime and God charged us with it. Hence, rather than being
immoral, a voluntary substitutionary atonement is the apex of morality.”
Make no mistake, this is as much a
reflection of God’s justice in His deliverance as it is in punishment, as we
often think justice to be. If justice is what makes things right, then is not
the cross the pinnacle of justice? Through it, God gives us His righteousness,
He makes us right.
4.
Biblical Basis for Divine
Justice
Let’s have our Project Scriptura
verses. And when you read these off, I’m going to ask you whether you think
that this is speaking of punitive justice or merciful justice.
5.
The Righteousness of God
We’ve talked tonight about the
righteousness and the justice of God, the LORD making us right through the
cross and imputing to us, giving us His righteousness, His right-ness. Truly,
this is something we must hold on to and trust in. This is our basis for
relating to God. If God did not declare us right and make us right, then we
still have a huge problem.
It was this huge problem, this
dilemma, that Martin Luther wrestled with. Martin Luther was a German monk,
priest and professor and a prominent figure during a movement for reform in the
16th century, a movement we know today as the Protestant
Reformation. Martin Luther famously nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door
of the Castle Church of Wittenberg on October 31st, 1517. The Theses
contained his rejections of popular Catholic teachings which he believed to be
unscriptural.
But well before Luther had the
audacity to face off against the all-powerful Catholic Church of his day, he
wrestled with the concept of God’s righteousness.
In his own words, Luther said: “At
first I clearly saw that the free grace of God is absolutely necessary to
attain to light and eternal life; and I anxiously and busily worked to
understand the word of Paul in Rom. 1:17: The righteousness of God is revealed
in the Gospel. I questioned this passage for a long time and labored over it,
for the expression ‘righteousness of God’ barred my way. This phrase was
customarily explained to mean that the righteousness of God is a virtue by
which He is Himself righteous and condemns sinners. In this way all the
teachers of the church except Augustine had interpreted the passage. They had
said: The righteousness of God, that is (id est), the wrath of God. But as
often as I read this passage, I wished that God had never revealed the Gospel;
for who could love a God who was angry, who judged and condemned people?”
But the key that unlocked the
Reformation came when Luther realized that the righteousness of God in Romans 1:17 isn’t referring to punitive
justice but to merciful justice, to use the terms we’ve studied with tonight.
Martin Luther realized that this was
referring to a righteousness by faith which God gives to those who believe. It
wasn’t talking about God’s demands for justice, but it was talking about God’s
ability to make a man justified, to make a man righteous.
I found this quote online: this
experience according to Luther was “a conversion experience. When he had
discovered that God gives His righteousness as a gift in Christ, he felt that
he "was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open
gates . . . that place in Paul was for me truly the gate to paradise." Now
his conscience was at rest, now he was certain of his salvation. Before there
had been only unrest and uncertainty… Thus fortified and converted by the
Gospel, Luther was now a ready instrument to be used by God for reformation!”
I share Luther’s story to show that
people sometimes need corrective thinking. Are you living under a God who seems
cold to you? Judgmental? Demanding? A God who holds you up to a perfect
standard only to show you what you are already painfully certain of, that you
are a moral failure, a criminal before Him, wicked and desperately sinful? If
this is how you picture God, then you are in need of some corrective thinking.
But this is how many people think
about God. And as A.W. Tozer reminds us: “What comes into your mind when you
think about God is the most important thing about you?”
And your view of His justice will
effect whether you come to God as a Father or as a Judge, whether you can
rejoice over His righteousness or cringe under its demands. How could you
rejoice over divine justice when that justice condemns your very soul? Unless
that divine justice was satisfied on your behalf upon the willing volunteer
that was the Son of God Himself. Be liberated like Martin Luther was from any
concept of God as being demanding without supply the means for satisfying His
demands.
God demanded justice and His satisfied
it at the cross. God burned with wrath and He soothed it at the cross. God’s
mandate is that you be righteous, and He clothes you with the righteousness of
His Son. Every blockade between you and Himself, the LORD Himself has removed.
When Luther realized that the just God
satisfied His own justice in making us right, he wrote: “Then the entire Holy
Scripture became clear to me, and heaven itself was opened to me. Now we see
this brilliant light very clearly, and we are privileged to enjoy it abundantly”.
Romans
3:21-22 are the instrumental verses that should shape our minds when we
come to think about God: “But now the
righteousness of God [His act of making right] apart from the law is revealed, being witnessed by the Law and the
Prophets, even the righteousness of God, through faith in Jesus Christ, to all
and on all who believe.”
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