Word of Salvation – Vol. 44 No.40 – October 1999
The Justice of God
Sermon by Rev M P Geluk
on Lord’s Day 4 (Heid.Cat. Q&A 9-11)
Scripture Reading: Romans 1:18-32; 2:1-11
Suggested Hymns: BoW 500; 181; 67; 334
Beloved Congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Before the Heidelberg Catechism moves on to the great and wonderful subject of the deliverance from sin, it has one more Lord’s Day on the doctrine of sin. It’s Lord’s Day 4 and it takes in the Bible’s teaching on the justice of God.
One is not finished with the doctrine of sin by only describing what sin is and what it does to man. We need to also look at the question as to what effect sin has on God. The entrance of sin badly affected the relationship between God, and Adam and Eve. He had to put them out of the Garden of Eden. It was the only thing God could do. His holiness and purity would not allow Him to continue on with Adam and Eve as though nothing had happened.
The idea that God actually punishes sin does not sit well with some people. And God punishing sin is linked up with God being just. And that is something else some Christians find hard to understand. They ask: how can God, who is love, punish sinners? And what does it mean that God is also a God of justice? So before we move on to deliverance from sin let us look at THE JUSTICE OF GOD. In fact, unless we accept and understand God’s justice, we will not be able to fully appreciate His deliverance from it in Jesus Christ the Saviour.
1. Why God’s Justice Requires Punishment
It is not easy to speak about the element of justice in God’s character. Most people prefer to focus on the love and mercy of God. But what faces every Christian is this: Whenever we speak about God, then we must always try our utmost to be true to Him and present Him as His own Word reveals Him. And the Scriptures show that God is both loving and holy; He is both merciful and just.
Unfortunately, many people today, even Christians, tend to emphasise the love of God at the expense of His holiness, and the mercy of God at the expense of His justice. In the past it has been sometimes the other way round. As recent as fifty years ago, it was customary in some Christian circles to so emphasise the justice and the holy anger of God that people were terrified of Him. They badly needed to also hear of God’s love and mercy. But today the pendulum has swung back too far the other way and many people hold to a concept of God that says He is all love.
What are the consequences of a one-sided emphasis on the love of God? For one thing, people begin to believe that they themselves must also show only love. From this one-sided emphasis on love has come the present willingness to show tolerance even for things that ought not to be tolerated. In the past when God’s love was not emphasised enough there was a lack of tolerance and people were often harsh and cruel to each other. But now society has become tolerant to the degree that just about anything goes. We are all aware that there are very few standards left with regard to moral behaviour. People today defend and excuse the most outrageous codes of conduct. Accompanying this passion for tolerance is the lack of discipline that we see, and with it a disregard for authority.
You see, if God is all love, what does it really matter if a person behaves differently to His will? Why has it come that far that people think there is nothing wrong with sex outside of marriage or with homosexual behaviour – just to name two examples? Even some churches and some church leaders are saying that these things can’t be condemned as long as there is love present. Apparently love makes everything okay. But they have taken God’s justice away from His character and see Him only as love.
in fact, the whole idea of sin has become a problem to many people. If God is only love, then sin becomes irrelevant really. When you follow that to its logical conclusion then you can see why people have difficulty with hell. How can you have a hell if God is all love? How can anyone be lost forever if God is all love?
But whoever follows that line of thinking soon runs into problems. What about all those evil people you read about in the Bible? Where did Pharaoh end up? Where did the evil kings of Judah and Israel end up? Where did king Herod who murdered all those little children in Bethlehem end up? And Judas, who betrayed the Lord? Or Pilate who condemned the innocent Christ to death? If God is all love would the likes of those be saved? What’s more, what about Nero, Hitler, Stalin, Idi Amin, Sadam Hussein, Pol Pot and Milosevich? Would leaders of such murderous regimes who never repented of their terrible crimes be saved and in the end find themselves in heaven because there is no hell?
There is a variation to the above way of thinking that realises that the Bible is very clear about Christ dying on the cross for sin. This variation says that all the sins of all people were paid for by Christ, even of those who refused to believe in Him. So God loves everybody and saves them all because Christ’s death for sin has taken care of all the sins of the human race, even of those who in their lifetime never heard or believed in Christ. Without their knowledge, Christ was also their Saviour. Is this what the Bible teaches?
You can see how important it is to be constantly taught by Scripture as to how we must see God. When people can’t accept the justice of God and that He will punish the guilty with everlasting punishment, then they will twist and turn in every way until everything fits into their belief about God being only love. So we must see God as He revealed Himself in His own Word. And the Word says that when anyone sins, then that person will be punished with death.
God said to Adam and Eve: “You must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die” (Gen.2:17]. And that’s exactly what happened. They died; they are not living any more. The Bible further teaches that all have sinned and therefore all die. And thus we have death in the world. When people die then we must say it’s because sin has come into the world. Go to a cemetery and you can very clearly see that God meant what He said that all will die because all have sinned.
Yes, the Lord God who describes Himself as the “compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin” is also the One who, “does not leave the guilty unpunished” (Ex.34:7]. God, says the prophet, is not a God who takes pleasure in evil; with Him the wicked cannot dwell. The arrogant cannot stand in His presence. He hates all who do wrong. He destroys those who tell lies (Ps.5:41).
Moses instructed the priests to recite before the Israelites a whole list of sins and with each sin the person guilty of doing it was pronounced cursed by God (Deut.27:14ff]. God told the prophet Nahum to proclaim God’s anger over against sin, “…the Lord takes vengeance and is filled with wrath… the Lord will not leave the guilty unpunished” (1:2-3). In the New Testament the apostle Paul writes: “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness” (Rom.1:18). And: “The wages of sin is death” (Rom.6:23]. And: “…God’s wrath comes on those who are disobedient” [Eph.5:6). And the letter to the Hebrews says: “…man is destined to die once, and after that to face judgment” (19:27).
Now all that is not nice to hear, but it has to be faced because it comes out of the Word of God. And, let’s face it! Hell is a terrible truth, but a truth nonetheless. All unbelievers and all who do not repent from sin will go there when they die physically. Hell has no hope. Those in it experience the rejection of God. They wish they could escape from it but theirs is an eternal separation from God. Hell is a place to be feared. And the Lord Jesus whom some think of as being only meek and mild, spoke more about hell and everlasting punishment than anyone else in the Bible.
It is difficult to face the reality of God’s justice and speak of hell but it remains a fact even if all were to ignore it. This biblical teaching brought much sorrow to Moses when God threatened to separate Himself from Israel in the wilderness. Likewise, the apostle Paul had deep anguish when he saw fellow Jews being eternally lost because they had rejected Christ. The justice of God brings similar pain and sadness to every believer when faced with the unbelief of their relatives and other loved ones when they persist in their unbelief. So awful is the thought of the punishment of God upon sin that it caused the author of the Hebrew letter to cry out: “It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (10:31).
How can people still say that God is only love and that He will not punish the wicked and unbelieving? Do they know something about God that we don’t know? Do they have access to some knowledge about God that we have not read about in the Scriptures? If they claim to know aspects of God’s nature about which we read nothing in the Bible, then it must be that they know more about God than what He has revealed about Himself. But that cannot be. We can only know God from what He has said about Himself. And He has spoken of Himself as both being merciful and just.
The thing that people should be busy with is not what they regard as injustice in God but how sinners can be saved from the justice of God. That is the question that should really be faced. How to be saved from the justice of God? How to be saved from hell?
2. A Look At Some Objections to God’s Justice
Let us now consider some objections that people raise against the justice of God. Frequently they also come up in the Christian’s mind. One such objection goes something like this. Is it not unjust of God to ask anyone to do something he or she can no longer do? For example, Jesus said in the middle of His sermon on the mount: “Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” [Mat.5:48). It is not an isolated command for it is repeated elsewhere in the Bible. God knows that no one can be perfect. He Himself has said that all men have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Is it, therefore, not pointless to demand perfection from imperfect sinners? Or, how can God ask that we love Him with heart, soul, mind and strength, when each one of us is by nature inclined to hate God and our neighbour? Do these examples not show that God is unjust?
Adam and Eve were able to give God perfect obedience and total love. But after they chose to sin and thereby became sinful, they and all their descendants were no longer able to obey and love God perfectly. But should we now expect God to change because man brought ruin upon himself? Is it right to expect God to now demand less of us after The Fall than He did before The Fall?
God who remains holy and perfect cannot be satisfied with anything less than perfect. But that’s not all. Has there ever been a time that anyone sinned without wanting to sin? Has that ever happened to you, that you sinned totally against your will? I think it’s true to say that whenever we sinned, we did so because we wanted to or decided to do so. The sin might have been done with much struggle in our heart and with our consciences telling us not to. But every sin we do is done because at some point we decided to go against our conscience. We gave up the fight to resist and our wanting to sin was greater than our desire to not want to sin. The objection, therefore, that God is unjust to ask from us what we cannot give, is really unfair to God. God is not the problem, we are.
What about the objection that it seems unfair for God to condemn the heathen who have not heard of God and His standards? There are people in the world who may have never heard of the Gospel. They never knew that Jesus Christ has come to save sinners and therefore never had a chance to believe in Him. So is it not unjust for God to send people to hell for not believing in a Christ they have never heard of?
The answer to this objection is that God will not condemn people for sins they did not commit. If they never rejected Christ because they never heard of Him, then they won’t be punished for that. But God will condemn the heathen, or anyone else for that matter, for the sins they did commit. People commit many more sins besides the sin of not believing in Christ. To have heard of Christ and to reject God’s offer of salvation through Him is a most serious sin, but it is not the only sin for which people are punished. A sinner is punished by God for the sins he did commit and knew that he was doing them.
Behind this objection there is the strange notion that the heathen are basically innocent. But there are no nice heathen. Where the light of the Gospel has not penetrated, there is still the darkness of barbaric practices, where life is cheap, where women have little or no rights, where there are slaves, where there is cruelty, where there are jealousies, power struggles, hatred, war and murder. When travelling through the world, we know where we will be the safest it will be among people who are serious about their Christian faith. It will be in places where society respects and obeys the laws of God.
Romans 1 speaks about the light of creation having come to all people. In nature God has revealed something of His power and beauty. Nature suggests to man that there is a higher power who has made the forests, the animals, the insects, the stars, the seasons, and so on. But instead of serving the Creator, man suppresses this truth by his wickedness and worships whatever creature he fancies, turning them into a god.
And there is not only the light of nature. Romans 2 adds to that and speaks about the light of conscience. God has put into man’s heart a knowledge of what is right and wrong. This may not cover all rights and wrongs but no matter how primitive a people may be, they know of a number of rights and wrongs. When they, therefore, do the wrong whilst knowing the right, they have already condemned themselves. God’s justice for them will consist of punishing them for the things they knew they did wrong.
But you should also know this. Many Christians who also ask – what about the heathen? – come to quite a different reaction. They do not question the justice of God in this matter. They know from the Bible that God’s justice is pure and impeccable. They have no doubts about God being right and true in punishing people for their sins. But their concern is how to bring the gospel to these heathen for they know that only in Christ can they be saved. So when the question came up – what about the heathen? – these Christians went to the heathen with the Good News of Christ.
And right there you have the whole work of mission and evangelism. Why do Christians witness to others about Christ? Because they know that none will be saved unless they hear and believe in Christ. So whenever you are concerned about the heathen, do not begin to wonder if God is unjust but begin to do something to save those heathen with the gospel.
Then there is one other objection that people sometimes raise and it is this: would God be so cruel to not save the infant children of unbelievers? We just dealt with the question: what about the heathen? And we saw that all have sinned and therefore will be punished for their sin unless they hear and believe the gospel of Christ. But what about infant children of unbelievers? If they die in infancy, what about them? They have not done any sins as yet, so surely God would save them?
Behind this concern for infants is the assumption that they are born innocent. But that’s not true. The Bible does not teach that people become sinners only when they commit sin. It teaches that sin entered the human race when Adam and Eve fell away from God. Children are born outside paradise, born in a world that has the curse of sin resting on it. They come from parents who have been affected by The Fall. The first sin put Adam and Eve and all their descendants into darkness and death, and in that state all children are born.
It’s a most terrible reality that the whole human race is separated from God and in the darkness of sin and death. We’re talking about a great many people here. But the answer to their plight is not to start questioning the justice of God. The answer is Christ. We must go and reach them with the Gospel. God Himself has shown the way when He said: “I so loved the world that I gave my one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
This well-known text shows that God is also merciful. People can sometimes be so preoccupied with God not being fair that they overlook His mercy. God’s mercy was already present when Adam and Eve did not immediately die physically after they sinned. God had said to them, “you will surely die” if you are going to cut yourself loose from me and my commandments. Whilst they died spiritually, they went on to live for many years before their bodies died and in that time God did not only give them the Gospel about Christ but provided them with food and clothes as well. Now that’s God’s mercy.
And God has continued to show that mercy to all Adam’s children, which is the whole human race, and to which also belong the heathen and their infant children. God shows them His kindness by giving rain from heaven and crops in their seasons. And He provides them with food and even fills their hearts with joy (Acts 14:17]. In all this we see the riches of God’s kindness, tolerance and patience. He is like that to the peoples of the world, all affected by Adam’s sin and themselves under the curse of sin. God shows them His mercy in order to lead them to repentance (Rom.2:4).
Let’s see God’s mercy, then, to those who in sinful ways use their hands and brains to bring needless cruelty and suffering to others. Let’s see God’s tolerance to those whose criminal activities make them ripe for His judgment. Let’s see God’s patience to those ‘nice’ people who can be courteous, hospitable, and sharing, but who at the same time ignore God as the Creator and Provider and show Him contempt when they regard Hira as impotent, powerless and harmless. The fact that God sends His rain and sunshine on both the just and unjust, and that He continues to show His forbearance to evil doers and others who blithely ignore Him, is an eloquent testimony of His mercy.
Many people do evil and pursue wrong but still God withholds His judgment from them. What if God were to paralyse an arm every time it were to strike others down? What if God were to strike people dumb every time they swear and curse? What if God were to blind all those every time they let their eyes roam with greed and lust? What if God were give an infectious disease every time people sin sexually? What if God were to punish people with insanity every time their minds plotted evil? Surely God’s mercy and patience is upon the human race all the time?! Truly, God is not unjust. God is so merciful that He patiently bears with us when we in our hearts raise objections to the way His Word speaks about His nature and His actions.
When it’s all said and done, then we can only see God’s holiness and the sinfulness of the human race. But that’s also the time that God makes us award of His mercy, and He points us to His wonderful salvation of lost sinners through Jesus Christ. Yes, let us not worry about the injustice of God, for there isn’t any. Rather, let us be more aware of the justice of our most holy God and learn how to be saved by Him who is too pure to look on sin. This much is clear – God will punish sin, and every human being has it. That’s His justice.
But there is also His mercy. The sin of anyone can be punished in Jesus Christ and so make the sinner free. With every human being it is either one or the other. Either we ourselves have to face God’s judgment or it has come upon Christ for us. If we are to be judged, then it’s hell for us. If Christ has borne our punishment, then it’s heaven for us.
Amen.