THE BIBLE
Can we trust a book written 2000 years ago?

EYEWITNESS
Did the writers of the New Testament get their picture of Jesus right?

GOD - MAN
Is Jesus really God?

RESURRECTION
Did Jesus really rise from the dead?

RELIGIONS
With so many religions, why Christianity?

SUFFERING
If there is a God, why is there so much suffering?

TRINITY
Understanding the Trinity.

SCIENCE
The complementary nature of Science & Christianity.

FORGIVENESS
What it is and why it matters?

GUIDANCE
How does God guide?

REPENTANCE
What it is and why you can't get to heaven without it.

BORN AGAIN
What does it mean to be converted and born again?

SAVING FAITH
The kind of faith that will get you to heaven

ASSURANCE
Can I know for sure that I am going to heaven?

TRUTH
What is truth and does it matter?

MORALITY
Does it matter how we live? A Christian view of morality.

THE CHURCH
God's vision for his family, the Church. A call to the churches of the new millennium.

PURPOSE
How can I find a great purpose for living?

IDENTITY
Who am I; Finding my true identity as a human being and as a child of God.

SELF-ESTEEM
How can I feel good about my self? The Christian basis for proper sel-esteem.

LIFE AFTER DEATHChristianity's Hope & Challenge.

THE CROSS
Why did Jesus Die? What the Bible says about the Cross.

Grace
The importance of grace in the New Testament.

The cross and the justice of God

The words “just”, “justice”, “righteous” and “righteousness”, either applied to God or to humans, occur about 650 times in the Bible. The word “judgement” occurs about 400 times and the verb “to judge” over 200 times. The same Hebrew and Greek words are translated as either justice or righteousness, depending on the context. It is not necessary for my purposes to go into the different words that are so translated and the shades of meaning of each. It is enough to repeat what Christopher Wright says, in Living as the People of God: “No idea is more all-persuasive in the Old Testament than that God is a God of righteousness and justice.” One could add that this is true enough of the New Testament as well, though with the coming of Jesus, as we shall see, it is more than balanced by grace.

The Psalmist could declare of God: “Righteousness and justice are the foundation of your throne” (89:14). God governs the world by his righteous laws. The consistency of his laws is observed even in the natural world, making possible the discipline of science. The very fact that we all have a strong sense of justice, even though it may be perverted by our own self-centredness, is adequate testimony that behind it all is a being of perfect justice who created us with some of his own characteristics. Such a sense of justice did not arise from some chance evolutionary process.

E. Calvin Beisner, in a monograph Justice and Poverty: Two Views Contrasted, defines Biblical justice as follows:

The Biblical concept of justice may be summarised as rendering impartially to everyone his due in proper proportions according to the norm of God’s moral law.

There are two important concepts in this statement. The first is that God gives to everyone what they deserve. If justice is to be truly impartial, there can be no exception to this. There is a very strong bias in the Bible, particularly in the writings of the prophets, towards the poor. However, the reason for this is that the poor are often poor because they have first suffered injustice. They are still held responsible for their moral behaviour.[44]

[44] For passages that underline God’s concern for social justice, see: Exodus 22:22; Deuteronomy 10:18, 19; Psalm 146:7-9; Proverbs 14:31; 22, 23; Isaiah 1:15-17, 23; 5:1-8, 22, 23; 10:1-4; 58:3-12; Jeremiah 7:5-11; 22:3, 13-17; Ezekiel 16:49-52; 18; 22:6-12; Hosea 4:1-3; 12:6, 7; Amos 2:6-8; 5:7, 10-15, 21-24; 6:12; 8:4-6; Micah 2:1-3, 8, 9; 3:1-3, 9-12; 6:8-13; 7:2-4; Zechariah 7:9-12; Malachi 3:5.

The second point is that God’s justice is always according to God’s moral law, and this law is a reflection of God’s own moral character. This means that if humans are to live in any meaningful relationship with God, then it is necessary for us to conform to that norm, or character. “You are to be holy to me because I, the Lord, am holy” is the command of both the Old and New Testaments (Leviticus 20:26—see 1 Peter 1:15). For the prophets of the Old Testament, failure in the area of either social injustice or general wickedness was always linked with the failure to “know” God (e.g. Isaiah 1:3-17; Hosea 4:1ff.).

Both these points, taken together, present us with a seemingly insoluble problem. Voltaire once said, “Of course God forgives sin: That’s his business.” But there is no “of course” in the New Testament. We have all come so far short of the norm given to us in the Bible, illustrated by such things as the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount and the life of Jesus, that if we are to take seriously all the Bible says about the justice of God, we can expect nothing but condemnation. Charles Finney, the eighteenth-century American revivalist, made the comment that he found lawyers easier to bring to faith in Christ than other groups because they had a stronger concept of the necessity of rule by law. The Jews gloried in the fact that they were the recipients of God’s moral laws. However, Paul says very clearly, “There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). Whether we are big sinners or little sinners becomes immaterial in the light of God’s perfect holiness and justice. However, in a manner that goes beyond anything in our human concepts of justice, God has solved the problem in the person of Jesus Christ.

Paul spells out the solution to the problem as follows: “God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith. He did this to demonstrate his justice…so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus” (Romans 3:25, 26). Denney says of this passage:

There can be no gospel unless there is such a thing as a righteousness of God for the ungodly. But just as little can there be any gospel unless the integrity of God’s character be maintained. The problem of a sinful world, the problem of all religion, the problem of God dealing with a sinful race, is how to unite these two things. The Christian answer to the problem is given by Paul in [the above] words.

How does the cross demonstrate the justice of God? It does so simply by revealing that God’s attitude to evil is such that it demanded so terrible a sacrifice. R. McCheyne Edgar, in a sermon on the cross, declared:

The gathering waves of the Deluge—the flaming fire of Sodom—the sacking of Jerusalem—all famine, pestilence and agony do not proclaim so unmistakably as the Cross—how real is the wrath—how terrible is the justice of the Most High in the matter of sin!

Some of our deepest thinkers have always thought that real forgiveness is possible only when due regard is paid to the moral law. C. A. Dinsmore examined such diverse writings as those of Homer, Aeshylus, Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, George Eliot, Hawthorne and Tennyson, and came to the conclusion that “It is an axiom in life and religious thought that there is no reconciliation without satisfaction.”

Yet, above all, as we have seen, the cross demonstrates the amazing love of a God who was willing to suffer the consequences of that sin within himself in order to fully satisfy that justice. As Alan Lewis puts it, “Here God, the Judge, becomes the malefactor, judged and sentenced, and bows to the divine verdict upon human sin and guilt.” American pastor Stephen Olford says:

The Cross expresses the divine mind, reveals the divine estimate of human sin, exhibits the divine righteousness, demonstrates the divine love, and yet does all this on a human platform so that we can appreciate the mystery of the heavenly counsels.

Emil Brunner, in The Mediator, put it this way: “The cross is the only place where the loving, forgiving, merciful God is revealed in such a way that we perceive that his holiness and his love are equally infinite.” Calvin, echoing Augustine, was even bolder: “In a marvellous and divine way he loved us even when he hated us.”

Jesus had said, in the days before his crucifixion, “Now[45] is the time for judgement on this world” (John 12:31). For one who has put their faith in Jesus, the wonderful news is that the judgement, which would have been in the future, is now 2,000 years in the past.

[45] Italics mine.

One objection that may be made to all this is that it can never be right for someone to pay the penalty for the sins of another. From a human perspective, maybe we can understand this better if we think in terms of Jesus as our surety, our guarantor. A guarantor is someone who is willing to assume an individual’s legal obligations in the event the individual should fail to meet them. We see nothing wrong in this if it is a voluntary agreement made beforehand. From passages such as Ephesians 1:4, 1 Peter 1:18-21 and Revelation 13:8, it appears that something like this is the case in the counsels of eternity. It is also suggested from the story told in Genesis 15, which I have discussed earlier under the heading “A God who is prepared to die” in the chapter on the Old Testament. What is also relevant on this point is the identification of Jesus with us and we with him, which I looked at earlier under the heading “Our identification with Christ in his death” in the chapter on “The cross in Paul”. Paul describes the Lord Jesus Christ as the second man and last Adam, who involved us in his sin-bearing as truly as Adam involved us in his sinning (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:45ff.; Romans 5:12 ff.). At any rate, it is the unanimous testimony of the New Testament that God’s way of doing it is in line with his perfect righteousness, whether we would consider it to be so or not. It is significant that in Romans 3:25, 26 Paul mentions God’s forbearance in the same passage as his justice. As Leon Morris says, “Neither justice nor mercy must be whittled down; but neither must they be separated.”

In his book Full Assurance, Harry Ironside, the prominent pastor of Moody Church in Chicago, told the story of a lawyer who lay dying. He had attended church all his life but had never personally trusted Christ for his salvation. He was known to be a man of unimpeachable integrity. Yet, as he lay there facing eternity, he was troubled and distressed. He knew that upright as he had been before men, he was a sinner before God. His awakened conscience brought to his memory sins and transgressions that had never seemed so bad as then, when he knew that shortly he must meet his Maker. A friend put the direct question, “Are you saved?” He replied in the negative, shaking his head sadly. His friend asked, “Would you like to be saved?” “I would indeed,” was the reply, “if it is not already too late. But” he added, almost fiercely, “I do not want God to do anything wrong in saving me!” Fortunately, God has devised a way in which he can both be “just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus” (Romans 3:26).

Paul declares that “in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed” (Romans 1:17). As Lewis states:

God’s righteousness is simultaneously that which judges sin and that which sets sin aside, with the free gift of justification apart from the law (e.g., Romans 1:16ff.; 3:21ff.; cf. 1 Corinthians 1:18ff. and the extended Johannine theme that Christ’s coming means judgement for the world, e.g., John 1:10-10; 12:31).

God did it right!

An old hymn puts it well:

Beneath the cross of Jesus
I fain would take my stand—The shadow of a mighty rock
Within a weary land…
O safe and happy shelter!
O refuge tried and sweet!
O trysting-place, where heaven’s love
And heaven’s justice meet!

I will finish the theme of these last two chapters with a quote and a story. The quote is from Ravi Zacharias, one of today's leading Christian apologists, from his magnificent book Can Man Live Without God? [45a]. This is the printed version of lectures given to some of America's best and brightest students at Harvard University. He says:

In the cross alone are integrated love and justice, the twin foundations upon which we may build our moral and spiritual home, individually and nationally. It is theoretically and practically impossible to build any community apart from love and justice. If only one of these two is focused upon, an inevitable extremism and perversion follow. Throughout history, mankind has shouted its ideals of liberty, equality and justice; yet the ideologies that have risen, supposedly in the pursuit of human progress, have left in their wake some very dastardly experiments that echo with the whimpering sounds of man, like a trapped animal. Rising above the cry of liberty, equality and justice is the more rending plea for that sense of belonging we call love. And the love unbounded by any sense of right or wrong is not love but self-centredness and autocracy. In the cross of Jesus Christ, the demands of the law were satisfied, and the generosity of love was expressed.

[45a] W Publishing Group, 1994, ©.

The story is one told about Shamyl the Avar that illustrates this tension between justice and love. He was a remarkable leader who rallied the tribes of Dagestan in the Caucasus mountains in resisting the advance of Russia into their territory in the mid-nineteenth century. He was a giant of a man and a superb horseman and swordsman. In the process he captured the romantic imagination of Western Europe. At one time during his rule, bribery and corruption became so prevalent that he was driven to severest measures. He announced that every case discovered would be punished with one hundred lashes. Not long after, a culprit was found. It was his own mother.

For two days he shut himself away in his tent, with neither food nor drink, sunk in prayer. If he made an exception for his mother, could he ever stand before his people again as a just lawgiver and a man of his word? After two days he gathered the people together and, pale as a ghost, commanded the prisoner to be brought forward and tied to the whipping post. He ordered the executioner to be ready, and gave the word for the punishment to be inflicted. This was done. But at the fifth stroke he cried, “Halt!” He had his mother released, bared his own back, had his hands tied, and directed the executioner to lay on him the remaining ninety-five lashes, with the sternest threats if he failed to give him the full weight of each blow. Both justice and love were satisfied. In the case of Jesus, however, he took one hundred percent of the punishment.

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