God's Justice - 1

Following on from some of the posts below, I have recently finished reading R.C.Sproul's EXCELLENT book - 'The Holiness of God'. I'm going to share some of the quotes from the book that have specifically affected me and reminded me of the truth of who God is. (By the way anything that is in blue text are my thoughts, and everything else...isn't!)

The purpose of this post isn't to become introspective and burdened by sin. It is a chance to take a fresh look at God's justice. When looking at God's justice afresh, the first and primary point is that his justice has been fully and completely satisfied at the Cross. Nothing we can do can ever go any way to appeasing his wrath and satisfying his justice. As J.I.Packer writes in his book, 'Knowing God'

"...Our sins have been punished; the wheel of retribution has turned; judgement has been inflicted for our ungodliness - not on us, but on Jesus, the lamb of God standing in our place" (Knowing God Ch 18 p212)

Speaking in relation to creation, Sproul writes:

"In creation God is not obliged to give us the gift of life. He is not in debt to us. The gift of life comes by His grace and stands under His divine authority. The task that is given to mankind in creation is to bear witness to the holiness of God, to be His image bearer. We are made to mirror and reflect the holiness of God. We are made to be His ambassadors.
God put Adam and Eve on probation and said "If you sin, you will die." Sin brings the loss of the gift of life. The right to life is forfeited by sin. Once people sin, they forfeit any claim on God to human existence" (Ch 6 "Holy Justice" p109)

As Romans 6:23 says "For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord"

When we were created by God, we were created in His image and likeness (Genesis 1:26), as Dr Sproul writes, we were created to bear witness to His holiness, but when sin came into the world it marred that image.

Adrian Warnock quotes C.J.Mahaney from his sermon 'The Holiness of God':

"I don't believe it's unjust for God to take away the gift of life that he gave freely if it wasn't used for the purpose for which he gave it. Because when we sin, what we are saying is—we are not just making a mistake—we are saying no to God's law; we are saying your law is not good; we're saying—God, your law does not cut it, I'm not under your authority; my judgment is superior to yours; I'm defying and opposing you, who in reality I owe everything to."

(http://adrianwarnock.com/2008/06/c-j-mahaney-on-people-god-killed-sermon.htm)

So as soon as Adam and Eve sinned and ate the apple in active disobedience against God, they should have been wiped out for their transgression. However God chose delay his righteous justice


Sproul continues:

"In the case of creation and mankind's fall, the full measure of justice was delayed so that grace would have time to work. Here the delay of justice was not the denial of justice but the establishing of mercy and grace"(p115)

Ultimately God's purpose in everything is to bring glory to himself first and foremost. If he had, quite righteously, wiped out Adam & Eve as soon as they sinned, he would not have been any less just. But he chose to display his attribute of grace in delaying the display of his justice.


To be continued...

The wrath of God continued...

What kind of wrath is it? Well, it is the wrath of God, it is divine wrath and that is a very important beginning. It is divine wrath. It isn’t like anything else that we know in this world. It isn’t like your wrath or my wrath; it isn’t like when we get angry. It isn’t like when we get mad. We get angry and we get mad when we are offended. And, frankly, we have pride in the way. Our passion, our anger and our wrath is not like this, this is the wrath of God. And like every other attribute of God it is as perfect as His holy person. His wrath is righteous wrath. It is the right kind of wrath, it is holy wrath. The passion that we call anger in this world, the thing that we call wrath in this human world is always reflective of the evil heart of man. But we must not impose that on God.

One writer said, “We cannot think with full consistency of God in terms of the highest human ideals of personality and yet attribute to Him the rational passion of anger.” In other words, this writer was saying ‑ God could never be angry because we know anger is a bad thing. But he is simply trying to say that God’s like us, and He’s not. Don’t push our concept of anger on God. God is angry in a holy way, ‘in a perfect way. God’s anger is not some capricious, irrational rage.

In fact, let me go a step further. And you’re getting a lesson in theology proper here about the nature of God. God could not be God and be holy and be holy good if He didn’t react to evil. Do you understand that? He has to. He can’t be God. You cannot be holy and tolerate unholiness. It can’t be done. That’s why Habakkuk the prophet said: “Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil and cannot look upon iniquity.” God can’t tolerate it. And I’ll tell you something, the more Godlike you become; the more angry you will get at certain things.

Even in this warped world of men, indignation against wickedness is essential of human goodness. We expect people to get mad about certain injustice. For God is infinitely beyond that because even when we get mad about the right things it’s usually polluted by our sinfulness.

A classic illustration was Jesus in John 2 cleansing the temple, made a whip and just started whipping people all out of the temple. I mean, that’s a very dramatic scene. Do you want to know something? That was His first public act in Jerusalem. That is not the way you start a crusade. You don’t go into the religious places, take a whip and start flagellating everybody and overturning tables and crying about their sin, you’ll never get a crowd that way. You’ve got to send the advance committee, make it sound like harps and flowers. Jesus was furious because God was being dishonored. There was dishonesty there, there was cheating and lying and extortion and desecration.

So, don’t look at the low, irrational, selfish anger of men and then push that off on God. The wrath of God is always perfect, always. The wrath of men is always somehow compromised by the presence of sin.

- John MacArthur Jr