God Is Just
Texts: Jeremiah 9:23,24, Romans 3:21-26, Matthew 23:23
Pastor Phil Hughes, American Fork Presbyterian Church, Utah
February 5, 2023
In the previous five weeks the sermons have been on God, who he is and what he is like. We have considered that God is big. He is beyond time and space. He is above all the universes. He is greater than anyone can comprehend.
We have considered that God is love. Love isn’t just something he does but it is his very makeup. Love comes from God.
We have heard that God is good. Even though people have turned this world into a place where cruelty and bad abounds, God is still good. He is redeeming so much of our lousiness, pouring out goodness even as people can so often be bad.
We considered that God is patient. He waits for people to change and come to him. He can wait for years, for centuries.
And last week we considered that God is slow. He doesn’t work on our hurried timeframes. He might take his time to act. We often have to wait in trust for him to move. But when he moves it is always at the right time.
We end these sermons this morning by seeing that God is just.
If you asked the average churchgoer to describe God, my guess is that they would say God is loving, compassionate, and merciful. Some might say that God is welcoming, accepting and inclusive. But would many say that God is just?[1] Some people miss this part of God’s character.
In Deuteronomy 32:4 Moses says God is “A faithful God…just and upright is he…” The psalmist says, “The Lord is just in all his ways…”[2]
God is just in his workings in the world. And, God is just in his workings with us.
“Just” means “fair.” And it means to set things that have been wrong to be right. Because God is just, whatever is unjust outrages his heart. God is against what is unjust because it runs counter to who he is.
Knowing that God is patient and that God can be slow, sometimes we look at our world with all its unfairness and we wonder why God doesn’t do anything. If God is just, why does he let people get away with evil? But the wrongs of this world do not go unnoticed by him.
Because God is just, he demands justice. You can’t do a responsible reading of the Bible and not see that God is just. God looks out for the widows, orphans, helpless and defenseless. He wants fairness. God is passionately against the wicked, those who exploit, and people who use their riches, privilege and power to hurt and oppress others.
We read how he wants to see his people do justice. “Let justice roll down like waters…”[3] God says through the prophet Amos. And then there are these well-known words from the prophet Micah: “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”[4]
Jesus echoed Micah when he confronted the Pharisees, saying, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! You tithe mint, dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law; justice and mercy and faith. It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others.”[5] Justice is one of the more weighty matters of the law because God is just and he looks for us to be just in all our dealings with people. Jesus pounded the religious leaders for ignoring it.
God wants us to do good, seek justice, and come to those who are the least of these. He wants his people to do the right thing – the just thing.
We love passages about peace and heaven, but not so much those passages about judgment and God calling this world to account. But people in this world who have been treated very unfairly, who have suffered at the hands of others, find the passages about God setting things right as empowering. They embrace the passages about a God who is enraged by injustice and unrighteousness. They find strength and hope that God is a God who will right every wrong.
Why can’t God just be tolerant with everyone? No, God can’t just be tolerant because there are Vladimir Putin’s, and genocide, and a sex-slave trade, and places where people have to flee their homes or live in starvation because of the powerful and those who perpetuate war.
Why can’t God merely just accept everyone? Because there have been holocausts, terrorist attacks, and people who hurt others. Because people lie, are greedy, and are cruel.
It is fashionable in our time to think of God as all-accepting and never holding anyone to account. But we might ask ourselves what are “the consequences of belief in a god who is not set against evil in all its forms”?[6] Do we want a God who turns his face from injustice, deception and violence? If we aren’t bothered when we see unfairness we haven’t understood the depths of God.
In the book of the prophet Jeremiah, the Lord said to know and understand him is to know that he is a God who exercises kindness, yes. But, also, justice and righteousness. Some Christians talk a lot about knowing God. Well, God says one of the things about knowing him is to do justice. It says he delights in this.
Yes, God is just and a day will come when he will do whatever is necessary against what has been unjust in this world. One of our Presidents, Thomas Jefferson said, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.”
God is just and he shows that on a universal scale, but he also shows that he is just on a very personal way.
You see, things aren’t right with this world. But things aren’t right with us either. We point the finger at those who make the headlines and history with their evil. It’s easy to condemn some dictator, or someone who randomly shoots people in a public place, or doctors who abuse people. But what about the things that are wrong in my own life? Within every human heart there is arrogance, self-centeredness, and prejudice. We fall short of God’s standards by what we do, and sometimes by what we don’t do. You and I have offended God. Our little and big lies, our resentments and the hurts we have caused others.
“Just” is also a legal term that pictures a court scene. And if we are to be tried by a just God surely we will be found guilty. Indeed, when God’s justice confronts our moral situation we are found guilty. The sentence is death.
Some people try to justify themselves by saying, “Well, I am not as bad as that person. I’ve never done anything like that.” The God who is just doesn’t compare us to others and let us walk.
For God to merely pass over our sins or the evil of this world it would not match up with him being a righteous God. He’s not overlooking anything. Think of a very hurtful wrong that has been done to you. Would you want God just to excuse it and not take it seriously? If God saw children being abused and looked the other way, that would not be a good God. Are we not right to say slavery and genocide and extortion are wrong and someone needs to be held accountable? We would not want a God who overlooks this. That is a crooked god.
God can never condone evil. It is to deny his very own nature.
God is forgiving, but for God to have forgiven our sins lightly would be a cheap forgiveness. To merely look the other way or sweep it under the rug would imply that moral evil does not matter very much.
As we already know, another part of God is his patience. Because he is patient he has postponed his ultimate judgment. All accounts haven’t been called in. He postponed judgment because his plan for eternity was to deal with all human sinfulness at the right time through the death of his Son,
But we have been met in Jesus Christ and our situation has changed. At the cross, the God who is just, meets you and I who have broken his laws. The just God has set things right and rectified the broken relationship between us and him. He has put us right with himself.
Twice in Romans 3 Paul says that God demonstrated and showed his righteousness by presenting Jesus, his Son, as a sacrifice of atonement. Reparations have been made. God did this (listen to this) “…so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.”[7]
Here’s an interesting thing about the word “just” in both the Hebrew and Greek language: in both the Old and New Testament, it is the same word as the word for “righteous.” Right through the Bible. Just and righteous. To be just is to be right. To be just is to set things to rights.
In I John we read that God is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins when we honestly and humbly confess it to him. We might expect to hear God forgives out of mercy and punishes out of justice. But it says that God is just and his forgiveness is part of that being just.
And it’s not some cheap forgiveness. God doesn’t look the other way. No, he put forth his Son giving us a forgiveness that is beyond measure.
Evil is serious. Deathly serious. But so is God’s forgiveness. God is just. The sentence for breaking his law is fulfilled. The price is paid, but it is paid in Jesus, his Son. At the cross the just God reveals the fullness of his hatred of human evil and at the same time shows real and complete forgiveness.[8]
In the cross God is saying that our actions and decisions as moral beings is enormously serious. The cross is not a condoning of the evil we do. But the heart of the cross and the Christian message is that God bears the intolerable burden of that evil himself in the person of his own dear Son.
Here is how A.W. Tozer put it:
“But when Christ, who is God, went onto the tree and died there in infinite agony, in a plethora of suffering, this great God suffered more than they suffer in hell. He suffered all that they could suffer in hell. He suffered with the agony of God, for everything that God does, He does with all that He is. When God suffered for you, my friend, God suffered to change your moral situation.”[9]
The person who throws himself on the mercy of God has had his or her moral situation changed. God doesn’t say, ‘Well, we’ll excuse this fellow. He’s made his decision, and we’ll forgive him.” God doesn’t say, “Well, she’s gone into the prayer room, so we’ll pardon her.” God doesn’t say, “She’s going to join the church; we can overlook her sin.”
No! When we seek God in faith God doesn’t see a sinful person but a new creation. When God looks at a person who still loves his or her sin and rejects Christ’s work on the cross, justice condemns that person to die. When God looks at a person who has accepted by faith what Jesus Christ has done on the cross, God’s justice sentences that person to live.[10]
We are judged as if we had never broken any of God’s commands.
We should fear God that he is just, perfectly just, and will condone not even the slightest wrong. But we should love God because he has put up the price for even our slightest moral wrong. Through Jesus he has handed down the sentence, and the verdict is: forgiven.
Let me say it this way: God is faithful and just. God keeps his promises. We have not been perfectly faithful to God. We ruptured that relationship. We are responsible. Now it is up to the just God to decide what he will do. It is the good news that God decided to uphold the relationship that we broke. He didn’t do this by just cheaply excusing our offenses. He did this through the Lord Jesus Christ. That is why he is righteous and demonstrated that he is just. As it says in 1 John, He is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins.
The paradox of the gospel of grace is that though God should condemn us, he doesn’t. Instead, he accepts us not as sinners or criminals, but as children who are right with him.[11]
The sermons over these beginning weeks of this year have not been just an intellectual exercise in thinking about God. It isn’t just God-talk. There is so much God-talk out there that I just shake my head sometimes. The purpose isn’t theological gaming. The purpose has been to reclaim some awe before God, to know him, and understand how we can live for him and with him.
Going back to the words in Jeremiah, let the person who boasts boast about understanding and knowing God, who he is and what he is like. We can know a lot about the stock market. We can know about history. We can know a lot about technology. We can know a lot about how things work in this universe. We can know a lot about the human personality.
But if you want to boast, boast about having the understanding to know God.
Kathleen Norris hit it on the head when she said, “This is a God who is not identified with the help of a dictionary but through a relationship.”[12]
I can preach sermons all year long on God, but after opening the Scriptures we have to turn our lives over to him. We have to live with him, walk with him, struggle with him, trust in him. That’s how we learn God.
Maybe you have been in church all your life. Maybe you have been an elder or deacon or pastor. Maybe you read really good books about God. Do you know him? And understand his heart?
It isn’t just knowing about God. It’s living in relationship with him. It’s putting our lives before that cross and saying by faith, “You are my Lord.”
And when that happens he lives in us. And when that happens his love, his goodness, his patience, his justice – his fairness - begins to shape our lives.
And our lives reflect our great God, who is immortal, invisible, all-wise, all-knowing, holy, majestic, awesome, triune, faithful, and gracious.
Amen.
[1] Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.107
[2] Psalm 145:17
[3] Amos 5:24
[4] Micah 6:8
[5] Matthew 23:23
[6] Rutledge, p.131
[7] Romans 3:26
[8] Cranfield, p.214
[9] The Attributes of God, p.70
[10] ibid
[11] William Barclay
[12] Amazing Grace