17:6). God turns the ways of the world on their head. He is the great equalizer, the force that establishes justice firmly at the end of the day. The justice of God can be fierce, but it also can bring healing, redemption, even salvation. The trouble for our minds is holding these two characteristics in tension. We like the beautiful Garden of Eden, but it stings a bit when God kicks Adam and Eve out of it. We like justice for the oppressed, but tremble a little when the master boots wedding guests “into the outer darkness where men will weep and gnash their teeth.” It might help for us to keep in mind that the execution of justice is actually an act of saving. When a murderer is sentenced for his crime, the judge “saves” the memory of the murdered person. When a judge orders a thief to pay restitution to his victims, those persons are made whole.
Justice—Harsh or Beautiful?
Justice is harsh because it seeks to undo the cruel evils of crime. Evil criminal acts are truly harsh, and justice responds by attempting as best as possible to reverse the evil effects of a crime. Sadly, in many if not most cases of earthly justice, the wrong is never truly undone. A judge cannot bring a murder victim back to life or take away the horrible experiences of an abuse victim. A judge is limited to handing down jail sentences, community service, and, on rare occasions, the death penalty (about which recent popes have expressed strong reservation28). Each act of sentencing, of punishment, is an attempt to restore the order of justice, to put things back the way they were before the crime was committed. This function of just punishment is beautiful and restorative. It at least tries to do what cannot completely be done: to bring salvation. However, God’s acts of justice surpass earthly justice.
This rescue plan had multiple stages that reveal different dimensions of God’s character, but, most importantly, the rescue plan shows that God the Savior and God the Judge are one and the same.
God in fact is perfectly just, the measuring stick against which all judges can be measured. His justice does not suffer from the incompleteness that earthly justice does. But his dispensing of justice is conditioned by our circumstances—that is, we get to receive his acts of justice from his eternity into our time-bound existence. We can be confident that in the end he will bring all things together in his perfect justice, but in the meantime many injustices persist. This situation has its upside, in that God provides time for the wicked (us) to repent and so obtain salvation. Justice is about salvation, about putting things back the way they were supposed to be, about caring for the fatherless and the widow, about turning unjust systems on their heads and saving “all the oppressed of the earth” (Ps 76:9). The time between now and the final judgment gives us an opportunity to turn to God and become a recipient of his mercy through repentance rather than a target for his judgment through obstinacy.
God’s Rescue Plan
But God knew that we were stubborn. That’s why he didn’t sit on his hands in heaven and wait for us to fail. As soon as we dropped the ball (or the apple), he initiated a rescue plan that would bring us back to himself and get the real order of justice firmly established for all time. This rescue plan had multiple stages that reveal different dimensions of God’s character, but most importantly, the rescue plan shows that God the Savior and God the Judge are one and the same.
After the darkness of the Fall, God could have justly condemned humanity for breaking his law. However, he instead decided to try to save us. Even as he responds to Adam and Eve’s disobedience, he includes a note of hope when he says to the serpent that he “will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will strike your head, and you will strike his heel” (Gn 3:15, NRSV). This might seem like a mere allusion to the fact that human feet can stomp on ground-bound serpent heads, but many Christian interpreters have seen something far deeper: a promise of a savior. Theologians refer to this passage as the protoevangelium, the first gospel. Yet even after this initial announcement and the punishments that accompanied it, humanity fell back into sin and rebellion against God. He then brings upon the world a fearsome punishment: the Great Flood. However, even in the midst of such a terrifying judgment, his rescue mission moves forward in the hands of his faithful shipwright, Noah. God demonstrates his justice toward humanity through punishment, and he demonstrates his saving love for humanity through Noah.
As we saw above, justice itself has a salvific component: rescuing those who have suffered under injustice. But God’s justice and his mercy are about bringing salvation. Through his interventions in human history, the Lord demonstrates that he is not merely a judge, but simultaneously a judge and a savior. He promises a savior to Adam and Eve; then he rescues Noah’s family from the Flood. Generations later, after memory of Noah’s covenant with God has faded, the Lord launches his special rescue mission by calling Abraham out of Ur into the Promised Land of Canaan. The Lord asks Abraham to move not because Ur is a bad place, but because God wants to start a new people, make a radical change in the story of humanity, and that all begins with Abraham trusting the Lord by moving from the familiar to the unfamiliar.
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