The God of the Bible is a just God who rejoices over righteousness and rejects all sin and wickedness. Injustice is far from Him and He is not clouded by partiality. “The Rock, His work is perfect, for all His ways are justice. A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, just and upright is He” (Deut. 32:4). His justice is abundant (Job 37:23) and unfailing (Zeph. 3:5). Just as He is perfectly loving and holy, He is absolutely just.
For humanity, the justice of God is both comforting and terrifying. First, it’s comforting because unlike the false gods of mythology, the true God of the Bible is unwavering in His committment to righteousness (Job 3:8). He cannot be accused taking bribes and has never turned a blind eye to unrighteousness. “Surely God will never do wickedly, Nor will the Almighty pervert justice” (Job 34:12; cf. Deut. 10:17; 2 Chr. 19:7).
That comfort is quickly replaced with extreme fear when we understand that we ourselves deserve justice. Just imagine that you only commit one sin per day–that equals almost 24,000 sins in your lifetime (lifespan of 65) that demand action from God. We may believe that we are pretty good people in comparison with others, but the standard that God uses is not others’ lives. The Lord commands that we be blameless before Him (Deut. 18:13), but all of us have failed (Rom. 3:23). We love the justice of God until we realize that because of our sins we are due punishment. We desire God to punish the wicked until we realize that we are the wicked.
Some believe that God should just let bygones be bygones. But we would never accept that on a human level! When someone is convicted of a crime, his good works do not excuse the fact that he failed to live up to the standard that is set in place by our government, nor do we simply let the matter go. It’s the same with God. We have committed innumerable crimes against Him, and His justice demands that He punish us. He cannot turn a blind eye to our wickedness because that would cause Him to commit injustice Himself!
So what is the solution? The cross of Christ. At the cross, the Lord punished Christ for the sins of those who would believe in Him for salvation. “Much more then, having now been justified by His [Christ's] blood, we shall be saved from wrath through Him” (Rom. 5:9). For believers, your sins have been covered and you are blessed. As the psalmist wrote, “Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, Whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man to whom the LORD does not impute iniquity, And in whose spirit there is no deceit” (Ps. 32:1-2). For those who have not committed their lives to Christ’s work, I plead with you to do so. The Lord will not justify those whose sin has not been covered; He will not justify the wicked (Ex. 23:7). As we saw above, your good works will do nothing for you, and you will not be saved by them (Rom. 11:6).
“All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to Himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making His appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake He made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:18-21).
