Justice. It’s a word that receives a fair bit of use in everyday language, often expressed with ardent enthusiasm, quick-witted sarcasm, or downhearted despair. It should be a word important to us as believers, as our God redundantly speaks of Himself as the “God who exercises justice in the earth.” And I feel like I’m beginning to see why.

Not even getting into the obvious abuses of justice in the earth, as there are many, and increasingly so everyday - but the most basic offer of God’s sense of justice, namely - the gospel of Jesus Christ. Consider that God’s justice is sure, it is true, it is perfect, and unfailing. Consider also then, that every man, regardless of race, creed, or religion, has some serious consequences to face from the God whose perfect justice requires perfect penalty for rebellion. And though our justice may cause us to simply conclude that “it is just for God to punish sin” - consider this - that God, in His justice, punished His perfect Son.

And “it pleased Him to bruise Him” (Isa. 53). What kind of justice is that? Jesus, the perfect man, never having an ounce of malignant rebellion residing in His heart, mind, actions, or even thoughts, received the exact punishment due every other man in all of history. Every other man, in fact, being every other man who has ever or will ever sin against God. The category of “sinners” (everyone ever save one), those who do wrong, are potentially able to be completely exempt from the punishment they are due, because of the punishment of the category (of one person) who willingly took the punishment that He did not even deserve.

Unbelievable. Irrational. Unthinkable! What a unspeakable atrocity of justice!! But wait - who is the author of justice, the One who is by nature just or the ones who by nature are unjust? Who defines what justice is and what it is not? Surely the one who possesses perfect justice is the only one able to prescribe that which qualifies ultimately as “justice”. And it is God’s justice that man should be free from the power and penalty of sin through their faith in Jesus’ substitunionary atonement on the cross.

Ironically, it is man’s erroneous understanding of ‘justice’ that keeps him from being just before God, the just one. In our delusional state, we take one of two routes. We either think that there is no ultimate standard of justice, save that which we practice everyday without calling it that (and yet hypocritically requiring others to submit to it); or, we blindly believe that somehow someway we will escape from “having justice done to us” by “doing the best we can” and hoping that there is either no true justice, or that it will ignore that which needs to be dealt with.

It is delusional, our sense of justice. And it is killing the earth. And it is killing the heart.

It is perfect, God’s sense of justice. And it will redeem and purify the earth. And it will save and liberate the heart.