The Immutable God: Justice is God having his own
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There’s a municipal court judge in Painesville, Ohio that does justice a little differently.
Judge Michael Cicconetti offers guilty parties in his courtroom the choice between traditional, legally prescribed sentences (jail time and fines) and his own more creative punishments. One woman was sentenced to picking up trash for animal cruelty. Another man had to ride a bike in a charity parade with a humbling sign as punishment for stealing a bike. The judge’s method and sense of justice been the subject of several national news stories.
As unique as Cicconetti’s approach is, I wondered how he would approach more serious crimes. The thief can return what they stole to “make things right.” The liar can tell the truth. But what can the murderer do? If he dies too, you haven’t set things right. The victim is still dead and you end up with two dead people instead of just one.
I’ve been writing about how, in both the Old and New Testaments, God is the same eternal, triune creator whose character is perfectly holy, righteous, just, merciful, gracious and above all loving. In both testaments, he acts to judge, bless and redeem all of creation. This week, we’ll explore how God is consistently just throughout the whole Bible.
We tend to think of justice as punishing the wrongdoer. “Getting what we deserve,” or, “Equal consequence for action,” as some friends of mine put it. Webster says it is, “the maintenance or administration of what is just especially by the impartial adjustment of conflicting claims or the assignment of merited rewards or punishments.” It seems there are some tensions in this concept of justice that our normal mode of thinking about it doesn’t balance.
Plato, who was probably smarter than me and my three friends combined, defined justice as “having and doing what is one’s own.” In The Republic, he argued that a just society is one which quickly restores people to the position and possessions that they ought to occupy in that society to promote harmonious cooperation between its members. In his system, a wise philosopher-king would unilaterally decide what that was for everyone.
And the Bible does not flatly contradict the authority of one such king. There seems to be a biblical tension between God’s objective justice and human attempts at justice. On one hand, God seems to charge humans with executing justice in both the Old and New Testaments. When the pagan Babylonians sacked Jerusalem, destroyed the temple and took the Israelites for slaves, God commanded, “Bring your necks under the yoke of the king of Babylon, and serve him and his people, and live!” (Jeremiah 27:12). In the New Testament, Paul similarly told Christians in Rome, whose government like to use believers as fuel for street lamps, “Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God” (Romans 31:1).
On the other hand, the Bible is clear that God has a higher standard of justice and that everyone is accountable to it. Speaking through the same prophet by whom he commanded obedience to Babylon, God told the people of Israel, “Behold, I will punish the king of Babylon and his land” (Jeremiah 50:18) for failing God’s standard of justice. The New Testament affirms this sense of accountability. Hebrews 13:17 describes rulers as “those who must give account.”
The second tension is that between law and relationship. God’s law demands punishment while God’s relationship to us as creator calls for forgiveness. The books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy spell out God’s law in painful detail, even determining the handling of clothes with mildew in Leviticus 13. Judges through Nehemiah chronicle in painful detail how Israel repeatedly broke those laws and rebelled against God. The New Testament concurs when it declares “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23) and “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). The whole Bible consistently proclaims the legal reality of our sin.
That’s why it was so confusing to the religious leaders of his day when Jesus told them, “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice’” (Matthew 9:13). He had been eating with “sinners,” and the religious leaders were snickering about it. Jesus seemed to want to forgive and enjoy a meal with them rather than to punish them. But this wasn’t a New Testament idea. Jesus was quoting Hosea 6:6 from the Old Testament. In the original context of the verse, God is saying that the main problem is not the sins the people of Israel committed but their rejection of the relationship he wanted to have with them. If they would turn to him and accept the relationship, he would forgive them.
But is forgiveness justice? In the Platonic sense — which represents one side of this tension — yes. If all parties are willing to stop their harmful behavior and return to their own right places and relate to each other the right way going forward, justice would be served. But in the common sense — which represents the other side of the tension — no. Punishment must be exacted.
This is why Jesus accepted the punishment we deserve. The brilliance of Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross is that he was able to accept the punishment according to the law aspect of justice without forfeiting the relational aspect of justice since his death was not permanent. He had more life to give than the punishment required, and God said it would have to be this way in both Testaments of the Bible. Isaiah 53 predicts how our only hope is for a divine, suffering servant to bear our punishment for us. In Jeremiah 33, God promised to do something drastic to restore the relationship with his people so that, “I will be their God, and they shall be My people” (Jeremiah 31:33).
In defining justice, the common definition seems to focus on law at the expense of relationship. Plato failed because he did not identify the right philosopher-king. If I might offer a definition here, justice is God having and doing what is his own.
We see consistently through the Old and New Testaments that the punishment for sin that is “God’s own” is satisfied and having the relationship he wants with his creation will one day also be satisfied. Both the Old and New Testaments describe a day when creation is restored and people serve the Lord gladly. (See Isaiah 65, Ezekiel 47 and Revelation 21-22) God will have and do what is his, and justice will be served.