How Can We Satisfy God’s Justice? {Lord’s Day 5} BY William Boekestein for Core Christianity
(12) Q. According to God’s righteous judgment we deserve punishment both now and in eternity: how then can we escape this punishment and return to God’s favor?
A. God requires that his justice be satisfied. Therefore the claims of this justice must be paid in full, either by ourselves or by another.
(13) Q. Can we make this payment ourselves?
A. Certainly not. Actually, we increase our debt every day.
(14) Q. Can another creature—any at all—pay this debt for us?
A. No. To begin with, God will not punish any other creature for what a human is guilty of. Furthermore, no mere creature can bear the weight of God’s eternal wrath against sin and deliver others from it.
(15) Q. What kind of mediator and deliverer should we look for then?
A. One who is a true and righteous man, yet more powerful than all creatures, that is, one who is also true God.
The start of the second part of the catechism—on believers’ redemption in Christ—might not seem as invigorating as you would expect. It feels cautious as it explores the possibility of redemption.
But this is okay. In fact, the catechism gets to Jesus the way the Bible gets to Jesus. The promise of redemption comes early in Scripture. But the Old Testament is an extended study on human misery. The flood, the cycles of sin and judgment in the time of the judges and kings, and the exile of God’s people in Assyria and Babylon are just a few examples of how tenuous the hope of salvation appeared before Christ’s coming. Two loud messages of the Old Testament are these: People are very bad, and God is faithful in executing justice.
A circumspect approach to Christ challenges a nonchalant view of the gospel. “Jesus saves” is old news even for many who say they believe it. “Of course he does; why wouldn’t he?” But salvation didn’t come easily or quickly on God’s timeline. Prior to the gift of Jesus, Scripture made it abundantly clear: For people to be saved, God would have to powerfully intervene. He has! But never forget the total impossibility of salvation apart from Jesus.
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God’s Justice Is a Problem for Sinners.
We need Scripture to wreck our assumptions about how we can be righteous. Apart from Scripture people know they do bad things (Rom. 2:15) but cannot understand the fallout of their sin or conceive of an appropriate cure. We tend to minimize “the seriousness of God’s anger and the predicament of fallen creatures; God’s love is romanticized, and his justice is cheapened. The cross of Christ as God’s remedy scandalizes human reason.”[i] And so the common notion of salvation is little more than imagining away our badness or exaggerating the value of our goodness. But Scripture doesn’t allow that. It tells us that God is just.
