Today is the third Sunday in our series on the attributes of God. The
first Sunday we talked about God as a God of Celebration. Last Sunday we talked
about God as a God of second chances, and how as a God of second chances, He
extends to us three of the most beautiful words we will ever hear: forgiveness,
mercy, and grace. Today we will talk about a third attribute of God: our God is
a God of justice.
So what do I mean when I say that we
serve a God of justice? First of all, I hope you don’t confuse the word
“justice” with our judicial system. Contrary to popular belief, our country’s
judicial system is rarely run on justice, and is more often run on
technicalities of the law, who can afford the best lawyer, and who is the best
liar. That’s not justice. It is not justice for McDonalds to pay a woman for
spilling hot coffee on herself. Right? That’s not justice. And people in
appeals courts get off on technicalities and “unfair” trials, when everyone
knows they are guilty.
There was a man in a similar
circumstance who was going to be released after an “unfair” trial. The judge
knew he did it, the jury knew he did it, everyone knew he did it, but a
technicality set him free. Before he left the court room, the judge stopped him
and said, “We all know you are guilty, and one day you are going to have to
stand before a greater judge who rules by justice, not the law.” A month later,
the man robbed a house, and in his escape from the house, climbed a wall in the
back yard and dropped over to the other side, which happened to be the inside
of the city jail. That’s justice.
Justice is what is deserved. It is
deserved punishment or reward. Now some of you may hear that and say, “Woah,
hold on Pastor Dan. If justice is what is deserved, then God cannot be just. If
God is just, why does my mother have alzheimers? If God is just, why was I
abused as a child? If God is just, why do teenagers and children and babies
die? If God is just why do bad things happen to good people and good things
happen to bad people? God cannot possibly be just!”
And I’d have to say, you’re right.
That doesn’t seem just. But we have to remember, one, humanity is fallen.
Humans, by definition, are not “good.” We’ve all messed up. Not one is perfect
or blameless. Two, we cannot possibly see the big picture. I recently heard the
analogy, that if you would take a string and stretch it from
Well, as you might have guessed,
there are three aspects to God as a God of justice. Every good sermon has three
points. The first aspect of God as a God of justice is that God is a God of
punitive justice. What does that mean? That means that God gives just
punishment where punishment is due.
Now we’ve talked about this some before,
but I really want you to hear this today. In the old testament, the basic rule
was “an eye for an eye.” Your neighbor kills your goat, you can take your
neighbors goat. This is actually a very just system. The punishment always fits
the crime. Leave it to a God of justice to set this system up for the Hebrews.
But that was justice between men and men. Justice between men and God was more
complicated. Since God demanded perfection, any sin was punishable by death.
Fortunately, God gave the people the option of sacrificing animals instead of
dying themselves to atone, or “make up for” their sins. So every sin has to be
paid for with a life.
And since God is the same yesterday,
today, and forever, we know that rule has not changed. Paul tells us that the
wages of sin is death. However, God as a God of punitive justice saw a just way
of punishment that would work best for humanity, and that was through the
sacrifice of his son Jesus. A perfect and eternal man means a perfect and
eternal sacrifice and a perfect and eternal just punishment for the sins of
humanity. So just because God doesn’t strike us with lightning when we sin
doesn’t mean God is unjust, it just means he has found a different way to
reconcile, to make things right, to have just punishment.
And truly, we won’t realize just how
just this punishment is until the day we stand before God, and we see the glory
of Jesus, and we recognize that all of our sins, every time we messed up, that
glorious, wonderful man died for us. He died in our place. Thank God for
forgiveness, mercy, and grace!
The second aspect of God as a God of
justice is that God is the God of getting what you deserve. Stay with me on
this one. God is a God of getting what you deserve. Now some of you are saying,
“Time out! I NEVER get what I deserve! I work hard, I come to church, I live a
good life, and what do I have to show for it? Nuthin’.”
Well, let me ask you this question:
what do you deserve? What do you have a right to? Everything we have is a gift,
folks. And not only is everything a gift, but it is all a gift we don’t
deserve, because we have fallen short. We’ve missed the mark. We deserve death.
We deserve punishment. We deserve to be separated from God.
So if that’s the case, and God is a
God of justice and a God of getting what we deserve, then why aren’t we dead?
Because – for all you euchre players out there – Grace trumps justice. God’s grace is even more powerful than God’s
justice. God will at times give us more than we deserve, but God will never
give us less than we deserve.
Folks, everything is truly a gift,
we’re just spoiled to the point where we expect to have everything. We have
extremely high expectations of what we think we deserve. “I NEED a two-story, 4
bedroom, 2 bathroom house. I’ve got 2 kids now. It’s not fair that Jim and
Susie were able to build one and I’m not. They don’t go to church. They aren’t
very nice. How come they are blessed but I’m not? I deserve a blessing!”
OK, first off, no one deserves a
blessing. Blessings by definition are undeserved. Second, I want you to go to
the Darfur region of
And do you want to know what’s
really crazy? Those people feel blessed. Those people feel like God is watching
over them. They aren’t stressed out by financial issues, they aren’t jealous of
what their neighbor has. The praise God for their families and for the
opportunities of a new day. Still think you are getting snubbed by God? Every
persons sitting in this room, without exception, has been blessed by God with
infinitely more than we deserve.
And you know, that’s why we tithe.
We tithe to say, “God, you’ve given me more than I deserve. In gratitude, I want
to return some of it to you, so that you can use it to bless more people the
way you have blessed me.” You don’t tithe based on how good of a sermon I give
or how much you like the church or what the church is doing. If tithing were
based on the ability of the pastor, we’d be applying for government aid. No,
tithing is based on our recognition of the blessings God has given us.
Thirdly, God as a God of justice is
a God of social justice. Social justice has become kind of like a dirty word
for a lot of conservative Christians, for whatever reason. I think that’s
crazy. Social justice is exactly what we are called to as Christians. In the
scripture that was read for us, Jesus tells us that one of the reasons he came
was for social justice. He says in Luke 4:18,19: “The Spirit of the Lord is
upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He sent me
to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let
the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Who is the
gospel being brought to? The poor, the captives, the blind, and the oppressed.
In the Old Testament, God instructs his people to specifically care for three
main groups of people: the alien, the orphan, and the widow. In Matthew 25,
Jesus says that when we serve the hungry, the thirsty, the strangers, the
naked, the sick, and the imprisoned, it is as if we are serving him.
There is no way around it. Our God
is a God of social justice. So when we see people who sick and we say, “God is
unjust,” God says, “No, the justice comes when you go to visit them.” When we
see people who are hungry and say, “If God is just, then world hunger should
end.” And God says, “Then as my people, you should give them something to eat.”
When we see a young child whose parents have died and we say, “God is not just,
or else this child would have parents.” And God says, “I am just. I sent you to
this child to be his parent.”
I truly believe that God is sick and
tired of Christians looking at the garbage and the apparent injustices in the
world and just shaking their heads saying, “Tsk, tsk, things should not be this
way.” We are called to more than theology. We are called to more than
fellowship. We are called to more than
just praying for the oppressed. We are called to follow a God of justice who
wants to use his people to administer social justice. In other words, God wants
us to get our hands dirty.
The Habitat for Humanity project was
a great example of Christians working together for a social justice cause. If
we truly believe that people deserve adequate housing, then as people of God
let’s provide it. Did you see what happened? When God’s people got together and
decided this should be done, it took 3 weeks to build a house. For us, it took
one morning. We simply cannot ignore the fact that God has called us to
administer social justice to the people of this world. We need to dedicate
ourselves to making sure that the “least of these” receive the blessings of
God. That is what it means to serve a God of justice.
And I have to tell you, I am
thankful that I serve a God of justice, who is also a God of Second chances.
The two really go hand in hand. And I am thankful that our God has found a way
to bridge the gap that separates us through his Son Jesus Christ, who, on the
night before his sacrificial death, sat in the upper room with his disciples…
Van Buren United
Pastor Dan Metzger