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Discover God: Justice Psalm 2: 1 – 23 Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 09 Mar, 2008 |
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HOW CAN we reconcile God’s love and his justice? A loving God is great! But where is God when injustice occurs? We all demand justice — as long as God’s justice doesn’t land on me! |
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You’ve seen that God created us for fellowship with himself. You’ve noted the passion of his approach to us. You know he wants to be a Father to us, though we constantly reject him. You have seen that rebellion which separated the representative humans, the man and the woman, from God’s fellowship and from the blessing he had planned for us all. You’ve seen that last, sad scene: the two humans shut out of the garden, separated from all hope of eternal life. But did God abandon them? It was God who made them clothes from animal skins. It was God who made sure they were cared for even when they were far from him, even when they did not acknowledge his gift to them. When I was about three, I ran away from home. I can’t remember why. I suppose I was unhappy about something. Being a responsible youth, I told my mother that I was running away, because you should always tell someone where you are going. So I left. I reached the top of the second hill, not even half a kilometre from home. Suddenly, I realised that I didn’t know where I would go after that. I was heading the wrong way to reach my grandparents, and I didn’t know how to get to my aunt’s place. So I stopped. Its a scary to be alone in unfamiliar territory! I remember looking around in front of me and to both sides. I started to feel panicked. Then I looked behind me. There was Mum, not close, but close enough. She asked me, did I want to go home, or did I want to go further? I decided to go home. For years afterwards, I dreamt about that piece of road, that point I had come to when I could go no further. When we choose to go our own way, God lets us do it. When we go our own way, we can only see in front and to both sides. But, somewhere behind us, God is there, watching and waiting for each of us to turn around and see he is ready, asking us, “Will you go further, or do you want to come home, now?” However, the Bible gives us a much broader picture of God’s responses than just that he waits for us to turn. Today, I want us to look at three aspects of God’s response to human sin. He scorns, he warns and he judges. God scorns our hubris, our sense that we can stand up to him. He warns that our rebellion is taking us away from safety. And he judges those who don’t listen.
GOD’S SCORN In our passage from Psalm 2, we read, PSA 2:1 Why do the nations conspire 3 “Let us break their chains,” they say, 4 The One enthroned in heaven laughs; God doesn’t dither. When we rebel, God sees that rebellion and laughs. It doesn’t matter whether we are marching around with our wooden swords and our cardboard helmets, or whether we are just lazing around in the enemy’s villages, God sees that rebellion, and his laugh is not an indulgent laugh. It is a scornful laugh. It’s a laugh that says, “How stupid can you be? I’m in charge here! I am the one who has installed my righteous King. You can’t stand against me or against him.” Many Kings of the Israelites were highly unrighteous, they were part of the problem, not part of the solution. Yet God’s word points to a coming perfect King. When this Psalm was written, nearly 1000 years before Christ, people barely understood the coming Messiah, the coming anointed King who would rule in God’s power and authority. But this Psalm points to the Son, the Christ. He shall reign forever and ever. Somewhere behind the everyday run of good and bad kings, there was the coming ideal king, the one so in tune with God himself that the rule of the Messiah was the same as the rule of the God, and the rule of God was the same as the rule of the Messiah. God’s plans will not be thwarted. Those who think they can be are laughably stupid. If God is as powerful as we all know he must be, how could it be possible to defeat his plans? Yet we all act as though we think we can. Is it any wonder that God scorns our puny efforts to resist him? But maybe you are still thinking that you are not a rebel against God. Maybe you think, ”I’m a pretty good person, really. How could God call me a sinner?” The truth is that sin is more to do with lack of loyalty to God than it is to do with how bad a person you might be. We all, if we are honest, know we are not as good as we would like to be. But the issue for God is that we refuse to acknowledge his rule, refuse to submit to his Lordship, and that is the basic sin. I might be the most moral person in history, but if I am moral in independence from God, I have nothing. Furthermore, when I am immoral, it only confirms that my behaviour is not fully under the rule of God. And, if I am accepted by God, it is not ultimately because of what a good life I lead, but it can only be because I acknowledge my rebellion, and I submit to God through faith in Christ. Rebellion is ridiculous, and finally futile, and God laughs at our lilliputian defiance.
GOD WARNS I used to work with a chap who hated God. Perhaps he didn’t want God to interfere with his lifestyle. He went through a string of girlfriends in the couple of years I knew him. They'd move in with him and, when he grew tired, he'd throw them out and find a new one. There is something evil about that lifestyle, and the people I worked with recognised it. He would blaspheme and dare God to strike him dead. But God never did. If he had read Romans, he’d have known that God gave them over to their lusts. God rarely sends bolts from heaven against our sin. He lets us face the consequences instead. When he does act, it’s generally against nations rather than against individuals. That’s one reason why we, as a nation, must repent of what we have done to Aborigines, what we have done to people claiming refugee status, what we did to the Timorese over gas reserves in the Timor Gap. God seeks repentance; he seeks softened hearts. PS 95:8Today, if you hear his voice, ...as the Psalmist wrote. Throughout the history of Israel, the prophets continually spoke to the people: MIC 6:7 Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams, MIC 6:8 He has showed you, O man, what is good. Or, as Amos puts it, AM 5:22 Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings, AM 5:23 Away with the noise of your songs! AM 5:24 But let justice roll on like a river, God is never pleased with mere religious rituals. At best, a ritual helps me keep focused on God. But if it doesn’t achieve that aim, what use is it? Israel thought that sacrifices or religious performances would please God and turn away his anger. That’s mere magical thinking. Four year olds know better. God says, “I can’t stand these things! Get them out of my sight, and do right instead!” Repeatedly, the prophets speak out about the wickedness among the surrounding neighbour countries, and then speak out against the wickedness of Israel itself. The book of Jonah is about how God sent Jonah as a missionary to Nineveh in Iraq, with a message of God’s judgment on their sin. Jonah was totally rebellious, totally unwilling to do what God sent him to do. The entire book is about God’s plans for Israel. He wanted them to be a prophetic people. He wanted them to live for himself. He wanted them to go to the nations around about, saying, “God loves you. God wants you to repent and follow him.” And they always ran away from the task. And the nations perished in their sins. God scorns rebellion, but, over and over, he warns that judgment will come if we don’t turn around and come back to him.
GOD JUDGES In the end, God has to judge. GEN 18:20 Then the LORD said, “The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous 21 that I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me. If not, I will know.” 22 The men turned away and went toward Sodom, but Abraham remained standing before the LORD. 23 Then Abraham approached him and said: “Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? 24 What if there are fifty righteous people in the city? Will you really sweep it away and not spare the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people in it? 25 Far be it from you to do such a thing—to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?” 26 The LORD said, “If I find fifty righteous people in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake.” Look at this. God has been keeping his distance in the hope that Sodom and Gomorrah would repent. Do you think that the reason God judged these cities was their homosexuality? That’s not what Ezekiel says. He says that they were arrogant, overfed, and unconcerned. They didn’t help the poor and needy. Detestable practices come a long way down Ezekiel’s list of things God judged them for. And it’s not even certain that he was talking about homosexuality then. God is primarily concerned about how we treat the weak and vulnerable. That’s the bottom line. Eventually God has to act. You can’t let a Hitler, a Pol Pot, an Idi Amin go on forever. Eventually God will judge even Usama bin Laden and George W Bush. The longer they go on, the more people suffer. If they will not stop voluntarily, God will stop them. Shall not the judge of all the earth do right? There are times when it is right to stop people — even you, even me. If we don’t treat people rightly, if we let radical self–interest control us instead of the love and compassion of God, then he must judge you and me, too. Some people say, “I am no fat capitalist boss, forcing migrants into sweatshop labour. I am no political leader, persecuting the helpless, the hapless and the homeless.” Do you remember that saying, “If you are not part of the solution, then you are part of the problem.”? It’s true. Hitler was hard to stop, but would he have been able to do everything he did, if the German people hadn’t let him? Hitler was evil, but everyone who went along with him had to bear some responsibility. That’s why we have to be responsible in our voting, that’s why we have to act when our leaders take us down wrong paths. What we condone we are responsible for before God. The options are stark. A just God must punish. The only other choice is to take advantage of the grace and mercy God grants through Jesus Christ, if we repent and trust. Like the old hymn says, Foul, I to thy fountain fly; A God who left sin unpunished would be a God who doesn’t care. And our God cares with a passion beyond human understanding. To recapitulate then, God scorns our puny efforts at rebellion. All he can do is laugh that we think we can outsmart the one who made us all. Still, God is never cruel or arbitrary. He scorns our childish rebellion, but he still warns. He wants us to get it right. He wants us to change. He warns us to give up our rebellion, to repent, to believe, to return to him in faith. But, in all fairness, God finally must judge — whether his judgment is to let us wear the consequences, or comes in some other way. But never forget the other side. Yes, God must judge; but Jesus came to bear the judgment that your sin and mine deserves. We should die for our sin, Jesus, the holy Lamb of God, did die for our sins. I repent. I believe, I accept that that death is for me. I trust that Jesus paid my penalty in full. I turn back to face God with my eyes lifted up. I am no longer afraid, beause I am set free to become part of the very househoild of God. If you want to find that same salvation, the steps are very simple.
Do that, and you’ll have salvation, and eternal life in the company of our Lord and of his heavenly Father. My prayer is that we will all come to know this to be true by experiencing it. AMEN |
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© Peter R. Green 2007. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.) |
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