God Is Just

Readings:
II Chronicles 32
Romans 3:1-6

Focus:
Romans 3:6b: "If God were unjust, how could he judge the world?"

An objection that people sometimes make to Christianity is that God doesn't always seem to treat people the same. Why, they wonder, are some people living in abundance and blessing, and other barely scratching out their lives? Yet both love him equally. And why do good people suffer and die while bad people prosper? God doesn't seem fair, people say. So, those people say, maybe Christianity is wrong.

Yet we only know of the concept of justice because God has built it into us. God himself is the definition of justice.

Somehow, beyond our ability always to understand it, God is being fair. Perhaps beyond the time we are able to know about it, justice will be done for the people that we now see suffering. Perhaps the ins and outs of justice are too complex for us even to grasp them.

But one thing that we can know is that God is just. God is fair. We wouldn't even know that there was such a thing as justice if God hadn't made us such that we wanted it.

Mercy Coming from Justice

Readings:
I Chronicles 22
Acts 13:1-12

Focus:
Acts 13:11a: "Look now, the hand of the Lord strikes: you shall be blind...."

It occurred to me when I was reading this passage that Paul was not merely inflicting a punishment on the sorceror Elymas when he called down blindness upon him. Blindness was what afflicted Paul himself when God encountered him and turned him towards himself. If Paul's action towards Elymas was the first step in leading Elymas to a saving relationship with God, then it was not only justice, it was mercy.

Sometimes it's hard to see how a difficult circumstance can be God's action leading us towards something good for us. But when we look back later, we see that, indeed, it was! God works in amazing ways.