Justice or Mercy - Kyle Yule

Well, good morning. So today I'd like to, uh, look at the idea of justice, um, and it is a very broad topic. And I did not do the vast majority of justice. I just had a couple ideas and thoughts that popped into my mind. Um, now, if you would ask me what justice was, or if you asked me for a definition a couple years ago, I would have probably given a definition much like this: justice is when punishment matches the crime that was done. Is it a—it is a sense that wrong is punished and good is rewarded.

I then would have pointed to a couple times in Scripture that this would have been the case, or at least I thought it would have. This idea that when people commit a sin or evil, that God sends judgment and vengeance upon them to punish them. And after all, that would be the just thing to do.

But then, as I started to think about this a little more, there were many times throughout Scripture that I found that God maybe doesn't punish, or maybe the punishment doesn't necessarily match the thing that was done. And to show this, I'd like to start, well, at the first thing that was done in the Garden of Eden and the fall of man.

In Genesis 3, most of you know that man and woman—women were deceived, and they did not obey God, even though they were given clear instructions not to eat of the fruit of this tree.

And in a sense, they rejected His authority, God's authority, and they chose to follow the serpent rather than what God had told them. And so what happened? Well, God could have started over again. I don't think it—I think it would have been pretty simple. It was just two humans to just hit a reset button and try again.

But it's interesting that He doesn't.

Yes, there is some punishment that God brings out. The woman will have great pain in childbirth, and man, He curses the ground in His labors, and he'll have to work by the sweat of his brow to eat and provide bread.

And yes, God does remove them from the Garden of Eden.

However, as I thought about this, I thought, when God removed them from the Garden of Eden, it may not have been such a bad thing.

He didn't want them to eat from the tree of life and to live forever. And as I thought, I thought that was a pretty great gift, that mankind does not have to battle sinful desires for all of eternity.

That there is an end, and now there is a hope. I think God also provides them with new clothes. He sees that the clothes that they have are these fig leaves sewn together, and that, well, that's not going to do very well. So He gives them new clothes, better clothes.

And finally, God allows them to still take part in His expanding His creation by childbirth, giving them children.

When I sit here and think about it, I don't know about you, but if I look at the—the what they have just done in a cosmic sense, I realize that, well, God was pretty merciful to them to look at what has now become of—of their fall and brought into all of earth.

And then I think of another one, just a chapter next in Genesis 4 with Cain and Abel. And we can see this theme provided again. Cain sins. I'll actually read it. So in Genesis chapter 4, if you would like to open there, or

I'll start in verse 6.

I'll start in verse 5. But he did not respect Cain and his sacrifices. So Cain was extremely sorrowful, and his countenance fell. So the Lord said to Cain, "Why are you extremely sorrowful? And why has your countenance fallen?

Did you not sin, even though you brought it rightly, but did not divide it rightly? Be still. His recourse shall be to you, and you shall rule over him." Now Cain talked with Abel, his brother, and it came to pass when they were in the field that Cain rose up again against Abel and his brother, Abel, his brother, and killed him. Then God said to Cain, "Where is your—where is Abel, your brother?" He replied, "I do not know. I am—am I my brother's keeper?" Thus God said, "What have you done? The voice of your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground." And I'll stop there.

And we see that Cain sins. He sins in his—his sacrifice that he brings to God. And yet, God is merciful. He—he tries to bring Cain to repentance, and he shows them what he's done wrong and explains to him, and he even tells Cain that he still is going to rule over his brother, that Abel is still going to be under him. And Cain does not listen, and he goes and he kills his brother.

And God still shows mercy to him. If we keep reading, we see that, yes, God does curse the ground that Cain is to work, and He pushes him even farther away. But God spares his life. And even more, He puts a mark on Cain so that no one will take it, so that when people see Cain, they know that, "I am not to kill this man." And if I do, God is going to punish them.

And I can go through—we can go through all of many accounts in Scripture where this is the case, but I would just like to do a couple more and then to move on. And so I figured, well, let's look at the first time in Scripture that we see where God gets angry.

Surely that will be an instance where justice will take place.

And maybe it's my lack of knowledge, but I actually didn't know where the first time was that God actually gets angry in Scripture, where Scripture specifically states. And I wanted to know if any of you know. Does anybody know where it says that God gets angry for the first time?

It's Exodus chapter 4, which was amazing that it took place for so long afterwards. And this is the first time that God gets angry.

And it's—if you recall, this is when Moses appears. He sees the burning bush, and God tells him that He's going to be the spokesperson to Pharaoh that will free his people from slavery. And Moses has a dialogue with God and rejects him. And what he says—and so I'm going to go through each of these times, and it starts in chapter 3, where Moses has this dialogue with God.

So Exodus 3:11 says, "But Moses said to God, 'Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and that I should bring the children of Israel out of Egypt?'" The next instance is Exodus 3:13. "And Moses said to God, 'Indeed, when I come to the children of Israel and say to them, 'The God of your fathers has sent me to you,' and they will say to me, 'What is his name?'

What shall I say to them?'" In Exodus 4:1, Moses answered and said, "But suppose they will not believe me or listen to my voice. Suppose they say, 'The Lord has not appeared to you.'" Another time in Exodus 4:10, "Then Moses said to the Lord, 'O my Lord, I am not eloquent. Neither before nor since you have spoken to your servant, but I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.'" Finally, Moses tells God in Exodus 4:13, "O my Lord, please send by the hand of whomever else you may send."

And then God gets angry. Five times Moses argues, debates, has excuses of why he shouldn't be the one that God comes to him and says, "I want you." Five times Moses rejected God's command to go or brought up all these excuses.

And after all these things, every time Moses had an excuse, God graciously worked with him. God tells Moses that He will be with him in all that he is going to do the first time. The second excuse, He tells him who He is and who to tell the people is sending him.

Then God gives Moses the ability to perform miracles to assure the people will believe him.

Then God appeals to Moses' complaint about lacking good speech by telling him that He will open his mouth and He will give him words to speak.

Then Moses finally answers with his last one. He says God gets angry. And right about now, if I've never heard about this story or read it before, I would have been shocked or stunned at the response that God had.

A man just refused God five times, and this is what he says. "To the anger of the Lord was kindled against Moses." And he said, "Is not Aaron, the Levite, your brother? I know that he can speak well. And look, he is also coming out to meet you. When he sees you, he will be glad in his heart. Now you shall speak to him and put the words in his mouth, and I will be with your mouth and with his mouth, and I will teach you what you shall do. So he shall be your spokesperson to the people, and he himself shall be as a mouth for you.

And you shall be to him as God. And you shall take this rod in your hand with which you shall do the signs."

That's amazing. God almost doesn't even react in anger. I can't tell you where it is.

He works with Moses to bring about his plan for his people. He insisted on leaving—yeah, he insisted on leaving Moses or punishing him. Actually, he works with him by using his brother Aaron to speak.

We see this again when Moses is on top of Mount Sinai, receiving the commands that the Lord is giving to him. And what happens? The Israelites down at the bottom see that Moses is gone for quite a long time and say, "Well, we need a God." So they gather up all the gold, and they make a calf, and they worship it. And I want you to put yourself in the perspective that God has. God leads them out of Egypt, brings them out of oppression and slavery.

He feeds them when they're hungry in the middle of the desert by providing food from the ground. And when they complain and mumble about, "Ah, we're tired of this bread. We just want some meat," He gives them meat in abundance.

He keeps their clothes and their shoes from wearing out, and He leads them. And then Moses goes up to the mountain to receive the laws and how to orchestrate this nation that he's going to implant.

And these people forget all about God, all about the person that led them away out of the slavery. They make an idol of gold.

And God gets angry again. He gets so angry he's ready to just start over. He says, "Okay. That's it. Moses, you're going to be my person that I'm going to make a nation out of." And Moses intercedes for them, and God has mercy.

All over we see this. Yes, even in the flood account, where God does use punishment, He wipes out the whole earth. He destroys humanity and all of creation because of their wickedness. But when you think about it, man was destroying themselves. They became so wicked and evil that it was just a bunch of this stuff going on, and God just expedied it, made it faster.

He said, "Okay. You want destruction and wickedness? I'm going to start over." So He finds one man, one family to start His new creation again.

And afterwards, God promises never to destroy humanity like this again. Even though He knows they are going to wander and fall and stray away from Him, what does He do? He decides to work with them. From this point on, we see God working with His people to bring about His will on earth, to be His people, and to show the world who He really is and His character.

And so right about now, I was thinking, "So where's the justice?"

Well, if we have a mindset of justice as a form of punishment for evils that are done, then obviously we come to this maybe conclusion where, "Is God really just? He doesn't punish the wickedness that's done all the time or maybe not with the right amount with our wisdom."

As I thought about it, I said, "This sounds kind of familiar because this is what Job does and how his friends address the issue."

In Job's mind, God is not just because, well, Job has an idea that God punishes evil and rewards good. And Job did nothing wrong. He was righteous. He knew that. He didn't deserve this punishment. So therefore, well, the only thing left is God is unjust.

And on the other hand, when Job's friends show up, they say, "Well, we know that God is just and that He rewards good and punishes evil. And so therefore, Job, you must be an unrighteous man."

And then God shows up, and He has this beautiful dialogue about how the universe and creation and the way that He rules and how it's much different than the way man rules and that it's beautiful and it's just and He knows what He's doing.

And then in the end, Job is restored. He receives everything that was lost back in abundance. In a sense, justice is restored. Justice?

How is this justice? Well, Job lost everything. And in the end, everything was restored. Job got back what was taken. In the end, Job had received justice.

This is a sense of justice that was new to me. It was a way of justice that seemed to match the teachings of love and forgiveness and mercy that Jesus teaches us to have.

It was the idea of God working in a way to restore what was wronged rather than punishing the offender.

Now, there are instances of Scripture where we see God does work in a way that He punishes the wrongdoer, not discrediting that. But most of the time, it is after they reject the idea of restoration or repentance, and it is usually a very slow process.

We can look at the teachings of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount and see that this type of justice that God is striving for, one that has a goal of restoring what God intended for humanity, God gives us the opportunity to restore the world, to preserve it. We, as followers of Christ, bring justice by restoring it to the way that God had intended it to be in the garden at the dawn of creation.

And in my research, I had found these two words to kind of use as explanations that people often used when they started to talk about justice. And it's rectifying justice and primary justice.

What does it mean? Well, rectifying justice has this sense of punishment and reward in a way that is equal and fair to the crime or activity that was done. This is usually what, well, prior, this is what I would have thought of when you told me, "Justice is done."

The sense that if I stole something, I'm punished for stealing.

When I was little, my parents or my dad, I had walked into a grocery store and the little carts with the fire trucks on them and the carts in the back, and I was sitting in the little cart. And my dad walked through the aisles of the grocery store and pushing me. And well, we got to the cash register, and my dad was unloading the groceries and paying for everything. And I looked over, and there was a stick of hubba bubba bubble gum. And I thought, "I really want that." So I took it, put it in my pocket. We got out to the car, my dad not knowing, and I opened it up and I offered my dad one. "Would you like a piece of gum?"

He said, "Where did you get that?" I said, "Well, from the store." And it just so happened, I don't know how this worked out, but there was a policeman standing in the grocery store. And so my dad made me walk back up to the policeman, give him the piece of gum, and say, "I'm sorry I stole this." And from that day, I did not steal a piece of gum ever again.

But that would be rectifying justice. There's a crime done and a punishment that matches it. Yes, it did work. There's also this sense of primary justice. And this second form of justice has a notion that if everybody acted in a way like this, there would be no need for rectifying justice.

There would be no need for punishment. There would be no need for anything because everybody is so just to each other. They are operating in a right way of being.

I thought, "Wow, what a world to live in where people treated each other with love and mercy, compassion, grace." Then I thought, "Wait, that sounds a lot like what Jesus calls us to live by." Except we don't only live this way in relation to brothers and sisters, but it's with the whole world.

And I'm still trying to process this. How is this justice, though? How is it that by us seemingly getting taken advantage of or maybe walked on, how is that justice?

Well, allow me to offer a thought. We know that the devil has authority here on earth, some authority, and that the world is not perfect. In fact, there is sin all around. Not that we are necessarily born sinful, but we are born into a world that has sin.

And when left to our own choices, we fall into that. We allow it to become our master. However, the devil, by whatever craftiness he's using, is winning people over by deceit and lies. So how do we restore justice?

By bringing back what the devil has taken.

Where there is lying, we offer truth. Where there is violence, we bring peace. Hatred, we forgive. We are restoring the things God had planned for humans to be: His chosen race, a people united under the king, bringing justice to a world that seems injust.

A restored humanity that restores humanity.

This justice is the justice that is shown in the parable of the prodigal son in Luke 11:15-32. And what the father says to the son who is sad about his brother returning in verse 32 is this beautiful picture of this.

It says, "It was right," this is the father speaking, "that we should make merry and be glad, for your brother was dead and is alive again and was lost and is found." It's interesting because when we read this account of the prodigal son, we see both sides of this justice coin.

The brother who is mad about his brother's return and they're throwing a party for him, he wanted a rectifying justice. He wanted his brother to be punished because he did a wrong. He said, "Dad, I consider you dead. I want your inheritance and I'm going."

So he takes his money and he leaves, and then he comes back. Comes and his father just forgives him. He loves him. The brother says, "That's not right. Why is it that I've been here this whole time and I've done wrong and I've been with you and you don't throw a party for me and my friends?" And the father responds in a way that shows this love, amazing forgiveness, and that justice is restored.

Your brother came back and he repented.

It's a justice that restores the relationship back to the original despite the circumstances that happened.

Interestingly, we see the same thing in the book of Jonah. When Nineveh repents of the evil and wickedness they had done, Jonah really wanted God to destroy Nineveh. And he was kind of upset when God didn't.

However, God gives them the opportunity to repent. And in this righteousness, humanity is restored.

In the eyes of God, justice had taken place. Nineveh's repentance was that.

Yet Jonah was mad at God because he wanted them to be punished. He desperately wanted vengeance. Yet God gave them mercy and forgiveness.

It's interesting, he says in Jonah that God says, "He saw their works and that they turned from their evil ways, and God had a change of heart about the evil which he said he would do to them, and he did not do it."

It's interesting because why would he? Why would he want to restore justice when justice has already been restored?

And it's interesting because we come to this passage in Romans 12:19-20, and I've heard Christians who hold to a non-resistant stance often refer to this passage. And it says, "Beloved, do not avenge yourselves, but rather give place to wrath, for it is written, 'Vengeance is mine. I will repay,' says the Lord.

Therefore, if your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he is thirsty, give him a drink. For in so doing, you will heap coals of fire on his head. Do not be overcome by evil. Overcome evil with good." And then this mindset becomes, "Ah, I'm not allowed to avenge myself, but God will. I'm going to give way for wrath. Just wait until they meet God." So then I pour them a cup of water and I give them water. You just wait.

However, I don't think that's the mindset that Paul had when he was writing this.

Maybe I am wrong. But I like what John Chrysostom says about this verse, and it's written in Old English, so I'm going to explain afterwards. "Unto what wrath? To the wrath of God? Now, since what the injured man desires most to see is himself having the pleasure of revenge, this very thing he gives him in full measure, that if thou dost not avenge thyself," he means, "God will be thy avenger.

Leave it then to him to follow up thy wrongs, for this is the force of give place unto wrath." Then to give further comfort, he brings the quotation forward also. And after winning him more thoroughly to himself in this way, he demands more Christian heroism of him.

And I think this is what John Chrysostom is saying. When we are injured, we really want revenge. But in fact, Paul gives us assurance that if we do not take vengeance into our own hands, God will take care of it for us.

And so we should lose the mindset of revenge.

And now that we take comfort in knowing God is that judge, he will repay whatever is right. We are to show them mercy and kindness. Paul demands it of us.

I believe what Paul is saying is that we shouldn't be doing this in the spirit of, "God's going to get you one day," but rather that by showing them mercy, we are giving them a chance to reconcile their wrongs.

I believe Paul writes this to help us press onward. In a sense, God is going to take care of it, so don't worry about vengeance. Instead, feed him. Give them a drink. Love them. Coals of fire that will melt the ill intention that has come over them.

Perhaps it is to soften their heart.

John Chrysostom goes on to say that and express this idea of, "What man, no matter how barbaric, will continue to do evil when you feed him?"

Plus, Paul exhorts us not to overcome evil with evil. And that if we have this intention when we feed our enemies or give them a drink that, "Oh, you're going to get it," we're still overcoming evil with evil.

And I'm fascinated with this term that John Chrysostom used, Christian heroism, and the idea that is tied to it. That we are the true heroes of society. We fight for the greater good of society by fighting against the powers of evil.

And that the way we do this is by living in the kingdom of God and by the teachings of Jesus and the apostles.

And so to conclude, I would like to bring back David's sermon a couple of weeks ago and how he had brought out the point that oftentimes we as humans try to put God in this either/or category. And that when often God operates in this both/and mindset.

And I feel it is the same way with justice. Today, I'm not trying to make the takeaway from the fact that God uses a type of justice that punishes wrong, but that God acts in wrath. But I want to show that this isn't the only type of justice that we see that God uses.

And in fact, it may not even be his main way of enacting justice. So to conclude, I'd like to come back to this idea of Christian heroism. That it is not something for the greats of this world. In fact, it is a lifestyle that can be picked up by anyone with the Holy Spirit.

That by living out in faith, the faith that was once delivered to the saints, we are bringing justice back to the world. It's not by voting or by force, but by meekness and humility of our genuine lives with Jesus as our King to show that he is a just God.