The Righteous Justice of God

Passage: Romans 3:21-26

We all know the story of David and Bathsheba and her husband Uriah.  One afternoon lounging on the roof of his palace David sees Bathsheba bathing in her backyard.  His lust turns to desire which turns to sin and she becomes pregnant.  In an attempt to cover up his sin, he calls Uriah home from the battle for a weekend of R and R, but Uriah is a man of integrity and honor and he won’t go home.  So David assigns him to the frontlines where he is killed.  Then he marries Bathsheba.

God sends the prophet Nathan to confront David in his sin, David is convicted and repents, Nathan seemingly presumptuously, announces God’s forgiveness, “God has taken away your sin.”  End of story.

But put yourself in the sandals of Bathsheba’s father or Uriah’s father.  What are you thinking about this whole sordid affair?  What, the Lord has taken away his sin?  This terrible king has raped my daughter, he has murdered my son-in-law, and he just gets away with it, he gets a pass.  Where is the righteousness?  Where is the justice?  If this is the kind of judge God is, He should be impeached.

Justice matters.  God has hardwired our universe that justice matters.  Justice is part of the moral fabric of the universe.  God has put a sense of justice deep in all of us.  The reason we know about justice and think about justice and care about justice is because we are made in the image of a just God.

Justice is hardwired into all our consciences.  Think about how upset we get over a bad call by an umpire or referee.  Some of us have not forgotten the injustice of the blown call by replacement refs at the end of the Green Bay/Seahawks game in September of 2012 that cost us the game.

How about when an incompetent person gets promoted, or a bribe changes an outcome, or if an election is rigged, or a criminal gets off on a technicality, or a crime isn’t punished or a judge perverts justice.  How young is a child when they first say something isn’t fair?  Injustice is a part of our fallen world, but when we are the victim of it, we hate it, and justly so.

We need to know God is always just and fair and does what is right by the righteous standards of His own law, by which He judges us.  We need to know how the righteous judge of the universe can forgive guilty sinners.

That’s the point of verses 25-26.  Last week we considered the first three of Paul’s uses of the righteousness of God.