Doctrine of the Angelic Conflict, part 32 – The essence of God – Justice. Num 23:20; Jer 21:10; 1Co 3:15; 2:9; Col 3:25.

Title: Doctrine of the Angelic Conflict, part 32 - The essence of God - Justice. NUM 23:20; JER 21:10; 1CO 3:15; 2:9; COL 3:25.

 

 

6. The essence of God part 2: Attributes that constitute God and are commuted to beings.

 

We have studied omniscience and righteousness and now we move on to justice, love, omnipotence, and truth.

 

Righteousness, justice, and love all combine to form God’s integrity and each of these has been commuted in a limited way to the creature created in God’s image.

 

The remainders that are commuted are omnipotence and veracity or truth.

 

G. Justice: The execution of what +R demands. In the trillions of decisions God has rendered, not one has ever been unfair or incorrect.

 

Justice is a legal term and refers to the essential character of the divine government in its highest excellence which is agreeable to divine righteousness.

 

Righteousness is that which the government of God ever advances and justice is its essential and holy character in action, which together make for the highest excellence.

 

At this point it is well to observe that God has absolute right and authority over His creatures. In his rebellion against God, the creature steadfastly refuses to recognize the truth concerning the Creator’s right and authority. God could have created or not at His pleasure. Other beings than those made might have been made and those made might have never been.

 

The only reason any one is alive as a human being is because God selected him or her to be so and created them with a personality that, in the image of God, can be born again and be righteous, just, loving, wise, powerful, and know the one absolute truth.

 

He has perfect right to dispose of all His works as it may please Him. If we reflect on these possibilities, of which we have no right to argue, it will be evident that man’s rightful sphere is that of the dependent creature and that man’s highest destiny will be reached, not by resisting the Creator, but by a complete conformity to His will.

 

People speak, in their ignorance, of a further evolution of man by means of natural selection over the next few million years, and neglect the highest destiny of man which can happen for each in their own lifetime.

 

Since the Creator’s authority is absolute, it is a superlative cause for gratitude that God is perfect in justice. What wretchedness would be the creature’s portion if it were otherwise!

 

understanding the perfect justice of God will lead the believer to be thankful for all things, prosperity as well as adversity.

 

What the perfect righteousness of God demands the perfect justice of God executes. All decisions by God are outside of time, done in EP, and not a result of cause and effect.

 

Ps 89:14

Righteousness and justice are the foundation of Thy throne;

Lovingkindness and truth go before Thee.

 

As we have already seen under the eternity of God, God is not in time, is self existent, and the cause of all things, therefore what the creature does or doesn’t do has not affected God’s decisions. Policy changes at the fall and at the transitions from one dispensation to another or even the transitions from spiritual to carnal are not circumstances of God being affected by an outside cause. Divine integrity determines what God must do. He must judge sin, He must discipline reversionism, and He must bless capacity. This is who He is and not a change in Him due to the behavior of His creatures.

 

NUM 23:13 Then Balak said to him, "Please come with me to another place from where you may see them, although you will only see the extreme end of them, and will not see all of them; and curse them for me from there."

 

NUM 23:14 So he took him to the field of Zophim, to the top of Pisgah, and built seven altars and offered a bull and a ram on each altar.

 

NUM 23:15 And he said to Balak, "Stand here beside your burnt offering, while I myself meet the Lord yonder."

 

NUM 23:16 Then the Lord met Balaam and put a word in his mouth and said, "Return to Balak, and thus you shall speak."

 

NUM 23:17 And he came to him, and behold, he was standing beside his burnt offering, and the leaders of Moab with him. And Balak said to him, "What has the Lord spoken?"

 

NUM 23:18 Then he took up his discourse and said,

"Arise, O Balak, and hear;

Give ear to me, O son of Zippor!

 

NUM 23:19 "God is not a man, that He should lie,

Nor a son of man, that He should repent;

Has He said, and will He not do it?

Or has He spoken, and will He not make it good?

 

NUM 23:20 "Behold, I have received a command to bless;

When He has blessed, then I cannot revoke it.

 

God can only do what His integrity dictates. The creature may change but the integrity of God never changes. God is not under the law of cause and effect.

 

It is difficult in the soul of the believer to change the notion that he is blessed when he is good and cursed when he is bad since most of his life he has believed this to be so and it is only after a sound diet of BD that he begins to see this policy as false. If he believes that God is under cause and effect it is as if it is his actions that dictate what God is going to do. That makes God subordinate to the believer’s causes. Divine integrity is unchangeable.

 

The believer suffers under the law of volitional responsibility as well as divine discipline because of eternal laws that cannot change because God cannot change. To say that God made me suffer is like saying the stove made you suffer when you burned your hand on it. The divine law is that human flesh can only take certain temperatures before tissue is damaged and pain signals are sent to the brain. The believer who learns divine law and is blessed by its observance is just like the man who refuses to touch the hot stove. He would not say that he is blessed because he has no pain, or that the stove blessed him, which is evidenced by no skin damage and no pain. The believer who avoids the painful consequences of the LVR is only applying the wisdom that God has given him.

 

So then, we would conclude:

The laws of volitional responsibility and divine discipline are eternal, unchangeable laws whose execution is a direct result of God’s +R.

 

God set these laws for His creatures by means of His Justice long before He created anything, way back in eternity past. To think that I can subvert them and somehow escape justice is ludicrous. Whatever we reap we sow and God is not a respecter of persons. God must do what His character must do, for His person and His attributes are one and the same. He is not like man as if He changes or compromises, for He cannot.

 

When the believer or unbeliever is in violation of these laws he suffers the misery of that environment. God is not changing in response to his actions.

 

JER 21:8 You shall also say to this people, 'Thus says the Lord, "Behold, I set before you the way of life and the way of death.

 

JER 21:9 "He who dwells in this city will die by the sword and by famine and by pestilence; but he who goes out and falls away to the Chaldeans who are besieging you will live, and he will have his own life as booty.

 

JER 21:10 "For I have set My face against this city for harm and not for good," declares the Lord. "It will be given into the hand of the king of Babylon, and he will burn it with fire.

 

Thinking that my misery is a result of God reacting to my actions is like getting mad at the coffee table when I stub my toe in the dark or getting mad at the booze I drank every day because I have liver disease. God is righteous and opposition to that righteousness means that justice must act accordingly. And as we will hopefully clarify, the believer is dealt with in grace, which justice determined in EP to be the policy of all those who have believed in Christ, and so for the believer, justice and grace become very closely connected due to the propitiation of the Father by Christ’s cross.

 

Undeserved suffering is quite different than deserved suffering, however it is allowed by the justice of God, yet God has made divine provision for solutions by means of the problem solving devices.

 

While deserved suffering is ultimately for instruction in righteousness, undeserved suffering is an opportunity for the assets of God that were graciously given to the believer to shine, revealing God’s glory, power, and wisdom. Therefore undeserved suffering is a blessing to the positive believer.