Lesson 31: God Satisfied His Own Requirement for Justice
There are many who say, “If God is loving, why doesn’t he just forgive everybody their sin?” This is because God is as just and righteous as he is loving, and this justice requires that sin be punished. As infinitely loving, just and righteous as God is, humans are as infinitely sinful, disobedient and hostile toward God. All that we know we shouldn’t do we want to do even more. More than one person has observed that given the right set of circumstances, each one of us would be capable of committing nearly all of the atrocious sins that have been committed by humans in the past. There is no way that on our own we could ever be justified to be in the presence of an infinitely holy God. The only just fate for us is eternal separation from God, which is the essence of hell. No amount of finite time spent in purgatory can change the fact that we are infinitely wicked and cannot be in the presence of an infinitely holy God. We carry a sin debt that is impossible for us to ever pay on our own. From the beginning God’s plan was to save us from this dilemma, and so he took full responsibility for satisfying the righteous requirements of his own justice by sending his son to be punished as a substitute for us. If we are punished we only get what we deserve because we have a sin debt, but he allowed us to commute our sins to Christ; since Christ had no sin debt he is able to receive all of our sins. A good analogy would be us having a credit card that is maxed out and we cannot get anymore credit; but Christ’s credit card has never been used. And so, once we are justified through faith we’re made perfect in God’s sight and have access to him in prayer. But he did this for a purpose, which is for us to try to put into daily practice what we already are in our status before him, which is perfect.