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Cedar Lake SDA Church

Jim Howard

Justice or Mercy

Father in heaven, once more we ask that You would be here in our midst, that You would touch our hearts with the Holy Spirit.

Help us to know that we have a loving Father and Savior in heaven who cares for each 1 of us, and who has a plan for our lives.

Bless us with the Holy Spirit and the powerful influence that He makes upon our hearts this morning.

I'd like you to take your Bibles as we begin today and turn with me to Exodus 33.

As you are turning there, I want to tell you about 1 of my favorite statements in the Bible.

It's in 1 John, where it tells us that God is love.

And 1 of the things that I'm really thankful for, and yet, something that I think some people get confused on, is that the Bible does not say, love is God.

Did you know it doesn't say that anywhere in the Bible?

The problem is that if it said love is God, then we would take our understanding of love and we would Place that upon God.

But instead, we are forced to look to Scripture, the primary revelation of God, and learn what love is through Scripture.

And so the world has all kinds of false ideas about love.

Misapprehension and confusion about who God is.

But we have the Scripture, and we know that God is love, and we're talking about the God of the Bible.

So, now we look to the Bible, and we're looking at Exodus 33, in verse 18.

This of course is Moses making an outlandish claim of God, or a request of God.

18 it says, "...and he said..." Speaking of Moses.

"...said, I will make all My goodness pass before you, and I will proclaim the name of the Lord before you.

I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion." So here God says, I'll show you My glory, and His glory was not merely a visible brightness, but it was His goodness, His character, that He was going to show him.

When the time actually came that God showed Moses His glory, He began to speak and describe His character.

You find it in the next chapter, chapter 34, beginning with verse 5.

It says, Now the Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the Lord.

Now, by the way, the name of the Lord is synonymous with His character, who He is.

And the Lord passed before him and proclaimed, The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious.

Longsuffering, abounding in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for how many?

For thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin.

By no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children's children to the third and the fourth generation." Now to far too many, Though they wouldn't likely admit it, many people see a contradiction here in the description of the character of God.

And their inability to see the beauty and the harmony of the character leads to wrong conclusions about the plan of salvation.

They wonder, how can He say keeping mercy for thousands, and also say by no means clearing the guilty?

And actually visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children's children to the third and the fourth generation.

In the minds of many, God's justice and His mercy are in opposition to 1 another.

If you're going to be just, you can't be merciful.

If you're going to be merciful, you can't be just.

But God's Word declares that love cannot exist with both of the twin characteristics of mercy and justice.

Ellen White beautifully paints this in the book, The Desire of Ages.

Ellen White is 1 of the founders of our church who we believe had special inspiration from God.

And here's what she wrote in this wonderful volume on the life of Christ on page 762.

She said, God's love has been expressed in His justice no less than in His mercy.

Justice is the foundation of His throne and the fruit of His love.

It had been Satan's purpose, whose purpose?

The devil, to divorce mercy from truth and justice.

He sought to prove that the righteousness of God's law is an enemy to peace.

But Christ shows that in God's plan, they are indissolubly joined together.

So Satan's purpose was to divorce mercy from truth and justice and to prove that God's law was an enemy to peace.

This was exactly the understanding that existed in the days of Christ.

The rulers and the Pharisees believed that the law left no room for mercy.

When a man was sick, they chastised him for the sin that must have caused his disease.

And when Jesus healed, they saw Jesus as impeding the righteous judgment of God.

When Jesus allowed a sinful woman to anoint Him with perfume, they saw it as compromise with sin.

And when a woman was caught in adultery, they sought to prove that Jesus was opposed to the law by challenging him to command her stoning.

Justice and mercy were perfectly blended in his character.

He could discern when administering justice was the most merciful thing to do, and when administering mercy was the most just thing to do.

Now had that woman caught in adultery, been brazen and hard-hearted, He would have responded differently.

But He saw in her a victim of the venom of the priests.

He saw in her a broken and a contrite heart.

And with a wisdom born of heaven, Jesus executed justice.

He did the most just thing by extending to her the hand of mercy." I remember a minister friend of mine saying that the Pharisees and Sadducees both hated Jesus.

The Sadducees hated Him because He was so principled.

And the Pharisees hated Him because He was so nice.

So far-reaching was the influence of the Pharisees through the devil's deception that the law leaves no room for mercy, and tried to separate that.

The Pharisees had bought into that and their influence was so great that the disciples themselves were confused by it.

Do you remember when they called on Jesus and said, would you like for us to command fire to come down from heaven and to consume these, just as Elijah did?

Jesus, of course, said you don't know what manner of spirit you are of.

Just like the Pharisees, the disciples had a hard time seeing how somebody could be merciful if he was going to stand for truth and justice.

But Jesus blended perfectly justice and mercy throughout His ministry, culminating with the greatest expression of justice and the greatest expression of mercy at the same time in the death of the Son of God.

That's why the Bible says, mercy and truth have met, righteousness and peace have kissed at the cross of Christ.

That same book, Desire of Ages, page 762, says this, By his life and his death, Christ proved that God's justice did not destroy his mercy, but that sin could be forgiven, and that the law is righteous and can be perfectly obeyed.

Satan's charges were refuted, and God had given man unmistakable evidence of his love." 1 of the most impactful portions of the writings of Ellen White that I ever read in my early Christian experience was in the back of a volume called 7a.

7a is the passages of Ellen White that are littered throughout the Bible commentary series.

And in the back, there's a couple of appendices.

And it gives all the passages of Ellen White, not all, but a great compilation of what she had to say about the atonement.

And 1 of the most fascinating things that I remember reading was on page 470 of that volume where it says this, God bowed his head satisfied.

Now He could be just, and yet the Justifier, merciful, of all who should believe on Christ.

You can find that, by the way, in Romans 3.

Just in the Justifier, verses 23-26 is the section.

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Justice or Mercy

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