“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
-- St. John
Have you ever paused to wonder what John is saying here about our salvation when He says God is “just to forgive us”? How is this just? Don’t we deserve punishment as sinners? Isn’t it only by God’s grace that we are saved? What does this verse tell us about God?
Many of our struggles in understanding God come because we attempt to artificially separate the attributes of God without recognizing their radical unity in Him. God’s justice and mercy (or grace) are two which we have a hard time reconciling. We do not know how God can be both just and gracious. In a way this is a great mystery to us, but we often make it more difficult than it need be. We confuse the issue even further by trying to explain God as just or merciful without recognizing that He must be both.
Some choose to ignore God’s justice in its temporal application. They do not want to interact with the judgmental side of God. They see His justice only as a future contingency of judgment if people will not choose His grace in salvation. The fear of God’s justice provides an impetus to find salvation, but that is really as far as they will go with it. They prefer to focus their time on the fact of God’s love and grace to men.
Others try to see a more complete picture of a God both just and merciful, but they end up in a similar error by splitting the attributes apart in God. They see God as just in some situations and merciful in others. Then they think they understand that He has both justice and mercy. They see God’s justice (without room for grace) only in his righteous judgment of wicked men. They also see God’s mercy (without room for His justice) only in His gracious salvation of men. In taking this view of God, they wrongly apply human limitations to God’s nature, and they limit their own understanding of God, whose justice and mercy are one. If God’s attributes are not unified in His nature, He becomes arbitrary and denies Himself as He has revealed Himself to us. To allow for disunity in God essentially annihilates Him.
The unity of God’s attributes provides a beautiful picture of the whole which allows us to more clearly see the beauty of the parts. Essentially separating God’s attributes clouds His beauty.
