Weekly Dose Of Lloyd-Jones

The next moral attribute of God that the Bible emphasises is the righteousness or the justice of God. Now this follows, of course, inescapably, from the holiness of God. What is righteousness? Well, it is holiness manifested in God’s dealings with us. I think that is as good a definition as you can get. Or, you can look at it like this: it is that quality in God which always reveals God as doing that which is right. It is that in God which makes Him incapable of doing anything which is wrong. Righteousness and justice are the carrying out of God’s holiness and the expression of it in the government of the world.

There are many ways in which this conception can be analysed and a good one is this: righteousness is the demonstration of God’s legislative holiness. God gives His laws in order to impose upon us His righteous demands. He legislates for us. Justice, on the other hand, is God’s judicial holiness, by which, of course, He exacts penalties from those who have been guilty of breaking His law, those who have been guilty of sin.

A further definition still is that the righteousness of God is God’s love of holiness, and the justice of God is God’s abomination of sin. And I think that that is the definition that most commends itself.

Now the righteousness and the justice of God, of course, are revealed almost everywhere in the Scriptures. The wrath of God is taught in both the Old and New Testaments. Our Lord Himself taught it; one of the cardinal doctrines of the whole Bible is that God has a hatred of sin which He expresses in His wrath. If anyone does not believe, says John, then ‘the wrath of God abideth on him’ (John 3:36). We are all by nature, says Paul, ‘the children of wrath’ (Eph. 2:3).

But God’s righteousness and justice are not only manifested in His wrath. He reveals these same qualities in forgiving us our sins: ‘If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness’ (1 John 1:9). Having prepared the way of forgiveness, if we conform to it, the justice of God comes in, and by His Justice God forgives us. And God prepared the way of forgiveness by providing propitiation for our sins—and this is the most remarkable thing of all. The classic statement of that is in the epistle to the Romans: ‘Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God’ (Rom. 3:25). It was God’s justice, coupled with His love, His mercy and His compassion, that provided the offering and the sacrifice—the propitiation—that was necessary.*

*Lloyd-Jones, D. M. (1996). God the Father, God the Son (72–73). Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books.