I believe in God—a God who, by his irrevocable nature of holiness, exists, and can exist in both perfect justice and perfect mercy. A God who by his Trinitarian being can exist as both fully God and fully man, can also; I feel, exist as fully just and fully merciful. Full is not universal. The size of the cup determines the quantity of fullness. Therein I assert that God is not necessarily equally just and merciful—for few will be unblended to His mercy, but that He is nevertheless complete in his mercy and his justice — filling equally, both cups to their brims. We often also forget the vastness of our God— that his entire being is seemingly endless. We think wrongly that the nature of man even in its entirety could even come close to encompassing the nature of this great God. God is all of love and all of wrath and all of God and all of man and all of pride and all of humility and all of justice and all of grace and yet his being is not completed by these things. He is far bigger than that and far bigger too, than the bigger that we can imagine. We can’t fill God up with a single trait or value. We can’t fill him up with thousands. He is all of them; miraculously and by his nature able to satisfy what we as humans can neither comprehend nor imagine, dream nor dare.
Justice is by far the larger of these cups, as God reveals his justice every moment as the parade of newly dead souls crawl to his courtroom and are judged. Throughout history, justice has been defined by the equal distribution of law enforcement and trial, but not the equal distribution of condemnation. There is no quota on how many people must be condemned in every town. This would be nonsensical as some towns would be condemning the innocent and others letting the convicted walk free. No, indeed there is no justice if there is equal condemnation. We are all judged by the same standard, of whether or not our name is written in the Lamb’s book of Life, and in this, God is perfectly and wholly just. After Jesus’ resurrection the law states this is the separation between the redeemed and the condemned. Thus he has established an equal standard and applies it to every soul entering that court.
How then can he be wholly merciful? Is not mercy, by definition, the opposite of justice—receiving pardon and grace which we do not deserve? Indeed it is. I would propose that His mercy is made clear in the Lamb’s book of Life. In the very book that allows for nigh the whole world to be condemned, he allows a remnant to be saved. Being totally depraved, we would not choose God were He to allow us that decision, and yet, He sent His son that a number might be unchained from the blinding bondage of their sin, and by the power of the Holy Spirit have their name be written in that beautiful book. God is not entirely merciful in that he saves everyone. Hell is real, it is devastating and overpopulated, but God is complete in mercy in that by His death, he allowed that some be saved.
When we are young people tell us how God mourns when people are condemned to hell, and when we are older, possibly wiser, and a bit bolder in our interactions about and with the Father, we are told that God is glorified when sinners are condemned because it makes more beatific his mercy and evinces his righteous justice. God doesn’t shed tears like us or perhaps he does, but does God really not mourn those condemned? God doesn’t send all ‘good’ people to heaven but is he not still good? As the Creator of the Universe, to see an image bearer parched by the sulfuric fires of hell dying eternally at the hands of all the foul beasts, would not he mourn that? This is where many times the controversy between justice and mercy gets tripped up. God mourning the loss of some does not necessitate Him (being good) to show mercy, nor does his nature of justice allow for it. God shows His mercy by bringing the justice of resurrective salvation to those whom he has called, not through ignoring the justice of death and saving those at random that he pleases. God did not predestine us randomly without purpose or full of ambiguous vagueties, rather, he foreknew those whom he predestined and called those people unto himself and God has enabled some to accept this gift and others to be blind to its meaning or its relevance.
God is completely just in his dealings in condemnation as well as in mercy. Condemnation therefore is not God’s lack of mercy, but of our own sinful heart’s lack of salvation. God is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and thus He cannot be the variable in this judgment day equation, nor can his mercy or justice—for just as God is fully God and fully man, he is fully just and fully merciful.
Mercy and justice cannot coexist in our minds because we are incapable of comprehending a rejection of mercy. God was fully just in condemning us all to death, and He was fully just to grant us all to life by the death of Christ, but it is in our refusal of being tried under this merciful justice, our faithlessness that such a thing could exist that drives us away from the courtroom of Heaven into the gnashing of teeth that await us as we fall.
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