How God Can Be Both Loving and Just Without Sacrificing Either One

Well, how many times have you heard someone tell you this: "God is love"? The phrase comes from 1 John 4:8. And the full context of that verse is this: "The one who does not love does not know God, because God is love" (that's from the Christian Standard Bible, the CSB.

Welcome to the Think Podcast with Joel Settecase. I’m Joel Settecase, and this is the show that tackles impossible questions from a biblical perspective to help you explain, share and defend your faith.

Well, how many times have you heard someone tell you this: “God is love”? The phrase comes from 1 John 4:8.

And the full context of that verse is this: “The one who does not love does not know God, because God is love” (that’s from the Christian Standard Bible, the CSB. The Bible has many translations in English. The CSB is one of my favorite translations. Maybe I’ll do a review on it some time. But in whatever translation you read it, 1 John 4:8, at least the second half of the verse, is pretty much going to say the same thing. In the Greek, it’s ὁ θεὸς ἀγάπη ἐστίν. There’s not really any other way of rending it in English other than simply, “God is love”).

While God is love, he is also just. And a just God has to punish sin. These two attributes of God seem to be in conflict. Have you ever thought about that? Well we’re going to get to the bottom of it today. And I want to show you how to explain the Gospel basing your presentation off of two words: love and justice.

God’s Love

1 John 4:8 is a beloved verse, not only by believers but by nonbelievers as well. We all find it comforting to think that behind the reality that we experience, there is a Creator, the author of life, who is, in his very nature, loving--in fact who is so loving that it is proper to actually say that he *is* love.

Sometimes an attribute or role so thoroughly characterizes a man that he can appropriately say that he is that thing. To use an example from entertainment, this is like Batman saying, “I am vengeance. I am the night. I am Batman.” Batman isn’t literally saying that he is the time of day between dusk and dawn. He’s rather saying that he thrives in the shadows, he is at home in the darkness, he is unseen, etc.

In a similar way, there are some attributes that describe the Lord so well that we can rightly say he is that attribute. Jesus himself points up this idea in John 11:25. In that verse the Lord Jesus says, “I am the resurrection and the life.” In other words, Jesus is so bound up with resurrection, with life after death and life that lasts forever, that he is the resurrection.

So now here 1 John 4:8 we have the apostle John telling us that God is love. This makes sense from a biblical conception of God, because God is Triune. He is three in one. God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And these three divine Persons have been loving one another since forever in the past. God is so characterized by love that he rightly is said to be love.

And we see God’s love throughout creation, in how he interacts with his creation. The Bible speaks to this. The following verse teach us about God’s love:*

“But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matthew 5:43-45).
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son…” (John 3:16).
“...God’s love has been poured into our hearts…” (Romans 5:5).
“But the fruit of the Spirit is love…” (Galatians 5:22).
“...love is from God…” (1 John 4:7).
“...God is love...” (again, this time in 1 John 4:16).
“We love because he first loved us” (1 John 1:49).

There are many more verses we could cite (for example, I didn’t even bring up the verse that says God cares even when a tiny sparrow falls to the ground), but I think the point has been made. God is loving toward his creatures, and no creature experiences that love in a more intense or special way than the creature made in God’s own image, namely man.

Throughout Scripture we see God’s love motivating him to deal kindly with man. We see this first with Adam and Eve. There’s a great video online of the late R. C. Sproul, sitting on a panel at a conference during a Q & A time. And someone asks R. C. why God dealt so harshly with Adam and Eve. R. C., in his typical gruff-but-lovable-grandpa way, pauses before recounted just how patient God actually was with our first parents. God warned them that they would die if they ate the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And after they ate it, they did not immediately die (though they did apparently die spiritually, they continued to live physically for hundreds more years). And God also promised a Savior for them, and cut them off from the Garden, so they couldn’t eat from the Tree of Life and therefore live forever in a fallen state. This was the same talk when R. C. famously said, “What’s wrong with you people?!” It’s a great quote, it’s classic R. C. Sproul, and you should go watch it, when you get a chance. But here’s the idea: God is loving toward people--even when they sin!

God’s Justice

Now this brings us to our dilemma. We have a dilemma (or at least, what seems to be the appearance of one), because the same Bible that tells us (over and over) that God is love also tells us that that very same God is just. In fact, while the Bible never says, “God is justice,” God is certainly perfectly just (in fact by definition, everything attribute that God has, he has perfectly.

Now, God is the judge of the world. And a just judge is a righteous one. A righteous judge does not let the guilty go unpunished.

See for yourself:

“God is a righteous judge and a God who shows his wrath every day” (Psalm 7:11).
“He loves righteousness and justice” (Psalm 33:5).
“The LORD will maintain the cause of the afflicted, and will execute justice for the needy” (Psalm 140:12).
“For I the LORD love justice; I hate robbery and wrong; I will faithfully give them their recompense” (Isaiah 61:8).
“Because of your hardened and unrepentant heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath, when God’s righteous judgment is revealed” (Romans 2:5).
“He will repay each one according to his works: eternal life to those who by persistence in doing good seek glory, honor and immortality; but wrath and anger to those who are self-seeking and disobey the truth while obeying unrighteousness” (Romans 2:6-8).
“For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:23).
“Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord” (Romans 12:19).

But…

But, you say, couldn’t God just overlook sin? After all, doesn’t the Bible say, “I will show mercy to whom I will show mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion” (Romans 9:15)? The idea of God simply overlooking sin, without dealing with it externally but simply absorbing the debt of the sinner (sans payment) accords with the Muslim view of God, but not the biblical view. The God of the Bible cannot be arbitrary. He cannot simply overlook sin. Sin must be paid for.

And you might say, but if I forgive a debt, it’s like I just absorb that debt myself. I simply strike it from my records. Can’t God do that--just absorb the loss? Again, no, not without payment. God adheres to an absolutely perfect standard of justice and righteousness, and that standard is not external to himself, nor is it arbitrary, but it is bound up with his very nature (which is what all those verses above were about). God is just and is the very standard of justice.

Now the crazy thing is, God does take our debts upon himself. However, God does not simply writing off the debt, but he canceled it by nailing the record of our debt to the cross (Colossians 2:14)! I love that verse, because of the stark imagery of it. God took your sin from you, stuck a railroad spike through it, and then sent that spike straight through the wrist of his Son, the Lord Jesus.

This is the Gospel. This is where the love and justice of God meet. At the cross of Christ. This is why Colossians 1:19-20 says,

“For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile everything to himself, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.”

It’s the blood of Jesus that atoned for our sin. God did that because he is perfectly just, and sin had to be paid for. Jesus paid for our sins on the cross (this is why Paul says in Galatians 2:20, “The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (emphasis added. Jesus, the Son of God, gave up his life, taking on the punishment for sin that his people had earned.

God did this because of his love, but also because of his justice. The Bible makes this clear. And when it comes down to brass tacks, while we might not fully understand this, this is what the Bible teaches. And the Bible is necessarily true (and if you object and say you believe the Bible is not true, you should know that the very concept of truth presupposes God.

No Dilemma After All

It turns out that the love and justice of God are not in conflict but perfectly coexist in harmony. They work together. In pursuit of justice, God sent his Son to die for sinners--everyone who ever trust in Jesus, everyone whom God chose in advance (Eph. 1:3-14). And in love, God sent his son to die for sinners. Love and justice work together. There’s no conflict. God is awesome.