“Q & A 9 But doesn’t God do us an injustice by requiring in His law what we are unable to do? No, God created human beings with the ability to keep the law. They, however, provoked by the devil, in willful disobedience, robbed themselves and all their descendants of these gifts.
Q & A 10 Does God permit such disobedience and rebellion to go unpunished? Certainly not. God is terribly angry with the sin we are born with as well as the sins we personally commit. As a just judge, God will punish them both now and in eternity, having declared: “Cursed is everyone who does not observe and obey all the things written in the book of the law.”
Q & A 11 But isn’t God also merciful? God is certainly merciful, but also just. God’s justice demands that sin, committed against his supreme majesty, be punished with the supreme penalty—eternal punishment of body and soul.”
It is quite miserable to feel responsible for what cannot be done. I imagine that you have had such a responsibility put on you by others. Perhaps someone at work has expected you to do what was not possible to do. Perhaps you have led a board through a controversial decision that had to be made; people expected you to find a way forward that would offend no one and such a decision did not exist. You have most likely found yourself expected to do what could not be done. You have most likely expected someone else to do what cannot be done.
You have most likely expected yourself to do what cannot be done. I dare say that you have, at some point, felt responsible to change someone whom you love and, of course, you can change no one. I dare say that you have, at some point, felt responsible to fix a situation which one the parties involved did not want to fix. You have felt responsible to do what cannot be done.
Having the sense that you are responsible to do what you cannot do is a miserable experience and it is an inescapable part of life. Now we do put unrealistic expectations on others, and we do put unrealistic expectations on ourselves. We do expect what cannot be done and we are wrong to do so. God expects you to do what you cannot do, and He is right to so. You are responsible to fulfill the morality required by God and you cannot do that. This dilemma in which we find ourselves explains a good deal about humanity’s miserable condition. We are required to do what we cannot do and what is more we are rightly required to do what we cannot do. Understanding this aspect of the human condition is the burden of our study this evening.
God rightly requires us to do what, by nature, we cannot do. That is the claim of this sermon: God rightly requires us to do what, by nature, we cannot do.
We will study this in three points. First: why are we responsible for obedience we can’t accomplish? Second: why can’t God just turn a blind eye to sin? Third: how can a God of mercy punish sin?
First: why are we responsible for obedience we can’t accomplish? Last week we saw that God created humanity good and in His image. We studied the depths of sin into which we have fallen. We learned that we humans are, by nature, unable to please God and that, apart from His grace, we are quite unwilling to please God. We learned that we please God and we cannot please God so why does God still require us to do what we cannot do? Why doesn’t He lower His expectations?
This is an important question, in part, because many well-meaning Christians will tell you that God has lowered His expectations. They will say, ‘God used to expect moral perfection; you see that in the Old Testament; now, however, He is a bit more realistic and He simply asks you to believe a few doctrines.’ That is not the case.
God has not lowered the bar of expectations. His law still calls us to do what we were created to do; “love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and strength and love your neighbor as yourself.”
Jesus made that clear, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets”, he said “I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them”. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the law until everything is accomplished. Therefore, anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.”
God’s expectation for morality has not changed since the fall into sin, but our nature has changed. We are now unable to obey. We are required by God to do what we cannot do. Now is this an injustice?
The Catechism’s summary of Scripture says “no”. “But doesn’t God do us an injustice by requiring in His law what we are unable to do? No, God created human beings with the ability to keep the law. They, however, provoked by the devil, in willful disobedience, robbed themselves and all their descendants of these gifts.”
Now man considers it an injustice for God to require him to do what he cannot do, but man is quite biased in this matter; he is the guilty party. We shouldn’t be surprised that man considers God’s expectations unreasonable.
Consider your inability to keep the law from God’s perspective. “If a prince were to give a nobleman a [gift] and [that nobleman] were to rebel against [the prince], [that nobleman] would lose [that gift] not only for himself, but for [his children] also; and the prince would do no injustice to [those] children by not restoring to them that which was lost by the rebellion of their father, and if he does restore it, it is because of his goodness and mercy.” That is an illustration from the primary author and the Catechism.
God has done no one any injustice by leaving man in his sinful state. As we will see the fact that He has restored a sinless state to anyone is not a sign of justice but of mercy.
The fact that man is unable to keep the law is not God’s fault but man’s fault. The fact that none of the 7.7 billion people alive today are able to keep the law of God is not God’s fault. It is man’s fault. “It is not the fault of the law, but of the sinner, that he comes under its penalties, which are intended, not to make man miserable, but to deter him from sin, which will certainly make him miserable,” as George Bethune puts it.
Why should God change the law which warns us of sin simply because we are sinners? Think for a moment what would happen if God did change the standards of the law. We wouldn’t want Congress to legalize stealing for the sake of kleptomaniacs. We wouldn’t want Congress to legalize murder for the sake of serial killers. The only ones who would want such changes are the guilty parties. The only reason man wants God’s law changed is because he is the guilty party.
The proper response to our guilt is not to try to change the law of God but rather to recognize our guilt before God. As Paul puts it, “we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God.”
God will not change His requirements and it is for our good that He does not. He maintains standards which sinful man cannot keep to show sinful man his need of a savior. Luther was right, “As long as a person is not a murderer, adulterer, or thief he would swear that he is righteous. How is God going to humble such a person except by Law? The Law is the hammer of death, the thunder of hell, and the thunder of God’s wrath to bring down the proud and shameless hypocrites. When the Law was instituted on Mount Sinai, it was accompanied by lightning, by storms, by the sounds of trumpets to tear to pieces that monster called Self-Righteousness. As long as a person thinks he’s right, he’s going to be incomprehensibly proud and presumptuous. He’s going to hate God, despise His grace and mercy, and ignore the promises in Christ. The Gospel, the free forgiveness of sins through Christ, will never appeal to the self-righteous. This monster of self-righteousness, this stiff-necked beast needs a big axe, and that’s what the Law is, a big axe.”
Your inability to keep the law shows you your need of a Savior. Your positive biopsy shows you your need of therapy. Don’t blame the biopsy. Have the surgery. Don’t blame the law. Come to the Savior.
You can’t keep the law, but Jesus did. “What the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh,” wrote Paul, “God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering. And so He condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.”
You find justification before the law of God not by your own goodness, but by the goodness of Jesus. You wouldn’t have seen your need for his goodness unless you had given up your own goodness. You only know that you aren’t good because your inability to keep the law has proven it.
Some people are not satisfied by this answer. They want to get rid of our sin problem by getting rid of the consequences for sin. We see this in our second point: why can’t God just turn a blind eye to sin?
Some people see God as rather petty for condemning sin and sinners. God doesn’t see it that way and neither does the Catechism. “Does God permit such disobedience and rebellion to go unpunished?” Question 10 asks, ‘Certainly not. God is terribly angry with the sin we are born with as well as the sins we personally commit. As a just judge, God will punish them both now and in eternity, having declared: “Cursed is everyone who does not observe and obey all the things written in the book of the law.”’
The man who sees God as petty for condemning sin and sinners does not see his sin for what it is. He looks at his life and wonders what in the world he could have done to deserve the wrath of God. Now let’s give this man the benefit of the doubt and say that he is a decent person. He has done nothing worthy of arrest; what could he have done that is worthy of hell?
Such a man does not see that it isn’t merely one act of despicable sin that makes him worthy of hell. His sin is far more global than that. He is unwilling to submit to the God who created him. By nature, man sees God’s expectation that man will serve Him with all His heart, soul, and strength as unreasonable. By nature, man finds God’s expectations invasive and he rejects them.
Man will defend himself before the judgment of God by pointing to his own decency, but that is not the issue. The issue is that man, who is a creature, will not submit himself to the expectations of the Creator. When you understand this, you understand what Paul meant when he wrote, “There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.” Paul wasn’t saying that no man was decent; he was saying that no man, by nature, will submit himself to the expectations of the God who created him and that is the root of sin.
God is justifiably angry at man’s unwillingness to submit. Parents are justifiably angry when children refuse to submit to their authority; God is far more justifiable in His anger when His own creation refuses to submit to His authority.
Take a step back and ask yourself what kind of a God could tolerate perpetual rebellion against Him? Man recoils at the realities of wrath and hell, but how could it be other than what the Catechism says, “God is terribly angry with the sin we are born with as well as the sins we personally commit. As a just judge, God will punish them both now and in eternity”?
God created man with an immortal soul. He will not tolerate an eternity of rebellion. Now man condemns God for this reality of hell, but man is far less patient with those who sin against him than God is. A man goes out of his way to avoid a colleague who once slighted him at a meeting and then condemns God for judging a man who has spent his whole life refusing to submit to His creator. Man is petty. God is long-suffering.
God is also upfront about what happens to a man who spends his life defying Him. He was upfront with Adam in the Garden. “You must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.” He was upfront with Israel, “See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse—the blessing if you obey the commands of the Lord your God that I am giving you today; the curse if you disobey the commands of the Lord your God and turn from the way that I command you today by following other gods, which you have not known.”
God’s bark is not worse than His bite. Man is so used to giving threats and leaving them unfulfilled that he expects God to do the same. Man finds hell repugnant because it is a reminder that God actually means what He says. “God is not man, that He should lie,” as Numbers 23:19 puts it, “He is not a human being, that He should change his mind. Does He speak and then not act? Does He promise and not fulfill?”
God keeps His word. He must or there would be no such thing as morality. “All [God’s] intelligent creatures have a right to ask from [Him] His estimate of right or wrong… they [cannot learn this] except from the reward He attaches to obedience and the penalties He denounces against disobedience,” writes George Bethune. “Were He to overlook His creatures’ good or evil… the consistency of His administration would be shaken and doubt as to the very principles of truth or happiness would darken over the universe.”
If God didn’t condemn rebellion against Him, there would be no basis for judging good and evil. Abraham saw that. When He was pleading for mercy for Sodom and Gomorrah, he knew that God would not condemn the righteous and He knew that God would not acquit the guilty, and so he prayed, “Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? What if there are fifty righteous people in the city? Will you really sweep it away and not spare the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people in it? Far be it from you to do such a thing—to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?”
Abraham knew that God would not acquit the guilty nor condemn the righteous; he knew that the Judge of all the earth would do right. Tolerating continual rebellion against Him would not be right. God is not into fakery even if humanity is.
The fact that God condemns sin is not a sign of His injustice but rather of His justice. Now man does not like this justice because man is the guilty party in question. Man condemns God for the reality of hell and Man calls God unmerciful. We see that in our third point: how can a God of mercy punish sin?
Now the sad reality is that even many professing Christians today do not seem to believe that, when push comes to shove, God will condemn anyone to hell. There is something of an embarrassment about the reality of hell, as if humans were more just than God Himself. Jesus would disagree; he said, “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”
Now man pits this wrath of God against the mercy of God. Man seems to think that since God is merciful, He cannot possibly mean what He says about destroying both soul and body in hell.
The Catechism faces this assumption, which was common in that day as it is today. “But isn’t God also merciful?” it asks. “God is certainly merciful, but also just. God’s justice demands that sin, committed against His supreme majesty, be punished with the supreme penalty—eternal punishment of body and soul.”
Man has a hard time reading that sentence about hell and seeing how God can still be merciful because man thinks justice and mercy are extremes between which a compromise must be found. We think mercy excludes justice. That is not the case. It is not the case in human courts. “What should we think of a human [judge] if he should cease to execute, or irregularly execute, the laws out of pity for the offenders?” asks George Bethune. “Should we not say that he was unfit to govern, that his miscalled mercy to the criminal was cruelty to the many, because [he is actually encouraging crime?] If a judge indiscriminately released criminals, he wouldn’t be called merciful. If God indiscriminately left sinners unjudged, He would not be called merciful.
The mercy of God is something else entirely. God’s mercy does not come at the expense of His justice. The means by which God is both merciful to sinners and just towards sinners is the most important event in human history. “God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement,” wrote Paul, “through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith. He did this to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished—He did it to demonstrate His righteousness at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.”
The cross is the means by which God is just in His punishment of sin and merciful in His justification of sinners. He is just in punishing sin. He is merciful in taking this punishment upon Himself on the cross where “He descended into hell” as the Apostles’ Creed puts it. The hell at which man recoils is the hell which Jesus chose. Praise God that Jesus didn’t recoil from it the way that we do or no one would be saved from it.
The fact that not everyone receives mercy is not an argument against the mercy of God. The fact that anyone does receive mercy is an argument for the mercy of God. ‘What then shall we say? Is God unjust?’ asks Paul. ‘Not at all! For He says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.” It does not, therefore, depend on human desire or effort, but on God’s mercy.’
Those words are about predestination but that’s the point. No one would be saved unless God took the first step. He wouldn’t have taken it unless He was merciful.
Now perhaps you think that if God were more merciful, He would save everyone. If this is the case, I urge you to inspect your own passion for the salvation of sinners and compare it with God’s passion for the salvation of sinners. No man who thinks that God is unjust for leaving some unsaved has ever had a real passion for soul-winning. No man who thinks that God is unjust for leaving some unsaved has ever lived a life like Spurgeon practiced what he preached, “if sinners be damned, at least let them leap to hell over our dead bodies, and if they perish, let them perish with our arms wrapped around their knees. If hell must be filled, let it be filled in the teeth of our exertions, and let no one go unwarned or unprayed for.”
No man who thinks that God is unjust for leaving some unsaved has ever lived a life like Jesus who looked upon his capitol city and wept saying, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.”
“Winners of souls must first be weepers for souls,” said Spurgeon. The question for you this evening is whether what you’ve heard has caused you to condemn God’s justice or to weep for souls. If you are weeping for your own soul, there is a Savior. You cannot do what God demands and He will not, and should not, change those demands. He sent His Son to fulfill those demands. He is what you should be. He has taken the hell you deserve. He invites you. “Just as I am without one plea, but that Thy blood was shed for me, and that thou bidst me come to Thee, O Lamb of God, I come! I come! Amen.