The Compatibility of Love and Judgment

In the Tim Burton film Big Fish Albert Finney plays Edward Bloom, a father and husband known for telling large tales. At one point in the movie, while having dinner with his family Edward tells them that the African parrot when in its natural habitat speaks the most elaborate French you’ve ever heard. These parrots, he says, will talk about anything. They’ll talk about politics, romance, business, and economics; everything except religion. When pressed one why the parrots don’t talk about religion Bloom responds that it is not polite to talk about religion, “you never know who you’re going to offend.” It is certainly true that true religion offends. In the modern culture, Christianity in particular is often labeled as very offensive. One of the more pernicious doctrines of the faith, it is said, is the doctrine of divine judgment. The most frequent assaults against this doctrine are that it is incompatible with the doctrine of divine love, and thus one or the other of these two doctrines must be dropped. Is it true, however, that divine love and divine judgment are necessarily incompatible? I intend to show otherwise.

In order to see how these two doctrines can coalesce we must begin where God begins, that is with God-centeredness. Part of our dilemma in viewing these two doctrines as friends is that most of us start our theology by looking at man, instead of looking at God. This is what is known as doing theology from below. The Scriptures teach us, however, that all theology must begin with God. Why? Because God begins with God.

When one begins to contemplate God’s design it is often with humanity at the center of it, this notion is, however, flawed. Isaiah 43:6-7 correct us when we read God’s words there, “I will say to the north, Give up, and to the south, Do not withhold; bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth, everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made[1].” Here we find the purpose of man most clearly stated: to glorify God.

Most often people today believe that God exists from man’s connivance rather than man for God’s glory. We believe that the chief end of God is to love man. The members of the Westminster Assembly, however, had a different view on life. They sated in the Westminster Catechism: The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. Modern theologian John Piper has taken those words and performed surgery on them to convey another message: The chief end of God is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. Is that true? Is God’s chief desire to glorify Himself? Of course the only way to answer that question is from scripture. Let’s look first at Isaiah 48.

For my name’s sake I defer my anger, for the sake my praise I restrain it for you, that I may not cut you off. Behold, I have refined you, but not as silver, I have tried you in the furnace of affliction. For my own sake, for my own sake, I do it, for how should my name be profaned? My glory I will not give to another. (Isaiah 48:9-11)

Within these verses we see a truth that probably most of us have never heard before: that God’s primary concern is His glory. God does an action with the chief concern being for Himself and His glory. It is as Jonathan Edwards, that great puritan pastor of the 1700s, said, “God delights in Himself and makes Himself His end.” In this context the people of Israel have been in captivity in Babylon for many years, since before the fall of Jerusalem in 587. Many have died in captivity and many have been born here. Soon the great Persian King Cyrus, will release them to return home and rebuild their city, but God is concerned now with preparing them for that time. His concern is that if He does not tell them now that this is His work that He will do in sending them home, then they are liable to attribute it to the King or even to some false god. In verse 3 of Isaiah 48 God reminds the Israelites that He foreordained their captivity, “The former things I declared of old; they went out from my mouth and I announced them; then suddenly I did them and they came to pass.” But God did not only predict their captivity into Babylon, He predicted and foreordained their return from captivity as well. But why did He do that? Verses 4-5 explain.

Because I know that you are obstinate and, and your neck is an iron sinew and your forehead brass, I declared them to you from of old, before they came to pass I announced them to you, lest you should say, “My idol did them, my carved image and my metal image commanded them.”

These obstinate and stiff necked people, who have been so immersed in the culture of their captors, would ascribe to their graven images their return if it were not for the Lord’s promising it beforehand. God did it (that is, declared this prophecy) for the sake of His own glory, and that is what we see in the text of verse 11. “For my own sake, for my own sake I did it…” God is primarily concerned with glorifying Himself. It is for His praise (v.9) that He does not pour out His anger on the Israelites. It is not primarily because He loves them, though He does love them, it is primarily because He desires to preserve His glory. God is for Himself, and indeed He must be.

Were God to love anything more than Himself, to put something above His own glory, it would be idolatry. God’s dedication to His glory is right and just. It is proper to love something in accordance with that things worthiness, and thus God must love His glory because it is above all things the most worthy of love. Do you still contend that God must love us first and foremost? When asked what the greatest commandment was Jesus responded by saying, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and will all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment” (Matthew 22:37-38). For God to do any less, for God to love us more than Himself, is to commit idolatry! God, in order to maintain His justice, and because He is indeed worthy of all love, praise, and adoration, must make His first and chief goal in all things to bring glory to Himself. There is further confirmation of this found within the pages of scripture.

Ezekiel 20: 8b-9, “Then I said I would pour out my wrath upon them and spend my anger against them in the midst of the land of Egypt. But I acted for the sake of my name, that it should not be profaned in the sight of the nations among whom they lived, in whose sight I made myself known to them in bringing them out of the land of Egypt.”

“Yet He saved them for His name’s sake, that He might make known His mighty power” (Psalm 106:8).

One might also look at: Exodus 14:4, 18; Psalm 23:3; 2 Kings 19:34; 2 Kings 20:6; Ezekiel 36:22-23, 32. The point is made; God’s passion for His glory and His God-centeredness is indeed Biblical.

We must now return to our initial question and ask: how does God’s God-centeredness reconcile the apparent conflict between divine love and divine justice? If it is true, as I believe it is, that God must love His own glory above all things then we must realize that He must hate the belittling of that glory. If God were to ignore sin, which is what any offense to Him is, then He would cease to be just and righteous. This loss of righteousness and justice would be detrimental to His love. For if we cannot guarantee that God is righteous and just then how can we be certain that He will always love us? How can we be certain that He will not choose to hate us, or that His forgiveness and tenderness will not simply fail? God’s justice is, in the end, the assurance that we have that His love will remain.

Perhaps this gives you little comfort. After all we are all sinners, all of us deserve wrath instead of love. God certainly does not need us. Within His own triune nature the Father God has an eternal love relationship with the other members of the Trinity (the Son, and the Spirit). His creation of us was a free act, and one that, in light of our sinful rebellion, could just as easily be done away with. And in any case, how can God be just and yet still love such unlovable people? Perhaps God’s God-centeredness makes things more depressing, and not less.

The resolution to this problem can be found only in the cross. At the cross where Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, was crucified for sinners, the Lord is found to be both just and gracious. In punishing Jesus for our sins God was able to be just, but in Jesus’ willfully dying for us God was able to be gracious. The only hope any of us has for salvation is found in the cross. It is indeed the only hope that anyone has of divine love. The cross is the place where love and wrath embrace, and to do away with one is to do away with both.

At the end of this whole discussion it is possible that some will still see God as vain and selfish. He demands our worship of Him, and He punishes those who do not. But there is good news in all of this. If man was created to know God and to worship Him, if God is truly worthy of worship and truly wonderful, then fulfilling the purpose of our lives will bring us great joy. Whenever we worship something, whenever we praise something that adoration is part of our joy. If I get new shoes I am not as happy in those shoes as I can be until I have pointed them out to others and expressed my delight in them. But shoes will not truly satisfy me. Not homes, not cars, not wives, not jobs, not health, not wealth, will satisfy the soul that was made for God. So for us to truly take joy in God we must not only worship Him (thereby completing our joy in Him) but He must be satisfying. This is where we see that God’s God-centeredness is for our joy.

If God denies His worthiness by loving anything more than Himself, even us, then He is essentially saying that He is not satisfying. If that is true then all our hopes of true joy are dashed. So for God to truly love me He must first love Himself, which He does by punishing all those who reject and hate Him. And then He must offer Himself to me, which He does by means of the cross. At the cross God Himself bears the punishment that I deserve and offers me the privilege of knowing and rejoicing in Him. Take away judgment and you take away God’s righteousness and justice; you take away the cross, and you take away the only hope for man to be truly satisfied. Divine love without divine justice, then, is really nothing more than getting a pair of new shoes. They’re nice for a while, but eventually they get old and fall apart. So while it is true that true religion does sometimes offend, without that offense there is no true joy.

[1] All Scripture references are taken from the English Standard Version. (Wheaton: Crossway, 2001).