Our Just God
Heidelberg Catechism • Sermon • Submitted
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Arise, O Lord, in your anger;
lift yourself up against the fury of my enemies;
awake for me; you have appointed a judgment.
Let the assembly of the peoples be gathered about you;
over it return on high.
The Lord judges the peoples;
judge me, O Lord, according to my righteousness
and according to the integrity that is in me.
Oh, let the evil of the wicked come to an end,
and may you establish the righteous—
you who test the minds and hearts,
O righteous God!
My shield is with God,
who saves the upright in heart.
God is a righteous judge,
and a God who feels indignation every day.
If a man does not repent, God will whet his sword;
he has bent and readied his bow;
he has prepared for him his deadly weapons,
making his arrows fiery shafts.
Behold, the wicked man conceives evil
and is pregnant with mischief
and gives birth to lies.
He makes a pit, digging it out,
and falls into the hole that he has made.
His mischief returns upon his own head,
and on his own skull his violence descends.
I will give to the Lord the thanks due to his righteousness,
and I will sing praise to the name of the Lord, the Most High.
Scripture: Psalm 7:6-17
Sermon Title: Our Just God
So far this year during our afternoons and evenings in Harrison, we have been making our way alongside the opening section of the Catechism—looking at how great our sin and misery are. That means that we have paid special attention to ourselves. Along the way, we remembered the way God created us was good, yet we accept that we have fallen into sin and continue to sin. We have looked at our condition, our shortcomings, and have been reminded or made aware of how much evil is in every one of us and our world, without God’s intervention.
With the questions and answers before us tonight, maybe you noticed the change in subject. Our focus is shifting from us to primarily looking at God and his character. As we are guided by Psalm 7, we will look deeper tonight at God’s anger toward sin, the position of “just judge” that he takes in punishing sin, and his ability to enact the supreme penalty of eternal punishment while remaining merciful.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, in the early 2000s, a couple sociologists took up a project called the “National Study of Youth and Religion.” They interviewed a few thousand teenagers regarding their faith and spirituality. What came out of that was the term “moralistic therapeutic deism.” Maybe some of you have encountered that term in some of the books and lectures that have come out of that, but what does that mean?
Their research showed five reoccurring themes about what these teenagers from various backgrounds believed—the majority of them identifying as Christians. First, a god exists who created and orders the world, and watches over life here. Second, this god wants people to be good, nice, and fair to one another as the Bible and most religions teach. Third, the goal of life is to be happy and feel good about ourselves. Fourth, God is only involved in my life when I need him to fix something. Fifth, good people go to heaven when they die.
We can hear some good things coming out of those—the sovereignty of God, God’s desire for us to live with love for another, and God as one who can intervene in our lives. But there is much lacking—our need to repent of sin, the recognition that God cares for each of us personally and is needed every minute of every day, those beliefs do not place any value or worth in suffering and being persecuted. All in all, these observations show the faith of those interviewed puts God at arm’s length, under our control, and gives no place to his judging of sin.
The majority of young people who described their faith in the survey fall into the camp of question 11, “Isn’t God merciful?” and they tend to not look at much else. Part of what these sociologists have pointed out is that it is likely not just this group of teenagers surveyed and young people in general across the United States who hold these views, but likely this has something to do with those who have taught and raised them. Likely this is a glimpse of where young and adult alike are at in many places, many churches across America. By the catechism writers’ inclusion of that question 11, I think we see that the merciful God is not an idea or belief new to the 20th and 21st centuries, but Christians have had this in mind even 450 years ago, and likely much earlier before that.
When we hear that God is angry and does not permit our disobedience and rebellion to go unpunished, and David adding that God is righteous, expressing wrath every day, holding and utilizing deadly weapons—those characteristics tend to be absent from the center of most peoples’ faith. The popular view of the merciful God seems to leave no room for this wrath and justice. We want so much to focus on the pleasant aspects of what God does for us—God our Savior, the God of grace, the God who watches over us and lifts us up when we fall. The God who protected his people in battle, who delivered them from their enemies. The God who is a good shepherd, leading us in green pastures, quiet waters, and paths of righteousness. All of those characteristics of God are true, are real, and are spoken to in Scripture, but so too are the qualities and the actions that we find in places like Psalm 7.
The same God in the Old and New Testament is described as one who sharpens his sword, bends and strings his bow, and makes ready his flaming arrows. The God who commanded the Levites to take swords and kill brothers, neighbors, and friends, totaling about 3,000 after the Israelites had made a golden calf to aid their worship. This is the God who opened the earth and sent fire to consume Korah and his followers—leaders of Israel, when they rose up against Moses, God’s chosen leader. The God who struck down Ananias and Sapphira when they falsely gave “all” their profits to the apostles’ for giving to the needy. The God who John speaks of in Revelation will judge the dead—and those whose names are not in the book of life are to be thrown into the lake of fire.
Our God, who is rich in mercy and abundant in grace, is also grieved by sin—so much so that he is angered by the wrongs that human beings, his creation participate in. We read throughout Scripture that he is slow to anger—but there is very much a context for it. God’s anger is such that it can destroy as we have heard. It is fierce in its desire to get rid of wrongdoing. It is a right and just anger—there is validity to God being angry because he alone is perfect, holy, and sacred. Having called a people to himself, he does not find pleasure in us doing what we want that is contrary to his will nor is he willing to compromise with what’s right.
Before we move on, we need also recognize the anger of God may be a comfort for those whom God has chosen. That is what we find the psalmist writing about, “Arise, O Lord, in your anger; rise up against the rage of my enemies. Awake, my God; decree justice.” David began that psalm speaking of how he finds refuge in God while others are pursuing him. Those chasing after him desired to tear and rip him apart like a lion. They sought to overtake him and trample him to death. David has said, “If I am innocent, then may your anger rise against them.” God’s anger is jealous for his people and for their protection. When we follow his ways, we can trust that he will provide for us. David’s not boasting in what he has done or finding salvation in his works, but he is trusting that faithful living and honoring God’s commands will not anger God but rather bring about God’s care in David’s struggle. If God’s anger is displayed, it will be just.
Our Catechism puts forth that God is a just judge, similar to David’s recognition in verse 11—“God is a righteous judge.” What is a judge? If we look back into Israel’s history—Moses was a judge; he was someone who the people came to settle a dispute by informing them of God’s decrees and laws. He trained others who he could trust to serve who hated dishonest gain. Later after the people had settled in the Promised Land but kept felling away from serving the Lord, God was angered and would send enemies to overpower them. But then, we are told, in the book of Judges that he would raise up judges to save his people. These men and women were sent by God to turn his people back to his commands, to the ways that had been taught to their fathers and mothers. Judges were covenant reminders and returners.
This is the precedent for what David was calling for God to be. The one who knows the heart and the ways that come out of the heart would justly treat his people. Where there is wrongdoing and so much evil in the hearts of men, where there is oppression of the innocent and weak, God’s servant desires for God to faithfully intervene. God set out his covenant to treasure his people, to keep them set apart—to protect them. David calls upon the greatest of judges to continue with those promises.
It can be hard at times for us to truly understand justice in our world. We look at our courts and judges, and we do not always find them handing out judgments or sentences that we think are fair and fitting to the case. At the same time, there are other people who look at the same judgments, and see them as very fair. To be a judge is not an easy task—to be a human judge is to be fallible and make mistakes. They will not always have all of the facts, and with people seeking to make cases for and against, it is not hard to twist the truth in a favorable or an unfavorable light. Officials can be corrupted with bribes and shady dealings—it is hard to find a good judge whose use of power is completely consistent and always righteous.
Yet the righteous God, the just judge, God Most High is incorruptible. As Calvin comments, there is not a day that goes by where he neglects justice or in which he neglects his people. David cried out to him, seeking hope, not because he himself was necessarily without sin but because his wholehearted desire was to follow God and be at his mercy.
The judging that God the Father does is the judgment in punishing sin; that punishment is brought now and in eternity. We are brought back again to the weight of sin in God’s eyes—it is not only affecting things in the present, but there are eternal consequences to sin which must be dealt with. As the eternal God, the only one who knows and exists in perfect righteousness across all of time, he alone is able to deal with sin in this way. The sin affecting our souls needs not only a cure, but it also deserves punishment.
If we can think back to that study that resulted in the term “moralistic therapeutic deism,” the fifth observation was that good people go to heaven when they die. “Good” people—the widespread view that young believers may hold does not include whether or not they have faith in the one true God, it does not include if they have repented from their sin and committed themselves to living God’s grace towards obedience; it was simply that people who live “good” should go to heaven.
Ideally there would be only two categories in this world—those who do good because they believe in and desire to honor God; and those who clearly do evil because the true God is not in them. That seems to be the premise that David writes from in verses 14 through 16: the man who is pregnant with evil and conceiving trouble gives birth to disillusionment or lies, the one who digs a hole falls into it, the person who causes trouble and violence has it come on himself. When a person’s life is all about bringing destruction on others, or in other words, living selfishly—it is clear that the end result will not be life.
But we also need to remember our world is not so black and white. As I mentioned in Corsica last week Sunday morning—people can be generous, kind, and forgiving, but if they do not have faith, then they have not been saved. There can be people living “good” lives by our standards, but that does not remove their punishment. Only a living faith in God can save us.
We see this in Jesus’ parable in Matthew 25. He was talking about those who had passed on opportunities to help the poor, the needy, and strangers in this world; he says, “Depart from me, you who are cursed into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” These are people who could probably say but we have been living good lives—yet Jesus says, “You did not feed me, give me drink, invite me in, clothe me, or look after me.” We might look good to others, but if we don’t respond to the opportunity to help the least of these, then God considers us to not be helping him. Jesus concludes, “They will go away to eternal punishment.”
When we make heaven or paradise or our eternal destination about comparing ourselves to other people, and not about our need to be saved and live in faith, we are making an eternal error. There is no salvation except through faith in Christ alone—he is the only cure for our sin, and he is the only one who can take the punishment that every human being deserves. If he is not believed in, then we will certainly face eternal punishment.
Hopefully we are seeing that faith and living with love go hand in hand. It is not our good works that merit us eternal life but neither does faith that is not connected to our lives. In view of God’s righteousness, all humans are deserving of punishment, eternally so, because of their sin. Yet God, our Creator and our Redeemer gifts us a means by which all who turn to him may be saved—that is, he give us his Son. We will remember and celebrate his dying and rising again in the coming weeks. But we also are reminded of what we profess in the Apostles’ Creed—he descended into hell. That means that he not only died for our sins, but he took the eternal punishment of all who turn to him. Justice has been served—the punishment accounted for—it is only because of what God has done that we can experience the incredible opportunity of everlasting life. With David, let us give thanks to the Lord because of HIS righteousness and sing praise to the name of the Lord Most High. Amen.