Breakfast at Tiffany's: God’s Character, The good judge

“…forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty…” Exodus 34:7

In God’s Character [part 3]: The Glory of I AM, God revealed His glory to Moses which entailed the goodness of His character revealed in His name:

And the LORD passed by before him, and proclaimed, The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty (Ex. 34:6-7a, KJV).

God’s goodness is a two-sided coin. The side that is often the most appealing is that of His love, grace, patience and mercy. The less popular side of the coin is God’s righteous judgment of sin which is also called His wrath. Many people wonder how a God of wrath could also be good. However, if God were to omit His righteous wrath from the equation, then He would also cease to be good. James M Hamilton, Jr. explains,

To know that he is Yahweh is to know his goodness— goodness that upholds what is right. If he does not uphold what is right, he is not good. If he does not keep his word, he is not faithful and cannot be trusted. Yahweh’s righteousness, therefore, is an essential component of his love. An unrighteous, unfaithful god is not a loving god but a scary, unpredictable horror in the likeness of the ancient Near Eastern deities or the gods of the Greco-Roman pantheon.[1]

Imagine that a man who violently raped and murdered an innocent child is standing before a judge in court. The murderer appeals to the judge’s goodness and pleads with him to mercifully set him free. Meanwhile, the child’s parents sit there weeping and praying for justice. In response, the judge says to the murder, “You have asked me to set you free based on the fact that I am a good judge. However, because I am good, I must punish you to the full extent of the law and sentence you to death.”

Had the judge failed to convict, he would not have been loving. He would have been unjust. In the same way, God’s mercy is never unjust. “When God mercifully pardons, he upholds his own righteous standard. He satisfies the wrath he justly feels when he has been offended. In the old covenant God’s righteous standard was upheld through the Levitical system of sacrificial, substitutionary atonement, but even this was looking forward to the cross” (Hamilton, 123).

Every single person has sinned and fallen short of God’s glory (Rom. 3:23). Therefore, because the ultimate punishment for sin is death, we all deserve to die (Rom. 6:23a). However, just as God passed over sins in the Old Testament through animal sacrifice, He has completely nullified sin’s punishment through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ upon the cross (Rom. 3:24). God “judges the substitute so that the one for whom the sacrifice is made can be saved— mercifully and justly saved” (Hamilton, 124). The goodness of God’s character means that He is “just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus” (Rom. 3:26b).

[1] James M. Hamilton, Jr. God's Glory in Salvation Through Judgment: A Biblical Theology, Crossway, 2010.