In C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lucy and Susan are told about Aslan, the great Lion who is ruler of Narnia (and Lewis’s figure for Jesus Chris).
“Then he isn’t safe?” said Lucy.
“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver. “Who said anything about safe? ’Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.”
Mr. Beaver puts his paw on another major Christian paradox: God is both just and loving. As with all biblical paradoxes, living within this tension of God’s justice vs. God’s love is difficult and yet essential for a healthy spiritual life.
When God is only Justice
According to A. W. Tozer, the God we envision determines the person we are becoming:
“We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God. Were we able to extract from any man a complete answer to the question, ‘What comes into your mind when you think about God?’ we might predict with certainty the spiritual future of that man.” (The Knowledge of the Holy)
What happens when we primarily focus on a God of justice and judgement?”
Those who believe in a judging God easily become judgmental themselves. We can end up like the Pharisees: well-intentioned, deep admirers of Scripture (the conservatives of their day) who so identified with God’s justice they became God’s policemen, with a divine duty to keep everyone else in line.
Those who see God solely pursuing justice might end up like Inspector Javert in Les Misérables, so tragically consumed with exacting justice that he is unable to offer any mercy and, just as tragically, unable to receive mercy himself.
When God is only Love
While we have little problem imagining all the problems of God’s justice without love, it’s harder the other way around. How could too much love ever be a problem?
Some of the most heart-wrenching counseling sessions I’ve had during my pastoral career have been with parents wrestling with how to be both loving and just at the same time. A real-life example: an adult child steals from parents to support his or her addiction. “How can I kick my child out into the street?” these parents ask. “How can I see my child go to jail?”
It was through just such anguishing situations that tough love entered our vocabulary in the 1980s. We realized that sometimes genuine love needs to be tough, i.e. be coupled with justice or founded in truth. Genuine love must be tough enough to allow loved ones to face the truth, including the just consequences of their actions.
A “love only” approach–love not tempered by truth, justice or right and wrong–can do incalculable harm.
- Excessive love of country can be manipulated or corrupted into national idolatry (e.g. Nazi Germany) or ethnic idolatry (e.g. ethnic cleansings or genocide, which Christians have been complicit in down through history, including against Native Americans). My first article in this series, God’s Chosen Nation? addressed this issue.
- Excessive love of a hobby/sport, skill (e.g. one’s profession) or institution (e.g. one’s local church) can become an all-consuming obsession that creates havoc for all concerned.
- Excessive love of love can be dangerous in itself. As biblical scholar NT Wright notes, “ ‘Falling in love,’ even when one or both parties have made lifelong promises elsewhere, is regularly deemed to justify the breaking of promises and the destruction of families.”
God becomes a benignly loving heavenly grandfather, who smiles on his children no matter what they do. We easily then assume any loving person is automatically a Godly person or any belief system with some love in it must also have God in it. Both lead us far afield of a biblical worldview.
Following Jesus Into the Tension
Some people think the “wrathful” Old Testament God of justice is just a warm-up act, preparing the audience for the real God of love who takes the stage in the person of Jesus Christ.
And yet, as the human embodiment of a loving God, Jesus spends an embarrassing amount of time talking about judgment. Many of his parables end with people being “thrown outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matt. 8:12). And who does the judging in the end? Jesus says, “The Father judges no one, but has entrusted all judgment to the Son” (John 5:22, emphasis added).
We go at it the wrong way if we begin with abstract ideas like justice and love and then try to see how Jesus fits into this picture.
Instead, we must begin with the concrete, historical human being Jesus, who himself is the central reality, the center of truth about God. The clearest pathway we have been given into the nature of God is not musing about intellectual concepts, but by watching Jesus.
In Jesus, we find an uncanny blend of justice and love. Here are two examples, both dealing with women, underdogs in a highly patriarchal society.
- With the woman about to be stoned for being caught in the act of adultery, Jesus begins with love (“He who is without sin cast the first stone”) but ends with justice (“go and sin no more”).
- With the Samaritan woman at the well, Jesus shows love in reaching out to converse with a person his fellow Jews considered scum of the earth, yet eventually calls her to just account (“you have had five husbands and the man you’re with now is not your husband”).
In The Problem of Pain, C. S. Lewis says that God has paid us the “intolerable compliment” of loving us. Those two words, intolerable and compliment, are not often used together. What is an intolerable compliment?
Imagine an artist who loves a painting, the greatest work of her life. The artist lavishes it with care and often scrapes off the paint and starts certain sections over and over until she paints them just right. If the painting could talk, after being scraped and started over for the tenth time it might say it would rather be loved a little less than endure all this hurtful revision.
Lewis expands this idea:
“Those Divine demands which sound to our natural ears most like those of a despot and least like those of a lover, in fact marshal us where we should want to go if we knew what we wanted. That is, whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want. Once more, we are embarrassed by the intolerable compliment, by too much love, not too little.”
God’s love is all the more magnificent because it includes perfect justice. And this tough inner fiber of justice is what makes it perfect love! It is all a mystery we will never comprehend.
Our Lenten Self-Examination
Where might I need to repent?
- Remember AW Tozer’s point: “We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God.”
- Which do you gravitate toward most often, a loving God or a just God? (How about most of the Christians you know?)
- How has gravitating to one or the other shaped you, or other Christians you know?
- When you are not living in the paradoxical tension created by God’s love and justice (i.e. you focus on either love or justice) what consequences have you observed in your personal or family life? Your church life? Christian responses to society as a whole?
- Do you identify so much with God’s love that you at times wonder if you have lost your moral compass?
- Do you identify so much with God’s justice that at times you actually hate the people or groups that you believe are against God’s ways and therefore “enemies?” (In all angry confrontations with his opponents in Scripture, Jesus never hates them, and in fact, commands us to love enemies.)
- It’s the justice of God that shows us what terrible trouble we’re in, that makes us feel the heavy weight of wrongdoing that Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress carries on his back.
- It’s the love of God, through Jesus Christ’s sacrificial death on the cross and his resurrection from the dead, that allows Christian’s heavy burden of sin to be released and fall off his back.
Good Friday and Easter, the cross and resurrection, are pinnacle moments when we see the ineffable justice/love paradox in full operation! Might you ponder God’s justice and love as you prepare for Holy Week?
(Portions of this article are taken from my book on biblical paradox, Paradox Lost: Rediscovering the Mystery of God)
