Rediscovering the Justice of God's Love
- we are dealing with the justice of His love.
- We must not posit a contrast between divine justice and divine love.
- God’s justice never comes to us with genuine heart-crushing effect except when we see it as the just claim of His love.
- Only when we see it in this way does it bind us to an eternal judgment.
- for only faith that has returned to God’s love in Christ is able to see the justice of that
love.
Thus nothing has really been taken away from the terror of God’s justice.
- However, there is now a being tied to and pulled by His love
- while at the same time a being consumed in our sinful nature by His justice.
- That is also what Scripture says when it reveals to us that our God is a consuming fire.
- when by faith we have also learned to accept that He is our God.
- At the moment we realize we have to deal with the justice of His love,
- it begins to crush and devastate us in spirit.
When faith in God through Christ leads us,
- we are prepared to have God’s Word instruct and correct us.
But does not God do man an injustice by requiring in His law what man cannot do?
- No, for God so created man that he was able to do it.
- But man, at the instigation of the devil, in deliberate disobedience robbed himself and all his descendants of these gifts.
- Certainly not.
- He is terribly displeased with our original sin as well as our actual sins.
- Therefore He will punish them by a just judgment both now and eternally as He has declared:
- Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the book of the law, and do them (Galatians 3: 10).
The Heidelberg Catechism Lord's Day 4
Adapted Excerpt from THE TRUE FAITH S. G. De Graaf Translation by Richard Stienstra
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