JUSTICE

                                   JUSTICE

    REMARKS OF: Derek Flood, therebeagod.com/Hell Paper.pdf

So how can we understand justice through the eyes of grace? A good starting point is to realize that the commonly held wisdom that God's justice is different than ours is simply not true. God has ingrained us with a fundamental understanding of justice.

C.S. Lewis once said that we live in “a universe that contains much that is obviously bad and apparently meaningless, but containing creatures like ourselves who know that it is bad and meaningless.”

What he was getting at is that the only reason we recognize injustice at all, is that we have been made with a God-inherited need for justice, just like God has given all of us an inborn need for love and meaning.

[The reason] you are outraged at injustice, [the reason] you ask “why!” [is because] these are primarily God’s questions inside of you. The real question is: Why did God want me to ask this question? If this is from God, then how can I channel this outrage positively working together with love rather than against Him?

Our reactions to these questions - to want revenge, or to run away from God - may be misplaced, but the fundamental understanding and need for a world where things are right and whole and just is not in conflict with God, but from God.

It is said that God cannot be where sin is. But we see in Christ that this is exactly where he was. He walks through the streets, filled with death and loneliness, and kneels beside the empty faces. It is sin that cannot be where God is. It is our dysfunction, our hypocrisy and hurt that can't remain when we are with Him.

Without God there is no love, there is no justice. Everything you understand about what these two things mean, you have because God has revealed these truths to you, because he has planted these things in your heart. The conflict between our understanding of justice and God's is simply not there. Still it seems that it is by what we read in the Bible. We will be going over many of these things now, trying to make sense of them throughout the rest of this paper, but we now have a starting point: God is love, God is just.

These are theological absolutes.

 To read the 14 page paper go to Derek Flood's above noted pdf.