The self-affirming purity of God demands a like purity in those who have been made in his image. As God wills and maintains his own moral excellence, so all creatures must will and maintain the moral excellence of God. There can be only one centre in the solar system,—the sun is its own centre and the centre for all the planets also. So God's purity is the object of his own will,—it must be the object of all the wills of all his creatures also. Bixby, Crisis in Morals, 282—“It is not rational or safe for the hand to separate itself from the heart. This is a universe, and God is the heart of the great system. Altruism is not the result of society, but society is the result of altruism. It begins in creatures far below man. The animals which know how to combine have the greatest chance of survival. The unsociable animal dies out. The most perfect organism is the most sociable. Right is the debt which the part owes to the whole.”This seems to us but a partial expression of the truth. Right is more than a debt to others,—it is a debt to one's self, and the self-affirming, self-preserving, self-respecting element constitutes the limit and standard of all outgoing activity. The sentiment of loyalty is largely a reverence for this principle of order and stability in government. Ps. 145:5—“Of the glorious majesty of thine honor, And of thy wondrous works, will I meditate”; 97:2—“Clouds and darkness are round about him: Righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne.”
John Milton, Eikonoklastes: “Truth and justice are all one; for truth is but justice in our knowledge, and justice is but truth in our practice.... For truth is properly no more than contemplation, and her utmost efficiency is but teaching; but justice in her very essence is all strength and activity, and hath a sword put into her hand to use against all violence and oppression on the earth. She it is who accepts no person, and exempts none from the severity of her stroke.” A. J. Balfour, Foundations of Belief, 326—“Even the poet has not dared to represent Jupiter torturing Prometheus without the dim figure of Avenging Fate waiting silently in the background.... Evolution working out a nobler and nobler justice is proof that God is just. Here is ‘preferential action’.” S. S. Times, June 9, 1900—“The natural man is born with a wrong personal astronomy. Man should give up the conceit of being the centre of all things. He should accept the Copernican theory, and content himself with a place on the edge of things—the place he has always really had. We all laugh at John Jasper and his thesis that ‘the sun do move.’ The Copernican theory is leaking down into human relations, as appears from the current phrase: ‘There are others’.”
(c) Neither justice nor righteousness, therefore, is a matter of arbitrary will. They are revelations of the inmost nature of God, the one in the form of moral requirement, the other in the form of judicial sanction. As [pg 293] God cannot but demand of his creatures that they be like him in moral character, so he cannot but enforce the law which he imposes upon them. Justice just as much binds God to punish as it binds the sinner to be punished.
All arbitrariness is excluded here. God is what he is—infinite purity. He cannot change. If creatures are to attain the end of their being, they must be like God in moral purity. Justice is nothing but the recognition and enforcement of this natural necessity. Law is only the transcript of God's nature. Justice does not make law,—it only reveals law. Penalty is only the reaction of God's holiness against that which is its opposite. Since righteousness and justice are only legislative and retributive holiness, God can cease to demand purity and to punish sin only when he ceases to be holy, that is, only when he ceases to be God. “Judex damnatur cum nocens absolvitur.”
Simon, Reconciliation, 141—“To claim the performance of duty is as truly obligatory as it is obligatory to perform the duty which is prescribed.” E. H. Johnson, Systematic Theology, 84—“Benevolence intends what is well for the creature; justice insists on what is fit. But the well-for-us and the fit-for-us precisely coincide. The only thing that is well for us is our normal employment and development; but to provide for this is precisely what is fitting and therefore due to us. In the divine nature the distinction between justice and benevolence is one of form.” We criticize this utterance as not sufficiently taking into account the nature of the right. The right is not merely the fit. Fitness is only general adaptation which may have in it no ethical element, whereas right is solely and exclusively ethical. The right therefore regulates the fit and constitutes its standard. The well-for-us is to be determined by the right-for-us, but not vice versa. George W. Northrup: “God is not bound to bestow the same endowments upon creatures, nor to keep all in a state of holiness forever, nor to redeem the fallen, nor to secure the greatest happiness of the universe. But he is bound to purpose and to do what his absolute holiness requires. He has no attribute, no will, no sovereignty, above this law of his being. He cannot lie, he cannot deny himself, he cannot look upon sin with complacency, he cannot acquit the guilty without an atonement.”
(d) Neither justice nor righteousness bestows rewards. This follows from the fact that obedience is due to God, instead of being optional or a gratuity. No creature can claim anything for his obedience. If God rewards, he rewards in virtue of his goodness and faithfulness, not in virtue of his justice or his righteousness. What the creature cannot claim, however, Christ can claim, and the rewards which are goodness to the creature are righteousness to Christ. God rewards Christ's work for us and in us.
Bruch, Eigenschaftslehre, 280-282, and John Austin, Province of Jurisprudence, 1:88-93, 220-223, both deny, and rightly deny, that justice bestows rewards. Justice simply punishes infractions of law. In Mat. 25:34—“inherit the kingdom”—inheritance implies no merit; 46—the wicked are adjudged to eternal punishment; the righteous, not to eternal reward, but to eternal life. Luke 17:7-10—“when ye shall have done all the things that are commanded you, say, We are unprofitable servants; we have done that which it was our duty to do.” Rom. 6:23—punishment is the “wages of sin”: but salvation is “the gift of God”; 2:6—God rewards, not on account of man's work but “according to his works.” Reward is thus seen to be in Scripture a matter of grace to the creature; only to the Christ who works for us in atonement, and in us in regeneration and sanctification, is reward a matter of debt (see also John 6:27 and 2 John 8). Martineau, Types, 2:86, 244, 249—“Merit is toward man; virtue toward God.”
All mere service is unprofitable, because it furnishes only an equivalent to duty, and there is no margin. Works of supererogation are impossible, because our all is due to God. He would have us rise into the region of friendship, realize that he has been treating us not as Master but as Father, enter into a relation of uncalculating love. With this proviso that rewards are matters of grace, not of debt, we may assent to the maxim of Solon: “A republic walks upon two feet—just punishment for the unworthy and due reward for the worthy.” George Harris, Moral Evolution, 139—“Love [pg 294]seeks righteousness, and is satisfied with nothing other than that.” But when Harris adopts the words of the poet: “The very wrath from pity grew, From love of men the hate of wrong,” he seems to us virtually to deny that God hates evil for any other reason than because of its utilitarian disadvantages, and to imply that good has no independent existence in his nature. Bowne, Ethics, 171—“Merit is desert of reward, or better, desert of moral approval.” Tennyson: “For merit lives from man to man, And not from man, O Lord, to thee.” Baxter: “Desert is written over the gate of hell; but over the gate of heaven only, The Gift of God.”
(e) Justice in God, as the revelation of his holiness, is devoid of all passion or caprice. There is in God no selfish anger. The penalties he inflicts upon transgression are not vindictive but vindicative. They express the revulsion of God's nature from moral evil, the judicial indignation of purity against impurity, the self-assertion of infinite holiness against its antagonist and would-be destroyer. But because its decisions are calm, they are irreversible.
Anger, within certain limits, is a duty of man. Ps. 97:10—“ye that love Jehovah, hate evil”; Eph. 4:28—“Be ye angry, and sin not.” The calm indignation of the judge, who pronounces sentence with tears, is the true image of the holy anger of God against sin. Weber, Zorn Gottes, 28, makes wrath only the jealousy of love. It is more truly the jealousy of holiness. Prof. W. A. Stevens, Com. on 1 Thess. 2:10—“Holily and righteously are terms that describe the same conduct in two aspects; the former, as conformed to God's character in itself; the latter, as conformed to his law; both are positive.” Lillie, on 2 Thess. 1:6—“Judgment is ‘a righteous thing with God.’ Divine justice requires it for its own satisfaction.” See Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:175-178, 365-385; Trench, Syn. N. T., 1:180, 181.