Resources - Leadership

February 2005

God of Grace & Mercy
Using the Canons of Dordt to Help Answer the Tough Questions

 

Rev. Geoff van Schie

God of Justice & Mercy??

They have been appearing on a daily basis for about a month now in West Australia’s main newspaper. Passionately questions, answers and sometimes hostile responses have been flying thick and fast as to God’s existence and whether there is an afterlife.

The context is the Boxing Day 2004 earthquake and tsunamis. The question so often heard when engaged in an evangelistic contact is repeatedly thrust before readers in the letters to the editor: “If there is a God then what sort of God is He that he would allow such destruction and death to occur, especially when a majority of those killed were women and children?” It is a good question that the Canons of Dordt in their summary of what Scripture teach helps us to answer.

Beginning with human tragedy people often speak of victims not getting what they deserved. This leads to the view that God is unfair and uncaring in allowing such a thing to happen. Behind this view lies the understanding that God owed the victims something better.

In it’s very first article the Canons of Dordt spell out a terrible truth the world chooses to ignore: "Since all people have sinned in Adam and have come under the sentence of the curse and eternal death..” (Canons 1:1a)

• EVERYONE is a sinner both through our biological and representative tie with Adam and the sins we ourselves commit everyday. When Adam stood before God in the garden he was humanity’s representative so that when he fell into sin and its corruption, so did the whole human race. This is the very same principle by which we say that Australia has won a World Cup even though only a small group of people actually played the game. Scripture proclaims no one is innocent before God. (Romans 5:12).

• Humanity is under God’s CURSE. Having rebelled against God, humanity was exiled from God’s presence and God’s curse fell upon humanity and creation itself: (Romans 8:19-21). All that the world experiences in terms of its hardships is humanity’s fault; we are lying in the bed we have made for ourselves.

• The end result of our rebellion and curse is eternal death. Not only do we suffer here and now in this life but when we die we face the wrath of an angry God who in JUSTICE must punish wrongdoing with the required penalty (Romans 6:23). In Perth a twenty year old man is alleged to have deliberately aimed his car at a father and the child he was pushing in a pram resulting in the child’s injury having been catapulted from the pram. If convicted we can imagine there would be community outrage if he were given a ‘light’ sentence – “justice must be done”.

When it comes to God and our sin we can expect nothing less of God who is perfectly just in His dealings with those who sin. The penalty for rebellion against God, which is what sin is, has always been death (Gen. 1:15-17). So it is that the Canons counter the claims made by those who question God’s existence or His morality when looking upon human suffering: “God would have done no one an injustice if it had been His will to leave the entire human race in sin and under the curse, and to condemn them on account of their sin”.

Evangelism today must begin again with the NEED of the sinner for Jesus. With no understanding of sin and God’s wrath there can be no felt need for Jesus. We must relearn the lessons of the Great Awakening when preachers like George Whitfield and Jonathan Edwards did not hold back from preaching about sinners before an angry God and the need for the only God sent mediator, Jesus Christ. The unbeliever by God’s grace must be brought to the place of Peter’s hearers on the day of Pentecost: "When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?”" (Acts 2:37).

Understanding God’s justice in leaving us in the bed we have made for ourselves we are in a position to understand our only hope is to plead for mercy – that is, for what we do not deserve. The Canons under the heading ‘The Manifestation of God's Love’ in the second article immediately goes on to speak about this mercy: “But this is how God showed His love: He sent His only begotten Son into the world, so that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life”.

The rest of the Canons detail humanity’s responsibility for sin and our cursed world and God’s answer in Christ that reveals His justice and mercy.
 

Back to top
Back to 2005 Index
Return to Resource Leadership Archive Year Selector

All material on this site © 2004 Trowel & Sword

Privacy