3 Comments

1. 

   Deanna February 9, 2016 at 7:45 pm Reply

   Since Sunday I have been thinking about how he can be a just God but not a fair God. Can you differentiate the two?

   Also, I have had discussions with a few friends of other religions that believe there are “tiers” of heaven, as though the better you are the greater the reward. Besides the story of the landowner and the worker, are there other passages you can think of that support the idea of a grace that doesn’t include levels?
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     Dr. David Palmer February 10, 2016 at 11:53 am Reply

     Deanna,
     Thank you for these excellent questions!

     There is a significant difference between the Biblical idea of “justice” and the human idea of “fairness.” In the Bible, the justice of God is God’s aim that the world should be upright – that all people should be treated as persons of value, that they should not be exploited and should be able to have what they fundamentally need. So when God acts in justice, God typically acts to raise up the poor and downtrodden and rescue those who are oppressed. A good example of this in the teaching of Jesus is the parable of the unjust judge in Luke 18:1-8, which is about a poor widow who is being exploited but cannot get help from the unjust judge in town. God, in contrast to such a judge, will act in justice to help the needy. As Jesus said, “Will not God grant justice to those who cry to him day and night? Will He delay long in helping them? I tell you, He will quickly grant justice to them.” (Luke 18:7-8). Here the “justice” of God is God’s action to lift up the downtrodden against maltreatment.

     The notion of “fairness” – that God should apportion rewards or punishments to people exactly according to what they deserve – is really not what the Bible is talking about when it says that God is just. While the Biblical concept of justice does include the idea that God will act to thwart evildoers, the aim of God’s justice is primarily to create an upright human society. Thus when we speak, using Biblical language, of the “justice ministries” of the church, we are speaking of our work to help the downtrodden and create a society in which all people have a place of worth.

     Your additional observation that some friends of yours believe in “tiers” of rewards in heaven reflects the fact that most non-Christian religions are built around ideas of fairness. The Biblical idea of grace moves directly against such notions, and the idea permeates the whole ministry of Jesus. When Jesus says that the guilty criminal next to him on the cross, on account of his faith in Jesus, will be with Jesus in paradise (Luke 23:43), or when he says simply, “The Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10), he expresses the principle that even the worst sinners can be received into heaven through grace – which is precisely the idea that people can be given by God what they do not deserve. Nowhere does the Bible present an idea that there are tiers or levels in heaven according to what people have earned. Heaven in the Bible is not a set of rewards but is the blessedness of eternal fellowship with God, and since we are all sinners, we all enter that fellowship only by grace, which we receive through faith. As Paul said, “Since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forth as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith.” (Romans 3:23-25)

     I will be talking further about the saving atonement of Jesus this Sunday!
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       Deanna February 10, 2016 at 8:49 pm Reply

       Thanks! I just can’t comprehend seperation in heaven, or better rewards for better believers! Fairness is something even my four year old is demanding daily, and not everything is fair, no matter how much we wish it is.