the nature of God

Last Sunday at church we had an interesting lesson on the atonement, and, as usually happens, the whole justice vs. mercy thing was discussed. You know the drill. Mercy cannot rob justice; justice needs to be satisfied, so in order to have both justice and mercy a third party is needed. The thing that bothers me about these lessons is that almost inevitably SOMEONE will say "there are some laws that even God cannot break, and the law of justice is one of them." I hate this. While I understand what they are getting at, I feel like they are approaching it wrong. Saying "God is also subject to the law of justice and he can't break it" very much implies that there is someone else that is more in charge than he is, and that he has to obey their rules. In reality (and this is now The Gospel According to JM), the reason God cannot "break the law of justice" is because of the nature of who he is. God, as a perfect being, is perfectly just (and perfectly a lot of other things too, but justice is what we're talking about right now). Thus, he is preventing himself from being unjust because justice is a fundamental attribute of his personality. God can't break the law of justice because he IS just. It's not that he wishes he could, but can't because there is some greater law that he is subject to. He can no more be unjust than I can change the fact that I'm human. That's just how it is.

hmm... I promise in my head this makes sense. Anyway, maybe that's what everybody actually means when they talk about this and it just took me a while to get it.

Well, back to work I suppose.