10.21.24

This week we continue our series in the Atributes of God. And we will be moving on to look at the justice of God from Matthew 11.20-30.

This passage is a bewilidering mix of attitudes from Jesus. On the one hand, he is incredibly harsh with the relatively good conservative small towns he “curses” here with his “woes”. But on the other, he is incredibly gentle and meek with the social and moral and ethnic outcasts. In the very same passage we find him on ultimate extremes of attitude toward people. And we wonder: which Jesus is the real Jesus?

And what we will see this week is the both are the real Jesus. Without his harsh judment, his love and mercy make no sense - they have no power behind them. And without his love, his justice is nothing more than a temporary bad mood.

Modern day people really struggle with a harsh judging Jesus who can send people to hell - and yet who is loving and merciful and forgiving. And the assumption is that he can’t be both. But the Bible insists that he not only can be both, but that the one establishes the other - they hang and fall as a unit.

Any good parent knows that justice and mercy both flow from the same source: love. To the degree you love someone, your heart is melted with mercy and grace toward them. But that same love rouses itself to severe anger when something threatens those loved ones - even when that something arises from within them. A good parent might feel like applying discipline to wayward children in the Wal-Mart shopping aisles, but their love only reaches to apply it toward their own children.

True love wants the object of our affections to thrive - in every way. And when we see evil threatening them - both from the outside as well as from the inside - our goal (because of love) is to do everything within our power to remove that harmful evil from them.

And so what our passage is teaching us this week is that you can’t have the restful Jesus at the end of the passage without having the judging Jesus at the beginning. They hang together - just like they do with any good parent.