God: Holy, Loving, and Just

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Salvation starts with God, not with us. The Bible opens with Him: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" (Genesis 1:1). He made human beings in a special way: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them" (Genesis 1:27). We were made to know Him, to love Him, and to live with Him.

God Is Holy

When the prophet Isaiah saw a vision of God, the angels cried: "Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory" (Isaiah 6:3). Holiness means God is perfectly pure and set apart from all evil. "God is light, and in him is no darkness at all" (1 John 1:5).

God Is Loving

The same God is also love. "He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love" (1 John 4:8). "The LORD is gracious, and full of compassion; slow to anger, and of great mercy" (Psalm 145:8). His love is not a feeling that overlooks wrongdoing; it is a love that acts.

God Is Just

Because God is good, He cannot be indifferent to evil. A judge who ignored crime would not be a good judge. The Bible says "it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment" (Hebrews 9:27). Yet it also says that the Lord "is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance" (2 Peter 3:9).

The Heart of the Matter

Here is the tension at the center of the Bible. God is holy and just, so sin must be dealt with. God is loving and merciful, so He wants to forgive. How can both be true? The answer, as we will see, is the cross of Jesus Christ, where Paul says God showed that He is "just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus" (Romans 3:26). C.S. Lewis explored this tension in The Problem of Pain, arguing that a goodness indifferent to evil would not be goodness at all [3].

CHAPTER 3