Deuteronomy 32:4
He is the Rock, his works are perfect, and all his ways are just. A faithful God who does no wrong, upright and just is he. (NIV)

After graduating from law school, I landed a pretty decent government job. It wasn’t my dream job, but at the time, we weren’t that far removed from the ‘08 recession, and there was a gluttony of attorneys in the market. With a mountain of student loan payments on the horizon, I was just happy to have an income. Within a couple of weeks of the job offer, I made the 8-hour move from Lexington to Memphis. I rented a patio home in the burbs, started attending a local church, and settled into my new job with my office building overlooking the mighty Mississippi. However, it wasn’t long before I grew discontent with my new career, and I soon began the job hunt again. By the time I hit my thirties, I considered myself to be somewhat skilled at the interview process. However, I can remember one interview question that made me ponder more than usual. I was asked, “What makes you angry?” I had to give myself pause to reflect. 

When looking back over the years, I realized that what made me angry was… injustice. While in my second year of law school, I worked as an extern for the Kentucky Innocence Project, an organization that works to exonerate wrongly convicted people. There were plenty of times when life was unfair to me, but nothing could compare to the injustice done to the clients at the Innocence Project. All of these men and women were robbed of their freedom and unfairly imprisoned. The purpose of the Innocence Project is to restore these people to a right position, to restore them as they should be. In the same way, God’s justice is restorative.

Our God is a just and righteous God (Psalm 11:7). We see evidence of this from the very beginning. In Genesis 17-18, we read of God’s covenant with Abraham, where God promises to bless him and his family for generations to come, with the hope that Abraham and his family line would “keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice” (18:19 ESV). But God also promised that through Abraham’s lineage, “all the nations of the earth shall be blessed” (18:18). Hundreds of years later, Jesus became the ultimate fulfillment of that promise, and the embodiment of God’s restorative justice, by bringing long-awaited redemption to all people. God showed us His standard of righteousness through Christ’s perfect, sinless life. Though we can never meet that standard and deserve death for our sins, God’s unbiased justice, as seen in the sacrifice of His only Son for the salvation of all sinners, restores us to the righteousness of Christ.

Monday’s Reflection

Read Proverbs 28:5. Have you ever found yourself at a point where your understanding of justice differed from God’s standard? Why is God’s justice more fair than any standard we could ever set?