I’ve been working on this short series that discusses the holiness of God and the existence of hell. I am looking at what happens when the holy God comes into contact with human sin. Yesterday I showed that God may react to sin with just wrath. Today I want to show that God may also respond with patient mercy. I went to the story of Uzzah to provide a display of God’s just wrath; God’s mercy is displayed in many places in the Bible, but let’s focus on Exodus 32, the familiar story of the golden calf.

God has delivered his people from slavery and Moses has now gone up Mount Sinai to meet with God and receive instruction on how this people must now serve their God. While Moses is there the people grow tired of waiting for him, and decide to make a new god. The whole nation comes together in this plan, bringing all the gold they plundered from Egypt, and with it Aaron makes a golden calf. He sets it up there before all the people and they begin to pay allegiance to it, saying, “This is the God that brought us out of Egypt. This is the one that did all these amazing deeds for us.” They worship this God, they bring their offerings before it and break out in a great celebration.

God sees this and he tells Moses about it, and says to him, “This is the last straw. I am going to wipe them all out and I will then make a nation out of you!” In a fascinating exchange, Moses pleads with God. He brings a case to God and says, “I’ll give you two reasons that shouldn’t do this. First, the Egyptians will say, ‘Ha! Look at this God! He brought them out of our land and then destroyed them all in the wilderness.’ Think what that would do for your reputation.” And second, “Don’t forget the covenant promises you made to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob that their descendants would come into their inheritance. Don’t forget your promises! Don’t forget who you are.”

And in verse 14 we read, “And the Lord relented from the disaster that he had spoken of bringing on his people.” God decided not to bring justice against this nation right now. God could have put every one of them to death and he would have been perfectly just to do that. Instead, he shows mercy.

What is mercy? Mercy is God acting patient. It is God extending patience to those who deserve to be punished. Mercy is not something God owes to us--by definition mercy cannot be owed--but is something God extends in kindness and grace to those who do not deserve it. God does not owe you or anyone else his mercy. In the aftermath of the golden calf God says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy.” Later in Romans we read, “God will have mercy on whomever he wills.” God does not owe anyone mercy, but will give it when it suits his great purposes. The mercy he shows in the face of our sin is holding off the judgment of justice to a later time. 

Yesterday I began a short series on the holiness of God and the existence of hell. In a day when hell is under attack, I want to show that any question of the existence of hell is not at heart a discussion of whether or not a place exists, but a question of the character of God. Yesterday I said that there are two ways God may react to human sin: with just wrath or with patient mercy.

Today I want to show that when the holy God comes into contact with human sin, he may react with just wrath. I want to look at the story of Uzzah (2 Samuel 6:1-7) to help us understand God’s justice. Let me give a bit of context: Many years ago the ark of the covenant had been captured and taken away. God’s people had broken covenant with God and he had given them over to their enemies. When he did that, the Phillistines attacked them, pillaged them, and captured the ark. When they captured the ark it was not just that they were taking away a religious icon. Instead, they were taking away the presence of God from among the Israelites and the Israelites understood that this meant that God had abandoned them and was no longer there in the midst of his people. Their sin was so great, so offensive to God, that God had turned his back on them for a time.

But that time lasted just a few months. After just a few months the ark was returned to the nation of Israel, but not to the tabernacle. Instead it sat for many years in the house of a man named Abinadab. And now, finally, as we come to 2 Samuel, King David has determined that he needs to return the ark to its home in Jerusalem. This is more than moving a box from one place to another. This is returning God to his central place in the hearts and minds of the people. It is a meaningful act that demonstrates the hearts of the people returning to God.

And so they load the ark on a brand new cart and as it goes down the road, there is dancing and singing and rejoicing. The people are celebrating the Lord’s return. God will once again dwell in the midst of his people. This is a great day! And then, suddenly, right in in the middle of all of the celebrating, everything goes silent. A man has fallen down beside the cart. He falls to the ground and is pronounced dead.

What has happened? As the cart is trundling along, the oxen suddenly stumble and for just a moment it seems like the ark might tip over. A man named Uzzah sees this happening. He puts his hand out to steady the ark, to keep it from falling to the mud. And in the instant he touches that ark, God strikes him dead.

Many years before God had commanded that no one was to touch the ark, ever. He had given very clear rules about how the ark was to be transported and taken care of. There was a whole family in Israel, the sons of Kohath, who were dedicated to this one task of transporting the ark and the other holy objects. Uzzah was from this family and the very first thing he would have learned about his task was this: Do not touch. You aren’t ever to touch it and you aren’t to put it on a cart. Uzzah and Abinadab and David know this. They are without excuse.

The ark was a holy object. It was the place of his presence, an earthly representation of his holiness, that no one was ever to touch. By reaching out his hand and touching the ark, Uzzah was acting as if God was not holy at all, as if he and God were peers. He was treating God with contempt.

One of the great questions that faces the church today concerns the existence and the nature of hell. Hell is under attack from outside the visible church and from inside. The question each one of us must answer is this: Does hell exist? Is it, as Christians have long claimed, a place of eternal, conscious punishment, a real place where real people will go for real time and face the real wrath of a real God?

Such a question may be a little bit misleading. To ask whether hell exists is not really a question about a place, like when you ask, “Does the city of Philadelphia actually exist?” or “Was there really a city called Jericho?” It is not a question of world geography, but of Divine character. The question of hell is first and foremost a question about the character of God. Here’s the thing: If there is a hell, we know that it cannot exist outside of the knowledge and the will of God. If God is who he says he is, if he really is all-knowing and all-powerful, then people cannot be there outside of his decree. And so any question about the existence of hell is really a question about God himself.

In a brief series of articles, I want to explore the relationship of God’s holiness to human sin and ask this question: What happens when human sin collides with God’s holiness? I will need to presuppose that you have some understanding of God’s holiness and that you know that God’s holiness is one of his most fundamental attributes. God’s holiness is his quality of being set apart, of being completely unlike anything or anyone else. His holiness pervades all he is and all he does. There is a sense in which his holiness modifies his other attributes, so that his love is a holy love and his justice is a holy justice.

In some way all sin is a violation of the holiness of God. God tells us, “Be holy as I am holy.” We are created in the image of the holy God; we are created as holy beings. Yet with every sin we choose unholiness in place of holiness, we choose our way instead of God’s way. With every sin we make light of God’s holiness, we make light of the fact that we are made in God’s image and are told to be like him. Every sin is a statement to God that says, “I choose not to be holy; I choose not to act in your image; I choose my way instead of your way!”

So what is the holy way for the holy God to act in the face of such sin? The Bible shows us that God may respond in two ways--he responds in patient mercy or he responds in just wrath.

In this series I want to go to the Bible to show that we worship a God of mercy and of wrath—a God who is praiseworthy for his mercy and his wrath. In fact, the only God who is worthy of our worship is the God who holds out not only the hope of heaven but also the horror of hell.

Here is how I will divide this up. First we will see that at times the holy God reacts to our sin with just wrath. Then we will see that at times the holy God reacts to our sin with patient mercy. Then, to wrap things up, we will look to the place where wrath and mercy meet. What we will see as we take a deep look at the character of God as it comes into contact with sin is that there is an inexorable connection between God’s holiness and the existence of hell. We will see that hell exists because God is holy—that hell must exist because God must be holy.

That will do by way of introduction. Stay tuned for part two of this series tomorrow.

There are few issues of theology that confuse me more than issues related to social justice. Those who advocate Christian humanitarianism, those who tell Christians that they are responsible before God to fight injustice, to feed the hungry, to free the oppressed, are able to provide a compelling case and they are able to tap into a deep vein of guilt. It is difficult to hear of poor and hungry children and not feel that the primary mission of Christians must be to feed such people. And yet when we look around we see that ministries or organizations that make such a task their primary calling so quickly fade into theological obscurity. The social gospel so often trumps the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Into the fray step Christian Buckley and Ryan Dobson with their book Humanitarian Jesus: Social Justice and the Cross. They want to find that sweet spot between justice and gospel, that place where we can hold tightly to the gospel of Jesus Christ while still emphasizing the importance of social action.

The longer I live and the longer I walk through this Christian life, the more I come to understand what a gift it is to see the world through a Christian lens—through a Christian worldview. A worldview is simply the way we look at the world and the way we understand how life works. The predominant worldview in our day and our society is foundationally Darwinian. Built around an evolutionary framework, it teaches that we are all the result of an evolutionary process that allowed us, through chance and mutation, to evolve above the slime. We’ve come from nothing and have no idea where we’re going. We are in process—not the deliberate creation of a loving craftsman, but merely one result of chance mutations. This is, at heart, a hopeless worldview. It’s an awful worldview, really. I am thankful that, in granting me new life, God saved me from it.

For Christmas my wife gave me Ken Burns’ excellent documentary The War (a great series if you’re at all a World War II enthusiast) and, obviously, the series deals in part with the Holocaust. No matter how many times a person sees images of Jewish people being herded into train cars and sees German soldiers standing guard over emaciated, dying children, he cannot help but be affected. I have read about the war countless times and spent much of my time in college studying it. But those pictures still hit hard; they still hurt. A though that always occurs to me is this: those soldiers and I are not so different. I somehow like to think that, as part of a rational, ordered society like this one, we have developed far beyond such barbarity. Yet it was only sixty years ago and in a society not a lot unlike this one that men, who at any other time could have been authors and web designers, were happily shooting Jewish men, women and children and shamelessly plundering their homes. What happened? How did men sink so low?

As I watch this documentary and as I see Adolph Hitler, who for so many represents pure evil incarnate, I thank God that there is such a thing as justice. It would be easy to think that Hitler largely escaped justice. A person who utterly dominated and destroyed a nation while setting the world on fire, Hitler lived a life that was difficult in some ways, I suppose. But for many years he led Germany and was able to do nearly whatever he wanted. He was the cause of untold death and suffering. Not only did he orchestrate the systematic deaths of millions of Jews, but his actions also led to the deaths of millions (and probably tens of millions) of people from around the world as nations rallied to the cause of freedom and fought to curtail his power. Eventually, when his kingdom crumbled, he took his own life, suffering nothing as ended his life on his own terms. Justice was not served. It hardly seems that the self-inflicted death of an increasingly crazed and decrepit old man can serve as justice for so much death, destruction and suffering.

Without a Christian worldview, we would have no hope that justice would or could be served. If we deny that existence of God, or at least deny the existence of an active, present God, we deny that justice will ever be served to this man or to any other. What a distressing, depressing thought it would be that a man could live a life in which he caused so much death and then escape any meaningful consequences.

But when we look at the world through a biblical worldview, we see that justice will be served. Indeed, it must be served. And we want it to be served. Somehow God has built into us the desire to see justice served. This may be a natural desire some men suppress, but always it is there. We know that evil must be punished. We know that those who commit evil must be punished. Justice is “the quality of being just or fair;” it is “judgment involved in the determination of rights and the assignment of rewards and punishments.” But it is more. A Christian definition of justice goes further. Justice is the due reward or punishment for an act. God must punish evil. We know this. We tremble at this thought. Or we ought to.

God must punish evil. When we come to know Jesus Christ, we are shocked at the reality that He willingly paid the penalty for the sins of all who would believe in Him. When I believed in Him I saw that He suffered for me. I deserve to be punished for all those things I’ve done to forsake Him. But Jesus, through His great mercy, accepted this punishment on my behalf.

But those who do not turn to Him must be punished for their own sin. And it is here that we see how justice will be served. The sin of even a man as blatantly evil as Adolph Hitler differs from mine only in degree. He and I are both sinners through and through. We are both sinners in thought, word and deed. But, praise be to God, He has extended grace to restrain me from doing all of the evil I’d otherwise so love to do. And He has accepted Jesus’ work on the cross on my behalf. Justice has already been served on my behalf. But for those who do not turn to Christ, justice is still in the future. Justice hovers just over the horizon.

We do not look forward to the punishment of another person with a sick glee. We do not rejoice in what they must suffer. But we do look forward to the fact that justice will finally be served. God will not and cannot allow sin to be unpunished. And while we are humbled by the grace that is ours through Christ, we still thank God that there will be justice. We do not have unlimited license to sin knowing that death allows us to escape just punishment. Instead we see that death is just the beginning, just the entrance, to the courtroom where justice will be served.