Justice of God
“Righteousness and justice are the foundation of your throne.”
Definition
The justice of God is his perfection as a righteous judge who distributes to every creature exactly what is due: reward for obedience, punishment for sin. Barrett insists this is not an arbitrary policy God happens to follow but who he is: “justice is not merely a consequence of God’s decisions or his will; it is an essential property of God himself (Ps. 5:4). If he is righteous by nature and hates sin as the one who is intrinsically and absolutely holy, then he must punish iniquity.” Barrett distinguishes two components of this justice: remunerative justice, by which God rewards obedience out of covenantal love and grace, and retributive justice, by which he repays sin with the penalty it deserves, stemming from his holiness and righteousness in the form of divine wrath.1
Confessional Definition
The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession ties God’s justice directly to the atonement: Christ “by his perfect obedience and sacrifice of himself… hath fully satisfied the justice of God, procured reconciliation, and purchased an everlasting inheritance in the kingdom of heaven, for all those whom the Father hath given unto Him.”2 God’s justice is not a formality bypassed by grace but a real demand that had to be met.
Biblical Basis
Barrett presses the point with an ordinary moral intuition: a society where the guilty are simply released “is a society that allows the wicked to rise up and crush the innocent,” and no one who has actually suffered at a criminal’s hands would call that justice. God himself cannot be less just than this: “vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord” (Rom. 12:19), and his eyes “are too pure to look at evil” (Hab. 1:13). This is why the cross, not a bare pardon, is the gospel’s answer to sin: “he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities… and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isa. 53:5-6). Barrett draws the conclusion directly: “holiness, and the justice it brings, is not bypassed by God; rather, the law’s penalty is satisfied. Justice is served.” Paul names this “propitiation”: God “put forward” Christ “as a propitiation by his blood… to show God’s righteousness… so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus” (Rom. 3:25-26) — God remains just precisely by punishing sin in Christ rather than overlooking it.1