Many people have a question about why God has to punish sin; if He loves us, can’t he just forgive us and accept us as we are? (Perhaps a good, short response to such ones would be to ask them, Then should He just forgive Adolph Hitler?)

To do this, however, would be to ask God to deny His very nature, and He simply can’t do that. The apostle tells us,

He cannot deny Himself.
— 2 Timothy 2:13

God is indeed loving—in fact, He is loving far, far beyond anything we could ever imagine—but He is also infinitely holy. Because He loves us, He surely desires to forgive us, but He cannot do so in a way that violates His holiness; if He were to do that, He would be violating His own nature. In fact, if we ask God to forgive our sins without punishing them, we are not asking Him to be merciful, we are asking Him to be unrighteous, and that is something He simply cannot do.

(This, it should be noted, is one of the basic problems with the theology of Islam; it simply has no way to explain how a holy God could agree to not punish sin.)

I remember reading, in one of A.W. Tozer’s books about God, that the statement “God is One,” as we are told in the books of Moses (Deut. 6:5), includes the thought that all of God’s attributes are always in perfect harmony with each other; He will never set aside the demands of one to satisfy the demands of another.

So while God, because He loves us, does indeed desire to forgive us, He must do so in a way that is absolutely holy and righteous. And that is why Jesus had to die on the cross; because He paid the price there for our sins before God, God can now forgive us in a righteous way and so receive us back to Himself.

And, moreover, that is the only way, after all God’s work is finally complete, and the fallen, old creation has been done away, that full peace and harmony can be restored in the new heaven and new earth for eternity. That is, because it will be restored in a way that is fully righteous and fully according to God’s holiness, there will be no offenses left to deal with; all will be perfect peace for those who dwell there.

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—  15 August 2024 —