The Inevitability of Justice

In the legal sphere, distributive justice "is that which should govern the distribution of rewards and punishments. It assigns to each the rewards which his personal merit or service deserve, or the proper punishment for his crimes."5 Given that the entire human race is in a fallen condition, and that each individual has committed acts and omissions which are contrary to God’s Law, we are all deserving of his just punishment, eternal death. As the seventeenth century lawyer Hugo Grotius put it, the right of inflicting punishment is the prerogative of the ruler, "for example, of a father in a family, of a king in a state, of God in the universe."6

Just as a surgeon of competence and character can have no mercy in dealing with a cancerous tumor which threatens the life and well being of his patient, a holy God can brook no compromise with evil in the world he originally designed to be good. It is utterly inconceivable that he could tolerate evil in any form or allow it to advance with impunity in his universe. Thus he justly decreed that "the soul that sins will surely die" and "the wages of sin is death."7 Just as the punishment of the state will fall upon those who have been convicted of heinous crimes, the wrath of God will fall upon those who sinned against him. Although some offenders may escape the punishment of the state because of various imperfections in the criminal justice system, there is no such escape from the wrath of God.