I’ve been thinking about the tension between justice and forgiveness as I’ve been reading through the Old Testament prophets.

We love forgiveness when it comes to our relationship with God. We love that He forgives our mistakes, our mess, and that He restores us. We also love when other people forgive us for our mistakes. However, we don’t love forgiveness when we are the one who has to forgive. That feels unfair and in this moments we prefer to show justice more than we want to offer forgiveness.

We seem to have opposing desires to forgiveness and justice. We’ve just said that we love to receive forgiveness but don’t like to give it. However, when it comes to justice we like to give it but not receive it. We don’t love it when others serve it to us, even when we know we deserve it. We 100% don’t love it when God deals with us justly either.

We love that He forgives us but we don’t like that we have to do it.

We love that we get to do justice but we don’t want God to.

Both justice and forgiveness are Kingdom values. We can’t expect God to administer one and not the other, and therefore we can’t live one of those values and ignore the other. If our lives are marked by justice and not forgiveness we will lack compassion. it they are marked by forgiveness and not justice we will lack conviction.

This of course is the message of the cross. Our sin needed to be dealt with. We were guilty and had violated our covenant relationship with God. Justice needed to be done. But how God dealt with what we deserved was by sending Jesus, His son, who became the one who received the punishment so we could experience forgiveness.

What might this truth look like in our lives today?