Solomon and Christ

He who justifies the wicked and he who condemns the just, both of them alike are an abomination to the Lord. Proverbs 17:15

Citizens are rightly outraged when judges don’t do their job. When one slaps a child molester on the wrist or excuses a murderer on a technicality; when one buckles before a rich playboy or releases a thug who has some powerful organization behind him, everyone recognizes justice has miscarried. We grumble and protest.

Nonetheless there is a widespread expectation that God ought to let all of us (except maybe a few Hitlers and Stalins) off the hook. No matter how we have slighted him for idols, blasphemed him with doubts, perjured ourselves before him, stolen his glory, hated his righteousness, not a few of us think it unfair of him to punish us for what we’ve done. We forget that because he is infinite, any sin against him is infinite and deserves infinite punishment; and we resent the knowledge that he has prepared a place of such punishment.

God is pure and holy. He hates the smallest sin. He cannot justify the wicked. He cannot condemn the just. Yet from the first he had promised to provide salvation for us. That gave rise to a dilemma. How could he be just and yet justify the wicked?

His solution became the most astonishing fact of all history. He himself became a man and took man’s punishment. This was no light thing. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit had enjoyed an unbroken communion of love through all eternity. When Christ became sin for us, that communion was destroyed. God had, in effect, torn himself in two, a spiritual agony that makes the physical misery of the cross pale by comparison.

For a man’s ways are in full view of the LORD, and he examines all his paths. The evil deeds of a wicked man ensnare him; the cords of his sin hold him fast. He will die for lack of discipline, led astray by his own great folly. Proverbs 5:21-23.

Cardinal Wolsey, after a long life of wickedness, which included every kind of self-indulgence, extortion, political maneuvering and worldliness, fell afoul of his master, King Henry VIII. The King summoned him to London to give an accounting.

Knowing that he would most likely be found guilty and executed, the churchman dosed himself so heavily with purges that he died. Before death took him, he said, “Had I but served God as diligently as I have served the king, he would not have given me over in my gray hairs.”

What a contrast Christ Jesus presents to Wolsey. Because of his faultless and disciplined life, which sacrificed everything for obedience, God did not allow him to see corruption, but raised him from the dead, to reign forever and ever. He had no lament of failure as he went to his death.