God is Fair

Jury duty. 

There are not a lot of us who sign up for it willingly. In fact, it's a running joke through our culture about all the ways we try to get out of having to actually sit on a jury. That's interesting, considering most of us have an opinion about nearly everything and everyone - just look at social media if you don't believe me.

But something about actually sitting on a jury and being responsible for someone else's life is a whole different story. 

We understand that there are more factors in justice than all of our posturing would allow us. It's easy to sit at home and say, "He's obviously guilty." It's a lot harder to sit in a courtroom, listen to the extenuating circumstances, hear the testimony on how something came to happen, look a broken man in the face, and know that your same judgment - guilty - bears huge consequences on his life. 

We've begun asking questions in our living rooms about the things we may not know, the details we may not be privy to as simply private citizens. Was she abused? Does he have post-traumatic stress? Is there a history of bullying? What about mental illness? 

We know that "justice," however we want to define it, is never as black-and-white as we want to think that it is. The Bible says an eye for an eye, and we often quote it on this, but it also preaches a thing called grace, and that's important, too. 

The reason most of us don't want to sit on juries, no matter what reasons we actually articulate, is that we realize we are poor arbiters of justice. There are too many shades of grey for us to wrestle with, and we'd rather be at home, where things are more black and white. (Or at least, they seem that way.)

Praise be to the Lord, then, that we are never the arbiters of final justice. Even if we were to sit on a death penalty case and condemn a man to die, it would still be God who would ultimately judge that man - just as He will ultimately judge every single one of us. 

And God...is a perfect judge. 

God is a judge who can take all things into account and weigh them properly, balancing them out on the arms of the Cross. He does not neglect our guilt, but He puts it in its proper perspective, reflects on it in its proper grace. 

We need not cry about extenuating circumstances, for God knows them all already. He knew them the moment that Eve took the fruit off the tree. He knew them when His Son sweat drops of blood in the garden. He knew them with every strike of the nails that pierced through His hands. 

God is the arbiter of perfect justice. And when He delivers His verdict, it is so true and so saturated with grace and love and goodness, that the whole earth rejoices in song and breaks out in applause (Psalm 98). 

Let the Lord judge, for He judges rightly. 

Even when this thing we call justice is not, as we would like it to be, so black and white.