Death in the City - chapter eight

Death in the City Ch. 8 – The Justice of God

Schaeffer asks: “Is God really just in judging the man without the Bible?” He undertakes a thought experiment where a newborn baby has a tape recorder placed around his neck. The recorder works only when moral judgments are being made. Throughout the person’s life, every moral act or thought is recorded. After he dies, he stands before God. God then pushes the play button and the person hears his own moral judgments as they were expressed throughout his lifetime. There are thousands of these moral judgments. At the end of them, Schaeffer has God ask, “On the basis of your own words, have you kept these moral standards?”

What can a man say in response to such a question? He can do nothing else but be silent. “God says, ‘I will judge you upon your own moral statements (those judgments upon which you have bound and condemned others), even if they are lower than moral statements should be. Are you guilty or not guilty?’ No one will be able to raise his voice.”

Men will be judged based not on what they did not know but on what they did know. “So all men must say, ‘Indeed I am justly condemned.’”

Schaeffer quotes Luke 12:2-3: “For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known. Therefore whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light; and that which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the housetops.”

So is God just? If He judges based on the standards that we judge others, then His judgment is indeed just. But judgment is not the end when mercy also exists. Schaeffer states: “God has provided a way that no philosophy would have thought of. It is a way that would take us by surprise if we were not just thinking by evangelical habit. There should be everlasting surprise in it. I stand here. I am significant. God must be holy. Is all lost now that I have sinned? The answer is no! God has provided a propitiation, a substitute. There whole of God’s answer rests upon the substitutionary death of Jesus Christ. Because of who He is, His death has infinite value; it can cover every spot; it can remove true moral guilt (and not just the guilt feelings that exist) in the presence of God as the perfect Judge of the universe. Thus three great things fall into place: God’s holiness, man’s significance, and the possibility of man’s redemption. I don’t know about you, but I believe it is time to stand up and sing the doxology. Here is an intellectual answer that nothing else has ever presented!”