Is God fair?

The common misunderstanding exposed by this question arises from a poor appreciation of scripture on the part of many teachers. Most people just haven't read what the Bible actually says and either base their theology on a few scriptures plucked out of context or have simply swallowed teachings regurgitated by teachers who themselves swallowed other teachers' teachings which they then taught as their own.

In Genesis 1:26, God gave mankind dominion on this earth – authority to make decisions as he pleased. Unfortunately, Adam (one of the Hebrew words which mean 'man') chose to use that freedom to make the wrong choice and disobey the only law then in existence: ‘And Yahweh God commanded the man, saying, "You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die." (Genesis 2:16-17) Most people seem to stop right there and don't bother to connect or cross-reference what else the Bible has to reveal about this issue, which is actually quite a lot. But if you care to check out the New Testament you discover that the only thing that God told man not to do was to avoid what Paul later calls 'the law of sin and death' (Romans 8:2). This is the system of self-justification by performance. God's preferred system however, has always been 'grace' – his 'undeserved and unmerited favour', because God is merciful and his heart is ever to forgive. However, once Adam made his choice he and every descendant since was lumbered with the consequences, which is basically: 'Do good, get good. Do bad, get beat'. It wasn't God's choice but ours.

God's solution was extravagant, elaborate and very, very clever: he provided a Saviour to do what man couldn't do for himself – his own Son, Yeshua, whose name means 'Yah is Salvation', or simply 'Saviour'. Most Christians can quote John 3:16 off by heart but many miss the crux of verses 17 & 18, where Jesus says he didn't come to condemn the world but to save it, because it was already condemned. That condition of pre-existing condemnation into which we are all born is called 'original sin'. But by being conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of a virgin, Jesus was untainted by Adam’s fall and remained perfect throughout his life, which is why the Bible calls him ‘the Last Adam’ (1 Corinthians 15:45).

It is God's perfect, holy and righteous law that 'the wages of sin is death' (Romans 6:23), and 'the soul that sins shall die' (Ezekiel 18:4 & 20). But the corollary of this is that death cannot legally hold an innocent man. So God contrived that his Son Jesus would die in our place to pay for our sins while we would be imputed with his righteousness (2 Corinthians 5:21): ‘For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.’ Thus, when Jesus died all of God's wrath was poured out spent on our sins which were thereby paid for, but as Jesus had never actually committed them he had to be resurrected. He was not the soul that sinned. In a sense, he acted as a kind of divine bin man, taking our sins to the incinerator and leaving them there. So are we guilty again, then? No. It's too late for the Law to reclaim the believer, because we are now under the very grace that Adam relinquished in Eden, and we are now therefore untouchable by the Law (Romans 8:1). And that's why Jesus is the only Way of Salvation and also why rejection of him is so fatal. No-one goes to hell because they committed any particular sin, except that of rejecting God's lifeline of Jesus' sacrifice on their behalf. But why suffer an eternity of punishment for 70-years of sin? Because in Genesis God created man as 'spirit, soul and body', giving him authority in this temporal realm. When we die our authority and with it our ability to choose expires and, because we can no longer exercise it, we cannot choose God's Salvation offered through Jesus. The time for making that choice is now, because sin, and our ability to choose the condemnation of the Law or the free forgiveness of Grace, belongs to time, the consequence of which befalls us in eternity.

In one way it's extremely fair because it's what we choose. In another way it’s extremely unfair because condemnation is all we deserve. But Grace is not about the justice we deserve but about the forgiveness we don’t.

If you want to study some of these themes in a bit more detail, I would refer you to my other hubs: ‘How Salvation Works’ and ‘How the New Covenant Works’.