a. God is what He is — Infinite Purity. He cannot change.
“Who will not fear, O Lord, and glorify Your name? For You alone are holy;
For all the nations will come and worship before You,
For Your righteous acts have been revealed” (Rev 15:4).
Man is created in His image to be like Him in moral purity.
God’s ways with His creatures conform to the purity of His nature.
God can cease to demand purity only when He ceases to be holy — that is, only when He ceases to be God.
Justice and righteousness in God’s dealings with men are the revelation of the inmost nature of God. His righteousness is the perfect agreement between His nature and His acts.
Justice is nothing but the recognition and enforcement of this necessity of His nature. (Strong, 290, 292-93)
“For I am the Lord your God. . . . Be holy, for I am holy” (Lev 11:44).
b. Man, created in God’s image, is governed by Him, the Holy One.
He exercises His holiness toward His creatures and in all His dealings with them.
His righteousness demands conformity to His own moral perfection from all moral beings.
His justice visits non-conformity to that perfection with penal loss or suffering.
His righteousness appears in the form of moral requirements.
We experience His justice in the form of judicial sanctions and actions.
As God cannot but demand of His creatures that they be like him in moral character, so He cannot but enforce the law which He imposes on them.
Penalty is the reaction of God’s holiness against that which is its opposite.
Justice binds God to punish just as much as it binds the sinner to be punished. (Strong 291, 293)
“Your eyes are too pure to approve evil,
And You cannot look on wickedness with favor” (Hab 1:13).
What is well for us is determined by what is right for us. Right is more than a debt to others. It is a debt to oneself.
To arrive at the fullness and satisfaction of who we are and were created to be, we must be like God in moral purity. What is best for us is determined by what is right for us, not vice versa, because righteousness is God’s best for us. We were created for righteousness and holiness. While it is to our greatest advantage to be holy, holiness is not God’s answer to the goal that we be happy and fulfilled. While His holiness serves our advantage, it is so because it is His holiness that is the purpose for which we were created — “. . . that God may be all in all” (1 Cor 15:28).
“For us there is but one God, the Father, from Whom are all things, and we exist for Him; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, by Whom are all things, and we exist through Him” (1 Cor 8:6).
“You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy” (Lev 19:2).
(Spotlight 1, Lesson 10 in Doctrine 101: Learning about God)