What does it mean that God is just?

Who is just? God. Here there is an all-important principle: the righteousness of God means, first of all, His own righteousness — that He is just. It is not man's, or even yet some other's positive righteousness, made up of a quantity of legal merit, put upon him. The righteousness spoken of is God's being righteous ("just" is the same word) and yet so declared that He can justify the most dreadful sinners.

Righteousness has a double meaning. I am righteous, say, in rewarding or forgiving — that this supposes an adequate claim which makes it righteous that I should do so — merit of some kind. If I have promised anything, or anything be morally due, to righteousness, I am righteous in giving it. Thus that God should be righteous in forgiving and justifying, there must be an adequate moral motive for his doing so. In the sinner, clearly, there was not. In the blood of Christ there was.

God cannot do anything to make justification more perfect than it is. Any attempt of man to add to it, would be like trying to add light to the sun. Love brought Christ down, and righteousness raised Him up. The term, "the righteousness of God," means that God is just in justifying by the faith of Christ... The "righteousness of God" is the obligation, as it were, to bless me in Christ if I look to Him for salvation.

Here, then, we have the righteousness of God developed in the simplest and clearest way. It means that God is just, and justifies in virtue of Christ. He is just, because sin has been met in the cross: sin has been judged of God; it has been suffered and atoned for by Christ. More than that: the Lord Jesus has so magnified God, and so glorified His character, that there is a positive debt now on the other side. Instead of the obligation being, as it was, altogether on man's side... God now has interposed, and, having been so magnified in the man Christ Jesus in His death, He is now positively just when He justifies the soul that believes in Jesus.

When a person begins to find that it is not by comparing himself with others that he is to judge, but by comparing himself with God, when his conscience begins to be awakened to think of sin as before God, then indeed he finds himself guilty and ruined... And if we only heard that God was just, there could be no hope. But He is "a just God and a Saviour."

She was standing before One who could say, "Without sin," and who therefore could cast the stone... What would He say? Man had not dared to cast the stone; now what would God do? "Neither do I condemn thee; go, and sin no more." Such is still the gracious message to the ruined sinner, pronounced by the very Judge Himself.

He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins; for we have forgiveness through the blood. How could God in righteousness condemn our sins in the person of His own Son, and afterwards condemn them on us? Impossible. The idea would accuse God of injustice. But, blessed be His name, in virtue of the atoning work He justifies us... Instead of God condemning us, He now justifies us, and declares that He is "just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus."

"If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from every unrighteousness." If we have been betrayed into sin, what do we do then? It is so at conversion; it remains so throughout when the need arises. For our God cannot bear sins. We do not hide them; we confess them to God... He is faithful and righteous to forgive.

"If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." The proper path for a divinely-restored soul, is "the path of righteousness." In other words, having tasted divine grace, we walk in righteousness... The grace that forgives us our sins, cleanses us from all unrighteousness. Those things must never be separated.