From Pastor's Desk for August 2025

Dear Lighthouse Church:

The focus of this letter is sin and how God deals with it. His actions involve justice, wrath, and mercy, which are related to God’s lordship as our judge. God’s desire for us is our salvation through obedience to him. He has revealed the law to us and we are to follow it. God will deal with us justly, but he may be a God of wrath or of mercy. 

In Genesis, God’s justice was imposed upon Adam and Eve for their disobedience of his instruction that they not eat from the tree of knowledge. When they did so they were banished from Eden and were subject to death. The consequence of their actions was to be barred from paradise, which is a just result. But how else may we understand the justice of God as revealed in Scripture?

Deuteronomy 32:4 (NIV) states: “He is the Rock, his works are perfect, and all his ways are just. A faithful God who does no wrong, upright and just is he.” God is altogether righteous and just toward humankind. His justice is a major portion of his faithfulness to us. We can be assured that we will be treated with equity and judged fairly. His ways are the ways of justice as established by him. We must conform to the standard that he has set which he permits us to recognize as his commandments.

The concept of God held by the psalmist and prophets of Israel was that of an all-powerful ruler, high and lifted up, reigning in equity. Our primary duty in our relationship with God is to acknowledge our unworthiness of His justice. Such men as David and Daniel acknowledged their own unrighteousness in contrast to the righteousness of God, and as a result their penitential prayers gained great power and effectiveness. If we expect to be treated with justice, we must submit ourselves to God’s judgment.

It is sometimes said that justice requires God to do some act we know He will perform. This is an error of thinking as well as of speaking, for it postulates a principle of justice outside of God which compels Him to act in a certain way. Of course there is no such principle. If there were, it would be superior to God for only a superior power can compel obedience. The truth is that there is not and can never be anything outside of the nature of God which can move him in the least degree. All God’s reasons come from within His uncreated being. Nothing has entered the being of God from eternity, nothing has been removed, nothing has been changed.

We cannot evaluate the justice of God by our own human standards. We must accept the law of God and mold our behavior accordingly. Only through complete submission to him may we be treated justly. When we sin, we must submit to Him, and he will treat us justly. He will, in His mercy, forgive us that we may be justified and saved.

Pastor Eric Minamyer