Does God Vindicate Himself by Bringing Direct Consequences for Sin?

Does Goes bring direct consequences for sin to vindicate Himself in this world? Today, Joel Kim explores how Scripture addresses God’s justice and His loving discipline toward His people.

NATHAN W. BINGHAM: Joining us this week on the Ask Ligonier podcast is Reverend Joel Kim. He is the president and assistant professor of New Testament at Westminster Seminary California. Well, Reverend Kim, does God vindicate Himself when people sin by causing a direct consequence to happen to them?

REV. JOEL E. KIM: God is indeed a God of justice, and ultimately, all the wrong will be made right by Him. And we believe that indeed the Lord will make all things right. The question, however, is a difficult one in many ways. Obviously, many of us wrestle with this as well, even as we deal with our own sinfulness, as we see the sinfulness more often than not of other people, and the desire to see God come and intervene in some ways.

Here, in the providence of God, I don’t think it’s always the case, as Scripture explains to us, that somehow God’s action is directly tied to the actions of the individuals that are here. We could look at examples like, for instance, Job, whose suffering is something that you and I as believers know very well. In fact, the Scripture over and over indicates to us, while a sinful man, it’s not his sin that actually had caused his suffering that God had permitted. There doesn’t seem to be, at least in terms of what it teaches to us, a direct correlation between what Job did or did not do to God’s reaction to those things. And so here, I recognize why people might wonder and desire to know whether there’s a direct action of God in a retributive justice in terms of the sinfulness of people. But I don’t think the Scripture draws that parallel very tightly.

We see that also in Jesus, in Jesus’ teaching to His disciples, where the disciples came up and asked about a person simply asking, “Whose fault was it? Whose sin was it? Is it his or his parents?” And Jesus’ answer was simply “Neither.” Neither. And ultimately, God’s glory was seen through the individual, despite the fact that the question was not answered directly by Jesus in a way that might’ve been satisfying (see John 9:1–5).

Yet we do come to realize that Scripture as it teaches us about Christians, and as we are people who are sinful—I don’t know if saying that we are sinful—I don’t think in this audience that’s going to sound very awkward for us. We see the sinfulness of men and women as early as when they’re born. For some reason, I seem to recall a time when Tabletalk one time was talking about original sin. It had a picture on the cover of a beautiful baby, I mean, beautiful looking baby with a big imprinted “SIN” right over the kid’s face, which I thought was jarring but true. And we see that even in our own children as well.

And what Scripture does teach us, especially in places like Hebrews 12, is that God, as a loving Father does not allow us to persist in our sinfulness, that He does discipline His sons and daughters not as a punishment but as a desire to grow the individual who belongs to Jesus. And so, in some ways, you come to recognize that Scripture, out of His fatherly love, does correct us, rebuke us, bring us into conformity of the teaching of Scripture. But I think it would be very difficult for us to say that somehow there is a direct correspondence between what’s taking place and our sinfulness to God’s reaction to them, or as the question asks in particular, that He responds by vindicating Himself in direct action to individual sins that are being done.