Boundless GratitudeSample

Reason #6: God Is Just

My husband’s job requires him to remain on the premises during working hours. Daily he packs his lunch because there are no facilities to purchase food on the grounds, except one solitary vending machine. Recently he forgot his lunch. Rather than ask me to bring his food, he decided to purchase a snack from the machine. Somehow in the purchasing process, there was a malfunction. In fact, there were several. Twenty dollars poorer, my man finally walked away from the machine frustrated and hungry, without so much as a pretzel. More than dealing with his hunger, my spouse flared with the injustice of his experience. Within a few weeks, he learned most of his department shared his feelings, along with other hungry scavengers across the campus ripped off by the notorious machine.

There lives within us an unrelenting longing for wrongs to be righted. The Psalmist recognizes this need as something that runs deeper than unreturned pocket change. Poetically, the miraculous melds with the magnificence of God. He uses justice toward dealing with man to accomplish only what He can. Able is He to turn a desert into a flourishing paradise and bring the needy to a place of abundance. But God will not look at the suffering and turn His face to do nothing. Nor will He bless the wicked in their reckless living. The LORD is a God of justice. That is the bottom-line message from this writer, and for this unchanging quality, we are to be thankful.

Suppose you have suffered more injustice than some lost money over a bag of chips. What if offenses have cost lives, impacted futures, made life difficult, all the while your pain is unceasing? Let’s say you did not get your $20 back. The bad guy got away with the crime. Those you love have suffered. Justice has yet not prevailed. Tomorrow doesn’t look promising, either.

Is this Word still reliable?

Is God a God of justice? Even when I can’t see it? Feel it? And everything in me is angry because the wrongs remain in the wrong column?

Yes. If I believe God raised Jesus from the dead, and in that power has saved me from my sin and yours, I can trust He is a just God.

Let us be thankful for a God of justice. Pray for courage to trust Him to right every wrong.