The Justice of Heaven

Mat 5:45 That you may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he makes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.

While others are asking why God allows evil people to prosper, Christ takes a step further than any normal person would go. Rather than explaining or apologizes for God's treatment of evil people, Christ says that we must emulate it. While normal people get confused by trying to apply human standards to God, Christ ups the ante by applying divine standard to humans. So much for us testing God. Christ makes it clear that the purpose of reality is for God to test us.

So how does this make sense? From the time people first began to believe in a good and just God, they questioned how the world could be as it is. Why does God allow evil to exist? Worse, why does God allow evil to prosper?

The answer, of course, has to do with the purpose of the world, the purpose of our lives. The possibility of evil is the price of freedom. If we are to be truly free to choose or reject God, reality must not favor one course or the other. The world is created in a perfect balance of ambiguousness. Faith is neither demanded or disproven by science or experience. The rewards of faith are always internal, apprehended only by the individual sujective consciousness. Those rewards have and can have no objective proof. We cannot test God.

However, God can test us. The rule is that we are not allowed to judge others. Since we cannot know people's inner minds, we cannot treat people according to different standards. We cannot have one set of rules for those who are good and another for those who are bad. The rules of love are the only absolute.

Does this mean that people cannot punish evil-doers? One again, Christ gives rules for individuals, rules that deal with our personal choices. Individuals cannot pursue judging people. Societies can and must. Individuals cannot pretend to have the authority of law simply because they are following God. However, it is understood that the result of social law, public law, will not be true justice. Christ takes plenty of shots at the court system to make it clear that we cannot depend on the law punishing the guilty and freeing the innocent. The imperfection of social justice is the imperfection of human knowledge of the truth written large.

Christ is telling us, that no matter what advances we make, human society and the state will always be imperfect. As individuals, however, we can aspire to perfection, aspire to emulate God.