The Paradox at the Heart of the Bible
One of the most majestic passages of the Bible is Exodus 33-34. In it, Moses requests to see the glory of the Lord. God tells him that he can’t see His face and live, but He will do as much for Moses as He can. Hiding Moses in a cleft in a rock, God passes by and proclaims His name before letting Moses see Him from behind: “The LORD, the LORD God, merciful and gracious, long suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and upon the children’s children unto the third and fourth generation” (34:6-7, KJV).
Did you catch the tension in there? God announces that He “forgives iniquity and transgression and sin” but that He will “by no means clear the guilty” and “visit iniquity” on descendants in a curse. In the same breath, God talks about how mercifully He will forgive but also how thoroughly He will punish.
I’ll take a moment here to do the obligatory theodicy (i.e., a vindication of God’s righteousness) regarding the visiting of the sins upon the children to the third and fourth generation. Elsewhere God says, “The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers; every man shall be put to death for his own sin,” (Deuteronomy 24:16, KJV) and spends the entire chapter of Ezekiel 18 clearing up Israel’s mistaken proverb that, “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge” (v. 2, KJV).
So why would God seemingly contradict Himself when He reveals His most fundamental character in punishing children for their father’s iniquity? The key qualifier is provided in the Ten Commandments: “unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me” (Exodus 20:5, KJV). God doesn’t visit sins upon children who turn from their father’s wicked path. This is borne out by the Book of Kings when a wicked king begets a righteous successor, and God blesses the righteous successor for repenting. If a child sees all the evil his father does and does not repent, then God will hold him guilty for not learning from his father’s lesson. (This verse should teach us caution about blaming our parents’ misdeeds for our own failings.) Also, we should contrast the curse down to the third and fourth generation with showing mercy to thousands of generations.
Anyway, back to our paradox. This tension is first felt when God kills animals to make skin coverings for Adam and Eve in His mercy, but forces them out from the Garden of Eden. The Book of Leviticus describes in detail how sacrifices are to be made to atone for sin so that the worshiper is forgiven, but the Book of Hebrews points out how sacrifices had to continue to be made, making it plain that they didn’t resolve the issue of sin. All people have sinned, and God will not compromise His righteousness, but He forgives His people in the Old Testament. As David says in Psalm 24, “Who shall ascend into the hill of the LORD? And who shall stand in His holy place? He that hath clean hands and a pure heart” (vv. 3-4)—and this from an adulterer and murderer! It seems like we have an equation that can’t be balanced or, to borrow from accounting terminology, God is running up a deficit in the scales of justice.
This tension is not resolved until Jesus’s sacrifice of Himself for sin. God balances the equation by having His own Son pay the debt justice has been demanding against humankind for millennia, and living a life of the perfect righteousness that He demands of those who would ascend into His hill. “For He hath made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him” (II Corinthians 5:21, KJV). Paul makes plain in Romans 3 that God has neither compromised His justice nor forgotten His mercy in this wondrous transaction since He is “just and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus” (3:26, KJV).
This double imputation is the very crux of the Bible. We have all sinned and racked up a burden of guilt that God is impelled by His justice to punish. God wanted to be merciful, so He sent His Son to pay our forfeit on the cross and live a life that would satisfy God’s demands in the Law so that, for those who put their trust in Him, God will impute our sins to Jesus and impute His righteousness to us. In this way, as R.C. Sproul once shocked an audience by saying, God saves us—from Himself! And, for those who will not accept God’s mercy, they get the justice that God also proclaimed is so fundamental to His character.
Even though this tension is not resolved in the Old Testament, God did put out some strong hints about what He was going to do, notably in Isaiah 53: “But He was wounded for our transgressions; He was bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement of our peace was upon Him, and with His stripes we are healed” (v. 5, KJV). My favorite expression of this, however, is Psalm 85:10: “Mercy and truth are met together. Righteousness and peace have kissed each other” (KJV). By nature we are God’s enemies, but Jesus’s work gives us peace with God through His mercy without any compromising of God’s truth and righteousness.