Is God just? If you look at all the injustices of this world – innocents suffering everywhere, powerful oppressing weak at will, and evil systems suffocating the righteous – the evidence seems to point in the opposite direction. That’s the problem of evil (how to reconcile an all-powerful God with the doctrine that he is also good or totally just). I won’t tackle that here. All religions and all comprehensive systems of thought (like Marxism) have to offer some kind of solution (a “theodicy”) to this – God or no God.
Yet both Bible and Qur’an present God as just – and never more so than on the Day of Reckoning, the Last Day, or the Final Judgment.
But first, let me back up a bit. In the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament for Christians) God’s justice is represented on earth by the king. This is nicely expressed in the beginning of Psalm 72 (ascribed to Solomon):
“Give your love of justice to the king, O God,
and righteousness to the king’s son.
Help him judge your people in the right way;
Let the poor always be treated fairly” (vs. 1-2).
So God’s nature includes the virtue of justice. Some of you know this was a hotly debated topic in the third to fifth Islamic centuries, when the rationalists, called Mu’tazilites (mu’tazila in Arabic), made this point one of their five chief distinctives. God is just; justice is an objective value (they were avid students of Greek philosophy); God is bound to act justly; e.g., he can’t send a good person to hell or admit a bad person into heaven.
Readers who have read some of my work on contemporary Islamic law will know how important this last point is. It’s about ethics (the theory of the good) and it goes back to Plato: is an act good because it is good in itself (it partakes in objective goodness); or is it good because the gods say it is? All reformist stirrings in the field of Islamic law today gravitate toward ethical objectivism (the Mu’tazilite position, especially in their confident assertion that the primary objective of the Shari’a is to promote the welfare – maslaha – of human beings). Meanwhile, the traditional position of ethical voluntarism (only revelation can tell us what is right and wrong) is losing ground. Though not among ultra-conservatives like the Salafis.
Despite these debates, however, both Qur’an and Bible honor God as the epitome of the righteous judge.
The later Psalms, for instance, tell of God coming to judge the earth. Here is a good example:
“Tell all the nations, ‘The Lord reigns!’
The world stands firm and cannot be shaken.
He will judge all peoples fairly.
Let the heavens be glad, and the earth rejoice!
Let the sea and everything in it shout his praise!
Let the fields and their crops burst out with joy!
Let the trees of the forest rustle with praise
before the Lord, for he is coming!
He is coming to judge the earth.
He will judge the world with justice,
and the nations with his truth” (Ps. 96:10-13 NLT).
Notice how justice is here associated with truth. A righteous judge gives a true verdict. He will not be bribed by the powerful and rich. Whether poor or rich, the guilty are punished and the innocent vindicated. Sadly, in human society, this is not always so. Long before Israel’s theology was sure about an afterlife and even less about divine judgment after death, the prophet Isaiah offered this poignant prayer:
“All night long I search for you;
in the morning I earnestly seek for God.
For only when you come to judge the earth will people learn what is right” (Isaiah 26:9 NLT).
So we come to the Last Day, the Day of Judgment, where in both texts God’s verdict is absolutely fair and just. Only God, after all, can know all of a person’s actions; only he can fathom a person’s secret thoughts, desires and motivations. Thus only the Almighty can exemplify perfect justice.
Probably because the Meccans were primarily business people, the Qur’an uses commercial imagery (all quotes from the Abdel Haleem translation):
“We will set up the scales of justice for the Day of Resurrection so that no one can be wronged in the least, and if there should be even the weight of a mustard seed, We shall bring it out: We take excellent account” (Q. 21:47).
“On that Day, people will come forward in separate groups to be shown their deeds: whoever has done an atom’s-weight of good will see it, but whoever has done an atom’s-weight of evil will see that” (Q. 99:6-7).
“On a Day when people will be like scattered moths and the mountains like tufts of wool, the one whose good deeds are heavy on the scales will have a pleasing life, but the one whose good deeds are light will have the Bottomless Pit for his home” (Q. 101:4-9).
Yet, whatever the imagery used, the judgment is based on deeds:
“How will they fare when We gather them together for a Day of which there is no doubt, when every soul will be paid in full for what it has done, and they will not be wronged?” (Q. 3:25).
“The record of their deeds will be laid open and you will see the guilty, dismayed at what they contain, saying, ‘Woe to us! What a record is this! It does not leave any deed, small or large, unaccounted for!’ They will find everything they ever did laid in front of them: your Lord will not be unjust to anyone” (Q. 18:49).
Now to the Bible. The classic text in the New Testament is in the book of Revelation:
“And I saw a great white throne and the one sitting on it. The earth and sky fled from his presence, but they found no place to hide. I saw the dead, both great and small, standing before God’s throne. And the books were opened, including the Book of Life. And the dead were judged according to what they had done, as recorded in the books. The sea gave up its dead, and death and the grave gave up their dead. And all were judged according to their deeds. Then death and the grave were thrown into the lake of fire. This lake of fire is the second death. And anyone whose name was not found recorded in the Book of Life was thrown into the lake of fire” (Rev. 20:11-15 NLT).
The Apostle Paul speaks in similar terms:
“For a day of anger is coming, when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed. He will judge everyone according to what they have done. He will give eternal life to those who keep on doing good, seeing after the glory and immortality that God offers. But he will pour out his anger and wrath on those who live for themselves, who refuse to obey the truth and instead live lives of wickedness” (Rom. 2:5-8 NLT).
Jesus himself taught very clearly and consistently this same message. “Come and follow me,” he told his would-be disciples. Faith, of course, is crucial too. But faith rolled up into obedience is the only kind of true faith. As Jesus said near the end of his Sermon on the Mount, “Not everyone who calls out to me, ‘Lord! Lord!’ will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Only those who actually do the will of my Father in heaven will enter” (Mat. 7:21). You can know a tree only by the fruit it produces, Jesus often told his disciples. Deeds count enormously.
Here the Protestant in me shifts uncomfortably in his seat. Verses I was weaned on include:
“For God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16 NLT).
“For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 6:23).
“God saved you by his grace when you believed. And you can’t take credit for this; it is a gift from God. Salvation is not a reward for the good things we have done, so none of us can boast about it. For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago” (Eph. 3:8-10).
But this is the point of hermeneutics. You have to bring together all the disparate strands and make sense of the whole. Jesus’ step-brother James (according to most commentators) weds faith and good works in a similar way that Paul does in the above verse: “Just as the body is dead without breath, so also faith is dead without good works” (James 2:26).
But this is not just a “Christian problem.” Both Muslims and Christians believe that God is full of mercy and forgives the sinners who repent. Salvation in the end comes by God’s grace. Where they disagree is on what basis God forgives. The Qur’an says that God sovereignly chooses to forgive out of his own mercy – thus temporarily laying aside his justice for a greater good. But since one never knows ahead of time, better to pray for an intercessor on that Day, preferably the Prophet himself.
The New Testament is clear that repentance and faith must be focused on the God who sent Jesus, the sinless man, to die for humanity’s sins. Then he vindicated Jesus by raising him from the dead and appointing him to be Judge on the Last Day. Genuine faith in Jesus, which includes the in-dwelling of the Holy Spirit to guide and empower the believer in this new life, is what saves.
Intriguingly, it is on the topic of Judgment Day that we find the most dramatic convergence between the two faith traditions. The following parable of Jesus finds an almost exact parallel in a hadith reported by Abu Hurayra in Sahih Muslim’s collection (I mention this in the last pages of Earth, Empire and Sacred Text). It is a passage well worth meditating by both communities. In doing so, we will find ourselves actively engaged side by side to meet the needs of the poor and to relieve the pain of those suffering the most, like Pastor Bob Roberts said to a group of dignitaries this week in Doha:
When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his throne in heavenly glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. Then the King will say to those on his right, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.”
Then the righteous will answer him, “Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?”
The King will reply, “I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.”
Then the King (obviously God in the story) turns to those who had not cared for those in need and says, “I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me” (v. 45). And they were sent away to destruction. God’s just verdict had been passed.