Sherwin Thomas

Sherwin Thomas

How do we actually make sense of justice? What defines it, and where does it even come from? When you push those questions to their absolute limit, the answer inevitably points back to God. God creates and defines justice. Because we are made in His image, we have an inherent drive to understand fairness, but that also means we tend to form strong opinions about how He exercises it.

In Christian theology, two familiar scenarios constantly challenge our human expectations of fairness. Looking at them side-by-side reveals a profound tension that pops up whenever we try to force God’s actions into our own logical boxes.

Original Sin and Divine Prerogative

The first major hurdle is the doctrine of original sin. Adam and Eve fell in Eden, and every generation since has inherited that fallen state. Naturally, something in us resists this setup: Why should I carry the weight of an act I didn’t commit? I deserved the same clean start Adam and Eve received.

The standard theological explanation relies on God’s omniscience. God knew that no human being, past, present, or future, would have resisted that temptation. So He placed Adam and Eve at the beginning as representatives for all of us. In this view, no one was unfairly cheated out of a clean slate, because anyone put in that garden would have fallen. Allowing Eden to happen simply gives us a clear historical reference point to understand why the world is broken, rather than leaving us to view our flawed nature as an arbitrary penalty. 

The Purpose of Living Through History

The second scenario deals with our present lives. If God already knows who will ultimately accept Him and who will reject Him, why put everyone through the pain of living out this long, difficult timeline? Why not just immediately send believers to heaven and isolate those who refuse Him?

The counter-argument rests on human agency and visible proof. If God assigned people to their final destinations without them ever living out their choices, those who ended up in hell would view God as arbitrary and cruel, while those in heaven might feel they just got lucky. Allowing history to unfold provides experiential evidence. It shows that our ultimate fate comes down to our real, conscious choices rather than a random draw.

The Tension in Our Reasoning

When you put these two arguments next to each other, our human logic runs straight into a wall. The explanations actually pull in opposite directions:

• In the case of original sin, we justify God’s actions by saying He used His foreknowledge to bypass individual testing for the rest of humanity, establishing a representative fall.
• In the second case, we say God deliberately avoids sorting us based on foreknowledge alone, choosing not to bypass individual history because He wants us to go through time so our choices have visible proof.

We naturally want God to follow a single, uniform rulebook that fits neatly inside our minds. But when we try to force His actions into a neat system of mathematical consistency, the equations stop adding up.

Beyond Our Understanding

Scripture explicitly tells us that God’s thinking operates on a level far above ours. In Isaiah 55:8–9, God states this directly:

“‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,’ declares the Lord. ‘As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.'”

Because our perspective is limited by time and space, we inevitably hit a limit when trying to analyze an infinite mind. Paul reaches this exact same conclusion in Romans 11:33, exclaiming, “Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out!”

This gap between finite human reasoning and divine omniscience runs throughout the entire Bible. David considers God’s complete foreknowledge in Psalm 139:6 and admits, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, it is high, I cannot attain it.” Psalm 147:5 states that His understanding “has no limit,” and Proverbs 25:2 reminds us that “it is the glory of God to conceal a matter.”

The Lesson of Job

This brings us right where Job ended up. After facing immense, unexplainable suffering, Job demanded a chance to question God’s fairness directly. But when God finally answered him out of the whirlwind in Job 38:4, He didn’t offer a defense or lay out the mechanics of the universe. He simply asked: “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand.”

God’s response to Job puts human intellect back in its proper place. Justice isn’t an independent standard floating above God that He is forced to measure up to—God Himself is the standard. He reserves the right to approach different situations in different ways, whether that means allowing all of mankind to inherit original sin, or letting human history play out so our choices in accepting or rejecting Christ are made clear.

When our logical models fall apart trying to harmonize free will, foreknowledge, and fairness, the answer isn’t to force God into a human mold. It’s to recognize that justice is ultimately whatever God defines it to be, and to trust a Creator whose ways simply transcend our own.