To Encourage You

James 2:12-13 “So speak and so act as those who are to be judged under the law of liberty. For judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment.”

I’ve heard some form of the following question many times over the course of my life: “Why would a loving God send anyone to hell?”  It seems so inconsistent to some people. It just doesn’t make any sense to them. However, in reading the passage above from James 2, there is something else that makes much less sense, and it flips the first question on its head.  This passage mentions something called “the law of liberty.” It’s nothing more than another name for “the gospel.”  It’s the message of Jesus coming to bear the penalty for the sins of the world by His death on the cross.  He condescended from His royal position in heaven where He was crowned with all the glory of that place to be mocked by the very one’s whom He had created, and be made to wear a crown of thorns, be spit upon, scourged, and have nails driven through his hands and feet to be hung unmercifully on a tree to die.  And why would He do such a thing? Because God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever would believe in Him would be freed from the just penalty of their own sin (John 3:16). They would be freed from sin’s eternal consequences by simply believing. They would be freed from the second death that is the wages of sin (Romans 6:23).  And they would be freed to obey God willingly with a new heart that loved Him rather than to have a heart that either obeys Him only out of fear or that desires nothing more than to disobey Him. It’s the wonderful law of liberty made possible for anyone who would believe.

But so many won’t have it!  They don’t want to be freed from their own sin but would rather hold on to it until the end.  They don’t want anything to do with this God. They criticize Him because He judges sin justly, and they reject His gracious offer to be freed from the judgment of their own sins by Jesus’ substitutionary atonement for it. They have opted to love their sin and reject His Son. 

Jesus put it this way in John 7:7: “The world . . . hates me because I testify about it that its works are evil.”  In other words, those who have rejected Christ have done so because they hate that He has told them the truth about themselves, i.e., the truth that all (including them) have sinned and have fallen short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). And although God has offered them His mercy, they think they are too good to need that mercy, and yet they are blind to their sinful failure to show mercy to others.

And so God even gives us the freedom to choose to pay our own penalty for our sin forever if we refuse to believe and accept that He’s already paid the penalty for us.  But who would actually choose such a thing? Who would choose to hold on to what will damn them and reject such an offer of grace?  It’s what the world calls freedom, but it’s all such slavery to sin.  It’s a bondage that is so overpowering that many will refuse to follow the law of liberty and be set free.  James reminds us that for those who reject the greatest offer of mercy that God in His omnipotence can possibly give, for those who refuse to accept His love and prove so by, likewise, refusing to show mercy to others who have done wrong to them, “judgment without mercy will be shown.” It’s a choice. It’s a choice for which each and every person is responsible. And it’s a choice that will determine whether one will receive mercy or judgment in the end.