Mathematically Just

I have a friend (Hey, yes I do! I know it may be hard to believe ... but I digress.) who is stationed outside the country and, therefore, unable to review my blogs. He asked for an update and I sent him the month of December. Since then he has been responding to various blogs. I wanted to post this response to my blog of Dec. 7, 2006 entitled Is God Just? because I think he made some very interesting points. Here it is in its entirety.

I just finished reading December 7th's post, and I don't know if I quite agree with the entirety of your approach. I think you were right on until your third point. Now, before I get too far into it, I do agree that humans are guilty of cosmic treason, but... I don't think it is because of the reasons that you stated.

The United States is a government that God has instituted on this earth (like every other government), and has imparted authority to it to execute justice. Therefore, by transgressing the laws of our country that are within our country's right to legislate we are defying God Himself. It's the same mentality that was used in Europe for a long time. An assault on the king's soldiers is an assault on the king himself because they are his agents.

However, drug trafficking or counterfeiting is not treason. Not in any way. Choosing to not obey or remain under law is not the same is trying to overthrow the government which is what treason actually is. But with the way you have handled it in your blog, we have no other way to interpret transgression than as treason. The line becomes too blurred with your approach.

Like I said earlier though... I do believe we are indeed guilty of treason because when we were unregenerate, we were lending aid to the forces of darkness. We worked with the enemy to undermine and overthrow God's governance. We literally made war with God who is the rightful sovereign. That is why we are guilty of treason.

The other weakness I see in your argument is that you did not address the issue of annihilation. After all, our country ends the life of the offender for treason, but God does not. He tortures him for eternity. Now, I don't think the eternity part of it should be addressed, but whether or not we would be right in torturing those who have engaged in treason as long we possibly can.

Granted, we could argue that by the OT punishments, God has shown us the extent to which we should punish such people, but is that because they don't deserve it or is that God's wisdom acting to keep man's governance in check? Either is a perfectly valid argument since it can be demonstrated that it is God's habit to make rulings in the law for those reasons since the OT law is more like Israel's constitution. But the side of torture does have the advantage of God's example in how He handles treason.

Now, Annihilation would not adequately punish all sins. For example, let's say that it would be warranted for treason, but not for lying (hypothetically). But simply Annihilating the person, the lie is not really punished, only the treason. And so it goes for all sin... if all sin is worthy of annihilation, unless God recreates and reannihilates sinners until their sin is paid for, justice is not served.

So I am still left to the conclusion that a temporal sin committed against even an eternal country does not by necessity merit eternal death. Now, I know that this is a point where our doctrine's diverge a bit. I believe that sinful man's mere existence is a repugnant offense to God, and that is the root of our punishment. Our actions are merely evidence in court to prove that so that our mouth's might be stopped (one of the law's purposes so says Paul). So unless our nature is made new, we will always be deserving of divine wrath and are constantly indebted to receive it.
Annihilation in this case would be mercy, not justice.

Let's look at it from a math standpoint.

t = time
Tp = Time of punishment
To = Time of the offense
Tw = Total Wrath

Tp > To - Your first point in your post.
Therefore: Tp = f(To) = kTo, where k is some constant of proportionality > 1 associated with the severity of the sin.
Every moment of man's existence earns him wrath: { t | t = To }
If we integrate f(t) (giving us the total amount owed, since the current function only describes how much wrath man is earning at each point in time) we get:

Tw = F(to) = [k(t)^2]/2

Plotting it on a graph, with time being the x-axis and Tw on the y-axis, we can see that as time approaches infinity (eternity) so does Tw, but at a much faster rate. Therefore, man can never exhaust his punishment, and God's wrath is never fully satiated, ergo.... punishment is eternal.

Anyway.... that's my take on it. I do believe that for example, that if Christ had not paid for the sin of someone who was regenerate that that person would be able to in a temporal sense pay for his sin by taking his "lickings" for it, since the influx of sin would be stopped by regeneration. But that's a moot point because we have a Father and a Husband that couldn't stand by and let that happen.

First, I thought the math approach was fascinating. Frankly, I didn't understand all of it. (I'm sure you readers could figure that if I did have a friend, he'd likely be smarter than I.) But he managed to show mathematically that finite sin requires infinite punishment.

I thought his point about annihilation was a good one. My question was "Is God just?" He said, "Annihilation ... would be mercy, not justice."

I did want to address his objection, not because he's wrong, but because someone else may have thought the same thing because I wasn't clear enough. He said that violating the law of the land is not necessarily treason, so my parallel didn't work. He's right. Violating God's laws isn't treason. But that wasn't my parallel. Treason is defined as a violation of allegiance to one's sovereign or to one's state. The reason we break God's laws is because human beings have decided to give their support to His enemy, Satan, and have agreed to usurp God's rightful authority in their lives. Humans say, with Satan, "I will be like the Most High." This is why they violate specific laws of God, and this is treason on the cosmic level.

I will have to wait for my friend to read this and see if it clears anything up for him (or if he still disagrees). In the meantime, I thought some of you might enjoy the math approach. I liked it.