I. What is being confessed in this article?⤒🔗

This article points out how God, by sending us his Son, proved that he is merciful as well as just.

1. God sent his Son and allowed him to become man. Thus he could bear the disobedience of us humans, pay our debt and bear our punishment through his very bitter suffering and death.
2.  God’s justice was evident in his attitude toward his Son, namely, when he charged him with our sins.
3. But upon us he poured out his goodness and mercy, though we were guilty of death. So perfectly did he love us that he sent his own Son to die for us and after this made him alive again to extend to us the righteousness he first earned. And in that way we receive the true and full life forever.

II. God is just and merciful in sending his Son←⤒🔗

1. To our understanding the words merciful and just constitute more or less a contradiction. Each has its own weight. The term just elicits the image of a stern face, fitting someone who says that an agreement is something to be kept. He is someone you can fully rely on: one who keeps his promises faithfully, but also someone who will enforce his demands. There is no getting around it. The fact that God is called just means — especially in this article — at least that he maintains the requirements he has set in place. This implies that man would die for violating God’s commandment (Genesis 2:17). The wages that sin earns is death (Romans 6:23).
   The term merciful, however, elicits for us a kind face, and suggests someone who is willing to help and who does everything to save the other from certain disaster. The fact that God is called merciful here means that we, who deserved to be condemned, do indeed receive “immortality and life eternal."
2. The special thing to note is that the article does not say that God is just but also merciful, or vice versa. Nor that his justice and mercy balance each other, and much less that his justice yields to his mercy. What God is, he is always entirely, and therefore he is confessed here to be “perfectly merciful and just.”
   Both the one and the other appear in the sending of his Son. After all, God has not dropped any demands made of us, for he has “manifested his justice against his Son when he laid our iniquity on him." But at the same time, by doing so, he has redeemed us from sin, and that is his mercy toward us.

III. How God manifests his justice←⤒🔗

1. The article states emphatically that God has not deviated from his demand that all transgressions or sins be paid for by man. Therefore, Jesus had to take upon himself “that nature in which the disobedience had been committed”; in other words, he had to become a real human being. For only in this way could he “bear the punishment of sin by his most bitter passion and death.”
   The Bible also clearly speaks of this: “Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace” and “The LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:5, 6). He is “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). This matter will be dealt with separately in the next article.
2. It may seem that this article itself encourages the idea that God does not count his justice in his attitude toward us, for it says that God “has manifested his justice against his Son” but that he has “poured out his goodness and mercy on us.” Has God’s justice then given way to his mercy, at least in his attitude toward us? That is certainly not what our article intends to convey, for even when he cancels our debts, he is perfectly just. Why? Because payment has been made for this! For “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins” (Hebrews 9:22). And it is for that reason that God is not only merciful to us, but equally just, “and the justifier [meaning “the one who acquits”] of the one who has faith in Jesus” (Romans 3:26).
   Therefore, when it is confessed that God has shown his justice toward his Son, it should not be inferred that he therefore forgets or ignores his justice toward us. This article means that God manifested his justice exclusively to his Son, while toward us he is both merciful and just.

IV. God’s justice is not compromised by his mercy←⤒🔗

1. From the time of Calvin until today, there has been a line of reasoning that would make the justice of God disappear behind his mercy. It comes down to this: God is love, and that means he forgives our transgressions without demanding payment.
   In fact, this love is very cheap and unworthy of God, because his justice is silenced and stigmatised, so that nothing more needs to be paid. The love of God would mean that he overlooks sin.
2. On the other hand, this article maintains that God’s love manifested itself in a totally different and God-honouring way: “Out of a most perfect love he gave his Son to die for us.” See also John. 3:16. The love of God, therefore, is not that he forgot about his justice, but that he laid our sins upon his own Son.

V. God’s mercy is not compromised by his justice←⤒🔗

1. So, there are people who take their starting point in the mercy of God, but they pretend that this supplants God’s justice. After all, they say, God would not insist on his right. There are others who start from the exact opposite side. They imagine a God who is just and therefore very angry with us, even hating us. According to them, however, Jesus brought about a change in God. He would have moved God to feel love for us. By appeasing God’s wrath, Jesus would have caused God to be merciful toward us.
   According to this view, God also cannot be perfectly just and merciful at the same time; he is either one or the other. And these people honour Jesus as the One who turned God’s wrath into love. This worship of Jesus is called Jesulatry. It is a form of reverence of Jesus that we reject. We find it among others with the Herrnhutters (or Moravian community).
2. Our article strongly disagrees with the idea that God would not have shown mercy until after Jesus had appeased his anger. This becomes apparent when we read carefully. For it says that “God, who is perfectly merciful ... sent his Son." So God was already merciful the moment He sent his Son, and that was self-evident before Jesus had appeased God’s wrath. The same can be said of the statement that “out of a most perfect love he gave his Son to die for us." So God loved us even before Jesus died for our sins.
   The Bible also says that God first loved us, and that then and therefore “he sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10-11). See also John 3:16 and Ephesians 1:4-5. The ultimate ground of our redemption does not lie in the sacrifice of Christ, for the foundation is the inexplicable love of the triune God.
3. However, this does not exhaust all that we can say. For, on the other hand, the Bible does indeed say that we were enemies of God at first, and that his wrath was upon us, and that we were “reconciled to God by the death of his Son” (Romans 5:9-10). Are the Herrnhutters partly right then? No, because we are seriously deficient in our understanding of God’s love when we pretend that he hated us until Jesus changed that. It is precisely out of love that God sent us his Son (John 3:16). But it is indeed true that the Bible says at the same time that this God was very angry with us. The same God therefore who sent his Son out of love. Therefore we need to confess, as it were: God loved us, had mercy on us, and he was angry with us. This two-fold truth is clearly found in Ephesians 2:3-4. On the one hand, believers prior to their conversion are called “children of wrath," in other words, people on whom God’s wrath rested. And at the same time “God who is rich in mercy” has loved these children of wrath with a great love.
   We hold that this duality cannot be explained, and that we must reverently repeat what the Scriptures say about this.
4. It is not permitted to allow God’s mercy and his justice to come into conflict with each other: neither by allowing his justice be swallowed up by his mercy (see Section IV above), nor by thinking too little of his love, as the Herrnhutters do.

VI. The fruit of God’s justice and mercy←⤒🔗

1. The elaboration of what the heading above Article 20 summarizes as “God’s justice and mercy in Christ” is found in the final words of this article: “that through him (Christ) we might obtain immortality and eternal life.” We, being guilty and worthy of damnation, had actually deserved to be "condemned," to be punished for eternity.
2. This surprising change is due to the fact that God “gave his Son to die for us, and he raised him up for our justification.” Christ’s death (a) and his resurrection (b) are the two pillars upon which our acquittal and salvation rest.
   a. We no longer have to suffer eternal death for God gave his Son to die for us.
   b. At the same time we need a Saviour who ensures that we will receive "our justification." Only a living person can do that. And that is why God also “raised him for [meaning “for the purpose of our justification.”
   What Jesus has obtained for us by his death, he will indeed give us, because he lives. And so the way is open to our immortality and eternal life.

Points to discuss←↰⤒🔗

1. In the concluding sentence of Article 16 we read that God “is just in that he leaves others in their fall...” so that they are not saved. In our elaboration on Article 20 it is said that God is also perfectly just when he saves sinners (Romans 3:26).
   Do these two statements contradict each other? We need to carefully formulate what justice (or righteousness) is.
   See especially Psalm 51:14 where David, as a sinner, exults in God’s justice precisely in connection with the forgiveness of his blood-guiltiness!
2. Discuss the view of the 17th century Leiden professor Coccejus who claimed that there would not yet have been a complete remission of debt under the Old Testament. This would only have come in the time of the New Testament, after the suffering of Christ.
   Also discuss the Roman Catholic notion that the dead believers of the old dispensation had to wait for Christ’s accomplishment before they could enter heaven.
   Is this consistent with Psalm 32:1 and Psalm 103:12? How could we formulate the difference between then and now?
3. Some people state that believers do not immediately receive “immortality and eternal life” at the time of their death, but only upon the return of Jesus. In particular, which terms at the end of the article exclude this view? See also John 5:24; John 11:25-26.