The Certainty of Judgment

The bad news gets worse. Not only are we all in violation of God’s holy law, we are all therefore subject to certain judgment. In Cur Deus Homo?, St. Anselm of Canterbury put it this way:

[Sin is] ‘not rendering to God what is his due’ (i.xi), namely the submission of our entire will to his. To sin is, therefore, to ‘take away from God what is his own’, which means to steal from him and so to dishonour him. If anybody imagines that God can simply forgive us in the same way that we are to forgive others, he has not yet considered the seriousness of sin (i.xxi). Being an inexcusable disobedience of God’s known will, sin dishonours and insults him, and ‘nothing is less tolerable…than that the creature should take away from the Creator the honour due to him, and not repay what he takes away’(i.xiii). God cannot overlook this. ‘It is not proper for God to pass by sin thus unpunished’ (i.xii). It is more than improper; it is impossible. "If it is not becoming for God to do anything unjustly or irregularly, it is not within the scope of his liberty of kindness or will to let go unpunished the sinner who does not repay to God what he has taken away.’ (i.xii) ‘God upholds nothing more justly than he does the honour of his own dignity’ (i.xiii).4

If it is intolerable for crimes against the dignity and authority of the state to go unpunished, then how much more that sins against the majesty and sovereignty of Almighty God remain with impunity.