Why believe in a God of justice and judgment?

This is the ninth in a long series on the reformation of Christianity. I was challenged to write on this by Graham Pemberton. This series does not argue for the truth of Christianity. I’ve discussed that in many of my 200 plus posts on Medium. Instead, to analyze where Christianity as a faith or belief system may be going, I am first exploring “the good” or why I think the beliefs are beneficial and contribute to human flourishing. I welcome courteous comments.

In this post I explain what I see as the benefits of believing in a God of justice and judgment.

Earlier we talked about why believing in moral realism is better than believing in moral relativity. This is an expansion of that conviction. Moral realism is the idea that our basic ideas of good and evil as categories exist not within limits of spacetime, matter and forces, but in a kind of Platonic world of forms. This is an argument for good and evil as real, or as “ontological” as the philosophers would say. Moral relativity is closely linked to physicalism which says since there is nothing ontological outside of spacetime, matter and forces then any idea of an “outside” reality that includes good and evil is nonsense. The consequences are obvious and becoming more obvious every day, it seems.

Judges 21:25 says:

“In those days Israel…