While they were dealing with a problematic member, someone on the church board said to the pastor, “We can’t make decisions based on compassion.” We can’t? The pastor wondered what this person’s understanding of God and of God’s law must have been. Compassion certainly needs to be central in how we deal with people, especially erring ones. Compassion is part and parcel of love, and as Romans 13:8 tells us, to love one’s neighbor is to fulfill the law.

If love is indeed the fulfillment of the law, then we should be careful not to think of law in a way that is separate from love or to think of love in a way that is disconnected from law. In Scripture, love and law go together. The divine Lawgiver is love, and accordingly, God’s law is the law of love. It is, as Ellen G. White put it, the transcript of God’s character. (See Christ’s Object Lessons, p. 305.)

Though we have confidence that God will make all things right in the end, it still matters what we, as Christians, do in the here and now. Though there may be many injustices and evils that God will not now eradicate (because of the parameters of the cosmic conflict), this doesn’t mean that we can’t be used to help alleviate whatever suffering and evil we come across, at least to whatever degree possible. In fact, we are obligated, as Christians, to do just that. As we have seen, love and justice go together; they are inseparable. God loves justice. Accordingly, if we love God, we will love justice, as well.

Some years ago, an insightful children’s story was printed in Guide magazine. The story focuses on a boy named Denis, an orphan living as a foster child with a family in medieval times. Denis passionately hates the king of his land because, when his parents were sick, the king’s soldiers carried him away, and he never saw them again. Only later did he learn that the king separated them in order to spare the living all the horrors of the Black Plague. The truth about the king sets Denis free from the hatred that he had harbored almost his entire life. The king had always, and in every case, acted out of love for his people.