Sermon for September 13, 2026, Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Psalm 103:8-12 (Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost/Proper 19—Series A)

“Justice and Steadfast Love”

Lutheran Church of Our Redeemer, Enfield, CT

September 13, 2026

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Our text is from the Psalm appointed for the day, Psalm 103:8-12:

⁸Yahweh is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. ⁹He does not always accuse; He does not keep His anger forever. ¹⁰He does not deal with us as our sins deserve, and He does not repay us as our iniquities deserve. ¹¹For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so His steadfast love is strong toward those who fear Him. ¹²As far as the east is from the west, so far does He remove our transgressions from us.

          Martin Luther summarized today’s psalm, saying, “Psalm 103 is a psalm of thanks, beautifully and lovingly made, in which the psalmist thanks God for all His goodness, namely, forgiveness of sins, making a sound body and soul, giving us enough of all sorts of goods, making us joyful and confident, delivering us from enemies and distress. In short, the psalmist thanks God that He is a gracious, compassionate, and loving Father toward us, even though we are frail and unsteady creatures. God does not deal with us according to our sins, but according to His gracious goodness in us, who acknowledge Him and keep His covenant. That is, we believe in Him and gladly will be godly and neither arrogant nor stiff-necked in our holiness and righteousness.”[1]

          “We are frail and unsteady creatures.” That’s a pretty good summary of the human race. David in Psalm 103 wrote, “For [Yahweh] knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust. As for man, his days are like grass; he flourishes like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more” (Psa. 103:14-16 ESV). Both the psalm (and Luther’s summary of the psalm) highlights the fact of our mortality. David uses picture language to describe humanity in terms of flowers and grass that are here today and gone tomorrow. He says that God remembers that we are dust because that is what God formed the first man and woman from, the dust of the ground.

          But that “dust of the ground” into which the Lord God breathed the breath of life was not created return to the ground. The man and woman were created to be immortal, to have eternal life in body and soul. But that was before Genesis 3, before the man and woman fell into sin, disobeying God, and bringing upon themselves and all their descendants the curse of death. God had said, “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Gen. 2:17 ESV).

          We also read God’s Word in Isaiah 30:18, “For the LORD is a God of justice.” Psalm 103:6 echoes this, “The LORD works righteousness and justice for all who are oppressed.” God is righteous. That is, He is blameless, honest, and just. He must do what justice demands, and that is condemn sinners to death and hell. That is the only just move that a righteous and holy God can make. He must file a lawsuit against His human creatures for breaking His Law and see that they are punished. This is what justice demands. The Lord our God is “a God of faithfulness and without iniquity, just and upright is He” (Deut. 32:4 ESV).

          St. Paul has written the sad truth for humanity in Romans 5, “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned” (Rom. 5:12 ESV). Since the Fall, humans are mortal. We will die. That is the just and right punishment for sins committed and the good omitted as well as for the very sinful nature with which we are all conceived and born. It is human sinfulness that separates us eternally from God and so demands our punishment in body and soul. Man, who was created to live, is now born to die. Humanity’s way through life is a way to the grave. God’s justice must be done.

          But justice, righteousness, and holiness are not God’s only attributes. David, who highlighted God’s righteousness and justice in verse 6 continued in verse 8 to describe God, saying, “Yahweh is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.”

          Yahweh is righteous and always does justice. Yahweh is compassionate. His character and attitude are merciful and forgiving. It is an important word defining the character of God, and every use of this word in the Old Testament is in reference to God. God is also gracious in the sense of being merciful to those who do not deserve mercy. Again, this word is used solely as a descriptive term of God. What’s more, the only true God is “slow to anger.” He is patient and long-suffering with people. And He abounds in steadfast love which is His undeserved loving-kindness and tender mercy toward sinners who are lost and condemned creatures.

          Listen to what David, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, wrote next about the Lord: “He does not always accuse; He does not keep His anger forever. He does not deal with us as our sins deserve, and He does not repay us as our iniquities deserve. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so His steadfast love is strong toward those who fear Him. As far as the east is from the west, so far does He remove our transgressions from us.”

          But what about the Lord’s just accusation against sin and sinner? What of His holy wrath against sin and sinner? What about His righteousness and justice that demands the sinner be punished? Is the Psalmist saying that God somehow turns a blind eye? If God ignores the transgression of His Law, He cannot be just and holy! But the Lord is both. He is righteous, holy, and just. How, according to His justice, can God not deal with us as our sins deserve and not repay us as our iniquities deserve?

          The answer is that Yahweh is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. According to His mercy, God chose not to accuse sinners and deal with them according to what we deserve—death and hell. In His compassion and grace, God poured out His anger against sin on a Substitute, who took the sins of the world upon Himself. This was the Father’s own divine Son, Jesus Christ. God’s justice against sin would come down in the punishment of Jesus on the cross. The Father’s justice fell like a hammer—a hammer that nailed His only Son to the cross where He and He alone suffered for the sins of the whole world. 1 Peter 2:24, “[Jesus] Himself bore our sins in His body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness.”

          Jesus, the Son of God, suffered hell on the cross in the place of sinful humanity—the cry of dereliction, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken Me?” The Father withheld His pleasure from His Son. He was bearing the sin of the world as if that sin were His own. His innocent blood was being poured out for all as an atoning sacrifice in order for sins to be forgiven. Jesus, being struck by God Himself, drank the cup of God’s wrath that rightfully belonged to you, me, and all humanity.

          This is how God chose, according to His mercy and grace, not to deal with us as our sins deserve. The death of Jesus Christ as the once-for-all sacrifice for the sins of the world is how God does not repay us as our iniquities deserve. God’s justice was inflicted on Jesus, in our place, so that we might receive, not the punishment of death and hell, but rather the forgiveness of sins and eternal life. Because of Jesus’ death and resurrection from the dead, in victory over both death and hell, God removes our sins from us. His steadfast love is so strong that He chose to punish His only Son instead of you and me. He gives us what we do not deserve, forgiveness, and grants us eternal life instead of everlasting death.

          There was once a small-town hardware store that kept an old-fashioned ledger behind the counter. Every purchase, every return, every debt owed was written in that book. Over the years, the pages grew thick with ink—names, numbers, mistakes, forgotten payments, accidental charges. It was messy, confusing, and impossible to sort out. One day the store changed owners. The new owner walked in, saw the ledger, flipped through the pages, and shook his head. “No one can untangle this,” he said. “It’s too far gone.”

So he did something shocking. He closed the book, carried it outside, and dropped it into the burn barrel behind the store. The flames consumed every page. Every debt. Every mistake. Every record. Gone. When customers came in the next day asking about what they owed, the new owner simply said, “There’s no record of it anymore. The ledger is gone. You’re free.”

          “Yahweh is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. He does not always accuse; He does not keep His anger forever. He does not deal with us as our sins deserve, and He does not repay us as our iniquities deserve. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so His steadfast love is strong toward those who fear Him. As far as the east is from the west, so far does He remove our transgressions from us.”

Because of Jesus’ death and resurrection, God has taken the ledger of our sin, the record of every failure, every rebellion, every hidden shame, and He has done what we could never do. He didn’t hand it back to us and say, “Try harder.” He didn’t ask us to pay it off little by little. He handed it to His Son. And at the cross, Jesus bore the full weight of that record. God’s steadfast love is so strong that He chose to punish His only Son instead of us sinners. Christ took the ledger of sin, absorbed the judgment of death and hell, and rose again with the book forever destroyed. Now God says to you because of the blood of Christ shed for you: “There’s no record of sin anymore. The ledger is gone. You are free.”

Forgiveness you did not deserve! Eternal life you could never earn! Steadfast love that removes your sins “as far as the east is from the west”! Amen.

     [1] Martin Luther, Reading the Psalms with Luther (St. Louis: Concordia, 2007), 242.