s grace underlies this
possibility.

Accordingly, the divine holiness has two aspects, the overwhelming wrath
of His justice and the uplifting grace of His long-suffering. Without
justice there could be no fear of God, no moral earnestness; without mercy
only condemnation and perdition would remain. As the rabbis tell us, both
justice and mercy had their share in the creation of man, for in man both
good and bad appear and struggle for supremacy. All generations need the
divine grace that they may have time and opportunity for improvement.(301)

7. Thus this conception of grace is far deeper and worthier of God than is
that of Paulinian Christianity; for grace in Paul's sense is arbitrary in
action and dependent upon the acceptance of a creed, therefore the very
reverse of impartial justice. In Judaism divine grace is not offered as a
bait to make men believe, but as an incentive to moral improvement. The
God of holiness, who inflicts wounds upon the guilty soul by bitter
remorse, offers also healing through His compassion. Justice and mercy are
not two separate powers or persons in the Deity, as with the doctrine of
the Church; they are the two sides of the same divine power. "I am the
Lord before sin was committed, and I am the Lord after sin is
committed"--so the rabbis explain the repetition of the name JHVH in the
revelation to Moses.(302)

Chapter XIX. God's Justice

1. The unshakable faith of the Jewish people was ever sustained by the
consciousness that its God is a God of justice. The conviction that He
will not suffer wrong to go unpunished was read into all the stories of
the hoary past. The Babylonian form of these legends in common with all
ancient folk-lore ascribes human calamity to blind fate or to the caprice
of the gods, but the Biblical narratives assume that evil does not befall
men undeserved, and therefore always ascribe ruin or death to human
transgression. So the Jewish genius beheld in the destruction of Sodom and
Gomorrah a divine judgment upon the depraved inhabitants, and derived from
it a lesson for the household of Abraham that they should "keep the way of
the Lord to do righteousness and justice."(303) The fundamental principle
of Judaism throughout the ages has been the teaching of the patriarch that
"the Judge of all the earth cannot act unjustly,"(304) even though the
varying events of history force the problem of justice upon the attention
of Jeremiah,(305) the Psalmists,(306)