04.006. The Recompensing God
The Recompensing God The Lord God of Recompenses shall surely requite-- Jeremiah 51:56. This is one of the chosen names of Jehovah. He is the Lord God of Recompenses. The retributive aspect of the Divine character is not only no blemish; it is as necessary to His perfection as any other attribute, and itself as truly a perfection as His Law or His Love. The arch of government rests on two pillars--the sanctions of Law--the certainty of reward to well doing and retribution to evildoing. If either of these pillars gives way, the arch and all that rests upon it fall into wreck and ruin comp. Psalms 9:16, Daniel 5:27, 1 Samuel 2:3, Judges 1:6-7. Jeremiah specially reveals how God used Babylon, first, as the “hammer” to break in pieces and bruise other nations, and even His own people who needed correction; and then in turn He broke in pieces the “hammer of the whole earth”-- Jeremiah 50:23
Note:
God’s character, as the God of Recompenses
The certainty of His requital
The perfection of His knowledge and equity
The singular correspondence of sin and penalty
The merciful purposes of His long suffering
The fearfulness of His final judgment
The grace of His provision for pardon
The Lord God of Recompenses appears often in poetic retribution, as in the judgments preceding the Passover. For eighty years the Egyptians sought to drown all Hebrew males; in one night vengeance was exacted for all these eighty years of murderous oppression, Haman plotted to hang Mordecai; he and his sons were the first that swung from the scaffold, etc. It would be interesting to collate all the instances of such exact recompense in sacred history, as the infallible proof of His moral government; for no chance coincidences can account for the awful exactness of His adaptation of penalty to offence, any more than for the exact correspondence of rhythm and rhyme in the lines of a poem.