“Surely his salvation is near those who fear him, that his glory may dwell in our land. Love [mercy: KJV] and faithfulness [truth: KJV] meet together; righteousness and peace kiss each other. Faithfulness springs forth from the earth, and righteousness looks down from heaven” (Psa 85:9-11 NIV)
“Righteousness and peace kiss each other!” Like two old friends who finally meet after a long separation, they embrace and kiss one another, so thankful for each other’s company. So why should righteousness and peace finally kiss each other? Or, to go back to the beginning, why were these two old friends ever parted in the first place?
The answer, as we might expect, is found in the early chapters of Genesis. When Adam and his companion Eve were placed in the lovely Garden of Eden, they lived in a totally harmonious environment. The Almighty Creator had made all things good; His creation existed, quite peacefully, in a full and free fellowship with Him. The LORD God walked among the trees of the garden, and talked freely with Adam and Eve.
The sin of Eve and Adam changed all this. Their disobedience to their Creator’s wise requirements — in other words, their unrighteousness — caused them to be exiled from the garden, away from the peaceful life they had once enjoyed.
In poetic terms, the wonderful partnership of righteousness and peace had been dissolved, and Adam and Eve had lost both. Now they lived in a world of thorns and troubles, consequences and guilt, confusion and sin and death. And by the time they realized what they had done, they could no longer retrace their steps to that place of pristine righteousness which had been theirs in the beginning. Their sins had shut the door upon the place where God’s righteousness and God’s peace had resided in beautiful harmony, and they were on the outside looking in, with no key! Cast adrift in a broken world, they had absolutely no remedy.
We know now what Adam and Eve found out firsthand: that the Almighty God, who is perfectly righteous, cannot even look upon sin, much less have true and lasting fellowship with sinners. Between the Heavenly Father and the crowning glory of His first creation — man and woman — there was a great gulf fixed, and a region where there could be no real peace because there was no real righteousness to be found there. And when children and then grandchildren were born to these two outcasts, they also inherited the same tendencies to sin and the same experience of enmity, or hostility, from the LORD God.
Something or someone was needed to bridge the gap between the righteousness of God and the peace of God. If that great gulf could be bridged, then this sad world so soon filled with sinners could begin to find its way back to that first place of peace and comfort in the presence of God.
So, how can a pure God save a world of impure sinners?
In God’s work of salvation through His Son, two disparate (almost mutually exclusive) elements are at work together. God’s righteousness was declared and vindicated in the sacrifice of His Son, a sacrifice that demonstrated the decreed consequences of sin and its nature (Rom 3:21-31). Because of that sacrifice, and the obedience of the Son who offered it, God was pleased also to offer His peace through His merciful forgiveness of sinners who showed faith in that Son (Rom 5:1,2).
Thus, it is a wonderful miracle that in and through Jesus, both the truth of God and His mercy have been manifested in the Word made flesh (John 1:14-18). These divine attributes parted company at the fall of the first Adam, when God’s holiness decreed an exile from the garden of His presence. They have been joined together again with the coming of the last Adam. Thanks to His Son’s role as a mediator, the irreproachable righteousness of God can save sinners and bring them peace (joyful reconciliation and fellowship with Himself), without any diminishing of His absolutely righteous character. Jesus alone could pray, as he surely must every day: “Father, forgive them, for my sake!”
Surely his salvation is near those who fear him, that his glory may dwell in our land. Love and faithfulness meet together; righteousness and peace kiss each other. Faithfulness springs forth from the earth, and righteousness looks down from heaven.
As pictured by the psalmist, this figurative meeting of heaven and earth in Psa 85:10,11 is an anticipation of the advent of Jesus. In him, heaven and earth meet together: Son of God and seed of the woman. This is described in the words of the hymn written by David Brown (Christadelphian Hymn Book, No. 83), words which are themselves a paraphrase of John 1:14:
Thy grace and truth became Flesh for a saving name.
In His righteousness God looked down from heaven, and then planted the seed which germinated in the “earth”, that is, in the womb of the young woman Mary. Out of that barren soil of fallen human nature there sprang up a Righteous Branch — the Word made flesh in an absolutely righteous human being, the like of which had never been seen before. Jesus Christ was the heir of all God’s promises and the perfect expression of His will — as priest, mediator and king.
Only through such a man as this could God offer to the rest of us the “righteousness” of sins forgiven, and thus the “peace” of eternal fellowship with Himself.
Righteousness and peace kiss each other
One of the subtle beauties of these verses is that word “kiss”. God’s offer of salvation to man may be worked out and explained in a fairly logical manner, and we are grateful that it can be so explained. Some people need this type of explanation in order to understand and accept the gospel.
But, really, the gospel of salvation as described in the Bible bears much more resemblance to a look of love, a tender kiss, and a gentle caress. It is seen in a husband’s gentle caress of a good wife. It is seen in a father’s tender kiss of a small and helpless child. And it is seen in the devoted love of a man laying down his own life for his friends.
So, is God’s plan of righteousness a matter of logic, like a deed or a contract? Or is it an ongoing act of love? There are certainly elements of a legal contract to be seen in God’s dealings with man — there are covenants, conditional promises, and the inheritance of land. What God promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob can be ours too if we believe the right things and take the right actions.
But the heart and soul, the spirit and avowed intent, of God’s interaction with us is a kiss. Nothing good could ever have happened without the divine love manifested in such a kiss. It began with a gentle kiss of divine love, soft as a small bird settling lightly upon a person:
“As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and lighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased’ ” (Matt 3:16,17).
And it culminated in an embrace and a kiss of joyful reunion:
“But while [the prodigal son] was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him” (Luke 15:20),
The psalmist saw all this in the brightness of a clear morning, as the sun rose on a dew-covered pasture, its beams sparkling like a million diamonds. The dawning of a new day, in all its freshness of possibilities, was like a new creation and a new birth:
“Arrayed in holy majesty [the beauties of holiness: KJV], from the womb of the dawn you [Zion] will receive the dew of your youth” (Psa 110:3)
It was then that the writer knew that those fresh drops of dew symbolized those who were born again from the dead:
“But your dead will live; their bodies will rise. You who dwell in the dust, wake up and shout for joy. Your dew is like the dew of the morning” (Isa 26:19).
The inspired poet looked again, and in the beautiful sunrise and the sparking dewdrops he saw a glorious heaven kiss a perfect earth. He knew then that God’s ancient promises would come true — that even the worst of sinners could be part of the eternal family born out of that divine kiss of love and joy, never to die again.
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One