“If God should presently execute His justice, His perfection of patience, which is a part of His goodness, would never have an opportunity of discovery.
Part of His glory, for which He created the world, would lie in obscurity from the knowledge of His creature.
His justice would be signal in the destruction of sinners, but this stream of His goodness would be stopped up from any motion. One perfection must not cloud another.
God has His seasons to discover all, one after another: ‘The times and seasons are in His own power‘ (Acts 1:7). The seasons of manifesting His own perfections as well as other things: succession of them in their distinct appearance makes no invasion upon the rights of any.
If justice should complain of an injury from patience, because it is delayed, patience has more reason to complain of an injury from justice, that by such a plea it would be wholly obscured and inactive.
For this perfection has the shortest time to act its part of any; it has no stage but this world to move in.
Mercy has a heaven, and justice a hell, to display itself to eternity, but long-suffering has only a short-lived earth for the compass of its operation.
When this dam of long-suffering is removed, the floods of fiery justice will rush down.”
–Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, ed. Mark Jones, Updated and Unabridged, vol. 2 (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2022), 2: 1563-1564.
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