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Justice vs Righteousness

So after reading George MacDonald's {unspoken} sermon on Justice in spurned me to do a little research of my own. His view that mercy and justice are one in the same has spoken volumes to me personally.

I found it interesting that the more modern bible translations seemed to have lost the righteousness and mercy of God. Meaning that those two words aren't used as often in the text. On the other hand in the KJV the word "justice" is used only 28 times in the whole bible; all of those times being in the Old Testament. {The picture on the left is the breakdown of each word and how many times it is used in each version respectfully.} What I am wondering is that if we start to leave out righteousness and instead use justice it can give the wrong connotation of who God is in His character. Not that He isn't just, He is. But His justice is in the midst of several other attributes.

When I think of the word justice I always think in terms of judicial or criminal; earthly law. But when I think of the word righteousness I think in terms of Divine virtue. I don't think of the righteousness of God to be one of His characteristics; I think it to be the umbrella that defines who He is in all His characteristics and attributes. I have always believed one of the most powerful verses in the bible to be when Moses asks God who he should say is sending him, God responds "I AM who I AM" {Ex 3:14} Meaning God is who He says He is all the time and in all fullness.

What makes the Godhead righteous is that HE IS "merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin..." {Ex 34:6-7} That HE IS "love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law." {Gal 5:22-23} These are His righteousness, this is what makes Him who HE IS. So anytime anyone of the Godhead has told us who HE IS, it should tell us He has always been that way and will always be that way. God is infinitely and eternally righteous.

Justice

"George MacDonald (10 December 1824 – 18 September 1905) was a Scottish author, poet, and Christian minister. Known particularly for his poignant fairy tales and fantasy novels, George MacDonald inspired many authors, such as W. H. Auden, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, E. Nesbit and Madeleine L'Engle. It was C.S. Lewis that wrote that he regarded MacDonald as his "master": "Picking up a copy of Phantastes one day at a train-station bookstall, I began to read. A few hours later," said Lewis, "I knew that I had crossed a great frontier." G. K. Chesterton cited The Princess and the Goblin as a book that had "made a difference to my whole existence."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_MacDonald

"I firmly believe people have hitherto been a great deal too much taken up about doctrine and far too little about practice. The word doctrine, as used in the Bible, means teaching of duty, not theory. I preached a sermon about this. We are far too anxious to be definite and to have finished, well-polished, sharp-edged systems - forgetting that the more perfect a theory about the infinite, the surer it is to be wrong, the more impossible it is to be right." from a letter George wrote to his father

The following are some exerps from George MacDonald's {unspoken} sermon on Justice. {link for entire sermon at the bottom of post}.I just read it yesterday for the first time and was totally blown away. I keep reading it over and over and am still blown away. MacDonald was known in his time for thinking outside the theological box of his day. Instead he focused more on what the scripture said to him personally and how it spoke of his relationship with Jesus. Sounds like my kind of guy.

"'Mercy may be against justice.' Never--if you mean by justice what I mean by justice. If anything be against justice, it cannot be called mercy, for it is cruelty. 'To thee, O Lord, belongeth mercy, for thou renderest to every man according to his work.' There is no opposition, no strife whatever, between mercy and justice. Those who say justice means the punishing of sin, and mercy the not punishing of sin, and attribute both to God, would make a schism in the very idea of God. And this brings me to the question, What is meant by divine justice? "
***
"God is one; and the depth of foolishness is reached by that theology which talks of God as if he held different offices, and differed in each. It sets a contradiction in the very nature of God himself. It represents him, for instance, as having to do that as a magistrate which as a father he would not do! The love of the father makes him desire to be unjust as a magistrate! Oh the folly of any mind that would explain God before obeying him! that would map out the character of God, instead of crying, Lord, what wouldst thou have me to do? God is no magistrate; but, if he were, it would be a position to which his fatherhood alone gave him the right; his rights as a father cover every right he can be analytically supposed to possess. The justice of God is this, that--to use a boyish phrase, the best the language will now afford me because of misuse--he gives every man, woman, child, and beast, everything that has being, fair play; he renders to every man according to his work; and therein lies his perfect mercy; for nothing else could be merciful to the man, and nothing but mercy could be fair to him."

***
"'Mercy is a good and right thing,' I answer, 'and but for sin there could be no mercy. We are enjoined to forgive, to be merciful, to be as our father in heaven. Two rights cannot possibly be opposed to each other. If God punish sin, it must be merciful to punish sin; and if God forgive sin, it must be just to forgive sin. We are required to forgive, with the argument that our father forgives. It must, I say, be right to forgive. Every attribute of God must be infinite as himself. He cannot be sometimes merciful, and not always merciful. He cannot be just, and not always just. Mercy belongs to him, and needs no contrivance of theologic chicanery to justify it.' "***