Act Justly. Do Mercy. (At least for four weeks in May.)
“The Justice of God is fixed, universal, timeless and transcendent, but lawlessness is random, capricious and arbitrary.”
On Sunday, May 9, Trinity will begin a 4 week series of sermons exploring the Justice of God and the justice God commands of his people. God commands us to “Act justly. Love Mercy.” In previous days, these two commands were erroneously set in opposition to one another. Our age has subverted the meaning of these commands completely. This has happened because we live in a what the Scriptures call a lawless age. We have rejected the authority of God and so rejected the authority of God’s laws. To do justice and mercy there must be a universal standard, and One whose standard it is. Godlessness will always lead to injustice and a mercy that crushes and destroys. God’s justice and mercy will lead to joy and peace for all his people.
And so, in an age that is increasingly without any such standards, and yet also an age demanding justice according to lawless and egalitarian standards - How are we to live as Christians? How are we to speak of the God who always does what is right — who always acts justly? At stake in these things are not only our own discernment about the current cultural climate, but also our understanding of the cross, of justification through faith, of the very meaning of heaven and hell. Also at stake are the more mundane, and sometimes far more pressing questions about adjudicating disputes between siblings, how to treat our employees or what to do when your kid wrecks the car. In other words, the question of “what is justice” touches the toughest social questions we face as Christians and the most mundane parts of our lives. And if we don’t do the work of establishing definitions and drawing a clear distinction between what our secular neighbors call justice and what God calls just we will find ourselves in rebellion against God himself.
Sin doesn’t just take the shape of direct rebellion against the commands of God, it also leads to the kind of confusion that calls evil “good” and labels good “evil”. It leads to a world that labels injustice “justice” and calls justice “unjust”. Far too many Christians are inadvertently going along with this confusion and doing so in the name of love. But we are to act justly — according to God’s standards and we are to see clearly the nature of true justice. Such living and such seeing will create a people who love and celebrate mercy.
I invite you to come with us over the month of May to worship the God who is just, to learn from the God who does justly, and to eat with the God who meets us with mercy.
May God use these weeks toward that great end. May God grant us clarity on how to live faithfully before him. May God cause us to marvel at his justness. And may we be a people who learn to act justly and love mercy.