Justice isn’t Sexy
Biblical justice doesn’t play well at rallies. It’s not really inflammatory. It doesn’t go well with fits of rage or emotionally-driven appeals. It doesn’t get caught up in the moment. It fails utterly at our current obsession with empathy. If you’re looking for a quick remedy to an immediate social problem, biblical justice may be your best bet, but its going to be frustratingly slow. God is intent on stubbornly protecting the accused from unfair indictment. He refuses to favor the rich. He absolutely forbids showing partiality to the poor. And he is committed to a fair, repeated processes. For these reasons when you see people or courts (be it in online communities, real life churches or societies like ours) rushing to condemn and punish, you aren’t looking at justice. God’s justice is slow. God’s justice is patient. God’s justice is firmly planted in balanced and fair process. God’s justice accounts for all kinds of human madness and refuses to appease crowds, mobs, or our emotional needs. It isn’t designed to be emotionally satisfying.
This is frankly frustrating and it is absolutely best.
Furthermore, almost everyone agrees that we should love our neighbors. But start to define what that means in concrete terms and you’ll quickly see everyone set their hair on fire (masks or personal liberties, anyone?). I don’t know anybody who claims to hate justice, but start to define what that means and how we should go about pursuing it (whether in the context of our homes or in the broader arena of today’s social problems) and things will quickly come to blows. And this simply exposes a few things about us. We can all pretend to be unified about words, but the actual work of embodying those words is where the real division lay. Pursuing a good and just society is apparently desirable to almost everybody. Start defining the word “good” and “just” and you’ll find yourself quickly standing alone. But giving lip-service to ideas like justice and mercy isn’t good enough. God demands that his people pursue these things in concrete and meaningful ways. And he commands us to pursue these things in obedient ways. It isn’t enough to simply repeat slogans and it isn’t enough to simply do what seems best to us. He calls us to obedience, an obedience that actually bears real fruit in the world.
So when we begin to see A) How gloriously frustrating the Bible’s presentation of justice is, and B) How much conflict such concrete ideas can generate in our day - we can be sorely tempted to either redefine our terms “justice” and “mercy” as to be more emotionally satisfying in a secular age, or instead to skirt the top of the trees and refuse to actually engage in concrete definitions of what these things mean in real-world obedience. So we either alter our definitions in unfaithfulness or we refuse to define them concretely in unfaithfulness. Add to this the embarrassing truth that secularism and therefore secular societies are fundamentally incapable of coherent definitions of either justice or mercy (which makes these things all the more controversial - people want definitions independent of faith in God and obedience to the Scriptures while we must insist on both God and the authority of Scripture.) If we are to see our world marked by justice and mercy, then we must turn to what God has said. If we are to be a people who obey the oft-repeated command “Love your neighbor,” then we must learn how to do justice, how to love mercy and how to love our neighbors from a God who commands us how.
Join us as we explore these themes through the whole of Scirpture starting this Sunday and continuing for the next four weeks:
May 9 - The Foundations of Justice
May 16 - The Promise of Justice
May 23 - The Coming of Justice
May 30 - The End of Justice