Remember my short series on love? I think it was about a year ago, so maybe, maybe not. One sermon was dedicated to the prioritization of love. Right, we’re not supposed to love everyone equally.
You ought to love your wife more than you love a stranger. Should I have to preach on that? But that’s where we are today. Concentric circles, right, of importance of how you’re gonna exercise love, the intensity of love and like.
There’s a prioritization of love. That you should love your family more than your neighbor, who you should love more than someone on the East Coast, who you should love more than someone in Australia. Ad infinitum.
So what does that have to do with justice? That’s something that’s missing in our public debates, I think. In May of 2017, the Trump administration sent letters to about 800 employees saying they weren’t authorized to work in the United States. Records examined by the Chicago Sun-Times show.
Those Hispanic employees didn’t return to work. They were illegal immigrants. They were illegal.
Leaving the bakery desperate to fill their jobs. That’s a big bakery, 800 employees. So the company turned to another placement agency, Metro Staff Inc., and it provided Clover Hill with workers screened through the government’s e-verification program.
Most of these new employees were African American. Ed French, owner of the Elgin-based Metro Staff, pointed out, says his company became the main provider of the workers, and that about 80% of them are now black. According to a former consultant to the bakery, they paid the black workers $14 an hour, whereas before they paid the illegals 10 bucks an hour.
You see this as a question of justice now? Intersecting with love? Prioritization of who we’re supposed to exercise concern and consideration for? I hope you do. It’s a very striking illustration. American companies, within reason, ought to hire locals more readily than some stranger that’s shipped across the nation, across the world.
One would think. Justice defined. Of course, in the abstract, we talk about giving equal and fair results, or equal and fair treatment, and the like.
For doing the right thing, you ought to get a reward, or at least not get punished. For doing the wrong thing, there ought to be some punishment, or at least an acknowledgment that that is wrong. Fairness, promotion at work, a hooray from your wife, a thank you from your neighbor, and of course, doing wrong and being caught and being punished, that’s where we especially think about justice, right? That’s where we’re quick to say, that’s not fair.
There’s no equity there. There’s no justice. You ought to be punished.
They murdered your wife, and I would agree with you, they better get the death penalty. They just simply better. My wife pointed out an example, 48 hours or something the other night, where a gentleman is gonna get the chair thrown out of him.
He’s gonna be stuck in prison for the rest of his life for murder, because it was a hate crime, because obviously you murder for love. Whereas ordinarily in California, you don’t get the life sentence for murder. So this case was special, because it was hate.
Apparently other cases it wasn’t, that’s not fair. That’s not just, we notice that intuitively, and it has to be beaten out of us in going to four years of college to say, oh, it’s fair, and it’s really not. Justice is especially, and particularly not just abstract, but defined by God, who himself is just.
It’s one of his attributes. And we ought to be just like him, to have justice like him, although we do it imperfectly. We’re supposed to imitate him as Christians.
The Ten Commandments, in particular, define for us what is equitable, what is just, and what is right. Let’s not forget that. Now the Ten Commandments, that is God’s moral law for the world, and his people in particular, is seen in general revelation, as you recall, that which is written on our hearts, and acted in history.
Unbelievers know right from wrong, don’t forget that. Romans 1 reminds us of that, and has that list. They know these are sinning, these are sins, these are transgressions, but they make excuses for one another, it says, at the end of that chapter.
They try to cover, or redefine sin, rationalize it somehow, because it’s in their heart. However much they try to efface it, to rub it out, to ignore it, they are made in God’s image, and they cannot run away from the moral responsibility they have, and to be morally responsible means they have to know what sin is. And that’s exactly what Romans 1 argues.
They know what sin is, they even know that there is a God. There are no atheists. So that’s general revelation.
Special revelation is especially good for us, because it’s there written, not only in our hearts, but here in the Bible. And so we have a two-fold witness as Christians, that’s a stronger witness. More culpability, but more clarity, because it’s much clearer, much clearer there in the Bible for us.
And so it’s there written in the Bible for us. The exposition of the law of God and how the Ten Commandments apply, both the negative and the positive aspects. Remember, although it’s given primarily in negative form, thou shalt not, thou shalt not, thou shalt not, and thou shalt not.
It also applies the positive, thou shalt. Not only thou shalt not kill, thou shalt preserve life. Not only thou shalt not lie, thou shalt tell the truth.
The Ten Commandments are a summary of God’s law, not all that there is in just those bold-faced words. And so a good place to go for that, besides perhaps sermon series on the Ten Commandments. I preached the Deuteronomy, for example, and showed some application there of the Ten Commandments.
But the Westminster, that’s the Puritans of the 1600s, gave us the larger catechism, which goes through each of the Ten Commandments, the positive and the negative, with lots of proof texts. You don’t have to agree with it all, I wish you would, but there it is. It’s something to teach us about justice, about what is right.
This is the thing you ought to do. This is the thing you ought not to do. And when you do the right, you ought to be punished, or you ought to be rewarded.
When we do the wrong, you ought to be punished. And even that’s there in the larger catechism, because it’s there in God’s law. Now, God has given us his word, he has given us his law, but there’s applications of God’s law to circumstances.
Thou shalt not murder. True, thou shalt preserve life, okay? But what does that look like sometimes? It kind of looks different in some cases, in some circumstances. And again, let me give you an example about preserving life.
What if you lived in a neighborhood without a speed limit? Some of you who have libertarian inclinations may say, yes, no more control from the government, one less law. Yes, but you’re in one of those neighborhoods where you don’t have considerate neighbors. You don’t know who they are, but somebody is driving like a madman down that street.
But hey, there’s no speed limit. He’s not swerving or whatever else, because maybe there’s a law against that, maybe not. But in this case, there is no speed limit.
There is no speed limit. That’s dangerous. You’re like, I don’t want my kids out there.
Someone can get hit, and you try to stop them, you try to convince them. Of course, you can’t catch them, you can’t drag them down. And so eventually, because there’s enough people driving irresponsibly, and there’s no law against it, you go to the government and you ask, could you please at least make a speed limit sign so at least the cops can do something, have some authority? Now, how can you do that? Where does it say in the word of God, thou shall have a speed limit sign to preserve life? It doesn’t.
It’s not there in so many words. But under the rubric, thou shalt not murder. On the other side, thou shalt preserve life.
Coupled with the fifth commandment, the authority, not only of parents, but that’s shorthand for all authority. In this case, the civil magistrate, Romans 12 is very clear about the civil magistrate, Romans 13, that there is a civil magistrate that follows under the fifth commandment. To preserve life, they have the authority by God to exercise, depending on the circumstances, what is needful to preserve life.
And in that case, many of you, especially if you have kids, are like, no, that’s needful. That is, there’s no debate here. We want something, whether, maybe you don’t want to call it a speed limit sign, something, put a cop there, put a light there, whatever, something to preserve and maintain that command of God.
And so I bring this up because there could be debates about how to apply justice, right, in particular circumstances. And we ought to be, as it were, mature and Christianly about it. And I think this illustration is good.
It reminds us, on the large scale, what we take for granted on the small scale. Your parents have all kinds of authority. You just simply do.
The man of the house has authority over his house, and he tells you to go to bed at nine, even if you’re an adult. It’s his house, not yours, and you go to bed at nine, or at least turn off the lights, and you can go somewhere else if you don’t like it. He has, you’re like, that’s not in the Bible.
It is, it’s called the fifth commandment. Now, he’s not telling you to sin. That’s another thing, right? Don’t obey sinful commands.
But he’s got a lot of flex room, and I think that’s the same case, generally, for society. There’s a lot of flexibility, depending on the people and the circumstances. So, with all that, with respect to justice and exercising it and what is right and what is wrong as defined by God’s law, we come to something a little more meaty, perhaps.
If only because one way to learn the truth is to understand error. It’s contrast, right? To get a little contrast here. And so, we have, then, that the fifth commandment’s the same that you have for your parents, as also for the authorities above us, and the like.
And what we have, then, here, is the social justice warriors, they’re called. Justice is defined by God’s law, whereas in the social justice warrior world, I’m not going to give you a formal definition, it’s very broad, you’ve probably heard the term, and politics and the news and everything else, in that universe, it’s different. It’s outcome-oriented.
It’s simply and only outcome-oriented. If statistics show, the consequence of a policy or a practice is disproportionate, it’s therefore wrong. If they see the outcome of a law, in this case, people getting pulled over because you have the speed limit sign, and the people getting pulled over is a certain subsection of America, women.
I’ll just pick on women, sorry. They would say, because more women than men are being pulled over because of this law you passed to preserve life, there’s something wrong with the law, and you guys are a bunch of bigots. That’s how they think, it’s outcome-oriented.
Does that make sense? The reason for the law, or the justness of the law, under what rubric it fits, is not really relevant to most social justice lawyers. It’s the outcome that’s important, because the outcome should always be equal. Apparently, there should be equal number of men being pulled over as women.
I don’t, they really think that way. I’ve talked with them, I met with some of them. Other illustrations that you’re probably aware of, I think, that all of the whites today are to be blamed for all of slavery.
You might think that’s kind of crazy. Kind of heard some of that in the 60s from the radicals at times. It’s now become more mainstream.
It’s so bad that a race car driver lost his sponsorship. A race car driver lost his sponsorship because of a racial comment made back in the early 80s by his father. Does that sound just to you? Do you need a Bible verse to know that’s not just? Apparently, some people do in America now, even in churches.
That’s a real-world consequence. He didn’t lose his job, he still gets to race, he just lost his sponsorship, he lost a little money, perhaps. Thomas Sowell, Sowell, Sowell, Sowell, he’s the one I quoted last week.
I forgot the name. Many years ago, there was a comic book character who could say the magic word, Shazam! Wrong character, no. And turn into Captain Marvel, a character with powers like Superman’s.
Today, you can say the magic word diversity and turn reverse discrimination into social justice. That’s a nice way of putting it. Social justice, everything is collective or group-oriented.
And I did mention that aspect to justice where you have in the case of war, in the last sermon, right? War often is not just. At least, there’s gonna be some aspect of it that’s not just, there’s so much chaos going on and murder and mayhem and destruction, whether intentional or not. And it’s gonna end up having that and there’s no way to fix it.
You’re gonna have a lot of injustices from a war, especially in the case of the bad people win. Then what are you gonna do? You can go for decades or centuries, like in the case of being under the thumb of Rome, and never have justice. You may never have justice in this world, was my point.
And that’s an example of, as it were, group effects of justice and social justice. Well, the SJWs don’t just wanna say that that happens occasionally. They think it happens almost always in all scenarios.
And in fact, the more progressive versions of them essentially say, if you’re in a position of power and influence, it’s because you did something wrong. Probably because it’s part of your history, your collective whiteness, your collective maleness, or whatever the case may be. They’re group oriented.
And so that if a male is the one who held back a woman for an engineer’s job, all the males in that company are at fault somehow, some way. I’ve seen those quotes from professors of universities. You should have done something.
You should have, I guess, given up your job for another woman. Maybe that’s what they want. Remember the quote I gave was about your conscience.
See how they’re gonna manipulate your conscience? That’s how they’re gonna make you feel guilty. There’s not enough women, not enough men, not enough whatever. Your real answer is, well, the question is justice.
Justice isn’t always equal because people and their actions are not always equal. And individual actions, although it can be overemphasized, like in the case of libertarianism, is significant. And the Bible talks about justice, individual and collective, this question, very clearly and very explicitly.
The legal default is the father should not be put to death for their children, nor should the children be put to death for their fathers. A person should be put to death for his own sin, in Deuteronomy 24, 16. It’s the basis of what this nation and Western civilization has been built upon, as well as many other nations, in fact, to one degree or another, to be sure.
To make it even more clear, Ezekiel 18, mark that in your Bible. And all the virtual signaling I’ve seen and read, and all the debates I’ve read, I don’t see too many people quoting Ezekiel 18, Ezekiel 18, two and following. It’s a long section, there’s a lot of repetition there.
So I’ll condense it for you. What do you mean when you use this proverb concerning the land of Israel, saying, the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge? So you see the collective influence there, where the fathers did some sin, and now the kids, the children, suffer the consequences of it. Eat the grapes, and the kids feel the effect in their teeth.
That’s a proverb of collectivism, essentially. As I live, says the Lord God, you shall no longer use this proverb in Israel. Behold, all souls are mine.
The soul of the father, as well as the soul of the son, is mine. And the soul who sins shall die. But if a man is just, and does what is lawful and right, he is just, he shall surely live, says the Lord God.
If he begets a son who is a robber, or a shedder of blood, who does any of these things, and does none of his duties, shall he then live? He shall not live. If he has not done any of these abominations, he shall surely die. If he’s done any of these abominations, his blood shall be upon him.
The soul who sins shall die. The son shall not bear the guilt of the father, nor the father bear the guilt of the son. And apparently, the SJWs that went after that race car driver had not read the Bible.
Very clear. There is one case, I get a little ahead of myself, in which you do have a collective effect. That’s the fall.
And the other case is Christ Jesus. We who are in Christ Jesus are saved because of his work. We who are in Adam and Eve are lost because of their work.
That’s the federal headship. That’s where it belongs, in a formal sense. Justice is a theme of the Old Testament.
The Old Testament is more political than I think many Christians realize. I don’t think that’s a special problem here. We’re aware of this, I think, given our history.
Isaiah 59, for instance, judgment is turned away backward, injustice standeth afar off, for truth has fallen in the street and equity cannot enter. It is a theme of the prophets. You hear that in Micah, as I pointed out.
Very clearly, and the emphasis in Micah is on the oppression of the poor and the oppression of the middle class. Remember, they’re stealing their pleasant homes. Poor people don’t have pleasant homes, that particular word.
They’re stealing their cloaks, that particular word for cloak. It’s the only word they’re used. It means glory, so it’s not just some ragtag thing.
It’s a very nice cloak they’re stealing. It’s misunderstood, this theme of justice. When the old liberals and the mainline churches used these verses, used these themes to beat the conservatives with in the 20s, 30s, and 40s, and 50s, and now it’s morphed into progressivism, but I won’t go down there.
You’ve heard some of that before. The summarization of the Ten Commandments gives us justice and the definition of it. Exemplified in the civil case laws of the Old Testament, those are particular applications of the Ten Commandments that are one degree or another applicable, and there’s debate on that, of course.
Justice is Uncommon
We know that injustice is common, but how does justice become common? How can we make justice common? First of all, through the covenant. The covenant of grace mentions justice in a twofold fashion. Here, broadly, in Genesis 18, 19, where we have the formalization of the covenant of grace given to Abraham, and of course, we are part of that.
He is our father, Father Abraham, as we like to talk about. For I have known him, this is God speaking, I have known him, Abraham, in order that he may command his children and his household after him, that they keep the way of the Lord, to do righteousness and justice, that the Lord may bring to Abraham what he has spoken to him. It’s built right there in the covenant of grace, from the Old Testament manifestations of that covenant to the New Testament manifestation where we are today, where you don’t have to be a Jew and have the Jewish ways of doing things, living or worship.
And we know, in particular, two ways in which this covenant manifests justice, or points to justice, or exercises justice. The first case is that one word that has the word justice in it. Justification, our formal, legal, right standing before God and his law courts.
As he is our judge, Christ is our advocate, and his blood covers us, and so he sees us cloaked by the righteousness of Christ. He has obeyed the law in our stead, and God has looked at his ledger book and said, it is though you have perfectly obeyed the law. Not only has Christ suffered consequences for breaking the law, that’s one half of justification, taken our punishment, he’s also obeyed the law for us.
He has been perfectly just in our stead, and imputed, that’s the word, the legal word, imputed that righteousness to us by faith alone. That’s justice, brothers and sisters. You have a taste of justice right now.
But the world doesn’t have. They pine and long for that. It’s the end of the world for them.
They make mountain out of molehill when it comes to justice issues, and that’s one reason why. They don’t have the full assurance, the full blessings of justification. Full, absolute, perpetual justice is ours in Christ alone, by grace alone, through faith alone, brothers and sisters.
Secondly, sanctification. Now it gets a little trickier, right? Here we have the working out within us, in our lives, in our hearts, justice. Justice, as God commended before Abraham, and so to us, that we can, by God’s grace, exercise some form of justice this side of heaven, as a parent, as an employer, as a neighbor, to be fair and equitable to those around us when we sin, to be humbled by the Spirit who convicts us with his word, and in our hearts, and respond to them and say, you’re right.
I need to pay restitution. I need to fix this. I need to do whatever it is.
To what? Maintain justice and equity with your neighbor, with your family member, with your church member. That’s what we’re called to do, and we can do that by God’s grace and mercy. Generally, of course, Christianized nations, as we see and know, and I’ve gone over some of the history of that in Sunday school class, makes a difference, brings about more justice, because they have the grace of God.
They have, especially, the illumination of the word of God in their lives through the churches, and bring about better societies, frankly. You can say that. There are some societies better than others, on the main, on the whole.
You balance all things in consideration. Of course, everything before God is nothing, and it’s not just enough, ever, but we have Christ Jesus before us, and he works on us, both to will and to do his good pleasure, Philippians tells us, and his good pleasure is to have justice, as best we can, however incompletely. It’s not absolute like God, but a Christian society has certainly been superior to tribalism across the world, for instance, in the raids and the chaos and the wars.
Justice for Today, the title of the sermon series. Justice considers all of God’s law, does not cherry pick. That wouldn’t be very equitable, would it? So, a favorite verse for people, again, some of the older people remember this from the liberal churches that some of you used to attend.
Hey, look, Isaiah 121, learn to do good, seek justice, rebuke the oppressor, defend the fatherless, plead for the widow, help the poor, and so it blended and melded as churches ought to do that has influenced society. In this case, it influenced society to what? To give poor laws, to change the poor laws, to anyone who’s poor is equally poor in the eyes of the law, and you should get equal help. Whereas clearly in the word of God, clearly by God’s law, both in the word of God and in our hearts, not all poor people are equally poor and equally morally unculpable in that mindset.
There are deserving poor and undeserving poor, period, full stop. And our laws used to reflect that in America, I’ve read those laws, and it changed. Because it came, abused these verses, took them out of context.
The context is clearly the rest of the word of God. Context is also that particular people right then and there. And so it’s unjust to treat everyone the same when they are not the same, isn’t it? When some people are just frankly lazy.
I mean, Paul, New Testament, right? New Testament’s grace, New Testament’s love, it’s all there is to it. What you heard in those circles, and they still talk that way. And yet Paul says very clearly, if you don’t work, you don’t eat.
And there are people who don’t work, and that’s why they don’t eat. They come along and they feel big hearted. It’s not big hearted, it’s unjust.
It’s wrong. And help people who shouldn’t be helped. Because sometimes the best way to help a person is let them find out the hard way.
Some of you have been through that. Some of you have seen other people go through that. You know that’s fair.
So that’s an example. Often justice is best, another way of applying it for today, in a homogenous society, use that big fancy word to mean, having different ideas, priorities, expectations, different cultures creates chaos because people are fighting over what justice even means. Right? That’s not gonna work out very well.
That’s what we’re having in America. We have socialists and outright communists now running for office. And that creates a chaotic society.
It’s not a common base of expectations, a common belief system, even a common history, different priorities and the like. It’s a mess. Justice, as I pointed out in the beginning of the sermon, also prioritizes because love also prioritizes.
It’s all of a piece, the way God created the universe. Negatively, of course, we shouldn’t murder anyone, whether in our family or in our neighborhood or across the world. The negatives you don’t do.
Just don’t do it. Don’t lie, don’t murder, don’t cheat. But the positive, preserve life and the like, is often has to be prioritized because, I don’t know, we don’t have infinite resources.
We don’t have infinite money. We don’t have infinite time. So how do you prioritize then those commandments, those laws, that justice? Because the application of them is justice.
You prioritize them as I preached in that sermon. Your immediate vicinity, your family, your friends, your church, your neighborhoods, it’s a number of overlapping categories, of course, or in the broader case of the issues around us, you choose your nation before another nation. That’s just how it is.
That’s just a broader application of the neighbor law, of the law of love being prioritized. The opening illustration pointed to that very clearly. Let’s take care of ourselves, our family, and our own people, our own nation.
Was Israel in sin for essentially ignoring the world and taking care of its own internal problems? That’s a question you can ask yourself. Regardless of, well, we’re not Israel and that’s special. It wasn’t special in the sense that God didn’t give him commandments that were sins, did he? No.
Even if you don’t think some of them apply, I don’t believe any sane Christian believes that God actually gave him simple commandments. And they took care of their own. They didn’t worry about the rest of the world.
They might have dealt with and bought some wood like Solomon did for his temple and the likes. You have some economic dealings with other nations, but they didn’t run around trying to save the world. You gotta take care of your own people first.
There’s enough to take care of often, as you know, your own family, let alone your own neighborhood, your own city, your own state, your own nation. Let’s prioritize, back to localism as we used to. They’re not in sin.
When taking care of the fatherless and the widow, this is where another application of this, taking care of the fatherless and the widow, it’s those fatherless and the widow here. Your neighborhood, your city, and your state. Not strangers a thousand miles across the world.
Those nations and those peoples, in the case of Israel, Egypt, the Egyptians, and they did, took care of their own people. Justice is important, brothers and sisters. Justice for today is important.
Let us promote justice. It’s the Christian thing to do. But let’s promote biblical justice.
And justice in the proper proportion that God has given us and how it prioritizes relationships. Let us promote God’s way of doing things, beginning with those who we are most responsible for. Our children, our spouse, our friends, our church, our neighborhood.
Even as God prioritizes his people first. Let’s pray. Lord above, we thank you for your word that gives us justice, that gives us the law of God and how we are to apply it in our lives, Lord.
We certainly have debates at times in some of the particulars and the circumstances. Our God, may we have the wisdom to see and to unite in these matters. But especially in this day and age, Lord, where we have little, much less voice now.
We have abortion on demand, flat-out murder. And we can’t even stop that. So in many ways, Lord, it seems so theoretical.
But it is not when it comes to our own church, our own neighborhood, our own family’s God, the localism which we find ourselves. To exercise that justice as best we can, Lord, by your grace and your mercy, Lord, may we do thus out of love. We pray in your name, amen.