Q&A: Social or Biblical Justice?

The Gospel and the Worldview Behind Justice

Yeah, that's a great question. I'll try to condense this so that I can make time for more questions. The first thing I want to do when I am engaging with a person that is BLM or LGBT, I want to dig underneath their position and see what is their worldview?

What do they believe about human beings? What do they believe about this world? Because they're saying, this ought to be the case. We ought to do this, right? Not should, but we ought to do this. Justice matters.

I want to make this about the Gospel. So the first thing I have to try to challenge them with is a person holding to those positions is generally an unbeliever. It's a person who is typically holding to a neo-Darwinian, micro-mutation, macro-evolutionary view of the world.

I want to challenge them to show them, well, listen, when you talk about a concern for justice, I preach about that all the time. God's Word is replete with references to God's concern for justice. So if you're a fan of justice, you should be a fan of the God of the Bible because he really cares about justice and equality.

And so I want to challenge them to show that you can't really even have justice apart from the God of the Bible because if you believe human beings are just African apes in stardust, what one cosmic broccoli does to another is irrelevant.

And by the way, cosmic broccoli, I borrowed that terminology from Dan Barker, who's one of the most famous atheists in the world. Human beings are nothing more relevant than cosmic broccoli. And so what is cosmic broccoli doing decrying injustice?

How do you get that apart from Jesus? So I want to show them that the issue here is that you know the true God. You're crying out for things that you can only have with God, but your worldview can't make sense of that.

You need to repent of your sin and come to Christ to make sense of your indignation. You get all this moral indignation, but you can't really have that without Jesus. You've got to come to Jesus to make sense of what you're saying.

Biblical Justice and the Character of God

And generally today when people are talking about justice, no justice, no peace, no justice, no peace, and my experience, and my experience isn't the tell-all and everything, but my experience in engaging with the average person on the street that says no justice, no peace, and they're crying out for justice, they don't even know what it means.

So I want to challenge people, what do you mean by justice? Like what is justice that must be done? Oftentimes they're just quoting a slogan. Many times they're throwing up Marxist fists, and don't even realize the history behind all this and why this is being propagated.

Many of them don't even understand what they're asking for. When you say justice, what do you mean? Because when I look at scripture, and we look at the terms justice and righteousness, they're the same root, same thing.

Justice, righteousness, same thing. We're looking at the character of God. It says that God is just, His throne is established on justice, that the God of the earth will only do right. And so when I look at scripture, I have a firm foundation, an objective foundation of what justice really is.

I know what the standard of righteousness is, it's revealed to us in the Word of God, so if I want to know what justice is, I look to God's character, I look to God's law, and in God's law you have, I mean very clear descriptions of what justice is.

God doesn't just say established justice, and the Jews are going, what's that mean? Huh? He's explained to them, this is justice. Here's how you're to treat your neighbor. You're to have equal weights and measures.

You're not to show personal favoritism. You're not to bring charges against somebody without two to three independent lines of witness and testimony. You're not to lie in a court against your brother.

You are to do cross-examination to make sure that you're getting at the truth. You're to make sure that if somebody steals, that it gets repaid. Right? That's justice. Like for example, in this mic, I'm in some trouble here, but God's Word doesn't even have anything in it in terms of a long-term prison sentence.

Nothing in Scripture. Find me the long-term jail system in Scripture. Find it. It isn't there. Why? Because God requires justice, not taking image-bearers of God and throwing them to a cage for 80 years of their life.

Treating them like an animal. God requires justice. Victims' rights. You have created a victim. Now you owe them so that they're made whole again. That's justice. So when Scripture gives us that, it gives us due justice.

Social Justice, Covetousness, and Equity

Here's what it looks like. But oftentimes today, when you have the average social justice warrior talking about justice, when you can pin them down to somebody who's actually read some materials, they know what they're looking for, what they would talk about is not in terms of what we would talk about when we say equality.

They would talk about equity. And what they generally mean today when they say social justice is they're talking about giving to people over here what you have so that they have what you have. So when they describe social justice today, they don't mean equality in the courts, equality in judgment, equal weights and measures.

They mean, generally, this person has something that this person doesn't. Therefore, take it from this person and give it to that person. So today, typically, the social justice warrior is somebody who is struggling very deeply with covetousness.

I want what you have. And they mean, literally, I want your stuff and give it to me. We're not talking about admiring somebody who's a great businessman, has a very successful business. That's a good thing to look at somebody who's very successful and to say, maybe as a young man, man, I'd like to be like that one day.

That's not covetousness. That's sort of saying, wow, that's good discipline. That's a way to work hard. I really like that. I want to be able to get like that one day. But what we have today is covetousness.

I want what you have, meaning specifically your stuff. We see somebody that's successful today and it's popular in our culture today because of the influence of Marxism and all the rest in our culture and socialism.

We tend to see someone that's rich or successful today. We see them as the enemy saying, it's not right that you have all that stuff and you're successful. I want your stuff. You ought to give it to everybody else.

That's called justice today. We're actually covetous. We say, I want your stuff. You shouldn't have it. You should give it to everyone over here who doesn't have your stuff. It's antithetical to the biblical worldview.

The biblical worldview actually says God gives gifts to whoever he pleases. He causes the rain to fall and the just and the unjust. And when God gives gifts to people, that's in God's hand to do. And so we're not to see what somebody else has as believers and say, that's not really fair.

I want their stuff. I want to have what they have. Why can't I have what they have? I want their stuff. That's a sin. That's a sin, but it's a sin today that's seen as a virtue. It's virtuous for us to say today, that person's successful, so we need equity.

We need everybody to have exactly what everyone else has, meaning no one should be that successful. We need to take their stuff and give it to others. Or you get into issues today where they talk about things like white privilege.

We judge people on the basis of their skin color, which I thought was a bad thing. You carry this color of skin, and so because you carry this color of skin, you have this particular sin. Immediately, I know that you're guilty of.

Maybe your ancestors did such and such, and so what I need to do today is take from you your stuff to distribute it over here to these people over here. It's just covetousness at a national level and at a very high scale.

That's typically what people will mean if you pin them down and say, what do you mean by social justice? They mean distribution. Take what this person has and give it to them.