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#NoDespair2020
Shelter-in-place order, April 7th, self-quarantine, social distancing in New Hampshire. This is a video about social justice, definitely not related to any other topic, definitely does not have any analogies to any other topic, it is only about the social justice controversy in the church.
Only. Alright, alright, well I hope you had a good day yesterday, I had a great day yesterday. It's beautiful here in New Hampshire, it's sunny, you get to be outdoors if you do, that's wonderful, if you don't, I don't know what to tell you.
But here's the reality, I wanted to do a video only about what I normally do videos about, social justice. This is definitely only about social justice, and it's only about, it only ever will be applied to social justice, and there's really no tangential topics here.
This is just about social justice, definitely not related to anything else I've been talking about lately. The great thing about social justice and the controversy in the church is that it's a very simple controversy in many respects, because on the one hand, we understand, along with the social justice warriors, that God has commands in His Scripture that says that He loves justice.
What does God require of His people? Well, He requires that we do justice, that's said in the Bible many times. In fact, there's entire books of law in the Bible that tell us what justice is, and how God is a God of justice, let justice roll down like waters.
If you look at the Bible, and you do one of those fancy word searches that you can do, you'll find the word justice in the Bible many, many, many, many, many times. And so it's a concept that God cares about, it's a concept that Christians ought to care about, and we need to take it very seriously.
But again, this is only about the social justice controversy, trust me, it definitely doesn't apply to anything I've been talking about on Twitter lately. But here's the reality, though. We understand that sometimes when people, Christians even, say the word justice, and they're referring to something specific, it's actually not really the justice that God's caring about.
And the way we know the difference is we have to apply Scripture to it. God gives us the limits, God gives us the definitions of justice. And so when a social justice warrior says something stupid like, this is an injustice, and you're like, well, what is the injustice that you're referring to?
And they say, well, white families make on average 10 times more than black families, or whatever the number is, it doesn't matter what the number really is, I just made something up there. And they say, well, that's an injustice.
And you say, well, how is that an example of injustice? What do you mean? And they say, well, just the disparity itself is an injustice. Or they'll say something like in the coronavirus thing, well, black families are being disproportionately affected in Chicago by the coronavirus.
And you're like, well, what do you mean they've been disproportionately affected? And it's just that the difference in wealth or income or being affected by the disease or whatever, that's automatically a sign of injustice.
And the scripture, if you look at the rest of scripture, knowing that we have a God who cares about justice, knowing that God mentions that we ought to care about justice, that's a part of the Christian life, justice.
We can look to the scripture and say, well, hmm, doesn't actually say that an income inequality is an injustice. It actually doesn't even say that a wealth inequality is an injustice. And it certainly doesn't say that a disease affecting you is an injustice either.
That's kind of a weird concept. And so we can reject what the social justice warriors put forward as their definition of justice. And again, this definitely only applies to social justice warriors. It does not apply to the things I've been talking about on Twitter lately.
And so that's the thing. God gives us the parameters of what justice is. And so often when we're confronting social justice warriors for their stupidity and their nonsense and their evil, let's just face it, some of what social justice warriors promote as justice is actually evil in disguise.
And it's really not a very good disguise either. Give you an example. They'll say something like, well, we ought to take from white people and give to black people to make up for all the bigotry and the racism of the past.
And it's like, well, hold on a second there, Sparky. Hold on a second there. God says that the sons don't pay for the sins of the father. That's justice in God's perspective. Also, God says we don't treat people with partiality.
That is, according to as far as the law is concerned, we don't have one law for people that are tall and one law for people that are short or a different law for people that are black and a different law for people that are white.
Therefore, we shouldn't take from white people. That would be evil. That would be a textbook example of partiality. As a people of God, if we care about God's justice, we can't, number one, make the sons pay for the sins of the fathers.
Number two, we cannot show partiality in our judgments. You know what I mean? We can't treat people differently based on their skin color as long as we're going to claim the name of Christ. Otherwise, we'd be taking the name of Christ in vain.
That kind of thing. And we know this. So just because somebody says social justice or justice does not mean they're actually talking about the justice. And we know this because of the very important question that gets asked all the time and people get, they roll their eyes when they see this question, but it's the only question that matters.
By what standard, by what standard do you say that this is an injustice? By what standard do you say that this is a matter of justice? Because I can point to the scripture every time and take a principled stance.
Again, this is only about social justice, I promise you. I can take a principled stance and say I'm for justice in every single way that the Bible is for justice. And I reject your form of justice if the Bible does not teach it.
If the Bible, if the good and necessary consequence of what the Bible teaches does not apply to what you're saying, in fact, oftentimes it's against what you're saying, I reject you and your message. And I don't care how often you say I don't care about justice because your form of justice is topsy-turvy.
Your form of justice is evil. And so I don't care when you say, well, you must be against justice. Because you're not for equality and income. No, I am not for equality and income. You hear that? I never will be.
I never will be. Because the scripture does not say that that is a form of justice. Rather, the scripture says that whoever has something, they can do with what they have, they can do with what they please.
So if they want to pay you a salary to work a certain job and you don't make the same salary as me and stuff like that, well, that's on you. That's not on the person who made those deals. That's on you for not making a better deal.
And so if I'm a Christian, I'm going to say, well, I'm going to treat people fairly according to their work, according to what the value is to me. I'm not going to pay people according to skin color. But at the end of the day, you can't just tell me it's an automatic injustice if you as a light-skinned Puerto Rican is making more than a dark-skinned Puerto Rican.
That's an injustice. Well, no, not necessarily. Not necessarily. And I reject that definition of justice because it's not scriptural. It's not scriptural. And so this is the thing. The Bible tells us what is what.
The Bible defines these things. The Bible tells us when it says that the government is an avenger, that it should promote what's good and destroy what's evil or punish what's evil. It's not just leaving that up to the government to decide what's evil, what's good.
No, there's a standard there. And that's the focus that we should have when we talk about justice. So often when we have these conversations about social justice, one side is just saying, well, you know, this is justice because it's not fair.
It doesn't seem fair to me. And the other side is saying, well, hold on a second. We need to define justice according to the scripture. And it can't just be based on what seems right to me or feels right to me or, you know, seems fair to me.
If that's really what you're going with, I mean, that's a real problem because you're breaking your own standard of justice and that's not right. That's idolatry. If you're not defining these things biblically, that's textbook idolatry.
And so you need to take principled stances here. Every time somebody comes to you with a definition of justice that is not scriptural or even, God forbid, against what scripture says, like, you know, sons pay for the sins of the father, stuff like that, you need to reject it.
You must reject it. And it doesn't matter what names they call you. It doesn't matter if they call you white supremacist, racist, whatever it is. It doesn't matter because you have a different standard.
It's God's standard. And again, I'm just talking about social justice and the social justice controversy and SJWs and all that kind of stuff. I'm only talking about them. It definitely doesn't apply to anything at all.
Okay, I'm talking about Romans 13. Seriously, though, I do see a lot of similarities between what I talk about with social justice and what I'm talking about with Romans 13 because the reality is Romans 13 does tell you to submit to the government, but yet we also have very clear examples and commands to obey God rather than men.
And so the reality is if the government tells you something that the Bible does not give it the authority to tell you, there's only one authority. It comes from God. So who do you listen to? God or man?
God or man? This is a story that I told on Twitter in a tweet. When I was a pastor, one of my congregation, they were in the process of adopting a child in an international adoption, things like that.
And the country that they were adopting from, one of the rules for adoption was that they would not give a kid to someone who was going to use spanking as a form of discipline for those children. So they asked me, they said, I want to adopt this kid.
And obviously I'm going to follow the Bible when it talks about how to raise a kid and the way they should go and stuff like that. And obviously I'm not going to beat the kid, but I think spanking is a form of discipline that's commanded by the scripture.
So they're going to ask me if I'm planning on spanking this kid, is it okay to lie to the civil governing authority? And I did not hesitate. I said, absolutely it is okay in that situation to lie to the civil governing authority because they have no authority to tell you how to discipline and raise your children.
They have no authority to ask that question. They can ask you if you're planning on abusing them or beating them or something like that's totally fine because that's a matter of public safety that they do have jurisdiction over.
But when it comes to discipline, they do not. We have plenty of examples of people lying to the civil governing authorities when the civil governing authority had abdicated their authority that was given to them by God by going their own way and asking their own things.
And that's the reality. The civil governing authority does not have authority that God didn't give it because as Romans 13 says, there's only one authority. God tells you to meet and have the means of grace at a worship service and stuff like that.
The government says it's too dangerous to do that. How do you adjudicate that? You got to have a principled stance here. It can't just be, well, it seems super scary and if it's Ebola, you got to listen.
If it's the flu, maybe you don't listen and stuff like that. We need to decide this because next year when it's flu season, are we going to love our neighbors or not? You see, this is the thing. It can't just be like whatever feels right to you.
It can't be. There has to be a principled stance. It has to be. And so like with the social justice controversy, I feel like we need to understand scripturally what's that authority that God gives the government?
What is that authority? A lot of people are saying, well, it's just public safety. Well, again, but even the public safety authority has limits according to scripture. So we need to go with what the scripture says in that regard as well.
I remember the first time I felt this uncomfortability with people not taking a principled stance. It was my first church in Vermont. They were deciding to hire a pastor who believed that it was okay to have female elders.
And I said, that's crazy. And the people who were making the argument for it said, well, it was just a cultural thing back then. It was just a cultural thing back then that Paul was talking about regarding the women elders and stuff like that.
So it doesn't really apply to us today. And I said to these guys, I said, guys, this is the same argument that homosexuals make. They say, well, that was just a cultural thing back then. And they said, whoa, hold on a second, Adam, totally different apples and oranges.
And I'm like, I know you're saying it's apples and oranges, but it's not apples and oranges. It's the same kind of argument. So you need to explain to me why you accept it in this case, but not this case.
And it really seemed to me like that. And of course they wouldn't admit this, but it seemed to me like the answer was one of them, they still felt like a cultural revulsion to, and the other one seemed to make sense to them.
And they would never admit that, but that's really what it was. It was something made sense to them. And so they went with it. The other thing didn't make sense to them, so they rejected it. And I'm glad that they rejected it.
I'm glad that there was still an ickiness to the one and versus the other. But this isn't about what feels right. This isn't about what feels icky. This isn't about what makes sense to you. This is about what the scripture says.
It's about the definition of these things. And I know that reparations feels right to a lot of people. I know that equity and pay, same pay for the same work, feels right to people. But it's not right.
That's not what the scripture says. That's not the definition of justice. And so a lot of the things I've been talking about for years about social justice, and I'm getting lots of pats on the back for, the same idea of having the Bible define these things, principle positions on these things, is at play with this Romans 13 stuff.
And for some reason, not everybody's on the same page with this. And I'm very interested to find out why. Because the arguments that I'm getting for submitting to the government when they say you can't meet for worship, they're pretty lame.
They're pretty lame. They're kind of like the social justice, or what, you don't care about social justice? Like what, what, what, you don't care about submission to the authority? What, you're just a rebel?
I'm like, dude, like, is that how we're doing this? Is that how we're doing this? Because I don't know. That's not how I want to do it. But anyway, I hope you found this video helpful. God bless.
