Hebrew Scholar Refutes Keller, Platt, & Anyabwile on "Justice"

The Conversations That Matter podcast.

We have a special guest today, Dr. Russell Fuller, for what I consider to be a very important episode. He is a

Hebrew scholar. For many years, he taught at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. In fact, his

Hebrew textbook is even used by Jewish rabbis at Jewish seminaries. Very accomplished, knows

Hebrew very well. And we're gonna be picking his brain a little bit on the social justice movement, specifically the way that social justice evangelicals, and it's really not just evangelicals, it's people in mainline denominations, it's anytime you see this movement approach

Christianity, there's certain verses, especially in the Old Testament, that are used to try to justify a social justice outlook.

Verses about justice, where the word justice is used. Mishpat is the most common

Hebrew word there. And we wanna get his take on this. Can social justice activists use a

Hebrew word for justice, or words, and then use this to justify their position?

Is social justice in the Old Testament of Scripture? Is that what you're seeing there? Modern social justice type of stuff.

So Russell Fuller's gonna weigh in on that, and I'm looking forward to it. I wanted to just make a quick announcement, though, right before we get to that.

I did get the shipment in. Christianity and social justice, religions in conflict. And you can see,

Russell Fuller's the one who wrote the foreword for this. It's in,

I have them. And the autographed copies will be going out. That means if you are a patron, I am, by the time this video is out there, there probably already is an update in the post.

You might wanna check where the coupon code to get your free copy if you're a patron is there.

But if not, if you are not interested in that copy as a patron, then you go to social justice, or Christianity, I should say,

Christianityandsocialjustice .com. That's Christianityandsocialjustice .com, and you can get an autographed copy there, or you can find the

Amazon link if you want the Kindle version or something like that. So yeah, patrons, $10 a month or more, you get a free copy of this, signed by myself.

But everyone else, if you just wanna get a copy, and I would suggest, get a few copies. Maybe buy one from Amazon. Buy one,

I mean, look, I wanna get this in as many people's hands as possible. I like to get the Kindle version so I can search it.

It's got a search feature on it if I don't remember where something is. And then a hard copy.

And I think you want the autographed one. I'm just saying, the autographed copy. Just go to Christianityandsocialjustice .com,

and you can get that. And it makes great gifts for your pastor, or someone who's interested in this kind of thing, whether political or someone who's a

Christian and just wants to know theology better. So without further ado, here is

Dr. Russell Fuller. Welcome, Russell Fuller, to the Conversations That Matter podcast.

This is, I think, your third time, maybe third or fourth time on, and I appreciate every moment that you can give us to pick your brain on some of these things.

We're gonna talk about the Southern Baptist Convention at the end, but first, we're gonna talk about some passages that are abused,

I think, by the social justice advocates. But even before that, how are you doing? How's theology classroom?

Hey, thank you for having me on again. It's always a joy to be with you. And so, yeah,

I'm doing very well. Things are going well for me. The Lord, again, has been very good to me and blessing me.

And again, I appreciate, I know many of your listeners pray for me, and they can do nothing better for me than to pray for me.

And so I really appreciate you and your listeners. Yeah, well, thank you so much. That's very kind of you to say.

I know the theology classroom that you started when you were let go from the

Southern Baptist Theological Seminary has really blossomed. Why don't you tell everyone a little bit, just briefly, about what you're offering, kind of courses, and then what they can do if they want to sign up to learn theology from yourself, an expert

Hebrew scholar. Yes, we have something called a theology classroom. It's an online, we teach it through Zoom.

And right now we're offering about 11 different courses. And so we have courses in the languages,

Hebrew and Greek. I'm getting requests for Aramaic, so we might do an Aramaic class, we'll see.

And right now we're doing like a theology class where we're going through like the doctrine of inspiration, the doctrine of God, these issues right now.

Also doing a New Testament survey class. And then we have classes like on the book of Judges and like 1

John. We also have practical ministry courses taught by Tom Rush.

And so we're really excited about where we are right now and hope that some of your listeners are interested.

They can go to russeltfuller .com and they'll get further information.

Or again, and there you can even, from there you can contact me. And so if you're interested, and again, we are affordable.

Basically for a class at most of your major seminaries, you're looking at $1 ,000 or more.

And with us, a class is much more affordable than that. And so if you're interested in taking some courses, and again, we do them differently.

We have, this is for what we call self -motivated students. And therefore we have assignments, but again, that's optional.

We don't, the main thing, you come to the lectures. If you want the full experience, you could do the assignments.

But again, we're not accredited. We're not gonna be accredited for, for I think very good reasons.

But yet we're gonna offer things like, we're gonna offer a diploma program. Again, it's not accredited, but it shows that you've taken certain courses.

And I think it would be, it could be helpful for you down the road in ministry, teaching Sunday school, pastoring a church.

And so I think you can get solid biblical teaching. A lot of what's going on in the seminaries today is not solid, it's not biblical.

What they normally make you is mighty in scholarship. We wanna make you mighty in the scriptures, and to really understand what the word of God teaches.

That's what we're about at Theology Classroom. So if you're interested, again, RussellTFuller .com.

Thank you, John. Awesome, yeah, that's awesome. So yeah, go ahead and check that out. And I've heard so many good things from people who have gone through those courses that they just learned so much.

So I appreciate it. And I know you're gonna apply some of that knowledge that you disseminate to your students today on some social justice teachings, which

I'm really excited for, because I, you know, in the book that I wrote recently, which you were very kind to give, write a forward for me on Christianity and social justice,

I had to go through some of these things. But again, I'm not a Hebrew scholar, so I don't have the credibility or the knowledge that you have on this issue.

So we're gonna talk about some social justice passages too specifically, and then also whether or not the term social justice is just hiding in the scriptures.

Is it in the Old Testament? Did we miss it? Did Tim Keller, you know, thousands of years later, he happened to stumble across, wait a minute, it's been there the whole time, or is he mistaken?

So where would you like to start? I know there's two passages which we discussed, and then there's this question of whether or not combining these two

Hebrew words for justice means social justice. Is there any particular place you think would be good to start? Yeah, let's go to Amos chapter five.

I think that's a good start because this is a passage, when I first went to Southern, it was in a transition period between sort of the older liberal faculty and the new incoming conservative faculty.

And this is a verse that they would put on their door. This was sort of their life verse at the time, let justice flow like waters, you see.

And so this was a verse used by the liberals at that time.

So why don't we do, we'll do Amos chapter five first. Let me give you just a little bit of background about Amos.

Amos, you're looking at around a time of 750

BC. And when he, he's a Southern prophet from Judah, but yet a lot of his prophecies are against the

North. Israel, of course, as you know, Judah and Israel had split into two kingdoms.

And even though he was from the South, he was prophesying to the North, which is somewhat unique, really.

You see it of the prophets. And what makes him an interesting character, and a street prophet, is we know more about his life.

He gives us more details. Where maybe Joel, we don't know much about Joel personally, but Amos was really a, he was more of a farmer and a herdsman coming from Dakoa where that's right on the border between those two professions.

And he did both of these things. And what he says is he was not a prophet or the son of a prophet, either meaning his father was not a prophet or meaning that he was not a disciple of a prophet.

But later in his life, God called him to be a prophet. And so he went and he called out, he wasn't a social justice warrior, he wasn't.

And again, if you look at the liberalism and what they were saying about the prophets, let's say a hundred years ago, that's the way they saw them.

They saw them as moral reformers, sort of like a Pelagius before his time.

Pelagius was sort of a moral reformer in the church back around 400.

And he saw all the immorality and so forth. And so he started pushing, really, instead of the gospel, he started pushing just morality really.

And he was doing this. And really that's what they see about Amos, that he was pushing this.

But if you look at the very beginning of the book where he's talking about the sins that are being punished, the great sin against Judah is they had forsaken the word of God.

He's not just a moral reformer. What all the prophets do is they, what they tell the people is let's get back to God and his word.

We are departing from the truth. We're going toward idols. We're joining ourselves to false religions.

We must get back to the pure word of God. And as Isaiah says, to the law and the testimony, for if they don't speak according to them, there's no light in them.

And that's what both Amos and Micah is doing. And at the very end of Amos, it talks about a famine that's going to be coming upon the land.

And it's not a famine of water or of bread, but a famine of the word of God. And it's interesting.

Let me just tell you this real quick. The rabbis, the old rabbis lived back in the day, when they read that about Amos, when they read about that famine, they go, that's the famine during the time of Messiah, during the messianic reign, which again, maybe, maybe not, but I'll tell you what, we live in the messianic reign today.

We live during the messianic age between the first and the second coming. And I tell you what, we do have that famine in the land here in America, not of water and bread.

I mean, maybe that's coming due, but what we have is a famine for the word of God. Oh yeah, the word of God, it's in many homes, but we're illiterate when it comes to the word of God in this country.

And in many denominations, we are departing from these things. But yes, this verse here is taken.

The reason I think this verse is so popular with the social justice crowd, it's easy to lift it out of its context.

And of course, the context there in chapter five, Amos is calling the people back to repentance and let's get back to God's word.

And so what the people are trying to, what they're trying to do is, look, we're doing all the religious ceremonies, we're offering the sacrifices, we're keeping the feast days.

It's kind of like what more isn't pleasing to the Lord? You see, but the Lord says, I loathe,

I absolutely despise your feast days and your sacrifices and so forth.

Because what they had done is they had separated, as it were, the ceremonial law from the moral law.

They believed they could live any way they wanted to, as long as they made their sacrifices, as long as they made their offerings, and as long as they did their religious services, it was okay to link up together with false religions, the idolatry and so forth.

And over time, they had, really, a completely different standard of right and wrong.

And John, that's exactly what we see in our churches today. And so they come to this verse that talks about letting justice roll like water.

And so again, they're taking it completely out of the context here. But what

Amos is saying here is, listen, your folks are living immoral lifestyles.

You folks are joined to idolatry. You're departing from the faith. You're in apostasy, where what you should do is you should let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever -flowing stream.

In other words, get back to God's word and let's live in accordance with what God's word says. Now, again, this is not the gospel, as it were, but this is living out, the gospel is one thing.

We talk a lot today in our churches about this is a gospel issue, that's a gospel issue.

John, as you know, there's one gospel issue. That's Christ and Him crucified. That is the gospel.

But as it says, we're saved by grace through faith. This is not of yourselves, it's

God's gift. We're saved by grace through faith, not of works, lest any should boast.

For we are His workmanship created unto good works. This is the created unto good works, what we see here in Amos chapter five, verse 24.

Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever -flowing stream. This is the good works that flows from a person who's truly saved.

That's what's being described here and not something that's taken out of context. And now it's, again, a social justice, as it were, mantra or something like this.

Let me read for you. Oh, I'm sorry if I cut you off. Yes, go ahead, no, go ahead. I just really quick wanted to give you one example. There's so many

I could give you, but I figured I'll give you David Platt's talk called, Let Justice Roll Down Like Waters, Racism and Our Need for Repentance.

And just a quote from this. He says that, let's see here, that talking about Amos, that they denied sin, they ignored injustice, they refused to repent.

And he goes, there's a direct quote. I'm applying this text to the historic and current injustice associated with the black and white divide in the

United States. And then he says, are we now slow to speak and work against racial injustice around us?

And I'm convinced the answer to that question is a resounding yes. And one final quote. Pastors, instead of bridging the racial divide in our country are currently widening the racial divide in our country.

And so he goes on a whole list of all the disparities that exist in unemployment and income and mothers dying in childbirth and murders and education and all of this and says, that's what

Amos is talking about. That kind of thing. We're guilty of that today. What would your response be to that?

First of all, I think David Platt is coming at it from a non -biblical perspective.

He has accepted critical race theory. Now, again, they'll say, no, no, we don't believe in critical race theory.

But if you listen to David Platt closely, he's clearly very much influenced by it if he hasn't fully accepted it.

And the charges he makes come right out of the textbooks of critical race theory.

So his notion of justice, right and wrong comes out of, again, what they teach.

For instance, the numerical disparities. He sees if one group of Americans are incarcerated at a higher rate than another, and it's a difference in, let's say, races or groups of people.

This is clear evidence of racism to him. Well, again, if you're going to have a multicultural society like we have, and we're gonna have freedom, we're never gonna be equal in the sense of all of the different things that we can measure by statistics like incarceration rates, like household income.

In a free society, different groups are gonna do differently on different things, you see.

But to make these disparities evidence of racism, and again, the way he would view things is our whole structure is set up as a racist structure from beginning to end.

And therefore, that's why we have all these differences of numerical disparities.

But I do not see this kind of teaching in the Word of God. If everything, again, he's coming at it from really, again, a cultural

Marxist perspective. There's not equality in the sense of equality of outcome.

And so this must be an example of social injustice, injustice in society.

And again, I cannot see this in the Old Testament or the New Testament, where it views things this way.

So it's not Amos. Yeah, absolutely, not Amos. Now certainly, Amos cries out against sin in his day.

Of course he does. And but the sin that he, what he's doing is he's not looking at, he's not using a culture, he's not viewing this through a cultural

Marxist lens. He's viewing us through God's law. And where he sees where true injustice is being done in legal cases against the poor people, simply because they're poor and they're being able to be taking advantage of, he cries out against this.

And we would too. Our standard is God's Word. God's Word is the standard of right and wrong, just and unjust.

David Platt and the others in, leaders in evangelicalism that's holding to this stuff, they have a completely different set of standards.

It's not the Word of God. It's perceived racist disparities and so forth, coming from a cultural

Marxist lens. So again, this is why your book is so important. The book, your book is really showing that there's two religions.

We have different standards of right and wrong. We have different views of what the gospel actually is.

What you have in evangelism today, and you see it in the denominations, like the

Southern Baptist Convention or the PCA, there's a fight for what's the true religion.

Is it Christianity plus social justice, or is it Christianity faithfully taught and expounded?

And what you're seeing, that's why you see these battles in these denominations today. There's a struggle within these denominations.

What's the true gospel? What's the true standards of what God requires of us? The true standard of justice, of righteousness, is revealed to us in God's Word, not in critical race theory, not in MeTooism, and all these other things that I'll call the spirit of the age that many in the evangelical community are following.

Let me, that was excellent. Let me just repeat back to you in a nutshell what I think you're saying, and then you can tell me if I'm right or wrong about this.

So in Amos, what's being talked about there are people who live like the devil, including oppressing the poor.

Individually, this is what they're doing. It's as a group, but it's also that they're individual sins. They're all participating in this.

And then they go make the sacrifice like a bunch of hypocrites and say, well, I'm good with God. I did the thing that he told me to do.

And Amos is saying you can't live like that, which is much different than saying, well, you're just kind of passively living in this society that's got systemic racism, therefore you're guilty because there's a disparity at your church and too many white people.

That's very, those are two different things. That's what you're saying. That's exactly right. Those are two different universes altogether.

You did not see Amos talking in those terms. Now, yes, I mean, if you look at the kings during the time of Amos, he lived like, for instance, the

Northern king at the time was a guy named Jeroboam, not the first one after the time of Solomon, but the one later on, very powerful king.

Obviously from the political structure down to the individual, there was corruption, there was wickedness, but there was not, there was not something the way social justice advocates would see it.

Certainly we would look at our society, we would even look at our churches and see corruption sometimes throughout.

I hate to say that, it's true. But the answer is getting back to God's word, not to the latest, again, whatever the spirit of the age is, whether it's

MeTooism, whether it's social justice, racial reconciliation, as they call it, which is really, again, a critical race theory.

So yeah, this is what Amos is calling for is let's get back to God's word, let's repent.

He's really giving a call to repentance. And he's saying we need to have true justice rolling down through society today.

And the only way to do that is to get back to God's word. They didn't have justice, they had injustice going on.

And really when you hyphenate the word justice, you are really making it a misjustice, an injustice is what we're doing here.

And so social justice, what they wanna do is put their thumb on the scale of justice.

And what they wanna do is they wanna see laws that favor one group over another group.

They wanna make sure one group has affirmative action. One group has things like preferences when it comes to things like scholarships, reparations, these kinds of things.

And by the way, the Bible makes it very clear that you don't judge the sons for the sins of the fathers.

But with reparations and things like this, this is exactly what social justice advocates are looking to.

And so again, what they're pushing is really a form of, it's injustice is what they're pushing.

Real justice is something these people would really not like. True righteousness from God's word is something these people would see as bigoted and wrong.

One of the things as you were talking and giving those really good points, I thought of something that you've,

I know you've read this cause you wrote the forward and you read the book. There's a section where I talk about the social justice gospel.

And I found this really interesting person from history, Richard Ely, who founded the

Christian Social Union in 1891. He was inspired by Walter Rauschenbusch, but he argued that the church had forgotten the true gospel, which included a passion for social justice.

And he said that they had basically adopted a one -sided half gospel of individual salvation.

That's a direct quote, which sounds exactly like what we're hearing today. But of course in his, so not only was feeding the poor in his conception of justice and things like that, but he thought eugenics was a good thing.

And so I just wanted to point this out that what you were saying, Dr. Fuller, is just a hundred percent spot on that the spirit of the age is influencing, they're bringing this to this term justice when they see it.

And you have people from a hundred years ago saying, well, where for social justice, how about eugenics? You know, that's like directly the opposite of what they would, well, with the jab and everything else,

I don't know. But, you know, they wouldn't like that today. But at one time they did, and they would use the same kinds of arguments and passages

I'm assuming, so. That's right. I mean, they really want laws that discriminate on the basis of race, sexual orientation, all of these things.

They're wanting unjust laws that preference one group over another group.

What we would like to see is laws that are what I would call neutral laws.

They don't favor one group over another group. I want to see laws that are really consistent with God's notion of justice and righteousness.

And make those laws neutral, they apply to everyone neutrally, and then let's enforce them neutrally.

See, when you start using terms like that and you start talking about, let's make laws colorblind or something like that.

Oh no, that's racist. That's wrong, yeah, yeah. And I remember in a faculty meeting, Al Mohler basically saying, oh yeah, colorblind, that's racism, you see.

And another faculty member took him to task over this. Of course, that faculty member was asked to leave very soon after he did that.

But it's true, social justice advocates like Al Mohler and so forth, they see this notion of having a racially blind to these laws and so forth.

They see this as racism. This is racism to them. So again, this is injustice being, you're not gonna find, you're never gonna find true righteousness and true justice in a social

Marxist framework. You're just not going to. Well, let's, if you don't mind, let's move on.

Do you wanna go to the Micah passage now? Sure, let's go to Micah. Oh, let me just say one last thing about the Amos passage.

Notice that people like David Platt and others are quoting this verse now. Like I told you, when I started at Southern years ago, the old liberals were using this.

This was their go -to verse. Now you see the social justice advocates of our day doing the very same thing.

So again, as old liberals and really the new liberals of our day and with social justice, they do the same, they're doing the same thing.

And by the way, I mentioned Pelagius earlier. He was sort of the first social justice warrior. And the fight there was between what's the gospel?

Is the gospel works or is it truly salvation by grace through faith? And of course, Augustine said, no, no, no, we cannot have this.

And the church rejected Pelagianism as pure heresy. We should, and what social justice is, it's just a revival of Pelagianism.

And what we need to do is reject it completely and fully. Again, there's two religions in most denominations today looking to gain advantage, shall we say, to take over.

And I'm telling you, these denominations are gonna split or they're gonna completely become corrupted in these things.

John, yeah, let's go to Micah now. Yes, let me read you a quote before, actually, let's read the verse first.

It's Micah 6, 8. He has told you, oh man, what is good and what does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly with your

God. And Thabiti Inabuile, who used to be associated with Nine Marks, I don't know if he is anymore, but he still has a platform in evangelicalism, said this.

And I was a student at Southeastern when he came to chapel and said this. A person is not a liberal because they care about justice.

Now, the person you talk to might be a liberal, but it's not because they care about justice. Because if caring about justice makes a person a liberal, then

I'm here to tell you that God himself is a liberal and you had better become one. We preach and we do justice because we wish to be like our

Lord and we wish to see his righteousness fill the earth. The pursuit of justice and equity does not take us from the heart of our

Savior. The pursuit of justice and equity takes us deeper into the heart of the Savior.

So I wanted, and of course the whole talk, I don't have time to read all of it, but it's a social justice sermon.

But he uses this passage, Micah 6, 8, to essentially say that, listen,

Christians, this is your directive. You are commanded to do justice. So go out there and if you think you're being a liberal, then just swallow that pill and be a liberal because you gotta do justice.

So what do we make of this? Again, think of what the words he's using, justice, equity, righteousness.

But what does he mean by those terms? Remember, here's what liberals do. They take the language of Zion and corrupt that language.

They use that language because what they're doing is they're fooling people. They're deceiving people. Oh, he's talking just like the

Bible says, but he does not mean the same thing that the Bible means by the terms justice, righteousness, equity.

What he means, again, is the spirit of the age, he sees, as you know, our nation is born and raised in racism, the whole structure is racist, the walls are racist.

You can even have an organization with no racist in the organization, but it's still racist, you see, that type of thinking.

And so if he were to define justice, righteousness and equity according to biblical standards,

I would say, okay, let's talk about it. But again, this verse here in Micah, just like the verse in Amos, it's not, those verses are not the sum of the gospel.

Even when the Bible says God is love, that's not all that God is. He's just love and that's all he is.

No, the Bible tells us there's much more to the Lord than just love, you see.

And so to make these verses, this is the gospel in one verse.

No, the gospel in one verse is, I want to know nothing among you except Jesus, who is the

Christ and him crucified. So if you want a verse that really captures the whole of the gospel, that's it.

These verses are saying, basically, listen, repent, get back to God, trust the

Lord and his salvation, and then live according to his words. And that's what here is, again, this is an invitation to repentance that's being said here.

If you look at the verses right above it, again, the very first couple of verses, God is saying, basically,

I'm bringing you to court because I raised you, but yet you have gone away from me.

They've gone into apostasy. Then they talk about the sacrifices again, because Lord, haven't we offered you?

What do you mean we've gone away from you and we're not following your word? We're doing your sacrifices constantly.

They're looking to those sacrifices. And then they say, what if we offer thousands of rams?

And what if we offer even our firstborn up?

Would that suffice? Would you be pleased then, you see? And again, what they're doing is they're separating the ceremonial law from the moral law.

And again, it's like for me and you, we go to church, we do the things of church, but then we live a life that clearly shows we're not saved, that we don't really truly believe the gospel of Christ and him crucified.

And that's what this is, this is a call to repentance. And when it talks about in this verse here, what does the

Lord require of us? To do justice. And again, by justice, they're talking about following the laws, the morals that God says is right.

Well, that's what we should do. And those things which are wrong, we need to avoid. And then it talks about loving kindness or loving goodness.

The idea here, kind of a loving kindness is the way some translations would do it. And again, this is the idea of brotherly love for one another, you see.

And then to walk humbly before God. This is like the first four or five commandments, as Courtney, how you want to divide it, but the first four commandments of the 10 commandments that to love the

Lord our God with all of our heart, with all of our soul, with all of our might and so forth, is what's being said here.

But again, this is not work salvation. As it says in Deuteronomy, at the end of Deuteronomy, that the

Lord has to circumcise our hearts. He has to take away, as the prophets say, the heart of stone and put in a heart of flesh.

Then you'll walk in my ways. He'll circumcise our heart that we might walk in his ways.

So that's what's going on here. It's not, this is not a salvation by works. The Old Testament's very clear that there's none righteous, no, not one.

And in God's sight, it says no one, no flesh will be justified in the sight of God.

So there's no work salvation, whether it's the Old Testament or the New Testament. There is no such thing as work salvation.

It's salvation by grace through faith in the coming Redeemer, and with us looking back to the

Redeemer who came, the Messiah, Jesus Christ. That's where salvation is. Now we're gonna walk in God's ways, you see.

Paul talks about we're not under the law, but we're under grace. And by that, he means we're not under the law in the sense of its curse.

We're not trying to keep the law in order to be saved, which was impossible once Adam sinned.

That goes out the door at that point. But yet what we're seeing today is a new gospel.

We're seeing a new mores, the new laws that goes with this gospel, you see, or people are trying to put with the gospel.

And again, this is destroying our churches, destroying our denominations today.

So here's the question I have with Micah 6, 8. I mean, he uses a word to do justice, which

I think that's probably, you might know more than me. I'm looking it up right now. Is that mishpat that's used there?

Yeah, mishpat is used there, yes. Okay, so this is the word that's used most often to translate it as justice from the

Hebrew scriptures, right? Correct. So when he says - And this word, yeah, this word comes from a root that means to judge or to govern.

And what these are, these are God's righteous judgments about what is right, what is wrong.

His standard from which we're gonna be judged, you see. This is why we need the gospel because under God's judgment, none of us can stand.

And so I like what Machen said years ago. If we have a low view of the law, and I believe these social justice advocates have a very low view of the law, you become legalist.

If you have a high view of the law, you recognize you can't keep the law, and therefore you become a seeker of grace.

And that's what we need to be, seekers of grace, and then we walk in the ways of God. Again, we've been created under Christ Jesus under good works, which

God has prepared before that we should walk in them. Okay, well, thank you very much. That's very illuminating.

And it makes sense in the context when you realize these are people who are doing bad things, thinking they can just cover it up with, yeah, we're gonna sacrifice some rams or something.

Oh yeah, and John, by the way, when you combine the words, justice and righteousness, that's where people say, hey, and I remember there was a professor at Southern who said this, but yeah, when you combine the word for justice and the word for righteousness together, that's where you get the con, that's where you get the notion of social justice.

Can I read for you? Let's, cause that's exactly where I wanted to go next. Let me read for you a quote. Tim Keller from his book,

Generous Justice. When these words, Sadiq and Mishpat, are tied together as they are three dozen times, over three dozen times, the

English expression that best conveys the meaning is social justice. It is illuminating, an illuminating exercise to find texts where the words are paired and then to translate the text using the term social justice.

Here are just two. He goes to Psalm 33, five. The Lord loves social justice. The earth is full of his unfailing love.

And then Jeremiah nine, 23 through 24. And I won't read the whole thing, but he says,

I am the Lord who exercises kindness and social justice on the earth. So, I mean, are you saying

Tim Keller's wrong when he says that over three dozen times, the word social justice is in our Hebrew Bible?

Tim Keller is completely and totally wrong. And by the way, I can, this is easy to demonstrate.

You know, there's been some liberal translations of the Bible. If you go back to the RSV, the

Revised Standard Version, which came out in the 50s, or the revision of that that came out in the 80s.

Very liberal Bibles. They like gender neutral language and all these things. They never translate these things social justice, you see.

Now, look, I do believe in the future they probably will because these Bible translations are very much influenced by, again, the spirit of the time.

They're very much influenced. So, it will not surprise me in the future if you see that. But explain to me why no translation, especially before, let's say, 2000.

Of course, I don't know of any translation right now that translates it social justice. No, these two words don't go together and now make a hyphenated justice.

The Bible only knows about God's justice. It's justice. That's all it is.

There is no, social justice is almost like tribalism, tribal justice.

Again, it's looking at one group over another group. In the Bible, it's individuals.

And what the individual has done, you see, is the main thing. Well, then what, okay. So, you said this professor at Southern also did this.

Why do they do this? What's their justification? Are they just making stuff up or is there a reason that they say this? I think it's, again, they want to be the, what's popular in society?

What's popular in culture? And if they can kind of combine it and then sort of make a name for themselves. Oh, look at this.

When you put righteousness and justice, that's social justice and that's what we're talking about. I confronted that.

Well, I don't mean social justice in the way that these guys are using it.

I'm using it in my own way, which, I mean, how deceptive is something like that?

Well, how arrogant too. It's arrogant, that's right. In other words, you're using a term that's well -known how it's being used, but you're saying, but hey,

I do it in my own way. Again, Al Mohler is very famous for this. When he says that he doesn't believe in systemic racism, he wrote an article saying, yeah, but then he talks about he believes in systemic racism.

He uses that term, but then he turns around and goes, but I don't mean exactly what the advocates of critical race theory does.

In other words, I don't like the fact that it comes from Marxist thinking, but this concept is clearly in scripture and so forth.

So he's getting there and he's being very, he's muddying the waters and that's what's key.

You must muddy the waters in order to deceive people. So help us with this then. So Psalm 33 or any passage where you see those two coupled together,

Sadiq, if I'm saying that right, and then Mishpat. Righteousness, justice, what's the difference between those two things?

What should we gather when we see a passage that has those two things? What is that communicating to us?

Yeah, they're very close in their meanings, but the idea of justice is that which conforms, that which is just, that which

God has told us is just and correct, okay? Righteousness is like that which measures up to what is rectitude, what is the straight way to go.

In the Bible, the words for sin, some of the words for sin are like quick, twisted, crooked.

The word righteousness in some of those words has the idea of straight line. In other words, is what you're doing, does it measure up to God's word?

Is it righteous? Is it measure up or is it perverted? Is it twisted?

You see, that's sin a lot of times in God's word. Now again, the usual word for sin in the

Bible is to miss the mark, okay? And I think that's exactly what's going on here.

We're not, the mark is God's word and we have to hit that mark. These folks have changed the standards of what is right, what is just, to again, the spirit of the age.

And again, that's part of why we have two religions going on. Well, I hope you enjoyed Dr. Russell Fuller's take on some of these

Old Testament passages and how they are abused and misused by social justice advocates.

Again, you can go to RussellTFuller .com to find out more about Theology Classroom and you can go to ChristianityAndSocialJustice .com

to get a copy of the book Christianity and Social Justice. God bless you all. More coming later.