Biblical Justice vs Social Justice - Where ERLC, TGC and T4G Go Wrong - Evidence

Biblical Standards for Evidence and Listening to Testimony

All right, let's continue this primer on biblical justice versus social justice. And today I want to talk about sort of the methodology for evidence and for establishing whether something is true or not.

And I've noticed this very early on in my interest in this topic. A lot of times that I would be talking to someone in person or online, and, you know, I would be disagreeing with what they're saying about racism or social justice or white privilege or whatever.

And a lot of times the response would be, what you really need to do, Adam, is you need to listen to your black brothers and sisters in Christ about their experiences. You got to hear their stories. And I was always confused by that because I do do that.

I, you know, I read blogs, I follow certain blogs that are social justice blogs. I watch tons of videos from all kinds of different perspectives. You know, and so I do do that. You know, I was always confused by that, and I just figured maybe they didn't know.

But what I came to realize is this is really a part of their methodology, it's part of their strategy. It's called storytelling. And what they mean when they say that I need to listen to my black brothers and sisters in Christ is what they mean is listen and believe.

Listen and accept what they say. And on the one hand, I do want to listen to black brothers and sisters in Christ, and I don't want to disbelieve them. But at the same time, God's standards say in the church, God's standards in the church say, you don't just listen and believe in action on that.

Deuteronomy and First Timothy on Corroborating Witnesses

You have to listen, consider, inquire diligently, make sure, you know, confirm. So you believe what they're saying, but you confirm it before you go and take steps to fix it. And this all comes from the Old Testament code regarding criminal witnesses.

And let me take you to the book of Deuteronomy. This is Deuteronomy talking about criminal court cases, essentially. And here's what it says. It says, A single witness shall not suffice against any person for any crime or for any wrong in connection with any offense that he has committed.

Only on the evidence of two witnesses or three witnesses shall a charge be established. Now, that's very important because what it's saying here is in the criminal court case, and this is something that United States adopted into their own idea of what, you know, what should establish justice in a criminal court case.

You know, the whole thing about, you know, guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, you know, that's an application of this. It might not be a perfect application, but it's an application of this idea of two or three corroborating witnesses.

You can't just have the evidence of one witness because that witness could be false. And so you need to have at least two witnesses, ideally three or more witnesses that corroborate to establish whether something happened.

And so we can't just listen and believe. We have to listen and inquire and we have to listen and consider and cross examine and believe. And this is not just so a lot of people would say, oh, well, that's the Old Testament code.

We're in the New Testament context. Well, Paul applies this to today. You know, this is first Timothy, and he's talking about in the context of a church here. And this is especially instructive for us at these conferences and having this discussion in the church.

Here's what Paul says. He says, don't accept an accusation against an elder unless it is supported by two or three witnesses. That's a direct application of the Old Testament civil code. And he's applying that to the church context today.

False Accusations, Storytelling, and Biblical Justice

And so he says, don't even accept an accusation against an elder in the church unless there are two, hopefully three witnesses that corroborate. This is important. You know, we've forgotten this as a church because I've watched these conferences and you know, Matt Chandler makes a ton of accusations against the white church.

Russell Moore makes a ton of accusations. You know, David Platt makes a ton of accusations against the church and they're not good applications. They're accusations of sin. They're accusations of misconduct.

But they're not two or three witnesses. They're just kind of thrown out there and assumed and saying, well, this is the case. Okay. If you're going to accuse the white church, whatever that means, I don't even accept that category.

But if you're going to accuse a church of, of, of certain sin, you need to have two or three witnesses. Like we can go in history and look at the different failures of elders in the church to address certain things or to apply biblical justice.

And we can have, we can have, you know, witnesses that say that's, that see it, we can see their own words and, and we can compare it to the Bible and stuff like that. You need to do that now. You know, you can't just throw these accusations out there.

That's not biblical justice. That is storytelling. That is part of critical theory. That is part of cultural Marxism. That's their methodology. It's storytelling. But God says, storytelling is not enough.

We need to have two or three corroborating witnesses, and we just don't accept witnesses just automatically. Here's what Proverbs says. This is an application of the law of God. In Proverbs, it says this, the one who states his case first seems right until the other comes and examines him.

That's important too, because here's the thing. We don't take a witness and we just say, oh, well, everything this witness says is true. And therefore I'm going to action on it. No, we have to inquire diligently.

We have to cross examine. And that doesn't mean, you know, we have to like put that person on the hot seat and then, you know, you know, dissect every word. No, it just means that we need to consider what that person says.

And then we consider other evidence that we have and, and see if it matches up. This is, this is what's so confusing to me when someone says, you need to listen to your black brothers and sisters in Christ.

And I say, you know, I will listen to them because I've experienced racism myself. I know it's out there and I'm sure that the black brothers and sisters in Christ that are saying they experienced racism, have experienced racism, but that's very different from accepting this narrative of how everyone's racist and there's institutions and systems are racist.

No, we have to inquire into that. We need to cross examine what the evidence is for that before we can accept that. And especially in the church, you know, if you're going to make an accusation and say a church was racist, we definitely need to have two or three witnesses before we can even inquire with that, before we can even accept that accusation.

Diligent Inquiry, False Witnesses, and Proportional Justice

And this is something that the law itself, you know, recognizes it. It knows God's God's smart. He knows that certain times, sometimes witnesses can be false. And here's what he says. He says, if a malicious witness arises to accuse a person of wrongdoing, then both parties to the dispute shall appear before the Lord, before the priests and the judges who are in office in those days, the judges shall inquire diligently.

See, this is the part about cross examining. And if the witness is found is a false witness and has accused his brother falsely, then you shall do to him as he had meant to do to his brother. So you shall purge the evil from your midst and the rest shall hear and fear and shall never again commit any such evil among you.

Your eye shall not pity. It shall be life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand and foot for foot. Now this is a criminal case, right? And so he's saying if somebody falsely accuses somebody else of murder, what they were trying to do was they were trying to get that person to get the death penalty because murder, uh, you should have the death penalty according to biblical justice.

And so if it's a false witness and they were trying to kill that person through the court system, then they're the ones that should die and it should be an equal punishment. It should be a just punishment.

And this is not the kind of, of eye for an eye, tooth for tooth that was all about revenge. That's the kind that Jesus rebuked. He rebuked revenge, but he did not rebuke this proportional restitution based biblical justice.

Jesus would never rebuke and, and, and, and, and, um, and overturned God's law. He wrote it for goodness sake. You know what I mean? So, so here's the thing, like all of these accusations that are being thrown out there need to, we need to make sure that we have two or three witnesses and if we don't, that's a very serious thing.

James 1, Racism Accusations, and the Need to Be Slow to Speak

So, you know what pastor David Platt did and what Matt Chandler did, these are serious situations unless you, you better provide the two or three witnesses because if you can't, I have no choice but to consider you a false witness in that case.

And that's a very serious situation. What you intended to happen to these white pastors that you were calling racist, that should happen to you. Now this is the other thing about this as Christians, we need to remember to be slow to speak because we need to really inquire diligently.

This is another application of this same law, James chapter one. He says this, let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, and slow to anger for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.

Righteousness is just another word for justice, right? So the anger of man does not produce justice is what I see in the blogosphere. And I see this on Twitter all the time is, you know, something will happen and someone will say, Oh, that's proof of racism.

And it isn't. It's just, you know, like for example, the Starbucks incident, right? All we see is this accusation of racial prejudice, racial bias, racial, racial, um, um, uh, profiling. And we see a video of everything that happened after the fact, but not what led up to it.

So we, we actually don't have any evidence of any kind of racial discrimination. We don't. Um, but people are all over Twitter saying, here it is the proof of racism, blah, blah, blah. Look, we need to listen to the people that this happened to you, listen to what they say.

And then we have to inquire diligently. Is it racist? Do we have evidence of racism here? Do we know that this is what happened? This, this is, this is what happens all the time with, with, with police shootings as well.

You know, we'll see a white cop ends up shooting an unarmed black man. And so the assumption is racism. That's what we see in the media. Oh, this is a racist cop and, and there's just racist cops running around trying to lynch black people.

And that's what you're the accusation. And sadly, many Christian leaders will go ahead on Twitter and say, yeah, here's more proof of racism. And the reality is that's not the case. We need to keep our mouths shut until we know.

And that's what James is saying here. When he says, be slow to speak, he said, keep your mouth shut, inquire diligently, find out if these things are so you can't just assume racism because one guy was white and one guy was black.

You can't just do that. You have to have evidence of it. Christians have a higher standard. I know why the world does this. I know why the world does this, because they have no standard of justice. They have no standard of righteousness, but according to God's standard of justice, you can't just get angry about racism.

Every time there's a white cop and a black guy, and they're involved in an altercation and somebody ends up getting shot. Now it might be racism, but you have to prove it. That's why you are quick to listen, listen to what happened, listen to every side of what happened, not just the victim, not just Jesse, Reverend Jesse Jackson, not just these guys on TV that are on media.

You listen to every side and then you consider, do I have enough evidence here to say this is racism? And if you don't, don't go on Twitter and say it's racism because that doesn't produce the righteousness of God.

According to James chapter one, be slow to speak, shut your mouth, keep your mouth shut until you know what happened. And if you never know, then keep your mouth shut forever. But once you do know, if you do have evidence of racism, then go out there and say what you have to say.

That's okay. But you have to consider everything you have to be quick to listen, not just to the people that are claiming victimhood. You got to be quick to listen to everybody. That's the standard of a Christian.

And so, you know, all this stuff I had, I had a guy that I read that his blog article, this was his big gripe with, with Matt Chandler because he, every time that another shooting would happen, he'd get on Twitter and be, Oh look, another racist cop.

You know, that's a problem. That's a problem. Christians should not be that way. We need to be quick to listen to everybody, slow to speak and slow to anger. I hope this is helpful and we're going to continue this sort of series on biblical justice versus social justice.

We have a few more videos planned and you know, we'll see where this goes. God bless.