Sunday Night, August 2, 2020 PM

Deuteronomy 16 and the Theme of Justice

All right, let's open our Bibles to Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy chapter 16, I'll be reading from there in a moment, and we'll be looking at a variety of passages of scripture as we come back to our theme of justice as we get started.

Let me go ahead and pray for us again. Father, I thank you for our time together tonight. I pray that you would bless it with understanding that we would have your mind on these matters and that we would have your heart, that we would be compelled and zealous to do the things that you have called us to do, be obedient to Christ and eager to see his kingdom advance in every single possible way that we can.

Lord, we thank you for your long-suffering towards us and your love for us. We thank you for giving us to your son and giving your son to us, and it's in his name that we pray, amen. Okay, Deuteronomy chapter 16, and we're reading verses 16 through 20.

Defining Justice by Scripture and the Character of God

As a reminder of where we were last time, we are going through this series, Sons of Issachar, which is a note, a name that we gather from 1 Chronicles chapter 12, when David was being coronated by all of the tribes after a long and bloody civil war between the house of David and the house of Saul.

And in a time of difficult transition, the Sons of Issachar were those who knew that they understood the times, they understood what they needed to do, and that's the same kind of approach that we need to have in our day and age.

So let me read for us Deuteronomy 16, verses 18 through 20. You shall appoint for yourselves judges and officers in all your towns, which the Lord your God has given you according to your tribes, and they shall judge the people with righteous judgment.

You shall not distort justice, nor you shall not be partial, and you shall not take a bribe, for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and perverts the words of the righteous. Justice and only justice you shall pursue, that you may live and possess the land which the Lord your God is giving you.

Our goal with this study is to take key terms that are being used a lot in our day, not only in the wider society, but also in our churches, and do our best to understand them from a biblical point of view.

The word justice has been used a great deal, and it seems to be one of the key terms that we need to wrestle biblically to understand. It's difficult sometimes when the word that is a good word, a word out of the Bible, is being used in ways that we're not sure if that's a biblical way to use that term or not.

And to begin to try to carefully define it, it can be a very big challenge. Assuredly, we are for justice, not against it. We are for righteousness, not against it. And in fact, we desire to see justice done as Christians, as those who recognize the importance of justice from God's point of view, how many times he is concerned about injustice among his people, as we read through the Old Testament, how Jesus himself was concerned about injustice in his day.

These are all concerns of God, and therefore should be concerns of believers. And while we have that emphasis in the Bible, we also want to make sure that when we talk about justice, we are using the term in the way that the Bible uses it.

And I believe that is just about everyone's stated goal in evangelicalism, but there is a widening disagreement about what that term means. And so we're trying to bring some clarity to that matter. Our approach will be one of establishing our convictions according to the word of God, whatever term we're talking about.

If we're going to talk about the term racism, if we're going to talk about the term privilege, if we're going to talk about the term poor, whatever term we're going to talk about, we may even talk about submission to the government and so on and so forth.

Whatever the terms are that we're talking about, we can talk about quarantine, we can talk about all these different types of terms. What we want to do, first of all, is to examine the scriptures, be wise Bereans, to see what it is that the scriptures have to say about that buzzword, if you will, that important term.

And then after that, we want to proceed to think about our approach. How is it that we are going to listen to others who are talking about this information? If we hear it on the news, if we hear it from a friend, if we're reading an article or reading a book or listening to someone talk about these important issues on the internet, YouTube, or watching something on TV, how are we going to make sure that we're being biblical and not just whatever anybody is saying in print or media form sounds good to me?

How are we going to have discernment? What is the actual practice of discernment? We know we need to have discernment, but what does that look like? What's the process of discernment? And so we're going to try to employ that process by, first of all, defining terms and then running a reductio, which means taking the term that we believe to be non-biblical and, well, is it biblical or not?

Let's see if it matches up with the scriptures. Does that actually work? And then moving on beyond that to offer Christ. We need to understand, as we were talking about this morning, the answer for the chaos of man is in the supremacy of Christ.

We have to understand, what does Jesus think about the matter? What did he come to do to resolve this issue, whatever it is? And it has to do something with sin. So let's think about how it is that he came to destroy the works of the devil and establish righteousness.

And in all things, part of our approach is to stick with the scriptures over and against statistics and stories. And we'll talk more about that tonight. So it's a three-step thing. First of all, establish our convictions, talk about our approach, but then also I want us to talk about our hope at length.

I want us to see that, what is the way forward on these matters? Now, last time, I didn't know how long it was gonna take to get through some of the material. And so tonight I'll be reviewing some of what we were looking at last time and make a little progress.

And although justice is just too big of a term for us to handle in a couple of nights, it will be with us throughout the rest of our study. Okay, that's why I started with this one, because it's just gonna be with us the whole time.

But in future context, what I'm gonna, I'm just gonna plan on two nights for each session. I'm just gonna plan on that and then open it up a little bit more for discussion and so on. Okay, so just kind of trying to find my footing in this new format.

Partiality, Wealth, and Old Testament Justice

So last time we had a couple of quotes or clips from some Christian thinkers. We were given a six-step process from Paul David Tripp about reading the Bible and then interpreting the Bible based on other materials that would give us the proper understanding of it.

And we talked about how that's not a good approach. If somebody says, well, you need to read your Bibles, but then what you really need is this set of materials through which to understand the Bible. And then, and only then will you understand the Bible.

Well, we're Protestants for a reason. Okay, teachers are helpful. Tradition is there and we can rely on that. But we do not need an official priesthood or an official teaching cast to hand it to us and say, this is what you ought to believe.

And so those are just basic convictions. Now, when we come to the matter of justice, as we're trying to define that by the word of God, we started with a character of God. There's no partiality with God.

When he deals justly, what does that mean? It means that he's not taking into account whether somebody is rich or poor, whether somebody is free or slave or whatever considerations. There is no partiality with God.

And in fact, in Romans 2, Paul makes the point that God doesn't have partiality towards a Jew or a Gentile, whether or not they're following the law and so on. There's no partiality with God. And so we see that listed all over the place, the character of God.

God is just. I wanted to do a little bit more in talking about what justice looked like in the Old Testament. We talked about the bag of weights. It was instructed to the people of God that whenever they were doing any kind of business with one another, that they would not have unjust weights, that if they said, I'm giving you a pound of grain, that in fact, the weight that they were using to level the scales was in fact a pound, and they would not have a separate set of weights that would be a little bit off or different.

So they would treat this group of people fairly, but not this. And that was an example of justice. That's what we talk about when we talk about justice. And of course, it would be easy for somebody to cheat someone that way.

You can imagine. I don't like Reubenites. That tribe's never been nice to my tribe or whatever. I know this guy's a Reubenite. I'm gonna jip him. That's called partiality. And partiality is the opposite of justice.

Those two are continuously contrasted in the scriptures. To show partiality is the opposite of justice. Now, this is important for us if somebody is saying that showing partiality is justice, then you can understand the problem.

If somebody says showing partiality means justice when the Bible says justice means showing no partiality, that's a pretty strong contrast, I would think. And I'm trying to listen for why that is. The justice system that was instituted amongst the people of Israel, we've already talked about the system of officers and leaders who would hear the judges, who would hear the cases.

And if they couldn't decide on the matter, they would go up chain to people who were in charge of more people until finally went to Moses. And in our system of courts in our country is based off of that.

Lower courts to higher courts, okay? That's what it was based off of. We also have instructions to a king. The king, who would be the chief justice in these issues, the guy who was most responsible for establishing justice, what was he supposed to do?

He was to hand write a copy of it for himself of God's law. Like everything from Genesis to Deuteronomy, he was to write a hand copy for himself, the whole Torah for himself so he would know how to administer justice correctly, okay?

So the Bible itself is saying, hey, if you want to know what a just society looks like, look at the one that God crafted for Israel. Is that a foreign concept today? What is the society that God gave to Israel is held up as an example, not of justice, but of what today?

Cruelty, barbarism, backwardness. It is roundly condemned as unjust. I mean, maybe not that strong amongst Christian circles, but still it would be preposterous to think that the system that God gave to his own people, that God himself prescribed, could be considered just in any other context.

And does that make any sense to you? Does that make any sense at all? To say that God gave his people a barbaric, backwards, unjust system, and then he called it justice? That doesn't make any sense at all.

There's a lot of, as the older divines used to say, a lot of general equity in the law that we can learn from and apply to our own day and age, since we know that it was righteous and it was just. So that's what I hope that we will be able to do in an increasing fashion.

And again, people are trying to use the scriptures, and the claim is that much is unjust, and so the desire is to use the scriptures to say, well, how shall then we live? And we've talked about some of those concerns.

Sin, Shalom, and the Three I's

Last time we were together, I read you the definition of Cornelius Plantinga's idea of sin, whatever's against shalom, because God is for shalom, or in other words, universal human flourishing. Since God is for shalom, universal human flourishing, he's against sin, because sin breaks shalom.

And so if we wanna know what sin is, then we have to look at what shalom is. That's, I think, a misunderstanding of what sin is. Sin is lawlessness, the Apostle John says. Law is the character of God expressed, so that which is against the character of God, that's what sin is.

So we shouldn't put God into orbit around something else and say, because God is all about shalom, that's why sin is sin. I actually ran into somebody just the other day who actually quoted that definition to me as their understanding of sin.

And so we had a good discussion about that. And I tried to use the method. I don't wanna be a hypocrite. So I want us to think one thing. I want us to work a little bit on the definition of justice in our day.

When people are crying out for justice, as we were being told that this is what much of the chaos in our world is today, and we're told by several voices that the church has been built by injustice, that the church, the North American church especially, is a house that's been built by racism, by systemic injustice, and perpetuates injustice in a number of ways.

And that unless certain things are done in certain ways, then that's only going to continue. And then we're told the very same thing about the United States of America, and we're told the very same thing about all sorts of whatever seems to be the institution of the day.

When somebody says injustice, do we know what they mean? I mean, do you know what they mean? When you hear it on the news or you read it, someone talks about injustice. Do you have a clear concept of what they mean in general?

You know you're supposed to be against it. Even biblically so, don't you? But if you don't know what they mean, it might mean they don't know what they mean, right? It just may mean that they don't know what they mean, but they're definitely against it, you know?

It's like that old Andy Griffith show, they were having a flea market sale, trying to benefit somebody, and they were selling all sorts of items, and one of the old time farmers picked up some contraption and was looking at it with great wonder and admiration, and Andy asked him, he said,.

Do you have one of those?

He's like, nope. He said, you know what it is? Nope, but I gotta have it, you know? I had no idea what this is, but it's most definitely I have to have it. That's why it's important for us to try to define our terms biblically.

So we're talking about justice. When we're reading through the Old Testament, many times justice is connected to how you treat the widow, the orphan, the immigrant, and the poor. Many, many times. And the reason for that is, at the city gates, the elders of the city would sit, and they would deal with any matters of injustice.

It would be very, very easy to be partial to the locals, wouldn't it? Isn't that the sin nature, be partial to the locals? Or be partial to the guy who can help you out later, right? The guy who had lots of land and lots of resources.

That would be the temptation. The counter-temptation would be maybe you yourself never had a whole lot, and you kind of resented those who did. And then you kind of take up for the side of the poor. You're always the one who's championing the underdog, right?

And you can understand that temptation as well. That's why the scripture repeatedly says to show no partiality either to the poor or to the rich, but to judge fairly, right? And those were the laws that God gave to his people in terms of their civility, in terms of how they were to function as a society.

And so very often it would be difficult. There's responsibility laid upon the rich and the poor in the Old Testament, upon those who had the resources and those who did not. And that's usually how things are broken out for us in the common discussion.

A lot of the times people talk about injustice. How do you know there's injustice? Well, there's wealth disparity. The fact that somebody has more than somebody else means that there's injustice. And that's the kind of general feel of it.

And then they'll usually share a bunch of statistics. Which again, what does the Bible have to say about wealth disparity? What does the Bible have to say about wealth disparity, right? Is it a sin to be poor?

No.

Is it a sin to be rich?

No.

Is it a sin for the poor to covet being rich?

Yes.

Is it a sin for the rich to trust in their riches?

Yes.

Is it a sin for the rich to oppress the poor so that they can stay rich?

Yes.

These are all things that are very clear in the Bible. These are not new ideas. Just because of the fact of the wealth disparity doesn't mean that there's necessarily a sin. Though of course, it could occur.

Idolatry, Injustice, and Care for the Poor

In the covenant life of Israel, when you're reading in the scriptures, the Old Testament, you're reading the prophets and they're pointing at the fact that there's idolatry and immorality and injustice.

And the prophets always talk about those three. Amos talks about it. Micah talks about it. Malachi talks about it. Those three are always together, idolatry, immorality, and injustice. The three I's. They go together.

Why?

Because they rejected God. As soon as people start living, rejecting God's word, right? What happens? Immorality and injustice. Idolatry always brings immorality and injustice. That's what always happens.

If you want a just society, repent of your sins and trust in Christ. Submit to the lordship of Christ and follow him and he will lead us into righteousness. And there'll be some practical expressions of that.

But when Israel was worshipping idols, why were they worshipping idols? Worried about their crops coming in, right? Worried about their material wealth and so on. What were they supposed to do to the corners of their field?

Corners of their fields, what were they supposed to do? Leave them alone. Leave them alone. What were they supposed to do when they were harvesting and they were carrying the sheaves of grain from one place to another, they dropped some behind them.

What were they supposed to do that stuff they dropped? Leave them.

Why?

Because the widow and the orphan, the refugee and the poor were going to come out later and take care of that. Were they supposed to put gates on their vineyards? This is the people of Israel. This is the rules that God had for them, okay?

Were they to put gates on their vineyards? No, they were not.

Why?

Because somebody can come to the vineyard, not put anything into a container, but they were allowed to eat their fill. It's like, well, I go bankrupt if that happens. Not if you're honoring God. What did God promise?

He gave them abundance. He said, you're generous like that. You know, hey, you know, I'll bless you. Do we trust God? Do we fear God? Or is it all up to me, you know? So there was a spirit of generosity.

There were people were to leave the corners of their field and to leave the gleanings and to let people come into the vineyards and eat their fill. And they were to tithe. Why were they to tithe? A tenth of the tithes went to the Levites.

A tithe of the tithe went to the Levites, okay? And the rest went for all sorts of things, including helping to care for the poor. Who were in charge of taking care of those who were needy and making sure that things went the way they were supposed to?

The Levites were. The people in charge of worship were. The church used to know this. We don't know it anymore. But in church history, the church was in charge of taking care of those who were poor, making sure that they had a trade or making sure they had a way through.

You think of William Booth with Salvation Army and so on and so forth. But it was really the church. If you read about Geneva and the reforms that Calvin made in Geneva, only the most disabled of disabled were given their daily portion and everybody else was taught a trade.

Even if they were lame, they were still taught a trade with their hands. If they were blind, they were given something profitable to do. And all sorts of things were taken care of and they were organized by the church.

It was always in the church's responsibility to take care of that. There are stories about churches completely taking entire sections of cities off of the public payroll. We'll take care of that, they said, and they did.

That's good. That's good. It's not sufficient. It's not a replacement for the gospel at all. But Jesus went from city to city preaching the gospel and said, my priority is preaching the city. But he never failed to be compassionate as he went, did he?

He never failed to be compassionate as he went. And that's great. That is good. That's part of evangelism is to show compassion and so on and so forth. Now, if we're submitted to Christ and doing all of these things, will we be doing it biblically?

Yes, yes.

The church is not a social program where if for some reason you'd identify as the oppressed, we'll pay all your bills month to month from here to eternity. People tried that in Thessalonica. It didn't work.

He who does not work will not eat. They had to say, if you're going to be helped by the church, there are ways to honor Christ, and we're going to show you that. So I think it's important to, in just relying on the scriptures to understand what is injustice, what would be injustice in our day and is there injustice in our day and should we care about it?

Yes.

Yeah, there's all sorts of things that are unjust in our day, and we ought to care about it and do what we can to help. But it is not the same thing. It is not the same thing as agreeing to saying, well, just look at all these statistics and listen to all these stories.

The statistics are horrible. The stories are horrible. They confirm one another, and that means that you must start thinking differently and living differently and saying differently all that is demanded of you.

We cannot take up the stories and statistics and then read the scripture and say, well, I guess that's what it means now. Any more than somebody who says, well, Darwin proved that Genesis 1 is false. Genesis 1 is false.

Darwin already proved that. So now we have to read the entire scripture through the lens of Darwin. No, we don't. Any more than we have to read the entire scripture through the lens of Marx. We don't have to.

We're not required to or any kind of syncretism or synthesis of the two. Church has been through this generation after generation after generation. There has always been an outside interesting theory, interesting lens, and there have always been those willing to synthesize, try to synthesize Christianity or biblical knowledge with whatever this other thing is.

There have always been attempts to do that. Throughout all of church history, it's always happened that way. And it's important that we see that Christ triumph time and again in that. Our hope is in the justice and the righteousness brought to us by the word.

The Righteous Branch, the Law, and Loving Neighbor

Jeremiah 23, 5 through 6. Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous branch, capital B, a righteous branch, which means what? A just branch. And he will reign as king and act wisely and do justice and righteousness in the land.

In his days, Judah will be saved and Israel will dwell securely. And this is the name by which he will be called the Lord our righteousness. How many times we have to be told where justice is found? Jesus is the just branch, the righteous branch.

He will do justice and righteousness in the land. He will be called the Lord our righteousness. Not only does this mean that we are justified before God on the basis of Christ's righteousness, but it also means that in all the ways that Christ leads us to live and act, they will be right and they will be just by God's definition.

I have supreme confidence that if we follow Jesus, we will do right things. If we faithfully follow Christ, we will do right things and we will do just things as defined by the scripture. The term justice gets so big that people call giving somebody a cup of cold water justice.

That's not justice. That's called being kind. Somebody learns Spanish. So, oh, that's justice that you're learning. No, it may be kind of wise and practical and maybe interesting and fun. And you may just, you're like, oh, I would love to talk to people who primary language is Spanish.

But if everything is seen from a Marxist point of view, well, they're an oppressed class. And therefore, if you're learning Spanish, it's because you want to do justice. No, that's not what justice is.

We can't allow a category in scripture, a term in scripture gets so big that it's crowding out and redefining everything. There are consequences to that. For instance, the Roman Catholic expansion of the term grace to encompass works, that has some consequences, doesn't it?

We can't allow terms that are wonderful biblical terms to get expanded so far out that they begin to eclipse and encompass other parts of the scripture. That has dire consequences. So, you can be for justice without calling everything justice.

Okay, it's very, you can do that. Now, what does Jesus say in Matthew 5, 17 to 20? Do not think that I came to abolish the law or the prophets. I did not come to abolish, but to fulfill. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the law until all is accomplished.

Whoever then annuls one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven. But he, whoever keeps and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

For I say to you that unless your righteousness or your justice surpasses that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. Now, of course, I think primarily this means that we find in Christ the fulfillment of the law and his righteousness as our own.

And yet, we're also called to teach the law. In what way? The law as fulfilled in Christ. And so, that we are not under the curse of failing to follow the law, but the law is still full of usefulness for us.

It is God-breathed, and it is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, and training in righteousness. It is profitable to tell us what is true, where we're wrong, how to get right, and how to live God's way.

Why is that? The law is the expression of the character of God. The law has been fulfilled by Christ, and God gave a righteous way of living to his people Israel. And there's all sorts of things that we can learn about that and apply to our own lives.

Let me give you an example. Matthew 22, 34 through 46, when the... Well, I won't read that far. But when the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees,.

They gathered together,.

One of them, a lawyer, asked him a question, testing him, Teacher, what is the great commandment in the law? And he said to him, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind.

This is the great and foremost commandment. Second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend the whole law and prophets. That's great. Now we say, well, there it is.

The law, or being in agreement with the law, in other words, being just, means that you love God supremely and love your neighbor as yourself. Well, fine, as long as you love your neighbor as yourself, and that's what justice means.

But notice that we're not allowed to put into the container called love your neighbor as yourself whatever we think that means.

Right?

I think loving your neighbor as yourself looks like this, and then just kind of broad brush painting what your version of utopia looks like. We're not allowed to put whatever we want inside that container.

Jesus already says what it is. What did he call it? What did he say was in there? On these two commandments depend the whole law and the prophets. He was summing up something that's already been written.

The content is already there. Do you want to know how to love your neighbor as yourself? Read the law. Read the law. You're like, okay, well, I don't have a bowl that sometimes looks a little bit dangerous and tried to gore somebody one time, so I don't know how to apply that part of the law.

I've never had to hold my neighbor's cloak as collateral. I understand, yes, but there's wisdom there. There's principles there that tell us how to interact with one another, right? And so, if we want to know how to love our neighbor as ourself, we don't have to fill in the blanks.

There's no blanks.

It's already there.

Let's go read and think about that and with wisdom apply that. All the content is there. And there's nothing there that says that we have to eliminate wealth disparity and make sure that everybody has a chance to equal opportunity and equal outcome of everything.

Everyone reigning like kings or at least mid-level managers, right? That's not the scriptural content. So we can lean on the scripture, the sufficiency of the word of God tell us how to love our neighbor as ourself.

What does that look like? What does justice look like? All sorts of great application. I'm being kind of general here, but here's a little bit more and then we'll close with some Q &A. But Jesus, Matthew 28, 18 through 20, and Jesus came up and spoke to them saying, all authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth.

Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe or to keep all that I have commanded you. So part of the job of the great commission is to teach the nations to keep the commandments of Christ.

And lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age. And so if we're going to teach the nations the commandments of Christ, what will we be teaching them? First of all, repent and believe. First and foremost, repent and believe.

But then does it make a difference? Does it make a difference when a nation is called to keep the commandments of Christ? Yeah, ask Oliver Cromwell, right? It makes a big difference. Ask the Netherlands when things were going a lot better under Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavink.

Ask them how it went, if they were going to obey Christ. Ask how it went with our forefathers here in our nation, and the Puritan hope, and how they stitched together a nation. It makes a huge difference.

And it's interesting to me that in the name of rejecting stuff that is barbaric and backwards and antiquated and full of all sorts of awful stories of how people were oppressed under people who wanted to apply the word of God to society.

Okay, you've removed the word of God from society. How are we doing now? How are we doing now? Pretty bad. I think I would prefer life in the days of the judges to this.

Right?

So I think that we can lean upon the word of God to know what justice is, and then how to actually enact that in our lives. And all right, any questions or thoughts about justice and then what we're going to be looking at coming up next?

Discipleship, Worldview, and Closing Exhortation

So if you've been discipled, if you've been discipled that not getting your way or not being approved of or celebrated, if you've been discipled by someone to say, if you're not being celebrated and if you're not being handed a certain amount of stuff, then that is injustice.

Then what do you think that person who's been discipled that way will think? If I'm not being celebrated, if I'm not being handed a certain amount of stuff, then that's injustice and I am against injustice.

So where is the discipleship happening? Where are people being discipled? The discipleship has been happening for decades in the government schools, and it's been happening in higher education for a very long time.

Why is Rutgers rejecting grammar? That's just one more step in their absurdity. Grammar is racist, by the way, if you didn't know. Rutgers found out. But look, you have to recognize this has been happening for a very long time, okay?

It is, if you want to talk about something that's been systemic, that's been systematically taught and people are being discipled that way. When you come to somebody, it may not be that they're the ones who are the fountain of all the deception.