Justice

Because the God we serve is completely righteous and just in all his ways, we who have been justified by Christ are now called to put our thought and effort into enacting God’s justice in the world.

Note: This transcript was auto generated and may have errors.  If you would like to volunteer to review and edit our sermon transcripts before they are posted, contact Gail Peterson, gpeterson@calvaryefree.church.

Well, this morning we’re going to continue our tour through the mental contents of every Christian. Here’s the here’s the list of that. Let me just read it to you. Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. These last two weeks, we’ve considered what it means for our thoughts to be on whatever is true and honorable. But we have now made it to what is probably the most controversial, debated, dare I say, hot button categories of the list of Paul tells us to think about, uh, think about truth. Fine. No problem. Think about truth. That’ll be. That’ll be good. Think about beauty. Sure. No problem. Think about purity. I would expect nothing less in church, right? Think about justice. Hold on. What do you mean by justice? Biblical justice. Courtroom justice. Social justice. The word justice is now used for so many different areas, so many different ideas, that it’s difficult to know what we mean when we say it. It’s so charged with political ideology that the mere mention of justice causes others to assume that you have some sort of a hidden agenda, simply because you use the word justice. That’s especially true if you dare to put the word social in front of justice. That’s a sure way to stir the ire of your friends and neighbors, who think that you have, for certain, become a flaming liberal.

Right. And for the other side. Of course, if you are in any way skeptical of the huge amount of injustice that masquerades under the guise of social justice, then you are a fear mongering conservative who hates the poor and the oppressed, and probably puppies. Imagine what I’m even saying right now is causing some of you to be a little nervous about what I’m going to say next. You’re thinking, oh man, I like this guy too. Already googling churches in Rochester. It’s charged topic, isn’t it? It’s a tough one. Right in the middle of this list, Paul drops this bomb. Whatever is. Just think about these things. It’s command. It’s part of part of what God tells us that the Christian must mull over. It’s not an optional item for the politically minded Christian. The topic for all Christians. In fact, I haven’t mentioned this yet. But if you look at verse nine, the very next verse that comes right after verse eight, Paul says to the Philippians that they’re not only to think about these things, but they’re also to practice them. What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me practice these things. Paul is telling the church that they are to emulate him in all the ways that he has been living out this list. We are to do more than to think about truth. We are to be seeking truth and telling the truth.

And we’re to be doing more than thinking about justice. We need to seek justice and practice justice. The source and motivation for thinking about justice and seeking justice is the character of God Himself, whose love is expressed in his justice and grace. Because the God we serve is completely righteous and completely just in all of his ways, we who have been justified by Christ are now called to put our thought and effort into enacting God’s justice in the world. I like the way that our doctrinal statement says this. We have a statement, doctrinal statement for the FCA that we stand on, and it refers to God’s justice. In it, it says, we believe that God’s justifying grace must not be separated from his sanctifying power and purpose. God commands us to love him supremely and others sacrificially, and to live out our faith with care for one another, compassion toward the poor, and justice for the oppressed. With God’s Word, the Spirit’s power and fervent prayer in Christ’s name, we are to combat the spiritual forces of evil in obedience to Christ’s commission, we are to make disciples among all people, always bearing witness to the gospel in word and deed. Now. We won’t be able to impact that entire statement this morning. But in our study of Paul’s command to us, we are. We will see how justice and compassion are, in fact, an expression of true faith in Christ.

And as we’ve been doing, we’ll begin by defining the word just as Paul uses it here in the list. Then we’ll describe justice from the proverbs, and then finally we’ll see God’s justice displayed in Jesus. So let’s begin by defining just or justice. When we when we find this word in the Bible, it is most often used in reference to righteousness, God’s righteousness, or our righteousness. Righteousness is one of those Bible words that we hear a lot around the church that a lot of folks wrestle with because we don’t know exactly what it means. But it’s pretty easy to remember because it has the word right built right into it. Okay? Righteousness is being in a right relationship with God. You are righteous when you have no sin that is hampering the relationship between you and the Lord. That’s when you can be declared righteous. A righteous deed or an act of righteousness is any thought or action that’s in line with that, or is the result of that righteous relationship that you have with the Lord. So when you express your love for God by serving and worshiping in a way that that aligns with God’s Word to us, and you do that in obedience to Christ, you are acting in righteousness over 300 times. We find this New Testament root word 300 times. There’s so many, so many uses of this. And in the majority of those passages, it’s describing the right relationship that we have with the Lord.

But here in our list, in this list that Paul gives to us, the word appears to have a slightly broader meaning than that on its own, the word is used as a legal firm to refer to anything that is right or just or fair. Uh, earlier in this letter, Paul tells the Philippians how much he loves them and that it is right for him to feel this way about them. There’s our word. See it? Here it means something more like correct. It is correct that he feels this way about them. He’s telling them that his heart is precisely where it should be because of their partnership with him in the gospel. In Colossians chapter four, Paul tells the people in the church who have other people working for them to treat them justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a master in heaven. Now here the word is used to describe what a right relationship should look like between people, not between God and people, but between people, between humans. It’s saying human relationships need to be characterized by justice. These relationships need to be characterized by fair treatment of one another. And I want you to notice the reasoning here. You see the reasoning? You have people who work for you. But who do you work for? You work for God. Right? Yeah. You got some people that work for you.

But you you work for God. Treat these servants the way the Lord treats you as a servant. Paul says you’re not the top of the org chart. Okay, you are middle management. You are stewards of God’s beloved people. That’s where he’s he’s he’s placed you. And you better remember to act godly with them. Justice, fairness toward your fellow man. This is a very consistent pattern, by the way, very consistent pattern that we find throughout Scripture. Take all the goodness, take all the grace and all the goodness that you have received from God in Christ. And with the power of the Holy Spirit at work in you, treat other people in the same way. We see this over and over again. We see this with forgiveness. We saw this in Ephesians four verse 32. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another. Why, as God in Christ forgave you. We saw it with truth. We saw it with. With honor. The last two weeks. The same is true here of justice. That’s Paul’s argument here in Colossians. For the fair treatment that we give to others should be rooted in the treatment that we’ve received from the Lord, who is good and fair and right. And just now, here’s the thing that can get a little bit confusing, because we would look at this and say, well, wait a second, didn’t we receive grace from God and not justice? Isn’t that the whole thing? Isn’t that the whole whole of Christianity that we receive grace and not justice? If God treated us fairly and pronounced a just sentence on our sin, wouldn’t we be punished and banished from his sight? And if and if we’ve received his grace and now walk in that grace, shouldn’t grace then be the key feature of how we treat other people? Since God is pardoned our sins, shouldn’t we be only thinking about how to pardon the sins of others and not not be thinking about justice at all? Now I take you down, this little, this little trail of thought.

Because this is this is where my mind was most of this week as I was thinking this through. A lot of Christians get tripped up on how to think about godly justice when we are consistently thinking about grace, and it gets even trickier when we start to act on it. But there’s no real struggle here between these two. The key to untangling this is to remember that God’s grace is based on his justice. God’s grace assumes his justice. God doesn’t doesn’t give us his grace through an act of injustice. He doesn’t do that. He doesn’t pardon our sins by looking the other way or by skirting his own law. God’s God’s grace comes to us through an act of justice. He justifies us, meaning he declares us legally pardoned by enacting his justice for our sins on himself, on God himself.

Since there. Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. To justify someone is to declare somebody righteous. It’s the declaration, same root word here as our word, just for us to be declared righteous. God’s justice has to be served. It’s not skirted. It’s served. He would be an unjust God. Otherwise, it’s in his grace to us that he freely chose to take the penalty of our sins on the cross, thus justifying us, declaring us righteous, and renewing our relationship with him. And what that does is that makes the cross the ultimate act of both God’s justice and his grace. Justice in that he pays the full debt of sin, grace in that he pays for our sins, not his own. So when Paul tells us to think about whatever is just, he’s telling. He isn’t telling us to think ungracious thoughts about evildoers that he wants us to punish. He’s telling us to think and care about the difference between right and wrong. But good and evil and the with the seriousness that God has for his justice. Being gracious doesn’t mean that we overlook sin or that we refuse to take it seriously. It is not calling evil good or choosing to ignore the evil that’s around us. On the contrary, being people of grace means that we have a very deep commitment to justice because we know evil better than anyone else.

God’s given us his perspective on it. We know the sin from which we have been saved by grace. Grace doesn’t even make sense without justice. If I don’t have, God doesn’t have justice. What do we even need grace for? Our job is to see the world the way God sees it. A world filled with injustice that needs to be justified by the gospel. Justice is crystal clear in God’s mind, and so we should strive in our thought in life to to make justice as clear as we can in our minds as well. And here again, to do that, we really need discernment. True justice requires truth, and finding the truth in any given situation can be very difficult. And it’s even more difficult because we live in a snap judgment world. We have we’re quick to judgment. It takes time to sort out right from wrong. That’s hard to do when the pressure is to immediately act on impulses of vengeance, whether that’s a national thing, whether that’s a thing going on in your house. We also live in a world that will cover over the truth, cover over evil with lies and excuses. We will blame shift. We will justify ourselves with bad arguments and false narratives. Paul’s told us what real love will look like. He says this earlier in the letter, and it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more. What? With what? With knowledge and discernment.

All discernment. So that you may approve what is excellent. And so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ. The only way to approve what is excellent is to have knowledge and discernment. Knowledge is true. Information and discernment sorts that information out from what is false. So allow me to propose this definition of justice. Justice is the declaration of right from wrong, truth from error, good from evil, and the work to make things right because of the justifying work of God in Christ. To think about whatever is just is to use godly discernment and to take action whenever we can, to right the wrongs of the world. It’s to refuse to excuse sin and evil. Instead, we call it out for what it is, and working by God’s grace to undo the effects of sin and the evil in our relationships and in our society. So what will then a mind that’s set on this justice look like? Well, let’s look at justice described in the Proverbs. You you heard Proverbs 21 1 to 15 read earlier in the service. The whole section describes justice from various angles. But I want to focus us on a few verses. Looking at verses two and three, we see an assessment from the Lord that should cut us like a scalpel. Frankly, if God is doing heart surgery in these these two verses here, every way of a man is right in his own eyes.

There’s our word. Right. Same word. Here. It has the sense of being a straight path. Okay, so every person thinks that their way is the straight path. So Proverbs is saying everybody thinks they’re on the right path. It’s a straight path. They got it all figured out. They know what they’re doing. They have the correct way of acting and thinking. We are shockingly good at making very clear arguments in our heads for why we are right about everything. Right. Really, really good at that, man. I could make great arguments for why I’m right about everything. In our eyes, in our assessment of ourselves and everyone around us, we always come out on top. We’re always justified in our actions. Our thoughts are always correct and far superior to the arguments of other people. By the way, this is why repentance is so hard. If you’ve ever, ever struggled to repent yourself or met someone who is struggling to see why they would even need to repent, a lot of people won’t come to Christ because to be justified, because why do they need to be justified? I’m already right. Well, I don’t I don’t have to repent. I’m already justified in my own eyes. But where does God look to assess justice? What does he look at? Does he look at our arguments? No. He looks at our heart. He looks past the arguments and the opinions that we have for ourselves. He goes right to our heart and the Lord.

This means he knows our true motivations. He knows what’s really going on. God cuts through all of the self-justification and he says, here’s the true verdict you’re guilty. Guilty. Verse four says, haughty eyes and a proud heart are sin. They are the lamp that guides people to wickedness. Verse six says, getting treasures and riches through lies is a fleeting vapor and a snare of death. Your self-justification may get you money, but the money will be gone and then you’ll face the punishment of eternal death. I know this is not fun to talk about it. I get that this is reality. This is how how this is truly how justice is going to work. The Lord says, you want to know how justice works. God will tell you, here’s how it works. By contrast to this, verse three tells us, the Lord accepts justice and righteousness more than sacrifice. The way Israel worshiped was by bringing animals and other goods to the temple, to the priests at the temple. And this was the way that the worship of the Lord was prescribed in the Mosaic Law. The sacrifices represented things. They represented stuff like joy in the Lord or repentance for sins. It was a costly way to tell the Lord that they were reliant on him. But you have to understand the sacrifices were symbolic. They pointed to spiritual realities that should have been going on in the heart of the worshiper.

True love for the Lord, true sorrow over sin. The sacrifice represents those true realities in the heart. That’s what the way the worship is supposed to work. For some Israelites, these sacrifices became empty rituals that you just do before because you’re supposed to do it. Like many people treat going to church or praying before a meal, you just do it because that’s what we do. That’s what you’re supposed to do. The temple, sacrifices had to have a corresponding reality in the heart, in the worshipper for them to matter at all. That’s what the proverb is getting at here. It’s more acceptable to God to act in righteousness and justice in the world than to come perform some empty religious ritual. See, worship that comes from the heart is wonderful. God loves that worship that’s coming from our heart. Worship that is done without a heart commitment isn’t even worship. That isn’t even acceptable. It’s not acceptable in God’s sight. But seeking justice and righteousness in the world, that’s a truly acceptable form of worship when it comes from the overflow of the love that a person has for the Lord. There was a there was a big problem with the Israelites of going through the motions of religious practice, but ignoring the parts of the law that called for them to act with justice toward their neighbors. It was noted all over the place. They would they would look great in the temple.

But when they left, when they went back into their lives, when they went about their day, they would go back into the world and they would conduct business during the week using the same exploitative practices that all of the nations around them were using. It would be the same person as a person today, attending church on occasional Sundays, using the word Christian or the identity of Christianity to describe themselves, but then just just making every choice based on what seems right to the world or to himself. Nominal Christianity. We call that Christianity in name only, also called hypocrisy. The exploitation that’s listed over and over again throughout the Bible, both Old Testament and New Testament, is the lack of care for the poor and marginalized. You can see it in verse 13. Whoever closes his ear to the cry of the poor will himself call out and not be answered. God’s law for his people had safeguards built in so that no one would become desperately poor. If you read through God’s law, it really stands out. Just want to make sure nobody falls off into desperation. There are laws, for instance, on gleaning crops going along the sides of fields and being able to get enough food to eat. There are laws for how long debts can be held, acceptable collateral on loans. The goal was to ensure that those in poverty, regardless of how they got there, would have a way to get out of poverty and be protected by laws that would keep them from being exploited by powerful people.

So the key there was, they wouldn’t have to cry out. There would always be something there to catch them. But of course, sinful people and societies and choices in a broken world that we live in means that there are times when the poor do indeed cry out. Now. This is where it gets a little bit complicated and people get a little tense. We’re getting close to that tense point. What causes poverty? I worked for many years as a pastor with people in the generational poverty community in a town where I lived in Pennsylvania. I worked with a team of people that created a program that partnered with middle class Christians, with people in poverty. So somebody who was in generational poverty wanted to get out, would be partnered with middle class Christians, and they would walk together through life. And they would they would be friends, and they would carefully walk along side of them on their journey out of poverty. It was fantastic. We saw people lives renewed through it. It was fantastic. It was a joyous and fascinating ministry, and I learned so much from my friends who lived in that world. The experience and research of that time taught me that the causes of poverty are varied, okay. They’re varied. There’s so many of them. And by the way, that’s true of all societal problems.

That includes racism, abortion, hunger, the decline of education, the epidemic of divorce. All of those things are caused by varied sources. Everything that you can think of that’s falling apart in our world has multiple causes. All of it is sin, but it is all sin coming at the issue from different angles. In the case of poverty, it’s a combination of personal choices, exploitation by more powerful people, and the family situation that you were born into. Thinking about justice for the problem of poverty or for any social issue, requires gaining knowledge and working toward a solution that addresses the problem from all of those different angles. Justice in society or social justice is difficult precisely because it’s so complicated, and most solutions do not address the complexity. It’s easier to solve a murder by just putting the clues together and identifying the culprit. There you go. There’s justice. Done. We got it. But putting the clues together for societal problems that require justice doesn’t lead to one culprit leads to a lot of different culprits. Multiple culprits. All of them requiring attention. Now let me tie this back then to Christian thought. The Christian who has been justified by Christ. And now who loves God’s justice, will find ways to enact justice even when it’s complicated. He’s not going to ignore or explain away the cries of the poor. He will not ignore or explain away the real problems of racism, or sexual assault, or human trafficking, or the suffering of immigrants, or the cry of the unborn who have no voice or whatever it is.

We will not explain those things away. We will explore the culprits. We will find knowledge. If if he is comfortable but others are crying out, he’ll think about what God’s justice would look like for those who are hurting and do what he can. And anyone who claims to be justified by Christ but who ignores God’s justice in the world is fooling himself. The second half of verse 13 is a clear warning. If you don’t have a heart for concern for God’s justice in the world, then you don’t have the Lord on your side. And I believe this is a warning of final judgment. It’s one more way to look into the mirror of God’s Word to see yourself. And we see this very clearly displayed in Jesus description when he comes to be the judge. Jesus said that when he returns in his glory. Meaning, when he comes at his second coming to judge the earth to bring final justice. He will sit on his throne and the nations will be gathered before him. And he said that he’ll separate everyone as if you had two great big herds, one of sheep and one of goats, but they’re all mixed together. Jesus says, I’m going to come and I’m going to separate them out. I’m going to put the sheep on the right.

I’m going to put the goats on the left. And immediately, of course, when we hear that Jesus is going to make this separation, we want to know what makes the difference between whether a person is a sheep or a goat, because this is final judgment, this matters. This is the beginning of eternity. One group gets in, one group doesn’t. So the difference here is vital. What we would expect from all of Scripture is that those who are justified by Christ’s sacrifice on the cross are the sheep. That’s what we would expect by looking at the Bible. We are justified by faith in Christ, as we saw earlier in Romans chapter five, verse one. And so the other group simply are those who will receive God’s just punishment themselves. They don’t have Christ justifying them, and so they bear the weight of the justice. That’s justice. And that certainly is the difference. But Jesus says says it a little differently here. It says it a little differently. Jesus says it in a in a way that we can identify those who are truly justified by him. He’s pointing at a little bit of different angle on this. He says to the sheep, come, you who are blessed by my father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. And then instead of talking about their faith, he starts talking about their service to him.

He says that they fed him and clothed him and visited him. And when he was sick and in prison, and they welcomed him when he was a stranger. And he says, the righteous, the people who are justified by God are then going to question that. Boy, I don’t I don’t remember that at all. God. Uh, Jesus. I don’t remember any time when I was living my life that I saw you specifically, and I did these things for you. I don’t remember doing this directly for you. Jesus and Jesus will explain that they served him like this when they served their brothers and sisters in Christ, when they cared deeply and acted on the issues and the trials and the struggles of this world, that they proved that they had hearts that were changed by Jesus, their service was ultimately to Jesus himself. And the King will answer them. Truly I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me. They showed they truly lived under the reign of King Jesus because they they didn’t just claim God’s justifying work for themselves, they became active in the care of those who were in need. And then Jesus turns to the other group and his first words to them are, depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. What a terrible judgment, but not unjust.

Not unjust. What he’s doing here is justice. Jesus lifts off the same actions as before. But he says the second group didn’t do. Didn’t act on on any of the problems that that came to their door. They weren’t moved by compassion in any way when they saw these opportunities. Why? Because they didn’t have hearts that were motivated by Christ. They didn’t care about the Lord, and so they certainly didn’t care about the Lord’s people. And then he will answer them, saying, truly I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me. And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life. Church. Why does Paul tell us to think about whatever is just. Because our society is full of injustice. There is brokenness at every level. The natural inclination of our sinful human heart is to justify itself in our own eyes, right? To justify ourselves. You know what? Fill the world with people like that. Fill the world with people who can justify themselves in their own eyes, give them power and you’ll end up with whole societies built on unjust laws and values. You’ll have human trafficking. Did you know that Minnesota has hundreds of reported cases of human trafficking every year? You know that. And those are just the tip of the iceberg of unreported ice, unreported cases of suffering and injustice. We have immigrants fleeing violence who come to Rochester.

We have a rising homeless population. I could go on. None of these problems are single source problems. You can’t point to any one thing and say, this is why it’s happening. There’s not not a single law to fix or a single evil to address with the courts. The evil comes from multiple angles. No single person in this room has all the answers to the brokenness, to the injustice that we can see around us. But we do have something here among us that will do a great deal in righting the wrongs of our society. You know what we have? We have the call to serve Christ himself by compassionately serving the needs of our neighbors to care deeply about issues of justice. We can think about justice, the justice that must come against evil, and the justification that we have received by grace in Christ. We can bring those two things together, and God perhaps has placed you in a unique position to be able to make changes at higher levels politics, education, medical advocacy, whatever it is. If God has put you in a position to be able to address an injustice in our society, use your position. Bring God’s grace, bring salt and light. Speak your voice into that within the name of Christ. You can bring about justice from your particular place in this world. God has called us to care and engage for his glory. So church, whatever is, just think about these things. Let’s pray.