Justice and Righteousness
“It is an act of evil to accept the state of evil as either inevitable or final.
Others may be satisfied with improvement; the prophets insist upon redemption.”
-Abraham Joshua Heschel[1]
We often forget the role the biblical prophets played in critiquing the abuse and oppression of people by those in power. Jeremiah, Isaiah, Amos etc. would address the evils and hypocrisy acted out by kings, priests, and at times other prophets. They did not do this out of contempt or spite. They possessed a burning desire to see Israel remain faithful to Yahweh and to do what was right for others as an outworking of their relationship with Him. “Faithfulness to Yahweh” in the minds of the prophets was synonymous with being faithful to a spouse and all that spouse stood for. They saw Israel’s breaking of their covenant by worshipping other gods the same way as cheating on a wife or husband. They also saw the same type of adultery at play when those in authority would abuse their power to cheat and steal from the poor and disadvantaged. When leaders did this and still attended religious feasts and ceremonies it would incite God’s righteous anger. God desired the leaders to be faithful not just with words but also with action in regard to how they treated others. In Isaiah 1:11[2] we read:
“What makes you think I want all your sacrifices?” says the LORD.
I am sick of your burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fattened cattle.”
Yahweh goes on to deride the worthlessness of what the Israelites bring as sacrifices and the festival celebrations dedicated to Him because of their glaring hypocrisy. He then declares in verse 15:
“When you lift up your hands in prayer, I will not look.
Though you offer many prayers I will not listen,
For your hands are covered with the blood of innocent victims.”
In this text there is a connection between speech and actions. Worship is an act of total being, it’s not conceptually relegated to a compartment in our minds that we title “religious stuff”. If our words and prayers do not match our deeds, there is a very real problem. Yahweh is quick to point this out and it’s important to Him. However, God gives them a remedy for their crookedness in verses 16-17:
“Wash yourselves and be clean! Get your sins out of my sight.
Give up your evil ways. Learn to do good. Seek Justice.
Help the oppressed. Defend the cause of the orphans.
Fight for the rights of widows.”
In a sense God is turning nouns the Israelites knew like, “worship” or “sacrifice” with its proper rites and prescriptions into verbs, into “doings”. This is a call to a transformation of their formalistic piety that was mere ritual, into a love that does what is right for the sake of love itself. This is because ultimately as we see later in Israel’s history, Christ reveals that God is love. And this love is not of mere feeling but one of action also. It is a love that redeems. This is a love that seeks to take in and bless. It is also a love that seeks to protect and defend. This is shown most deeply in Christ laying down His very life for the sake of the world. It is an incarnate love of flesh and bone. This love has to be worked out in the world as God Himself worked this same love into the world as well. As He came to dwell among us, giving up His place in heaven, so He asks His people to step into the messy and broken places. He demonstrates that love is active and does not sequester away from the world’s pain but intentionally enters into it. God’s heart moved physically in the person of Jesus as He confronted evil and wickedness. As He was in the world, so we are meant to be as He was. This is our mandate. This is also why James can sound so scathing to modern ears because he is speaking the same prophetic language of incarnate love that Jesus and the prophets had when he says in James 1:26-27:
“If you claim to be religious but don’t control your tongue,
You are fooling yourself, and your religion is worthless.
Pure and genuine religion in the sight of God the Father
means caring for orphans and widows in their distress
and refusing to let the world corrupt you.”
James isn’t being harsh here. He is consumed by divine love to see the weak and vulnerable protected. It’s the same type of love his Lord has for the same people (widows and orphans were some of the most marginalized people in his culture). He is calling out and appealing to the best and true sense of what the church should be in his letter. James wants to tell us that God’s love comes to rescue because he sees human life as intrinsically valuable. There is also a warning that James gives us. We must be faithful to God’s love for people by purposefully seeking justice, but also doing this in a righteous way that is not the same way the world does it. “The world” meaning the culture and thought of the kingdom that’s not aligned with God’s Kingdom. In this sense, righteousness and Justice go together and are bound together like brothers. One does not have one at the expense of the other. The ultimate aim of God’s justice is to produce what is true, which is how righteousness could be defined. We could even say justice is righteousness in action. But we must consider James’ admonition that justice and righteousness must reflect the Kingdom of God and not popular reasoning regarding its definition (which is always shifting).
James and the rest of the biblical prophets want us to go after justice and righteousness but only as how God defines them. Ultimately God’s idea of these things will produce redemption, which is the world being restored to what God intended it to be. This is a world that reflects heaven. It is a world freed from the reign of all false gods that we put before the real One. This is the actual goal of biblical justice. Going back to Isaiah 2 verse 18 we see God’s ultimate means to enact redemption:
Come now, let’s settle this,” says the LORD. Though your
Sins are like scarlet, I will make them white as snow.
Though they are red like crimson, I will make
them white as wool.
God is shifting the entire focus of Israel’s ancestral religion from outward ritual and ceremony, to being one of the heart. Isaiah is saying that it is not the ritual that saves and changes the human situation, but the mercy and righteousness of God. Therefore it is God who is the one who gives the desire to do what is right. Ritual cannot change a problem so infinite in scope. Sin is a bigger monster than we think. It cannot be vanquished with formalism and vain hope. It takes a divine act of mercy to liberate and that is what we have received in the cross of Jesus. We cannot change our inner brokenness without His help. We cannot do justice or righteousness the right way without the inner cleansing of God’s Spirit. As the book of Isaiah moves onward, we finally arrive at chapters 52 and 53 that speak of Israel’s Messiah as being the very agent of this cleansing.
As a reminder for the church, we cannot deal with the issues of our own day without God’s Spirit breathing His breath on our hearts and the cross of Jesus being the standard of all we consider right. Only the Spirit of God moving in the church can cause the church to do what is redemptive. Redemptive action will always cause righteousness, peace, and joy to increase. The Kingdom of God is what redemption looks like. If our cries for justice do not produce a church and world that reflect these things, we are missing the mark.
This is also a sure metric for discerning what spirit we are of. James and John wanted God to rain down fire on a group of people who insulted Jesus[3]. However, Jesus sharply rebuked them for this and told them that they did not know what spirit they were acting like. The Holy Spirit seeks justice but that is always coupled in mercy. James and John were not showing much mercy, just a very real desire for revenge. So this story illustrates that we can be misled by what we think God wants instead of what He actually desires, which is to show mercy. But He also does not settle for evil perpetrated against another. This is why discerning The Spirit’s activity is so very important. We need His wisdom to stay in unity with mercy, righteousness, and justice. If we become unbalanced and out of step with The Spirit we can become “sons of thunder” and not sons of The Kingdom. This is important for the era we are entering. If our justice doesn’t look like Jesus; if it’s not married to mercy and righteousness, if it doesn’t produce mercy, peace, and joy: what spirit are we of? If we are ignoring the cries of the oppressed and the violated, what spirit are we of? If all of this doesn’t make redemption its aim; with love being its highest goal: what spirit are we of? We have to be able to pray and reflect on this and find answers. Our world depends on the church doing what is right. For God’s sake we must seek these answers!
Do our actions look like Jesus? Forget politics and political discourse, this is a far more important question that will affect the future of the church in America vastly more than politics ever will. If we are not aligned with God’s Kingdom and His priorities we have sold our souls for cheap power and prestige. If we ignore the cries for justice and ignore our prophetic mandate for living in righteousness we have done the same. Again, whose kingdom are we of? The prophets still cry out for us to ask God this and discern our own hearts and motives. Are we merely following trends, sectarianism, and national myths or are we following the King? His Kingdom is a triune monarchy. Is this the Kingdom we belong to?
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