Every Christian should be concerned with justice for several reasons. First, because the word “Justice,” is a word from the Bible. God, in His wisdom, chose to reveal to mankind, the ways of justice. Therefore, Christians who read their bibles must by divine order be concerned about justice. Social justice is not a Biblical term. Justice is a Biblical term. While all justice is social, the term social justice, the way it is being used today is a term that is a catchphrase for Marxist ideology and liberation theology. Second, our Lord Jesus Christ not only established and summed up and embodied every element of God’s justice and righteousness. He is literally “the righteousness of God.” Jesus is the explainer of justice. Third, this word in the Bible forces a choice: there are only two choices justice or injustice, righteousness or tyranny. The Bible describes both justice and injustice. Fourth, the Bible speaks of injustice as sin – “Perverting justice.”
Today we begin a series, a short series, on the matter of social justice. The significance of the issue, I think, is becoming well known, hopefully to most of us. Every Christian should be concerned with justice. First, because the word justice is a word from the Bible, and God in his wisdom chose to reveal his ways of justice to mankind in his word. And so therefore Christians who read their Bibles must by divine order understand and be concerned about justice.
Social justice, however, is not a biblical term. Justice is a biblical term. Social justice is not a biblical term, and it actually matters. While all justice is social, all justice works itself out in real life, The way that the term social justice is being used today is a term That is a catchphrase For Marxist ideology for liberation theology the sexual revolution and all kinds of other Categories which I'll get to in just a few minutes. It's also important that we understand justice because our Lord Jesus Christ not only established and summed up and embodied every element of God's justice and righteousness.
He literally is the righteousness of God. Jesus is the explainer of all just laws that are recorded in the Word of God. Another reason we should understand what justice is, is that this word in the Bible forces a choice. There are only two choices, justice and injustice, righteousness or tyranny. And the Bible describes both justice and injustice.
You know injustice by what justice is and vice versa. Also, the Bible speaks of injustice as sin. While the Bible doesn't use the term social justice, it does use the term perverting justice. There are ways that man perverts justice. He perverts it through his autonomy, through his desire to create a perfect society, like Plato, like Marx.
They, in their desire to be autonomous from God, to create a different kind of kingdom than God, create a different kind of justice. The Bible calls it perversion of justice. It's very important that we understand how to define justice, and I hope in the next few weeks that will become clearer and clearer. We do need to define these terms. The Bible speaks of justice in many places.
My hope is to leave behind for you a number of passages of Scripture over the weeks. I would like for us to end up with particular passages of Scripture, principles of Scripture that we can hang our hats on, because this is a sufficiency of Scripture issue. Is Scripture sufficient to define what is just and what is unjust? We happen to be a church that has said we desire that Scripture would be sufficient for everything, for our church life, trying to learn what's pleasing to the Lord, for our family lives, trying to establish true Christian families, and for every other part of our life, which does include justice. So we would want to think that Scripture is sufficient for justice.
That actually is the heart of the problem because man wants to invent a justice that is not God's justice. And that's why we end up with the term social justice injected with the meaning that it is injected with. Now, this is, I'd like to turn our attention to Genesis 18-19. God reveals the purpose of Abraham's life, and as it turns out, his living in justice and teaching justice to his children is an important part of his responsibility before God. Every father, every mother has a responsibility to teach their children what is just.
And so that's why we read these words in Genesis 18-19. For I have known him in order that he may command his children and his household after him, that they may keep the way of the Lord to do righteousness and justice, that the Lord may bring to Abraham what he has spoken to him." Here God reveals that Abraham must teach righteousness and justice and live it. A little bit like the way we saw Jesus do it today in John chapter 13. Jesus not only taught humility, He lived it. And that's what God called Abraham to do.
And so it's very critical. You know, one of the most famous verses to many of us is He has shown you O man what the Lord requires of you, but to do justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God." It's very critical that we understand these, just the very first words, He has shown you. Well, how has He shown you? He has shown you in the Word of God what is justice. Do not get your idea from justice from the feminists, from the Marxist revolutionaries, and from those who are pushing the sexual revolution.
That is injustice. So we'll unpack all these things as we go along. So we look to the Word of God and I want to try to deal with that. I would like for you to open up your Bibles to Deuteronomy chapter 16. This is one of the texts I hope you remember where it is when you begin to have conversations about justice with people in this world.
My view is that in the coming years you'll have many conversations about this. My view is that all you young people, all you people particularly who aren't married right now, you are going to face this over and over and over again in so many places that I never had to as a young person. Because there's a massive movement, and I'm just going to call it the social injustice movement. And you need to know what is just so that you don't get swept away with the corrupt philosophies of the world, because that's exactly what's happening. Deuteronomy 16, 19.
You shall not pervert justice. You shall not show partiality, nor take a bribe, for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and twists the words of the righteous. You shall follow what is altogether just, that you may live and inherit the land which the Lord your God is giving you." In that same context, God is explaining how he desires justice to be carried out among the people of God. In verse 18 of the same passage we read these words, you shall appoint judges and officers in all your gates which the Lord your God gives you according to your tribes and they shall judge the people with just judgment. And it's most important that they understand how not to pervert justice.
The human heart perverts justice because of its fallenness. And this is really critical that we understand. The Apostle Paul spoke of it in a different way in Colossians chapter 2. This is a verse I would like you to be left with in this series. My plan is to repeat some of these texts several times, so be warned.
It's intentional. Colossians 2, 8, and 9, Beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and empty deceit according to the tradition of men, according to the basic principles of the world, and not according to Christ. For in Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily, and you are complete in Him who is the head of all principality and power." What the apostle is saying is that the devil is out to cheat you through philosophies. This is one of the philosophies that the devil is out to cheat you and cheat the whole world and he is cheating the world right now. And I don't see an end to it.
Again, he has shown you, O man, what is good and what the Lord requires of you, but to do justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. Now I'm going to use a document called, what has come to be called the Dallas Statement on Social Justice. Last year some folks, some pastors and theologians gathered together to try to write a statement in order to expose and to explain, expose corrupt philosophies of the world that are working its way into the church and to explain on the other hand what is justice. So I'm going to quote from this statement quite liberally here in the next few minutes. I want to use the statements in the statement to set the stage.
Today is a introductory phase of this, and then we'll begin to work through some of the details. But I wanted to try to give a picture first, and I want to use the statement to do that. And I'll continue to use the statement on other matters as we go through the series. So here is one of the opening statements in this Dallas statement on social justice. In view of questionable sociological, psychological, and political theories, presently permeating our culture and making inroads into Christ's church, That's the issue.
The philosophies of the world can find their way into the church if the church is not fortified with the sufficiency of Scripture to help them see through the smoke. We wish to clarify certain key Christian doctrines and ethical principles prescribed in God's Word. That's exactly what I want to do in the next few weeks. Clarity on these issues will fortify believers and churches to withstand an onslaught of dangerous and false teachings that threaten the gospel, misrepresent scripture, and lead people away from the grace of God that is in Jesus Christ. All of this to say, going back to this statement, there are psychological and sociological and political theories that actually are assaulting biblical truth and they are harmful from these particular disciplines and philosophies.
And that's why the Apostle Paul says, Beware! Beware lest anyone cheat you. Beware. Be on your guard. You always have to be on your guard for the ideas that come across the culture.
And in many ways, this matter of social justice has really become the litmus test for political correctness today. Social justice in the way it's defined in the public square has become injustice, and I plan to spend several weeks trying to prove that. For example, gender justice has become a rejection of the creation order of womanhood, delivering women from husbands, and motherhood from the home. Sexual justice has become the right to choose your own gender. I just returned from a conference in Indiana, and one of the men there at the conference worked at Lowe's, and he said that Lowe, his facility, hired a human resources manager who was a cross dresser.
And so now the entire company has and is having a completely different profile of employee. This is called justice. Gender justice, sexual justice, has really become preferential treatment for those who are claiming to be transgender. Homosexuality was classified by the American Psychological Association as a mental illness until about 1970. It's now a moral virtue, and it's unjust to even refuse to bake a cake for a homosexual wedding.
You've committed a crime if you do such a thing. That's the kind of justice we're talking about. Same-sex marriage is a social justice, even though same-sex marriage has never been endorsed by any civilization in history. It's been practiced, but not endorsed. Even in Rome, even in Rome where homosexuality was rampant, homosexual marriage was not legal.
And it's become legalized right here in the United States. Transgender justice. Let's be very clear. There's no such thing as transgender. It doesn't exist.
There are XX chromosomes and YY chromosomes. There are only two genders. There are no other genders. This is a phantom. This is a fabrication.
This is, this takes us back to the emperor has no clothes. And Bioethical social justice is injustice regarding inequalities of health care, life support cessation and stem cell research. It's the new justice. The new justice is based on preferential treatment or differential treatment on age, on race, on gender, on sexual orientation, on religion, on nationality, on education, on mental and physical ability. This is the kind of justice that we have.
You know, we were just in John 13 where it's very clear that Jesus is destroying all class classifications in the church. In the church there is no black, there is no white. There's rich, There's poor, there's wise, there's foolish. The church is a family. It's very, very different than this world.
Social justice is celebrating a woman's right to kill her baby to free her from patriarchal domination. This is called reproductive justice. It's a technical term. Reproductive justice means that you can kill a baby in a mother's womb. Social justice in our society is delivering people from any limitations in sexual expression.
Social justice is trying to bring equality of income and outcomes of everyone's life, which actually is impossible. You can't equalize people in terms of income because God makes people differently. He creates people with different mental and relational capacities. He creates some people and He puts them in the poorest of the poor of India, and he creates someone else, and he puts them in America. You cannot equalize the world.
It's impossible. People are not the same. Justice, the way it's being defined today, is getting rid of hierarchies. Everyone must be equal. You know, a very popular pastor, J.D.
Greer, just a few months ago was on his platform arguing that we must destroy hierarchies in the church. This is an incursion of philosophies of demons in churches, creating various injustices in place of biblical justice. I'll quote one author, in cultural Marxism the oppressed are the socially marginalized, the foreigners, the women, the children, the homosexuals, the convicts, the mentally insane, the physically handicapped. No person should be permitted to be better off than another and no person should be permitted esteem higher than another. One writer indicates that there are 11 types of injustice.
There's economic injustice where a person is denied the opportunity to make money or unfairly paid. There is infrastructure injustice when someone has inadequate living conditions to allow them to thrive to the fullest. There is spiritual injustice when people are unable to practice their religion. There is over and over and over and over again. I won't list them all.
I think you get the idea. You have the whole idea of ecofeminism. Ecofeminism is kind of an activist and academic movement that sees critical connections between the domination of nature and the exploitation of women. In the exploitation of women, where nature, by virtue of the fact that from nature comes masculinity, is unjust to women because men are unjust to women. So it's ecofeminism.
There are a number of words that we're going to be defining over the time. I'll just shoot some of them out just so you have them in your thinking, but I won't stop on them. Gender quotas, reparations, privilege, systemic white privilege, oppressors and the oppressed. Here's another statement from the Dallas statement. Specifically, we are deeply concerned that values borrowed from secular culture are currently undermining Scripture in the areas of race and ethnicity, manhood and womanhood, and human sexuality.
The Bible's teaching on each of these subjects is being challenged under the broad and somewhat nebulous rubric of concern for social justice. So what's ahead is Dealing with these various issues, race and ethnicity, manhood and womanhood, and human sexuality. Those are the broad categories that we'll be covering as the weeks go on here. So over the weeks, I want to try to bring these things to bear. Here's another statement.
It is our earnest prayer that our brothers and sisters will stand firm on the gospel and avoid being blown to and fro by every cultural trend that seeks to move the Church of Christ off course. We must remain steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord." And then this statement, the Apostle Paul's warning to the Colossians is greatly needed today. See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world and not according to Christ. Scripture is the heart of the matter. As I said at the beginning, this is a matter of the sufficiency of Scripture.
Is Scripture your only sufficient guide or do you have the authority, the freedom to create your own world? That's really what's at stake here. And so there's a statement about Scripture which I know we've all encountered these kinds of statements before. We affirm that the Bible is God's Word, breathed out by Him. It is inerrant, infallible, and the final authority for determining what is true, what we must believe, and what is right, how we must live.
All truth claims and ethical standards must be tested by God's final word, which is Scripture alone. We deny that Christian belief, character, or conduct can be dictated by any other authority, and we deny that the postmodern ideologies derived from intersectionality—we'll work with that terminology—radical feminism, and critical race theory, are consistent with biblical teaching. We further deny that competency to teach on any biblical issue comes from any qualification for a spiritual people other than the clear understanding and simple communication of what God has revealed in Scripture. We affirm that God created every person equally in his own image. As divine image bearers, all people have inestimable value and dignity before God and deserve honor, respect, and protection.
Everyone has been created by God and for God. We deny that God-given roles, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, religion, sex, or physical condition, or any other property of a person, either negates nor contributes to that individual's worth as an image bearer of God. So these are the kinds of things that we that we plan to cover here. The pressures that are surrounding us on this matter are enormous. They're popping up all over the place.
And these matters of justice are forcing ungodly philosophies into the Church of Jesus. And you're seeing Christian churches capitulating. One of the realities of the world that we live in right now is that the left, the sexual revolution, the social justice revolutionaries are demanding complete capitulation on these matters. And if they prosper, then there will be prison for those who uphold biblical justice. We have a different standard and it's just very important that we understand what those categories are.
So we're going to spend, You know, quite a bit of time walking through a lot of these terms, a lot of the real issues that are going on in our world today. You know, very interesting, you know, many of you know that Joshua Harris, the former pastor who wrote the book, I Kissed Dating You By, not our dear friend Joshua Harris, but a different one, has renounced the faith. And I want to read you what he wrote yesterday on his Instagram account, because what he said there is so telling for the pressures that are on the rising generation he fell to the pressures. He says the information that was left out of our announcement is that I have undergone a massive shift in regard to my faith in Jesus. The popular phrase for this is deconstruction, the biblical phrase is falling away.
By all measurements that I have for defining a Christian, I am not a Christian. Many people tell me that there's a different way to practice faith, and I want to remain open to this, but I'm not there now. I have lived in repentance for the last several years, repenting of my self-righteousness, my fear-based approach to life, the teaching of my books, my views on women in the church, and my approach to parenting, to name a few. In other words, I'm throwing out everything that the Bible says about these things. But I specifically want to add this now to the LGBTQ plus community.
I want to say that I am sorry for the views that I have taught in my books as a pastor regarding sexuality. I regret standing against marriage equality, which is homosexual marriage, for not affirming you and your place in the church and for any ways that my writing and speaking contributed to a culture of exclusion and bigotry. I hope you can forgive me. Now the language that you find in here, exclusion, bigotry, these matter, these are, This is the language of the social justice revolution. It's all it is.
And it's social injustice. It is immoral. And it's against the Word of God. So I pray God gives us some understanding of this. I hope you notice that in this statement by Mr.
Harris, notice how he feels obligated to prostrate himself before the gods of the LGBT marketplace. The power of these gods, of this movement, in industry, in Hollywood, in Disney, in every area of life is something that we should take note of. It's coming to your homes. You might have little children, but it's coming to them and they're going to grow up in a world that's very different than the one you grew up in. If you are over 40 years old, your children are facing a different world.
And I hope we can somehow prepare them for it to some degree. Would you pray with me? Lord, I pray that you would pour out your wisdom, that you would help us to learn from you, to do justly and to love mercy and walk humbly before you, that you would come and cleanse our minds of all the injustice in our own hearts and the injustice movements that are in the world that we would hold against them, that we would stand firm for the faith once delivered. In Jesus name, Amen.