Biblical View On Justice

By Josh Bundy

All right. We've been looking at the Proverbs together, and in recent weeks we've looked at some character traits that various proverbs held together instruct us in character traits like the fear of the Lord, which many people have mistaken for an emotion. And although there's emotion involved in the fear of the Lord, it is actually a character trait. It has to do with how we look at and trust God, how we repent because of God's view of the world, and how ultimately we're shaped and held and safe with God. And then we looked at character traits like humility and self-control. And today we're going to look at justice. So the character trait of justice. Now this is our last sermon in Proverbs. But our series continues next week as we pivot to the New Testament. We'll look at James. We're actually going to read the Book of James together in service next week in chunks interspersed with worship music. So we'll get a chance to hear, uh, the brother of Jesus who wrote this short New Testament book very much in a style that imitates Old Testament wisdom. We're going to get to hear it together. And, uh, we'll still have a little preaching to. But we're going to do a longer reading. So today, as we, uh, we end for now, our journey in Proverbs, but we continue with God. This series on wisdom, we're going to look at justice in Proverbs. And I'm going to begin by reading three passages. Remember, the Proverbs are these short, pithy wisdom statements. So unlike the Gospels, you don't get this like long reading that all makes sense together. You've got to pick a few verses in the Proverbs and hold them together. So here's three verses, three passages to get us started. Some proverbs on justice. Are you ready? Yes. I'm ready?

Justice For Those Oppressed in Society

Proverbs 21 three. To do what is right and just is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice. Proverbs 31:8 to 9. Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute. Speak up and judge fairly. Defend the rights of the poor and needy. Proverbs 2222 to 23. Do not exploit the poor because they are poor, and do not crush the needy in court. For the Lord will take up their case and will exact life for life. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Thank you, God, for your scriptures. Even when we take a few verses and hold them together from different parts of the book, it's still the word of the Lord Now, as we you might see that one of these verses is in bold to do what is right and just is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice. We live in a modern time where we don't have animal sacrifice, and when we use the word sacrifice, we think about giving up something we might have enjoyed free time or money or material goods or whatever to help someone else, or to follow God's purpose. But we need to keep in mind that in the Old Testament world, sacrifice was also valuable. They gave valuable animals in sacrifice, but it was the way they thought of reconnecting with God because of sin or distance from God falling out of his grace in some way. This is a way that they would reconnect with God. Sacrifice. Okay, now look. Look what this verse says. Rather than bring me your animals and reconnect with me that way, God says. I would like you to do what's right and just. God would like for his people in the Old Testament to connect with him through doing justice before they try to do sacrifice. In other words, he wants them to be formed to become people with an ethic of justice, with integrity, with a character of justice more than with rote responses, religious responses, where they go, well, you know, that's just me being me again. I'll bring another dove or another goat. Does this make sense? God wants more from his people than merely to make amends with God, but to do something in the world called justice.

How Do We DO Justice?

So what does it mean to do justice? In the Bible, justice is something to do, not something to merely wish for. The Old Testament word for justice is mishpat. Everyone, you get to say a little Hebrew word today. So say with me Mishpat. Mishpat means justice. All right. That's fun. You don't know it, but that's really fun. What does Mishpat mean? Basically, it means to treat people equitably. Now this. The following is from a book by Tim Keller, who was a well-known, well-loved Presbyterian pastor in New York City, and previously to that he taught at the regional seminary at Westminster Seminary. That's just down the road from us. He wrote a book that I commend to you called Generous Justice. If you think that your Bible study group, you've gotten stale. All the books you read sound the same, just vanilla Christian living. Get generous justice. This book will shake it up a little bit. The subtitle is How God's grace makes us just okay, generous justice. And here's some thoughts from, The doctor. Keller, who's now with the Lord Mishpat, is giving people what they are due, whether punishment or protection or care.

The Quartet Of The Vulnerable

Mishpat in the Old Testament is concerned with the quartet of the vulnerable. Now, this is important. Um. Keller names four groups. Widows, orphans, immigrants and the poor. Here's the justification. Many Old Testament passages, such as Zechariah 710 through 11. Let me read Zechariah 710 to 11 for you. This is what the Lord Almighty says administer true justice. Show mercy and compassion to one another. Do not oppress the widow, the fatherless, the immigrants or the poor. All right. Anybody? Note takers? I'll say it one more time. All right. The quartet of the vulnerable, widows, fatherless, immigrants and poor. The Old Testament will talk about these four categories many times. Why? Because in their world, these were the most vulnerable categories of humanity on repeat in their societies. Okay. What we need to learn from that is to care for the quartet of the vulnerable, but also to look for in our world who now in our world setting are on repeat as vulnerable categories. Okay. And that may change with time. The vulnerable categories may change the biblical ethic and teaching never changes. But this is why becoming concerned about the most vulnerable and poor and marginalized people of our society, and making long term personal sacrifices in order to serve their interests, needs and cause is what it means to do justice. According to the Bible, according to the Bible, doing justice means getting involved for people in these situations. And so today we're going to look at three categories of justice from the book of Proverbs.

We're going to start with a more basic entry point. So if you have never heard Christian biblical teaching on justice, there's a place to start. Or if you just need to start again, and we'll move towards some more complex areas of justice. The three, in order that we're going to look at today, are one. Generosity towards the poor. Okay. We'll talk about generosity towards the poor. Secondly, we're going to talk about personal integrity. So justice as personal integrity. And then at the end, we'll talk about justice in society and leadership, okay. Justice in society and leadership. And as you might guess, because you're all aware of, like when lunch time is today. This is an introductory message, impossible for us to deal with all the nuanced and complicated issues surrounding justice in our world today. So, as a means of introduction, I'm going to give you these three categories from Proverbs. And we'll trust that God will continue to work in our hearts and minds to develop these in the areas necessary that God has called us to serve in.

Justice In Generosity

First, let's talk about justice in generosity with these three scriptures. The three more Proverbs, Proverbs 1431 reads, whoever oppresses the poor shows contempt for their maker, but whoever is kind to the needy honors God. 22. Nine the generous will themselves be blessed, for they share their food with the poor. And in bold. 29 seven. The righteous care about justice for the poor, but the wicked have no such concern. Now notice that this verse frames righteousness, the quality of being a righteous person, as caring about justice for the poor. Many times we who have been raised on a gospel of personal salvation, which, by the way, we sorely needed to have a personal savior. Uh, think about righteousness merely in this box of the things that I do and the way that I behave. But notice that even the Old Testament will say that what it means to be righteous. The righteous will care about justice for the poor. The wicked have no such concern. So when God thinks about a righteous person, he does think about your behavior, okay? But he also thinks about your posture towards his world and the people in it. This is a first and most basic form of doing justice in the Bible. It's caring about the poor and acting on their behalf. Now, as I named in the announcements, this might happen through giving of money. Okay, here's some other ways it could happen. This might involve opposing the oppression of the poor. It might involve working to improve their situation from a distance, which is what you do if you give money and entrust others to go and to meet with them and to help. It might involve engaging personally in direct ministry and fellowship with the poor. You might go on a missions trip, or you might serve locally in a soup kitchen, or a food pantry, or in some other ministry that is directly, uh, remediating some of the suffering of the poor and addressing it, but at a minimum, caring for the poor. In the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, and especially in the teachings of Jesus. Means giving generously to the poor with our money and our material goods. So even if we go, even if we send others, even if we're involved in like works to help alleviate oppression, God expects at some level that we do give something for this cause. It is called by Jesus almsgiving, and is one of the three foundational spiritual practices in Jesus's Sermon on the Mount, along with fasting and prayer.

So if we haven't read it in a while, maybe we could go back to Matthew five, six and seven again and read it again. As Christians who receive this teaching of Jesus, this sermon on the Mount as a foundation for our ethics and also our worldly concerns. And see that when Jesus gives his first practices, he's like, he's like, when you give, when you pray and when you fast. Asked. And this almsgiving for Jesus is central. So what are examples of this? I've already mentioned? You know, missions covenant has missions trips, a few of which we commissioned here in our services just on Pentecost Sunday. And in the year to come, you could join a trip like that. You could get trained here and go. We give water to a ministry or we give money to a ministry called Water is basic. We don't give the water, we give the money. They get the water. Uh, this is one that Pastor Steve Huber brought to us when he came here to this church. He brought this vision with him. And another one is regionally, we support small things in Philly, which is a food distribution ministry to those that are hungry in Philadelphia. And you can support this in various ways. You can give money to this church or directly. You can get the newsletters for these organizations and pray for them. I encourage you to choose a step. Choose one. If you already give some money, maybe you need to get the newsletter so you have a prayer prompt once in a while. A small thing sends out a regular newsletter with updates and they give. They give great content in there.

Now, for me personally, uh, this basic entrance into Christian Justice of a concern for the poor and helping them was formed by people that led me as I was growing up in Jesus Christ. And as I began to go into the world on mission, and one of the important people in my life that shaped me was a man named John. John Dias was a fellow minister in the church in Arkansas with me, where I worked, uh, for about 15 years. And when I was a young youth worker, the missions trip that we took the students to in And Baja California, which is that peninsula of California south of San Diego, was set up by John because John had become a Christian as an adult, gone to minister training, and almost immediately moved his family into Mexico and planted a church in Mexico City and then later, with others, started a preaching school there. And so the fruits of this ministry years later were that there was this preacher, a Mexican preacher, in need of a church and in need of having his trust in American partners restored. And there was an American church in Arkansas, and another one in Texas that had money and people to send, but no pastor and needed a location. And God brought all of these together for a church plant in a little place called Colonia 89, Colonia Ochenta Nueve, on the outskirts of Ensenada, Mexico. Why was it called Colonia Ochenta Nueve. Okay. When you live in the town, it's just literally named colony 89. It's not going to be the Ritz. This is where the poorest of the poor were being pushed out. Where many of the homes had sheet metal blocks that weren't mortared together. Cardboard. Plywood. Where? One of the first guests that we had at a big meeting that we held in the home of the pastor in Colonia Nueva, was a well-known local prostitute. Uh, the people there weren't sure they wanted to let her into the meeting. Uh, there was some, sometimes some very sorrowful incidents in that area. One year we showed up with all of our American kids, and we were kind of on keeping them in the grounds of the home, really close to the nest, because there had been a young person had been abducted and their organs harvested just a few weeks before. It's a hard and rough place. Dirt roads? It's a few ministries, few medical providers, and a lot of need for hope and the impulses of American Christians like myself, who are on this first level of learning to do justice in the world, is to go in there and to tell people what to do, and to give away tons of cash and to try to solve people's problems in one bright flash of light. And it took a seasoned, faithful pastor like John Dias to teach me and our church how to go into a setting like that and love people more than making a splash. And so our church set up what was called a long term intermediate mission strategy. So this is what it was. We didn't go and stay there for months at a time. We went for a week at a time. That was the intermediate part. The long term part was we went 3 or 4 times every year for the course of a decade. And actually that church still goes now and they still go multiple times a year. Um, but that was my run involved with it. And so there would be a visit each year that would be the build homes or work on the church grounds. There would be a visit where we would take a bunch of teens and families to do, uh, teaching, as well as to play with kids, to do a VBS, to do discipleship work. There would be a trip at Christmas where a bunch of young adults would walk across Ritter, get on the local Mexican bus system and drive the two hours down to Ensenada and do food distribution and shoe purchases for kids. And in all of these trips, getting to know the pastor and his family and the leaders in the church and the members and share photographs and on repeat year after year, share letters and photographs and memories. It was a kind of caring for the poor that got more personal, and this was because John knew how to lead us in this way.

And I'll never forget one of the most important memories in my ministry life was standing on the second floor balcony of this now fully built church building in a beautiful lot, surrounded by nice fences, well painted, well organized trash picked up in the middle of a neighborhood that still had a lot of litter and a lot of graffiti. Standing on the balcony of this second floor of this building, watching the the courtyard of this church property filled with Americans and Mexicans who were all interacting and as best as they could talking, they'd all grab their favorite translator and bring them over to the group and try to tell their stories. It's the last day of the visit. It's the big meal on Sunday. We've just had worship service and I'm standing on this balcony next to John. And John is getting a little emotional. And, uh, because he cared about the people. And also, we had been there for like ten days at this point, and we were just dog tired. And, uh, sometimes I'd find John asleep in the lobby of the hotel at night with snacks, dribbling down his shirt, because, you know, he's just like, you're just exhausted. Um. And he said to me, uh, he said, look at this. This is how we know that God is is. It's worked. What God's done has worked. And I and I'm, you know, I'm like, well, yeah, this is great. There's a lot of people. And John goes, no, look, it they're not asking you any questions and they're not asking me for any money. He's like, they forgot you and I are here. They don't need us. They've come together. This is what mission and justice is about. Boy, did that stick in my mind to this day. I remember that John's vision for doing justice in the world is you take this group of people I love and this group of people I love, and they don't know each other, but they get a heart for each other and they don't need you and me anymore. Now, for most believers, I say this. This is the basic or the entry point of doing justice because we can all give something. We can all pray for something and we might be able to go somewhere.

Justice In Personal Integrity

But to teach Proverbs, well, we've got to keep moving and get a little bit more complex. So Proverbs addresses something called justice in personal integrity. And here's three passages that we'll talk about. Justice in this ethic of living a life of integrity. The Lord in 11:1 detests dishonest scales, but accurate weights find favor with him. Now, this probably communicates to you a marketplace scenario, but maybe, you know, maybe you don't. Most of the ancient world, you know, they didn't have electronic scales. What did they use? They used different weights and they put them on the one side, and they put the grain or the food on the other side. And if you were clever and you filled the insides of those weights with lighter material, you could paint them a certain way and make them stamp them and make them look official or whatever. You could cheat people out of their food, and so they're paying you for food that they didn't get. God detests that. Now you're like, thank goodness I've never done that right, because you don't ever dole out food that way. But what would this mean for us in our world?

Uh, Proverbs 22:28 also says, don't move an ancient boundary stone to set a set up by your ancestors. This would be kind of a property fraud in which you just kick the rock a foot that way every day till you own their acre, you know, just a foot a day, a couple of inches. Move the fence a little bit, the guy dies, his grandkids come to claim the land or whatever, and they're like, oh, we thought we had a whole lot more field than this and go, no, not really boundary stone. Proverbs 1126 people curse the one who hoards grain, but they pray God's blessing on the one who is willing to sell. This has to do with market manipulation. If God cares that his people love the poor and vulnerable and work on their behalf, then it follows that God detests cheating others, depriving them of their rights, and manipulating markets to deprive people of access to goods and services, or to balloon profits at the expense of the poor. If God wants to send you on mission to the poor, into Philly or into Mexico or wherever, then he also cares that we're not cheating them the other 358 days of the year. While many justice issues are complicated by governments, international markets, and powerful industries, Histories. There is yet a call for God's people to do what they can, starting with themselves and to work upwards through the complicated systems of our world to ensure fair treatment, honesty, integrity and transparency, starting with ourselves.

This may mean rigorously examining our habits. Consider the series of questions. Self-examination questions. Am I accustomed to always telling the truth? Have I or do I now misrepresent the services or products a person needs in order to make a sale? Have I told half truths, one sided histories, or omitted key details, or omitted entire narratives to save face Place or to save reputation. Do I excuse myself from deceiving or cheating others on the basis that it's not as bad as my boss wanted me to do, or it's not as bad as the other company does, or this is just what you have to do to get by. Now, all of us have some area of integrity in which we need repentance. It might just be the stories we tell ourselves, but we all have these areas. One sure, truth is, we all have something to repent of when it comes to integrity. Jesus calls us to be perfect as our father in heaven is perfect. So even while we remember and enjoy his grace for us, we lean hard into self-examination and repentance so that we might become people of greater personal integrity. Now, uh, that's a little to say about a topic that we will need to look at over the course of a lifetime. But we have one more topic to cover.

Justice In Society And Leadership

And so we're going to talk about justice in society and leadership for a moment before we look at Jesus and then close in prayer while we're caring about the poor and examining ourselves. There's many things in our world for which we don't have autonomous control. Look at these. Proverbs 29:4 says, by justice a king gives a country's stability, but those who are greedy for bribes tear it down. And verse 14, if a king judges the poor with fairness, his throne will be established forever. 25 five reads remove wicked officials from the king's presence, and his throne will be established through righteousness. And we don't live in the Age of Kings. We live with our complicated, uh, you know, three part government. And we've got we've got the courts and we've got the executive branch and we've got Congress and so on. But yet these principles must say something to us about today that God still has a standard, and God's standard is always the standard in any form of government or institution. Perhaps the Bible's hardest truth about justice and injustice have corporate or communal forms that are larger than the individual. Yet individuals are called to care about and seek justice, whether it's in organizations, institutions, or societies. And this is often the bright line that divides so-called liberal Christianity from so-called conservative Christians. And I'd like for us to just mess with the line a little bit instead of get stuck in these categories. The basic question is something like this. Am I responsible for what others do in society or only for my own actions? And the Bible from the fall in Eden, which, by the way, is that we're all still paying the price of Adam and Eve's sin to the fall of Babylon the Great in revelation, which, if you haven't been reading the Bible long, you might not know what this is. But it's a big it's like almost like the Bibles cartoon of what happens to nations and Caesars and kings whenever they get full and rich and fat and pompous and do a lot of evil. And this Babylon character gets utterly destroyed. The Bible's whole story resoundingly asserts that we're all connected in ways that we might not like to admit. So if serving in missions or local mercy are the easy on ramps to doing justice, and self-examination and sacrifice are the harder passages towards personal integrity than thinking deeply contemplatively and for action on a societal level is like the graduate education of doing justice, thinking contemplatively about our world and its situations. And then with God being led into some actions is like the graduate studies, at least for most of us who were raised or brought to Christ with a message of personal salvation. Thinking deeply and clearly about society as a location for justice is a lifetime work. Okay. So again, yours truly is not pretending to give the final word on this topic today. Merely a biblical introduction. Personal salvation. What do I mean by that? Like Jesus is my personal Savior. He saved me out of this world of sin for a life in in heaven, in the world to come. Personal salvation and personal responsibility are not myths. They're real. These are things God really does. But God's salvation is large enough and powerful enough and capable enough of saving not only persons, but the whole world. Consider John 316, maybe the world's most famous verse, followed by the most forgotten verse 17. God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son. God so loved the what? The world, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. That whoever that's personal. So you've just gone from global to personal. And now look at how it'll go to global again. Whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send His son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. God has no qualms about giving one gospel sentence that talks about the globe and the people in it, and individuals at the same time. No problem for God. Notice how personal belief and global connections flow easily together. The following verse, which might be the Old Testament's most famous verse on justice, also has both a personal and corporate context. This is Micah six eight. I'm showing you just the verse. So when we just say, this is my favorite verse. We just take a verse out of the middle of Micah six. Do you know what that's called? It's called out of context. Now, that doesn't mean you've read it wrong. It just means that you haven't given the whole context. So here's the famous verse out of context. He's shown you, O mortal, what is good and what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God. Everybody read the last line out loud with me, ready to act justly and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God. Notice that at first glance, this seems to be individualistic until the context of the chapter reveals national Israel and civic Jerusalem are actually in view. Here's the verse in context, and you can go read it in your Bible later. Uh, in verse six two it says, the Lord has a case against his people, Israel. This is the context In verse nine, the Lord is calling to the city. This is the context in verses ten and 11. The Lord condemns things like their ill gotten treasures of short measures, dishonest scales, false weights, violence, lies and deceit. As a people, he has both the individual and the community in view. When he gives Micah six eight, clearly we need a vision of doing justice that incorporates both levels, personal and societal. And we need a Savior who has vision, volition, and power to bring about such a salvation. Amen. Amen. We need Jesus.

Justice Is A Sign Of Jesus' Kingdom

So finally, justice is a sign of Jesus's kingdom. I'm going to leave you with some scriptures from Jesus to show you that he thought this way, cared this way, and marked his kingdom out in these terms. When he preached his first sermon in Luke chapter four, he said, the Lord, the Spirit of the Lord is on me. He's anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor and to set the oppressed free. And he said other things. But notice that the categories that the Proverbs and Micah have in mind are Jesus's categories, because he's a Bible reading kind of Savior. Matthew five six. In his sermon on the Mount, he said, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, which we often think means blessed are those who really, really want to be a good person. The problem is the Greek word dikaiosyne means mishpat as well as it does. Um, the Hebrew word for righteous actions, which is righteousness. This Greek word dikaiosyne means both righteousness and justice. And so this verse does mean people. Blessed are those who want to live rightly in God's sight. It also means blessed are those who are hungering and thirsting for justice in the world. Don't be satisfied. And finally, in Luke six, right after he's given this sermon, and I'm just going to read an excerpt before we pray from Luke six from Jesus's ministry, the one who has the power, the grace, and the truth, not only not only to save us individually from the wrath of God and the punishment of hell, but to change his world with and through our cooperation in the spirit. Jesus pronounces in Luke six blessing over the poor and the hungry, and those weeping, those hated, excluded, insulted, and uniquely in Luke, unlike the sermon on the Mount in Matthew he pronounces woe. He says, woe to the rich, woe to the well-fed, woe to the laughing, woe to those who are well spoken of by everyone. You can tell that's not everybody's favorite passage to preach from, is it? And Jesus is not absurdly encouraging a wretched life or denouncing the enjoyment of goodness in God's world. He is not against the enjoyment of God's good things. But rather he's using the categories of mishpat from the Old Testament to instruct his disciples how to do justice as a sign of the kingdom of God. He goes on to give a famous teaching which we should understand as doing justice. And here it is. Jesus is quoted here love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who mistreat you. If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also. This is Jesus on doing justice. If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them. Give to everyone who asks you and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. Do to others as you would have them do to you. This is Jesus on justice. And then Jesus explains his teaching because his apostles, unlike you and me, were hard hearted. It's a slow burn right there. His explanation cuts through our self-justifications when we tell ourselves I'm a good and decent person by pointing us to a true vision for a life of doing justice. This is what Jesus said if you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Oh come on Jesus. He says, even sinners love those who love them. And you could take that word out and fill it with any category you want, right? Oh, even Iranians love those who love them. Even Russians love those who love them. Even New Yorkers love those who love them. Even Pirates fans love those who love them. You can run it up the scale and down the scale however you like. Notice I didn't say anything about the Eagles, but you could fill that. You could fill that with any category you choose. Jesus said, and if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. And if you lend to those who are going to pay you back, what credit is that? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full. But love your enemies, do good to them, lend to them without expecting anything back, and then your reward will be great, and you'll be children of the Most High. Because and this is the gospel truth that you and I first believed and need to believe again, God is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked, so be merciful, just as your father is merciful. Let's pray God in heaven help us. This sermon is beyond my living, my ability, and I think for all of us, these texts challenge us and call us to repentance and to renewal, and that we have an awareness that we need the gospel of Jesus again, and the grace of Jesus every day to try to lean into this teaching without becoming proud or pretentious or judgmental of others. God help us to do justice and help us to mercifully, humbly walk with you day by day, grow and shape us to care about the people in your world and lead us not into despair over the many problems in our world and in our own lives. Don't let us give up. Don't let us run out of holy energy. But in spite of all the divides, in spite of all the political divides, in spite of all the rhetoric in our world, all the news in our world, would you help us to lean into the love of Jesus, to receive it daily and to go out generously? Help us God, in the name of Jesus, your son. Amen.