Promoting Justice

Good morning. Welcome to our time of expounding on the Word. You can turn your Bibles to Micah chapter 6 for the text.

And I'm going to read the very familiar verse, Micah 6:8, and hopefully we can use that for a springboard for the topic that I want to discuss this morning. Micah 6:8 says, "He has shown you, O man, what is good, or what does the Lord seek from you, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to be ready to walk with the Lord your God." Now that's what the Septuagint says.

I forgot to paste in the New King James, but I think we all know that very well. And I do want to focus on the fact that it talks about walking humbly with our God.

Shall we pray? Father, as we consider this verse this morning, I just ask that You would open this up to us. We know that justice is so important to You. We know that mercy is so much part of Your character. And we know that humility is essential to walking with You.

And I ask that You would speak to us, to each one of us, show us areas in our lives where we can improve in these areas. In Jesus' name, amen.

When I was trying to decide what to share on, I just kept coming back to the topic of justice. And in some ways, I would have rather talked about a different topic, but I tried several different ones, and God said no every time. And I'm not going to apologize for what I'm going to share because I think that it is what God wants me to talk about. And as I studied, I was just so impressed. There are hundreds of verses in the Bible that talk about justice.

And it doesn't talk quite as much about justice in the New Testament except that somebody said, and I didn't do a lot of research into this, said that the word righteousness, as it's used in the Greek, could also be translated justice.

And we know that there are many, many, many references in the New Testament to righteousness. So this is something that's pretty much found in every page of the Bible, this concept is.

And so this morning, I want to consider what justice is, how it relates to the world in which we live. I want to talk about being just in business, and maybe we can find a little bit about justice in the church as well.

I found a definition of justice, and it's the quality of being just, conformity to the principles of righteousness and rectitude in all things, strict performance of moral obligations, practical conformity to human or divine law, integrity in the dealings of men with each other.

So you can consider that as we think about what justice is.

And God is a just God. It's who He is. You can't separate that from God. And I'm thankful that you can't because it ensures that justice will eventually be served. It's His nature and His character to be just. He can't be anything else.

And we see that in Matthew chapter 5, those familiar verses. And also, if we're going to follow God, if we're going to walk with God, we're going to need to be just. And Matthew 5 says in verse 43, "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven, for He makes His Son to rise on the evil and on the good.

And He sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet your brethren only, what do you more than others? Do not even the tax collectors do so?

Therefore, you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect."

So God is just. He makes it rain on everyone. He doesn't respect anyone's person there. He sends them on the good, the bad, whatever. When it rains in Schepensburg, it rains on all my neighbors too, whatever they're doing.

And that's the same in your neighborhood with your neighbors. And so that's an example of how we need to be just like God. And I'm going to read several more verses about justice. This is just a real brief sample. Again, I said there's so many verses. I could hardly get down looking at all of them to decide which ones to pick.

I like Amos 5:24, which says, "But let justice run down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream." And so there we have justice and righteousness sort of paired together in this same current, the same channel, and just cleans things up when water runs through. Leviticus 19:9 says, "When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not wholly reap the corners of your field, nor shall you gather the gleanings of your harvest. And you shall not glean your vineyard, nor shall you gather every grape of your vineyard. You shall leave them for the poor and the stranger. I am the Lord your God. You shall not steal, nor deal falsely, nor lie to one another.

And you shall not swear by my name falsely, nor shall you profane the name of your God. I am the Lord. You shall not cheat your neighbor, nor rob him. The wages of him who is hired shall not remain with you all night until morning. You shall not curse the deaf, nor put a stumbling block before the blind, but shall fear your God. I am the Lord. You shall do no injustice in judgment. You shall not be partial to the poor, nor honor the person of the mighty. In righteousness, you shall judge your neighbor."

And just keep that in mind with the particular areas of justice that I'm going to talk about in just a few minutes.

Leviticus 24:22 says, "You shall have the same law for the stranger and for one from your own country, for I am the Lord your God." And then Jesus said in Matthew 23:23, "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you pay tithe of mint and anise and cumin and have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faith. These you ought to have done without leaving the others undone."

So there's a scriptural background, very, very limited, as I said. And I guess I didn't give the title yet. The New English version translation of Micah 6:8 says that we're to promote justice. And I'm going to take the title from that, promoting justice. I think that as followers of God, that's what we're called to do. There's a lot of injustice in the world today, and we can't fix it all. It's impossible for us to write all the wrongs that we hear about every day on the news, let alone everything that has happened that we don't hear about. The other thing is that the world's making efforts to deal with these injustices and inequality.

I don't think they're going to be very successful because none of the programs that they have really do anything with people's hearts. And if you want to deal with injustice, you're going to have to deal with selfishness because that's where all injustice comes from. It's somebody who's selfish and who has a little bit more power than somebody else, and then you have an injustice that happens.

But I think there are some things that we can do that are going to be related to the circle of people that we directly have contact with. And I think we can bring justice into our world. And that's a little bit what I want to talk about in this message.

I'm going to read James 2:1 to 9, if I can find it here.

And James 2 says, "My brethren, do not hold the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, with partiality." Now, when you have partiality, you don't have justice, do you?

"For if there should come into your assembly a man with gold rings and fine apparel, and there should also come in a poor man in filthy clothes, and you pay attention to the one wearing the fine clothes and say to him, 'You sit here in a good place,' and say to the poor man, 'You stand there,' or sit at my footstool, have you not shown partiality among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts? Listen, my beloved brethren, has God not chosen the poor of this world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom which He promised to those who love Him? But you have dishonored the poor man. Do not the rich oppress you and drag you into the courts?

Do they not blaspheme that noble name by which you are called? If you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself,' you do well. But if you show partiality, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors."

So I have one, two, three, four. I have five areas where people, where we probably are tempted to show some kind of partiality, possibly some oppression. I hope not. I hope that no one here really gets their toes stepped on this morning. But if you are showing some kind of injustice or partiality in these areas, then I hope that this can wake you up and you can deal with it. So the number one issue, and this is the number one issue that you find if you look in the world today, read any news, and you're going to find at least one story about this, is racial, ethnic, or cultural.

And for some reason, I'm not quite sure why. I think this happened at the Tower of Babel, but I'm not entirely sure. We somehow have our hearts programmed to think that people who look differently or who act differently or who have different customs are somehow inferior to us.

And I think that's just pretty much bred into the human nature because in every people group that I've read about, you find this problem. And we see it manifested in genocide. And people are committing genocide against people that don't actually look any different. I mean, I think in Rwanda, you couldn't hardly tell any we couldn't probably tell any difference between those two groups that were killing each other.

They could. So we have genocide. The Holocaust is a huge example. Terribly injust. Discrimination. We're going to, like James said, we're going to sit you over here in this nice spot, but now you don't look so good, so we're going to put you down here in the corner somewhere where you don't have a very good seat.

That's discrimination. And it goes way, way farther than that. Hatred and much, much more. And so the world's trying to fix it with groups like Black Lives Matter. But Black Lives Matter, I read their goals this morning. They're not to change people's hearts.

And I'm afraid that secular legislation can't change people's hearts. We can try to make something cultural that says that it's really acceptable not to discriminate. I think there's been a lot of progress made in some ways over the years in the United States, but it's still very real. And we saw that in the last year.

Well, how can we address it? It's a big problem. Well, I think that how did Jesus address it? What did Jesus do? He told a story about the Good Samaritan, didn't he? And that was a cultural and possibly a racial divide. I don't like to use that word racial because there's only one race.

Ethnic divide. And he told this parable about the Good Samaritan and how he was the neighbor to the one that the Jewish man that was hurt. How did Jesus act when he went into most of the Jews went around Samaria?

They didn't want anything to do with it. But the Bible says he had to go through. Why? Why did he have to go through? He could have gone around like everybody else did. No. The Spirit said, "You have to go through so that you can demonstrate to people how you relate to people who are different."

And so then he didn't get served, right? And the disciples said, "Well, let's call down fire from heaven and burn them up." And Jesus said, "No, that's not the way that I operate. That's not the way that my followers are going to work."

And then he had this really, in a lot of ways, a really intimate conversation with a Samaritan woman of all people. And he fully revealed to her who he was. So Jesus demonstrated how to deal with these things. We need to build relationships. And so we can't fix the problem across the United States of America. We can't fix the genocide problem in Rwanda or whatever that country's called today. I don't think it's Rwanda anymore.

But we can do something about our neighbors. Do they feel welcome in our assembly if they're somehow ethnically different than us or culturally different? Do they feel welcome to come here this morning? Do they feel welcome to come into our homes, our businesses? Do we treat them the same as we treat everybody else? These are things that we can do to address the problem that's right in front of us. And that's what Jesus did. He treated this Samaritan woman almost the same as he treated everybody else.

So now that's the first one. The second one I want to talk about is women. Women have been marginalized in almost every culture, some worse than others. How do we as men view women? Are they valuable? Do we think they're somehow inferior to us because they're women? Because God said that we're stronger? How did Jesus relate to women?

And I think this is the thing that's the most telling. Who was at the tomb on sunrise, on the resurrection day? Was it the disciples, the men? The women had to go and tell them. It was the women. Why? I keep asking myself, "Why?"

What did Jesus do? He gave them worth in a culture that really didn't have a lot of worth for women. He sat there and he talked to them. He cast out the demons.

Mary, she didn't even remember to serve anybody because she was so enraptured by what he had to say. That's a good example for us. A very good example.

And so there's things we can do. If we hire a woman in our business, do we pay a fair wage? Some people pay less to a woman because, well, they're a woman. Is that how Jesus would do it?

I trust that we can do better than that. Well, what about economic injustices? And I just ran out of time, but I was going to find out. 1% of the population has, what is it, a very, very significant portion of the assets of the world. And that, in a lot of ways, doesn't seem very just. But we can't do anything about what the 1% has. But when we do business with people, how do we do it?

Do we give a good measure, press down and running over? Is that how we treat our customers? Is it how we treat our employees? Is it how employees treat their employers?

I'm not an employer. I'm an employee. And so am I giving my employer a good deal? Am I worth my wage or hopefully worth more than my wage to them?

And this might be one of the biggest areas of witness that we have in the community is how we're doing business. And I know that we were talking, and I'm not sure, maybe Edsel was saying this in our small group, but we were talking about stewardship, I think it was. And he was talking about how before Sheldon and the brothers moved into West Virginia, there was an Anabaptist man that was like, I guess he was a tractor dealer or something at a little bit of a distance, but people had gotten to know him. And apparently, when Sheldon's moved in, people associated them with this guy. And since this guy had treated them so fairly, it opened a door up for them.

Is that how our businesses are viewed? Is that how when we sell a vehicle or furniture or whatever we do, when we buy, are we trying to get people down to the very lowest dollar? I think that's something worth thinking about, considering.

Well, a terrible injustice today is abortion. And the worst part is that the people who are on the raw end of the deal there can't even say anything about it. They can't make their voice heard. So what do we do? Do we march on Washington? Do we try to vote to get politicians in office that are going to outlaw it? I've heard people say these things. Is that how Jesus dealt with those kinds of injustices?

He didn't take over the Roman government to outlaw slavery. It was wrong, but he didn't take that approach. Maybe a better way would be to volunteer with a crisis pregnancy group. Maybe if you can't, don't have time to volunteer, maybe you could donate money to a cause that helps people who are in trouble. I think we need to I don't think we should do nothing for sure because it's terrible. But I'm not sure that finally, I think probably it would be a little bit like prohibition. If you did actually get the thing outlawed, it would just sort of go underground and keep on happening.

And then the last one I want to talk about a little bit is abuse. And that's a terrible thing. It's injust. Somebody who's bigger and stronger is taking advantage of somebody who's weaker.

And it should never be named in our church. We should never, ever be guilty of abusing anybody, whether that's emotionally or physically. And may we never be guilty of covering up or marginalizing this. Those things happen. Is that how Jesus would never do that? He would never abuse anybody or marginalize it and say, "Oh, that's just what happens. That's what people do."

Is there a need for justice in the church? We've talked about the world. What about the church? I think we should treat everybody equally in the church, fairly. I think that the ministry should be just in their dealings with the congregation. And I think the reverse should be true as well. Sometimes the congregation can commit an injustice against the ministry by not allowing them to lead out. So I'm not going to say a lot about that.

Those are a few musings that I had on that. Well, then our text talks about not only promoting justice, but loving mercy. And every time I think about mercy and judgment, and justice often carries that connotation of judgment, I have to think about James 2:13, where James writes, "For judgment is merciless for the one who has shown no mercy, but mercy triumphs over judgment."

Isn't that just incredible?

And we are serving a merciful God today.

Otherwise, we wouldn't be here because it's only by God's mercy that we're not consumed. God is holy, and we often aren't very holy. And so we're direct beneficiaries of mercy this morning. If you're sitting here this morning, and better yet, if you've trusted in Jesus and you've had your sins forgiven, you've been given even more mercy.

And I just have a few verses here that I'm going to read about mercy.

Proverbs 14:20 says, "The poor man is hated even by his own neighbor, but the rich has many friends. He who despises his neighbor's sins, but he who has mercy on the poor, happy is he. Do they not go astray, who devise evil? But mercy and truth belong to those who devise good."

And then verse 31 in the same chapter, "He who oppresses the poor reproaches his maker, but he who honors him has mercy on the needy." And so we talked a little bit about justice and economy. And these verses are bringing out the fact of mercy extended towards the poor.

And then Jesus quoted this verse. But Hosea 6:6 says, "For I desire mercy and not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings." So God would rather have us be merciful than to bring a sacrifice to Him.

That's something to think about. I've realized over the years that I'm not naturally a very merciful person.

And so this comes pretty close to home for me. Am I exhibiting mercy to the people around me? When they say something that I don't like, do I have mercy towards them? When my children make me unhappy and upset, do I have mercy towards them? I don't think that mercy means that there's no justice. I've got that question down here a little later. Can you have mercy and still have justice? You can, and we'll talk about that in just a minute. I have a little story here. A mother once approached Napoleon seeking a pardon for her son. The emperor replied that the young man had committed a certain offense twice, and justice demanded death. "But I don't ask for justice," the mother explained. "I plead for mercy." "But your son does not deserve mercy," Napoleon cried, replied. "But, sir," the woman cried, "it would not be mercy if he deserved it.

And mercy is all I ask for." "Well then," the emperor said, "I will have mercy." And he spared the woman's son. I thought that just really brought out the point that you don't get mercy because you deserve it.

Mercy is over and beyond. It rejoices against judgment in that. Well, obviously, God has mercy and He has justice, right? Because we said that God is a God of justice. It's the only thing that He can do. He's just.

Well, one way to have mercy and have justice is to pay for someone else's wrong, yourself, right? That's what Jesus did for us. That's how God can be just and merciful. God said, "Okay, justice requires death for your sins, but I'm going to pay the price, and that's mercy."

And so there may be times as we relate to people where we have to be just, but we can also extend mercy and say, "I'll take that burden on myself."

And that's what God wants us to do. Well, the last thing I want to talk about is humility. Our text talks about loving or promoting justice and loving mercy and walking with humility. And I think that as we think about what it would mean to promote justice and to practice mercy, we're going to need a good dose of humility to get that done.

And what is humility? I think you've heard me give this quote before. It's my favorite quote about humility, and I'm going to give it to you again. "Humility does not mean thinking less of yourself than of other people, nor does it mean having a low opinion of your own gifts. It means freedom from thinking about yourself at all."

And that's attributed to William Temple. So finally, when you really get to the place of humility, it frees you from yourself. You're not constrained by yourself anymore. You're not worried about how you relate on the scale to somebody else.

And it doesn't mean that we have to grind ourselves into the dirt by saying how poor we are or we can't do this well. You've heard people say these kinds of things. And so I think the reason that humility is the key to understanding justice and producing mercy is that when we look at things in humility, we realize that we're really all cut from the same piece of cloth.

We have the same kinds of struggles. We have the same intrinsic worth. That's really important when you think about justice, is to realize that every person has the same intrinsic worth, no matter what your ethnicity, no matter your culture, no matter if you're born or not, no matter where you are in the economic system, you have the same worth.

And that's the key, I think, to being able to extend mercy is to realize that.

Well, hopefully, this message will stir us to action and help us to consider if these three things are present and active in our hearts and lives today. May God help us to be full of mercy and humility as we interact with others this week.

Does anyone have anything they'd like to add or take away? I thought you made a very good observation. There's very little we can do about.