I don’t know about you, but the last several years have felt especially heavy. Every day there are new injustices to lament. Some are close to home: food insecurities in our communities, neglected schools, inadequate recreation and play spaces for children, homelessness—the list goes on and on. This is especially true if you live near poverty and lack. Yet our exposure to injustice is not limited to the spaces that are within our reach. In the age of information, it is so easy to access news of injustice occurring throughout the world with just a few clicks—things like ethnic cleansing and genocide, the oppression of people groups, climate crises, and starvation in the face of global wealth. It can feel as though we are surrounded by a never ending stream of injustice. and its constancy can make it hard to trust that God cares about the injustices or the people bearing the brunt of them.
Why does God allow injustice to continue? Why doesn’t God intervene and do something about it?
The frustration that prompts these questions reminds me of a story that Jesus tells his disciples in Matthew 13:24–30. Amid a series of parables about what the kingdom of God is like, Jesus tells of a man who plants good wheat seeds in his field. Overnight, an enemy comes in and plants weeds among the wheat. But it isn’t until the wheat and weeds grow to maturity that the evil is discovered. —It is only after the two plants grow to fruiting and the wheat shows its heads of grain that you can tell the difference between the two. Upon recognizing the weeds, the workers of the field want to know how it happened and, more importantly, they want to do something about it. The owner of the field tells them an enemy did this. But when asked whether they should pull up the weeds, the owner responds purposefully, “Not yet.” Although he tells them why, it’s this moment of tension—when they want the evil to be dealt with immediately—that resonates with me when I think about God’s response to the injustices that we witness day to day. Regardless of what it may look like right now, we can know the following truth.
God Is Just
Scripture tells us that God is just.
Scripture proclaims that righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne (Psalm 89:14). In other words, justice forms the basis of who God is and how God rules. God, the maker of heaven and earth, executes justice for the exploited, gives food to the hungry, frees prisoners, opens the eyes of the blind, raises up those who are oppressed, loves the righteous, protects the foreigner, and helps the fatherless and the widow. (Psalm 146:6–9 CSB). God responds to the groans of the poor and rescues them from oppression and violence. (Psalm 12:5; 72:12–14). The Psalms are full of requests for God’s justice, care, and rescue for those who are actively being persecuted or who are at risk of harm. Frequently those requests are coupled with proclamations of the psalmist’s confidence that God will respond, protect, and save (Psalm 7:1–2, 17; 17:1–5, 15; 72:1-4, 18-20).
The truth that God “executes acts of righteousness and justice for all the oppressed” (Psalm 103:6 CSB) is a promise on which we can rest, even if we don’t always see it. Look at the example in Psalm 140, where David begs God to rescue him from those who are pursuing him and planning his downfall and to save him from their power and evil plans (vv. 1-5). David feels surrounded by threat and peril; yet he confidently expresses his trust in the Lord. Toward the end of the song, he writes, “I know that the LORD upholds the just cause of the poor, justice for the needy.” (v. 12 CSB). Even while actively seeking God’s protection from a very present evil, David knows that God is One who is faithful and just. Even if he could not feel actual deliverance and justice in that moment, he trusted the nature of God.
And in case we need an extra boost of confidence in this truth we can look intently at the person of Jesus to see and know God’s just character.
Look to Jesus to See God’s Just Nature
Hebrews 1:3 tells us, “The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact expression of his nature, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high” (CSB). This means that, should we ever doubt anything about God, we can look to Jesus to find a perfect reflection of God’s nature. And what do we find when we look at the life of Jesus?
Jesus announced that he was anointed to preach good news to the poor, proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, set free the oppressed, and proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor (Luke 4:18–19 CSB). And he spent the next few years showing his followers how to do just that. He ate with tax collectors, who were despised in their time (Luke 5:29–32). He brought the ostracized back into fellowship with others and offered grace to those who were suffering (Luke 8:26–39, 43–48). He forgave sins and blessed the broken with healing (Luke 5:17–26). The broken and bereft flocked to him because he made them whole (Luke 6:17–19). Jesus fed people from a place of compassion for them (Matthew 14:13–21) and made it a point to reflect value and dignity on those who were socially excluded. (Luke 19:1–10; John 4:1–38).
Not only that, but Jesus taught his followers about how to live justly toward others. He told parables to help people understand what it means to be a good neighbor (Luke 10:25–37), how to respond when the lost are found (Luke 15:1–32), and the sin of hoarding your riches for your own benefit (Luke 12:16–21). Importantly, Jesus also spoke out against hypocrisy, decrying those devoted themselves to outward religious acts while neglecting justice and mercy (Matthew 23:23–28). He told people to turn the other cheek when slapped, give more than what was asked of them, go the extra mile, and actually love their enemies (Matthew 5:38–48).
Jesus perfectly reflects the just nature of the Father. Jesus also expects us to be just. This is consistent with the expectations God had for his people in the Old Testament Scriptures too. For example, take a look at Isaiah 10:1–2, where the prophet Isaiah writes, “Woe to those enacting crooked statutes and writing oppressive laws to keep the poor from getting a fair trial and to deprive the needy among my people of justice, so that widows can be their spoil and they can plunder the fatherless” (CSB). And in Amos—an entire book dedicated to God’s response to human injustice—we find, “Therefore, because you trample on the poor and exact a grain tax from him, you will never live in the houses of cut stone you have built; you will never drink the wine from the lush vineyards you have planted” (Amos 5:11 CSB). God is not and has never been pleased when people deprive others of justice.
What is particularly unsettling about the warnings from the Old Testament prophets is how often the people against whom judgment was pronounced were actively committing acts of injustice while simultaneously carrying on with their religious observances as though those injustices did not matter or perhaps as though they were justified in doing them (Isaiah 58:1–14; Hosea 2:1–13) . Yet each time, God announced judgment in response to those evils, even if that judgment was not immediately felt.
Returning to Matthew 13, the field owner tells his workers that plucking up the weeds would damage the wheat because their roots had intermingled with one another while they grew (Matthew 13:29). Yet the disentanglement would eventually come (Matthew 13:36–43). Injustice is not the end.
We Can Live in Hope and Work Toward Justice Now
The prophet Micah considers what pleases the Lord: Is it burnt offerings with young calves, sacrifices of rams, ten thousand streams of oil? (Micah 6:6–7). No, none of those things. Instead, Scripture says, “He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8 ESV). It’s not more engagement in outward religious acts that would please God. What would please him more is his people doing justice toward others and walking with him. How do we do that? Again, we turn to Jesus.
The events of the Gospels took place during a time that was full of injustice. Roman occupation of Jerusalem included the oppression of the Jewish people, which led to periods of revolt against Roman power, retaliation, and ultimately the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem.1 Yet Jesus actively lived a life of justice, reflecting the Father’s character, by spending time with those on the margins, feeding people, healing them, inviting the separated back into fellowship, and working toward the realization of the kingdom of God.
After the story of the wheat and weeds, Jesus tells his disciples a story about sheep and goats and how God would distinguish between the two. And it wasn’t by how closely they followed religious tenets or observed rituals. Rather, it was based on how they treated the vulnerable in society—the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked one, the sick, the imprisoned (Matthew 25:31–46). The things we do for the “least of these,” as Jesus said, matters. And we are able to do these things today. We can respond to real people, in real time, by doing these simple acts of justice in the world and in our communities.. In fact, Jesus says in John 14:12 that we will do greater works than these because he now sits at the right hand of the Father (Hebrews 1:3). But we are on this earth now to continue his work through the power of the Holy Spirit living in us. The kingdom of God flourishes on earth as it does in heaven when we follow his example and do just that.
Notes
- Justo L. Gonzales, Luke: A Theological Commentary on the Bible (John Knox Press, 2010), 227. ↩︎
Photo credit: Jaymi Sanders
Brooke Jackson is a career youth defender who has worked with children and teens in the youth and adult legal systems for two decades. In that time, she has also volunteered as a ministry and community leader in spaces centered around justice. Brooke lives in central Ohio with her husband Matt and their three children. She is the author ofJust: A Journey Into the Mercy of God, published by Hosanna Revival.
