“Justice Practically Speaking”
“Justice Practically Speaking”
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(Used by permission.)
Speaking Practically About Justice to Those In Prison, My Second Article Written for a Local Jail Ministry
Brian Mann May 19
What is true justice? Masochism is the tendency to derive satisfaction from pain and humiliation. People are naturally masochistic. The human being looks to find someone to punish them to feel some justification for their crimes. Even getting caught in a crime distributes a sick satisfaction of guilt that ultimately never really satisfies. When our tendency to find some way to get the guilt off our back through any means (including getting caught) we are simply working out of our nature that is fallen, dead, and misled by the enemy and adversary of the Creator of mankind; and this is never justice.
It is a lie that when one has served time, paid a fine, or performed some other service to satisfy the penalty distributed by the state, that guilt has been abolished. The truth is that justice rarely is met today in a biblical way. The Bible treats crimes as personal. They are sins against a holy God and are defined as such not by the law books of humanistic naturalism but by Moses as written. Unlike humanistic law that makes breaking the law one of offending the state, whereby you have to pay the state, God’s law is always concerned with the people He made.
When justice becomes prescriptive with its benefits being focused on the state, justice is lost and reshaped into an idol to serve those in power. When the state begins to benefit more than the people by enacted laws, there is a dysfunctional justice which is no justice at all, but theft against image bearers of God. Justice is interested in people who have been personally wronged, not an impersonal institution.
It was the great protestant theologian John Calvin who said that every human being has value even the man who is laying in the gutter in his vomit because that man too is made in God’s image. To harm man is to commit a crime against his Maker. Rushdoony wrote:
“When the courts depart from God’s law, they begin to play god and to govern all things, including every triviality. They seek a total government which, unlike God’s, cannot be providential, but which is, rather, totally prescriptive and regulative. Where God’s law prevails, restitution is to the person offended. In statist law, it is the state which is offended and exacts a penalty in the form of fines or imprisonment. The result is not a restoration of order but an increase of statist power and control over all. Biblical restitution restores the balance by penalizing the offender to effect restoration to the offended. This is justice.” (From Exodus: Commentaries on the Pentateuch Vol. 2 R. J. Rushdoony)
One will not find satisfaction in the punishment of the state that restitutes the institution of the state because it is impersonal and is not the object of your offense. One will also not find satisfaction in doing time, serving a sentence, or paying fines that never deal with restoring the person you have really offended. The biblical justice that must be served is that of restoring what you have stolen from God by whatever way you have offended man. If your guilt is not alleviated by a full restoration toward the persons you have wronged, it will never be taken away. Nonetheless, there is good news in that God the Father sent His Son to bear the penalty for all of your commandment breaking and to remove your guilt by His personal sacrifice as a common criminal on the cross.
Make no mistake however, it is not believing that Jesus died for your sins that saves you, but it is by looking to Jesus Himself, not merely his benefits of justification that saves you. Everyone wants their guilt removed by any means. However, if Jesus is held out simply to give a gift, it is no more personal than a beggar on the street grabbing the money from the offerer without any personal regard for the giver. There is no justice there. However, if you receive Jesus Christ as Lord for who He is, the Creator, Redeemer, Lord, and Judge of the universe, then you have with Christ everything. In fact, you have in Christ a new ability by His Spirit to live lives that are constantly restoring the glory due to God and the good due to man. That is true justice, when your lives justify God, not merely when your time satisfies an impersonal state statute. When you receive the person of Christ, not make an impersonal and masochistic journey to do it yourself. Justice is a God-given, God performed work that restores the glory due His name and the honor due His creatures.
This is brought to you as a ministry service of the Inverted Christian found at https://www.invertedchristian.com/