We live in a culture in which justice is fundamentally misunderstood. A lot of people mistake justice as retribution or revenge. Seeking justice has come to mean taking someone to court and “getting even” for what that person took or damaged. Just look at some of the courtroom reality shows that fill daytime TV. You’ll see pretty quickly people trying to get even for something someone did to them. Christianity is different. I like how Cornel West describes it: “Justice is what love looks like in public.” There should be no better emulators of this than the followers of Christ. When someone falls into a river, it’s compassion to pull them out. But, eventually, someone should go upstream to find out why people keep falling in. That’s justice. But, we can only seek true justice when we view it the way God does. When we intercede for the persecuted, the oppressed, and the exploited, we need to also remember their persecutors, their oppressors, and those who are exploiting them. One of the first acts of justice we see demonstrated after the cross is on a murderous persecutor of the early church. He was a legalist to his very bones and persecuted the followers of Jesus with what he thought was a holy vengeance. His name? Saul of Tarsus. The Book of Acts tells us how Saul held the coats of the men who stoned Stephen to death. As he headed to Damascus to capture and imprison any Christians who might be there, he was squarely under God’s watchful eyes. Given the opportunity, how did God choose to eliminate this threat to His people…His own sons and daughters? You know the story. God didn’t strike him dead. He sent Jesus. Once Jesus shows up in someone’s life, things change. Once Jesus revealed Himself, Saul was able to instantly connect all the dots of his life—all the places God had tried to reach out to him with the truth, all the people God put in his life to teach him about His true nature—and realized it was time to change. Now, in that instant, not the next day or the next week, Saul had a change of heart. “Lord, what do You want me to do?" Jesus didn’t just stop him in his tracks. He transformed him. He took a tool in the hand of the devil who was trying to wipe out Christianity from the earth and turned him into the greatest proponent and catalyst for Christianity the world has ever known. This is a guy, after all, who wrote two-thirds of the New Testament! In a world where all sin has been paid through the cross, justice is no longer retribution. God isn’t going to kill Saul for killing Stephen; instead He is going to infect him with the same zeal Stephen had. And He is going to make him ten times the evangelist that Stephen ever was! For every person saved from injustice, there is a person saved; but for every persecutor, oppressor, or exploiter saved, exponentially more could be saved! Make a decision to not only pray for those experiencing oppression, but to pray for the perpetrators as well. We must pray for changed hearts on both sides of these crimes to bring God’s true justice and peace into our world.
Posted on: Wed, 02 Oct 2013 16:54:32 +0000
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