God, the Bible and Political Justice: Warning!
WARNING!
This book may be harmful to your current peace of mind. Read at your own risk.
Read this first!
This is an incredibly painful book.
No one should have written it. No one should read it. It should not be necessary. But here it is. God’s heart laid bare for all to critique.
We want justice. We want peace. We want love. We want everything He offers. But do we want Him?
This is the question from the beginning of time. This is the question we were born to answer. Do we want Him?
This question presses us as we face a world void of solutions; world crying out for an alternative to all its previous convictions and beliefs; a world crushed by weather, population, poverty, unrest and devastating diseases; a world longing to dream but with no vision; a world longing to change but with no options; a world bubbling with potential of a great age in the history of humanity but with no drum beat to follow.
He is who we are looking for. He is the dream fulfilled, the one who offers us our destiny. But will we allow Him to be Himself? This is an odd question in a generation that is asking that so strongly for themselves. Let us be us! Fair enough, God says. But first you must let Me be Me.
In this book we are looking at political justice, one of the desires of every heart, the cry of billions and the demand of many nation’s people. We have only one concern and that is “what does God say?” There is only one book for us to turn to in this study, that is God’s book. In the Bible God does not say what we want Him to say. He does not tell us how to take power and make our nations good and just. He does not tell us how to legislate sin out of our towns and streets. He does not give us a strategy.
Instead, He tells us our story and His purpose. It is an unrelentingly tragic journey through the history of man. We begin with an amazing vision of possibility for God’s human creation. The cosmos is made for our inheritance. We are co-regents with God in dominion. Perfection, regal authority and eternal comradeship with our maker is all ours. It is breathtaking.
Destiny to Destruction
From Genesis chapter three however it is a very different story. We are in freefall from sin and beginning with fratricide by chapter six we are all the way to human genocide. What is that all about? Nearly ten generations of human destruction ending in a violent global catastrophic flood. Why even read this stuff. What is the point? Where is God in all of this? Why not just skip this and get to justice in the New Testament. Because this is God’s selected history and He wants us to understand it. If we want His blessing we will have to understand His thinking. Do you want Him or your idea of Him? You have to make a choice
Finally there is some relief as God calls a man to father a tribe, a new nation to reveal Himself. But from the first generation of Abraham there is lying and cheating and difficult alternative families. Within four generations we are back to near fratricide of Joseph and genocide of the Shecemites. This is followed by more than 400 years of slavery as God deals with Abraham’s legacy. Where is the joy here?
The Law
Reprieve comes again in the form of the Law given to Moses to disciple the nearly free nation of Israel. God begins to speak for Himself and gives clear, concise and very specific instruction for how to achieve justice in a community. Five books, 10 commandments and one small nation should be doable. God is with them. They make a covenant with Him. Finally we are moving forward.
We have some good years and some bad years but it all hits the fan again. 2000 years from Joshua to the last Kings of Israel and total destruction of the promised nation. Sure there are highs and lows. Much of what God wanted is achieved even a certain amount of political justice but then it deteriorates into bloody chaos again.
But then there is David. Yes, our best political leader, only a murderer and an adulterer. But he had a heart for God? Yes, he did. But there is Solomon. Yes, the pinnacle of national history. A man of great wisdom from God in governing but so little wisdom at all in his personal life. The King of Israel’s greatest age and the father of the Kings that will in one generation begin to tear it all apart and take the nation to total destruction. Why read this stuff? Why dwell on this for hundreds of pages? And then we have the Prophets and a few hundred more pages of pain? Surely God wants us to put this awful history behind us and get to Jesus, peace and joy. More than a thousand pages of historic torture for what when we now have the good news of the New Testament.
Is There A Point?
There is God’s point! He is telling us who we are, what we were made to be and what we have become. He is telling us what He has had to witness, weep with, and address in order to bring us back to our destiny. He is telling us the cost, the painful unrelenting suffering of God and man, of all creation because of the misuse of our human authority, the cost of ignorance, the cost of lostness, the cost of the dream behind giving man authority in the first place. He is telling us everything else has been tried in human history and failed. He is telling us that we want the wrong king, that we are looking for the wrong kingdom and every time He tries to stir humanity in the right direction we refuse Him!
When we reject the Old Testament pain we are rejecting God’s view of humanity and reality. We are saying that we don’t want this God to be God. We don’t want this to be the truth about who we are. We do not what this to be the story. We want Jesus! And Jesus does come.
We Want Jesus
When Jesus comes his male peer group is slaughtered. When He comes His own people work with a pagan empire to execute Him. He is not the King they want. “But He is resurrected. He ascends!” He does, and the Spirit comes, the power of God in man to carry out his destiny. “Yes, this is the One; this is the King we asked for.” The church explodes and sweeps the known world. “Yup, this is the wave we were waiting for.” But then it begins. Persecution from within, believers ganging up on believers; and from without political domination and persecution from Empirical governments with different agendas. The church struggles to be His church and we continue to argue about what kind of King He actually is, all the way through the first three chapters of revelation.
If He has not come to give us control? If He has not come to give us peace and comfort, if He has not come to stop sin and violence, then what is the point? Why are we still here, on earth, suffering?
That is a very important question and for the answer you will have to walk through what God has walked through and see what He has seen before you will understand what He understands about justice, on earth and in heaven.
“Many people have compassion for the lost. I have compassion for God.”
Wynn Fountain
