God of Justice

We are living in a time when "justice" is a buzzword - social justice, racial justice, criminal justice, election justice. Justice for everyone! Justice for all! 

Can we even define justice? 

In the very same breath that we try to define it in one term, but we can't. Justice is ensuring equal opportunity for everyone, but we think it also requires stripping "privilege" from some. Justice is holding everyone responsible for their actions, but some are more responsible for their actions than others. We want to have justice for the black man killed by the white man, but we also recognize that if we had true justice to begin with, neither of those men would have been in that position in the first place. 

Thus, at the very same time that we think we know what justice is, we realize that justice starts someplace way before we are ready to execute it and true justice will never come until we trace it all the way back and find the absolute fundamental root of it and start there. 

Until we do, we're just putting a band-aid on the symptoms. And we know that.

So let's go back to where justice begins. 

It begins with God. 

It begins with goodness that spoke everything into being, set everything exactly into place, commissioned the world to grow and to thrive together, and had order. That "very good" God talks about in Genesis 1 is justice, in every single way that we want to define it. It is the thing that keeps us from being in a place where we have to try to figure out what justice is at all. 

If we want to restore justice, we have to get back to God. Period. We have to go back to the way He does it. We have to seek His heart in all things and then, execute. Put it into practice. Bring it into the world. 

I know, I know. There are many who will wrestle with this. Many who struggle to reconcile a good God in a broken world the way it is. We struggle with putting the pieces back together because there's something in us that has us even questioning God. 

But God's way is still good. It is still very good. And even Job's friends - who didn't get a lot of things right - got this right. When it comes to justice, they had this to say: 

Does God corrupt justice, or does the Highest One corrupt the good? 

The answer is intended to be a resounding, "Of course not." Of course not. 

So if we're looking for justice, we have to go back to God. Because there and only there will we find it uncorrupted.