“Preach the Bible, not the newspaper” This was excellent advice that I received from an older pastor when I interviewed him about how to handle delicate topics from the pulpit. What made this advice even more fascinating to me was that the delicate topic that I was inquiring about was race relations, and that the man giving the advice was an older, African-American Pastor that had marched in the Civil Rights Movement alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

In advising me to “Preach the Bible, not the newspaper”, he was saying two things:
1) Don’t feel obligated to address every single current event each week. Otherwise you will never get around to preaching and teaching the whole counsel of God.
2) Don’t ignore delicate and difficult topics when they actually do come up in scripture. If you can read the Bible without finding passages on race relations, equality, justice, etc, I suggest you read it again.

He stressed that at times Pastors miss opportunities to address issues of race and justice when the Bible speaks clearly about them. In fact, it appears to be true that many Evangelicals are only now discovering what the Bible has to say about race and justice. This should leave us asking ourselves; “How in the world was I reading the Bible before?”

One of the reasons that issues of race and justice are difficult to address is that we have allowed them to become politicized in our culture. Each political party adopts a few pet-issues that they care strongly about. Often we find ourselves adopting a political affiliation that coincides with the social issues that are the most near and dear to us. Rather than treating each individual issue as a moral issue we treat them as a political issue.

Here’s what I mean by that; when the leading cause of death in the United States is abortion, that’s not a political issue, that’s a moral issue. When black men are executed by police, essentially being assigned an immediate death penalty without the benefit of due process, that’s not a political issue, that’s a moral issue. When police officers are ambushed and killed, that’s a moral issue. When refugees are fleeing danger and looking for a safe place for their family, that’s a moral issue.

Unfortunately, we have allowed our culture to politicize these issues and make them divisive. I understand why the world divides over these issues, but I don’t understand why the church does. In my opinion, these issues are far less complicated than we make them out to be, but in order to protect our political affiliations we complicate them so that we can make them a matter of subjective opinion, rather than a matter of objective justice.

Furthermore, when we politicize moral issues we rob church leaders of the ability to speak prophetically into sensitive and timely real world events. I am convinced that the Lord has strong feelings about many of these issues and that He has clearly communicated those feelings to us in scripture.

In Psalm 146.7-9, the author writes:
[The Lord] executes justice for the oppressed;
[He] gives food to the hungry.
The Lord sets the prisoners free.
The Lord opens the eyes of the blind;
The Lord raises up those who are bowed down;
The Lord loves the righteous;
The Lord protects the strangers;
He supports the fatherless and the widow,
But He thwarts the way of the wicked.

In this passage alone I can get a sense of how the Lord feels about current topics like social justice, oppression, feeding the hungry, homelessness, prison reform, health care, immigration, fatherlessness and elder care. Primarily however, I find that the first phrase tends to summarize the following sentences. What does it mean that “The Lord executes justice for the oppressed?”

What is Justice?

I don’t think that our culture even knows what that is. Further, I don’t think the church really has a thorough, biblical understanding of justice. It seems that justice is often confused with equality. Sometimes justice is confused with vengeance. A misconception of justice can be seen as both a desire for “law and order” as well as vigilantism.

As Christians our understanding of justice needs to be informed by scripture. We need to know what the Bible means when it refers to justice. Further, we need to apply justice the way the Bible illustrates its applications.

So, what is a Biblical understanding of justice? Often in Hebrew and almost always in Greek, the word translated "righteousness" or "justice" is the same word. These two terms are very closely related.

"In the inspired Scriptures justice and righteousness are scarcely to be distinguished from each other. The same word in original [language] the becomes in English 'justice' or 'righteousness'..." - AW Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy

The words are often translated as "righteousness" when it is referring to the behavior of an individual and translated as "justice" when it's referring to the functions of a culture or system. People can be righteous, systems can be just. Or, they can not.

If you believe in righteousness, you should believe in justice. If you believe in justice, you should believe in righteousness. If you think that electing unrighteous officials will create a just system, you're dead wrong. You cannot divide the two.

In the same sense that people can be unrighteous, cultures and systems can be unjust. There are racist people and there is systemic racism. There are oppressive people and there is systemic oppression. Biblically speaking, justice is systemic righteousness.

Imagine for a minute what systemic righteousness would look like in the form of justice. Imagine that “innocent until proven guilty” applied to everyone. Imagine an educational system based on merit and not privilege. Imagine a legal system where court cases were decided on facts and not by who could afford a better lawyer. Imagine a culture where the life of an unborn child is equal in value to the life of a pregnant woman.

Who are the Oppressed?

Psalm 146 is considered a post-exilic Psalm. That means that the author of this Psalm is writing to encourage a people that have been conquered and are in recovery-mode. Many of their most productive citizens had been forcefully removed from their homeland and transported elsewhere to be placed in servitude. Their families, economy, culture and hope have been decimated. There is is a residual ripple-effect influencing their community and the author is writing in order to encourage, inspire hope and direct the communities attention to God.

The word that the author uses for “oppressed” means “to keep down, violate, defraud, do violence against, exploit, extort or crush.” The author is telling his community, “Let’s make sure that what was done TO us, is never perpetrated BY us on anyone else.”

So, who are the oppressed? The oppressed are anyone that fits the description above. Any one of us could probably say that we have had individual experiences that fit that description. But what if our experience of oppression was not occasional, but frequent? What if our experience of oppression was not a few isolated incidents, but a lifestyle or a pattern that we were convinced that we couldn’t escape? Wouldn’t you become desperate for change at almost any cost?

Who can execute justice?

This should be an easy question. The simple and correct answer is that God executes justice for the oppressed. We do, however, need to understand that while we should not “trust in mortal man, in whom there is not salvation” (Psalm 146.3), God can and sometimes does use the government, or a political leader, or the church, or a human agent to execute justice. God can use human agents to execute justice, but the human agent is not the source of justice.

We often get frustrated with social and political leaders when they fail to deliver on promises. We’ve placed expectations and standards on them that they can’t live up to. Our hope should not be in mortal man.

This is beautifully illustrated in the most significant justice movement in American history, the Civil Rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s, lead by a Pastor named Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. No other justice movement has had longer lasting effects than the civil rights movement. I believe that the reason that the Civil Rights Movement had success is because those in leadership understood that only God could execute justice for the oppressed.

In addition, the Civil Rights Movement started in local church prayer meetings, not political rallies. The atmosphere of the early Civil Rights meetings has been described as a “prayer meeting and a praise session” by Floyd Thomas, who grew up in Alabama and attended several of these meetings.

As I read the Bible with fresh eyes it becomes more and more clear to me that God values justice and that he cares for the oppressed. As His heart on these matters becomes more and more evident to me I find myself asking “Why would I ever stand in the way of His heart?”.

Furthermore, not only should I not stand in the way of His heart, what can I do to share His heart and see it realized on Earth? As I gain a more biblical understanding of justice and train my eyes and ears to identify the oppressed I am moved to look to God to execute justice on their behalf and to lend myself to be an imperfect human agent through whom He can execute justice. It’s on His heart and it should also be on mine.