Why Does Justice Matter?
All human beings, in virtue of being human, bear God’s image, from the greatest to the least. The image of God is foundational to understanding how and why we do justice. It’s that image which creates the standard that lends to each person’s transcendent value, requiring us to treat all humans with dignity and worth. Without this standard, justice isn’t possible.
I’ve been writing a lot about justice, but why does any of it matter? Why are we having this conversation at all? Justice is a word that has often been muddied, distorted, and even disregarded. To be God’s agents of justice, we have to work through the mud and distortion and bring clarity to true justice.
Daniel Webster said, “Justice is the great interest of man on earth. It is the ligament which holds civilized beings and civilized nations together.” Justice is the glue that holds society together, but it’s more than glue. When we act justly, we experience the true joy of Jesus. As he said, “If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love; just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and abide in His love. These things I have spoken to you so that My joy may be in you, and that your joy may be made full” (John 15:10–11).
As Christians, it’s paramount to understand biblical justice because what we think about justice influences almost every area of our lives. This is why I’ve been focusing on justice. The biblical concept of justice needs to be restored.
To restore justice, we need to understand a few critical concepts. The first is God’s call to justice. Justice is important to God. There are more than two thousand verses in the Bible directly related to justice. There are twice as many references to justice as to prayer, almost three times the references to love, and three times the number of references to money (which is often actually a justice issue).
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The Whole Counsel of God: Courageous Calvinism for the Twenty-First Century
Written by W. Robert Godfrey |
Tuesday, August 31, 2021
Our responsibility is not to produce great success in our strength. Our responsibility is to be faithful and thereby to be instruments that God may use just as He will. Our great concern should not be our success or our will, but it should be God’s will and God’s success. And as Calvinists, our confidence will be that God will accomplish His purpose.The calling of Ligonier Ministries is to renew the churches through a growing knowledge of biblical Christianity, which is to say a knowledge of historic Calvinism. Ligonier is continuing the teaching ministry of R.C. Sproul, one of the best minds and one of the most balanced, faithful, and effective Reformed teachers of the last half-century. He inherited and continued a marvelous tradition: the militant stance for the fundamentals of the faith of J. Gresham Machen; the scholarship and Reformed orthodoxy of old Princeton Seminary; the evangelizing, Reformed revivalism of the First Great Awakening; the confessional and experiential Calvinism of the Westminster Confession of Faith; the teaching of John Calvin and the Reformation; and the legacy of Augustine and true catholicity. What a heritage is ours. How much we have inherited from those who have gone before. What a responsibility for us to preserve and advance what we have received.
We recognize that the great accomplishments of Christians in the past are now challenged in unique ways. After more than 1,500 years of Christianity’s providing the dominant worldview in the West, we now find ourselves living in a post-Christian world. Certainly in terms of Calvinism, our numbers, our influence, and our fervor seem much diminished. I was reminded of this in an essay by John Updike. Thinking about those beautiful Congregational churches on village greens in New England, he wrote: “Joy and aspiration have shaped these churches, but a certain melancholy may fill them. Puritanism faded into Unitarianism and thence to stoic agnosticism; these gallant old shells hold more memories than promises.”1 Has our movement come to hold more memories than promises? That is the great issue, it seems to me, before us today. My passion and my concern are that we be committed to the notion that Calvinism holds more promises than memories, as rich and glorious as those memories are.
The title of this essay, “The Whole Counsel of God,” comes from Acts 20:27, from the words of the Apostle Paul as he encouraged the Ephesian elders in their future service of the Lord. He said to them in part:
You yourselves know how I lived among you the whole time from the first day that I set foot in Asia, serving the Lord with all humility and with tears and with trials that happened to me through the plots of the Jews; how I did not shrink from declaring to you anything that was profitable, and teaching you in public and from house to house, testifying both to Jews and to Greeks of repentance toward God and of faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. And now, behold, I am going to Jerusalem, constrained by the Spirit, not knowing what will happen to me there, except that the Holy Spirit testifies to me in every city that imprisonment and afflictions await me. But I do not account my life of any value nor as precious to myself, if only I may finish my course and the ministry that I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of the grace of God. And now, behold, I know that none of you among whom I have gone about proclaiming the kingdom will see my face again. Therefore I testify to you this day that I am innocent of the blood of all, for I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of God. Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood. I know that after my departure fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; and from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things, to draw away the disciples after them. Therefore be alert, remembering that for three years I did not cease night or day to admonish every one with tears. And now I commend you to God and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up and to give you the inheritance among all those who are sanctified. (Acts 20:18–32)
Paul called on the Ephesian elders to preserve and build on the Christian truth that he had brought to them. He had given them “the whole counsel of God” and called on them to live courageously on the basis of that truth. Today we need a courageous Calvinism for the unique time in which we live. What is the character of that courageous Calvinism that we need? What is the truth of God that we must embrace, live, and teach?
Comprehensive Calvinism
The first element of courageous Calvinism that we need is a comprehensive Calvinism. You notice how Paul talked about the “whole counsel of God” (v. 27), that he did not hold back from them “anything that was profitable” (v. 20). Paul spoke very much in the spirit of our Lord Jesus Christ, who sent out His disciples in the Great Commission to go and teach “all that I have commanded you” (Matt. 28:20). Scripture and our Calvinistic heritage are clear that we are committed to all that the Lord has revealed in His Word. We seek no shrunken religion. We seek no minimalist doctrine. We seek the fullness of what the Lord has revealed to us. We stand with Jeremiah as the Lord spoke to him: “Thus says the LORD: Stand in the court of the LORD’s house, and speak to all the cities of Judah that come to worship in the house of the LORD all the words that I command you to speak to them; do not hold back a word” (Jer. 26:2). The task that is committed to us is to speak the whole counsel of God, all that God has revealed. Ligonier exists to help Christians study that Word in its totality and grow in that Word.
Our growth is founded on and rooted in our commitment to the Word and its inerrant authority. We embrace the Word in the spirit of John Calvin, who said, “A soul, therefore when deprived of the Word of God, is given up unarmed to the devil for destruction.”2 Our conviction is that the Word must be our sword and our defense. The Word in its complete truthfulness is what we need and that to which we are committed.
Calvin, commenting on Jeremiah 42:5–6, said:
If we desire to prove our fidelity to God, the only way of acting is, to regard his Word as binding, whether it be agreeable or otherwise, and never to murmur, as the ungodly do; for when God would have a yoke laid on them, they complain that his doctrine is too hard and burdensome. Away, then, with all those things which can render God’s Word unacceptable to us, if we desire to give sure proof of our fidelity.3
We accept the Word of God in its fullness. We are committed to it, both where it is pleasing to us and where it pinches us. Because of our sins and our ignorance, we must have the Word of God to correct us. And that means that we stand committed to a full biblical theology. J. Gresham Machen expressed this forcefully, reminding us that the “Christian life is the fruit of Christian doctrine, not its root, and Christian experience must be tested by the Bible, not the Bible by Christian experience.”4 We are committed to this notion that the Word judges us; we do not judge the Word. The Word directs us; we do not direct the Word.
R.C. Sproul continued and deepened this commitment with his leadership in defending the doctrine of the inerrancy of the Bible during his ministry. Inerrancy became a touchstone of true biblical fidelity, helping to reveal those who tried to use traditional terms for biblical authority and reliability but used those terms in equivocal ways.
Because of our commitment to the Word, we are committed to the notion of the importance of theology. We are committed to the idea that theology is a reflection on the Word and an effort on the part of human beings to summarize that Word. We are convinced that theology is a useful, necessary discipline for appropriating the Scriptures for us. Evelyn Waugh, the British novelist, gave one of the best definitions of theology I know after his journey to Ethiopia for the coronation of the emperor Haile Selassie. After observing the extreme mystery of the rituals of the Ethiopian Coptic Church, he rejoiced in a theology that makes clear what God’s ways are. He wrote, “I saw theology as the science of the simplification by which nebulous and elusive ideas are formalized and made intelligible and exact.”5 The “science of simplification”—how seldom theology has been seen that way, but how true that is. Theology should make clear God’s will and God’s way as He has expressed them in His Word. And we here at Ligonier are committed to the full theology of the confessions to which we have subscribed, as they summarize biblical teaching for us.
Now, some have said that stressing the importance of theology makes Christianity too intellectualized. Some fear this means that only theologians have a role in the church. Perhaps in the tradition of our Reformed churches, there has been some danger of that. But it is not inherent in our tradition. We are not saying that theology is all there is to Christianity. But we are saying that theology must shape life. There must be life, but it must be shaped and directed by the Word of God.
Indeed, our Reformed heritage says that we do have more than theology. We also have piety; we have worship; we have loving service to the Lord. All these elements of Calvinism also flow out of the teachings of Scripture. We can see that clearly, for example, in the work of the Westminster Assembly. We need to remember that the Westminster Assembly not only gave us a confession of faith as a summary of doctrine, but it also gave us catechisms to teach the faith. It gave us a directory of worship to guide our meeting with God. It gave us a form of government to help in the organization of the church. And it gave us a Psalter to voice our praise to God. As we seek a comprehensive Calvinism, we must be sure that we have not shrunk it just to theology—however full our theology might be. We must be renewed in the fullness of a Reformed life flowing out of a Reformed theology. Our lives must follow a pattern of Bible study and prayer, of Word and sacrament, of self-denial and active love, and of Sabbath and of Psalm. We have seen a great decline in Reformed piety, in Reformed life, and I would suggest that decline is tied intimately to our loss of Sabbath and of Psalm. Too many of us have lost a day of rest, worship, study, and reflection and have lost the Psalms that put steel in our souls. We need to recapture that fullness of Calvinistic experience as well as Calvinistic theology.
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Social Media and Spiritual Warfare: Part 1
Social media has allowed us to keep in touch with friends and family across the globe, discover new information and meet people with similar interests. But at what price? Let us safeguard our souls while navigating this virtual world.
Social media has unquestionably transformed the way we behave. While some of these changes have been for the better, many have been for the worse. As Tim Challies poignantly writes in The Next Story:
Today, in our digital world, we spend much of our lives beyond Gibraltar, beyond accountability through visibility, able to say and do and look at and enjoy whatever our hearts desire. Yet for all the freedom it brings us, it can also bring us captivity. [1]
Recognising that we are in the midst of active spiritual warfare, Christians ought to be particularly aware of the dangers that social media poses to our souls.
Here are three key realities Christians ought to consider when using social media:
1. Social Media: The Gateway to Pornography
Pornography used to be something you had to intentionally go out to find. Whether it was enduring the humiliation of purchasing a magazine from the newsagency, or the shame of renting an X-rated movie from the video store, porn was not accessible by today’s standards.
But things have drastically changed. Pornography is now something you must intentionally go out of your way to avoid. As the Daily Mail recently reported, TikTok’s algorithms actively promote sexual content, drugs, and alcohol to users. Similarly, a large proportion of videos distributed via Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram’s newsfeeds contain soft pornography.
Social media has become an acceptable alternative to access pornography.
If this rings true for you, consider Jesus’ words in Mark 9:46:
If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off.It is better for you to enter life crippledthan with two hands to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire.
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Church Leaders and Woke
Society has changed radically, even in the last five years. If Christians do not understand where all this is coming from and have not been taught to assess this movement biblically how will they know what to say?
Why we need to open our eyes.
The Catholic writer Noelle Mering gives a helpful and succinct definition of ‘Woke’. She writes: ‘The term woke refers to the state of being alert and attuned to layers of oppression in society’. It is about being on the side of those who are or who see themselves as marginalised and discriminated against. Does that ring any bells for us? Surely, it reminds us of Jesus.
But then it gets subverted. While it began specifically and rightly with racism in mind, it has since broadened its scope to take in other areas where there is now commonly considered to be oppression – including questions of gender, transgender and sexual orientation. This becomes not just a mixed bag, but a can of worms for Christians. As just one indicator of how ‘Woke’ has been mis-focused, it is worth noting that although it is meant to be fighting for justice in society, as far as I know, it has little or nothing to say directly about poverty. The kinds of oppression with which it is concerned are quite selective in a 21st century, libertarian kind of way.
Why do pastors need to be teaching God’s people from Scripture on this subject? And why is it a very urgent matter? Let me give you three reasons.
Woke Power
The Woke agenda is now calling the shots in vast areas of our nation’s political, cultural, educational and working life.
That means that many of those in our congregations are having to confront ‘Woke’ issues in their daily working lives. Many Christians are expected, for example, to join in ‘gay pride’ week at the supermarket where they work. Is that okay? The pervasive influence of ‘Woke’ means that many parents are finding their children coming home from school having met up with a biological girl who is presenting as a boy – and vice versa. How is a parent to handle this?
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