In all of this we see that sometimes justice comes about quickly. Sometimes justice is delayed. And sometimes justice never seems to come at all – in this life at least. When it seems like great injustice is happening and is never being rectified, that can be a very grievous thing to go through. God’s people of course see this occurring all the time and often all they can do is cry out, “How Long O Lord? When will we see some justice?” The Bible speaks to this often. Indeed, the entirety of Scripture informs us that our God is a God of justice. We see him carrying out justice in the here and now, and we read about justice that is forthcoming.

Today justice is not always found, but full justice IS coming:
A million times a day there are acts of injustice taking place, be they greater or lesser acts. Most people have an innate dislike of injustice, and a strong desire for justice. Here I want to simply offer four examples of injustice: two recent and two ancient – some of which are followed by justice. I will then look at how the book of Revelation speaks to all this.
The first case involves a Christian in Ireland who was jailed. He was not involved in theft or sexual abuse of students. No, much worse, he refused to go along with the woke pronoun nonsense. And for that he had been jailed for several months and was set to miss out on Christmas. Talk about gross injustice and gross idiocy on the part of the authorities. One report says this:
“A teacher in Ireland has been suspended from work and then jailed for contempt of court after he refused to use the correct pronouns to address a transgender student. Enoch Burke was arrested on Monday for violating a court order barring him from teaching at Wilson’s Hospital School in Westmeath, or even being present there.” nypost.com/2022/09/06/teacher-enoch-burke-jailed-over-trans-pronouns-flap/
But a court has just allowed his release, so he was able to be with family to celebrate Christmas. Finally, a bit of justice: “A teacher who was jailed for ignoring a court order has been released from prison after a ruling by the High Court. Enoch Burke was jailed in September for breaching an order which prevents him from attending the school where he works.” www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn3z8x0vvk2o
Another recent case, also from Europe, involves a woman arrested for praying outside of an abortion mill: “The thing could seem implausible or grotesque, but one does not trifle with the law. Thus, a woman was arrested and charged with ‘mental prayer’ at an abortion clinic. Isabel Vaughan-Spruce is the director of March for Life in the UK and a volunteer supporting women in difficult pregnancy situations. She was arrested by police at an abortion clinic in Birmingham. She was later charged with four counts after telling police she was ‘maybe’ praying silently when asked why she was standing on a public road near an abortion center.” fsspx.news/en/news-events/news/uk-it-forbidden-silently-pray-certain-places-78890
Although released on bail, this sort of thing should never have happened. We really are at the end of civilisation as we know it when silent prayer is deemed to be a crime by the godless state, and those involved in it can be arrested and jailed. Where is the justice?
A third case also involves the powers that be committing great injustice to those who could not easily stand up for themselves. It took place thousands of years ago and is recorded in the Bible. I refer to a story found in 1 Kings 21 concerning the evil King Ahab and Queen Jezebel. You know the story.
Ahab lusted after Naboth’s vineyard, and was bummed out about not being able to have it. Jezebel chewed him out: ‘Hey, who is king around here? Leave it to me – I will get it for you.’ She gets some worthless fellows to bear false witness against Naboth. He is declared guilty and killed, and Ahab gets his coveted vineyard. Talk about deplorable injustice. But the prophet Elijah quickly condemns the king and tells him justice is coming. And that it does: we read about Ahab’s death in the next chapter.
My fourth case is also very familiar, and it involves a good King – David. We all know how lust got the better of him, and he committed adultery with Bathsheba. He then had her husband killed to cover up his crime. Those are some very ugly and unjust actions indeed. But the prophet Nathan quickly appears on the scene to call him out. He tells David a story which enrages David and his sense of justice. But then Nathan tells him: “You are the man!” See 2 Samuel 11-12 for the full story.
Obviously much bigger and badder examples of injustice can be mentioned, including the Holodomor in Ukraine in the 1930s and the Holocaust in the 1940s – both of which resulted in the deaths of millions of people. So whether on a massive scale or on a smaller scale, injustice is always happening.
In all of this we see that sometimes justice comes about quickly. Sometimes justice is delayed. And sometimes justice never seems to come at all – in this life at least. When it seems like great injustice is happening and is never being rectified, that can be a very grievous thing to go through.
God’s people of course see this occurring all the time and often all they can do is cry out, “How Long O Lord? When will we see some justice?” The Bible speaks to this often. Indeed, the entirety of Scripture informs us that our God is a God of justice. We see him carrying out justice in the here and now, and we read about justice that is forthcoming.
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Written by Rachel M. Coleman |
Tuesday, February 20, 2024
Because women are the only members of the human species that bear children—that is to say, because women bear in themselves the future of humanity—if there is an attempt to change, foundationally and fundamentally, what it means to be human, the attempt will manifest first and most visibly in women. Byrne writes that “what is a woman?” is “the main question” of TWG’s third chapter, and as anyone who pays attention to this discourse knows, that question may be the most volatile question to ask in our current moment. Why doesn’t it occur to Byrne to ask why the definition of “woman” is in contention rather than “man?” Kellie-Jay Keen knows why, as well as the radical feminist philosophers I mentioned above: because the very fabric of who and what we are is at stake.

It is not an overstatement to say that the question of sexual difference, and its counter-concept, gender, is among the most contentiously debated today. We should think about why the topic inspires such vitriol, but one possible reason is that everyone has skin in the game: to be human is to be either a man or a woman, and therefore, being human requires us to think about what it means to be a man or a woman. Every bit of ourselves is expressed either as male or female, and therefore, the questions surrounding sexual difference touch on—or perhaps coincide with—questions of our humanity.
One of the consequences of this, however, has been an absolute morass of once unquestioned terms. On the face of it, this seems silly: there are men and there are women, and we all bring something different to the table when it comes to being human. It shouldn’t be that complicated.
And yet those who pay even the least attention to this discourse (and even perhaps those who wish to pay no attention) know that it is complicated. Part of the reason is that sexual difference is more nuanced than we have previously thought it to be, but another part—probably the larger part—is that the terms of the discourse are intentionally confused and obfuscated by gender ideologues (those who contend that gender is different from sex). Gender ideologues want us to think that sex and gender are much more complicated than most of us can understand, and that the evidence we collect from the world with our own senses (as well as that of the billions of humans who preceded us in history) is not reliable.
Alex Byrne’s Trouble With Gender: Sex Facts, Gender Fictions (TWG) is a mostly successful attempt to cut through the intentional discomposition of the terms of discourse about sexual difference. In an extremely well-researched manner, Byrne addresses many of the “fictions” gender ideologues use to make their arguments. One example: many note that 1.7 percent of the population is intersex, which would mean one out of almost every fifty people have some combination of both male and female genitalia. As Byrne demonstrates in chapter three, that number was made up by Anne Fausto-Sterling in her article “How sexually dimorphic are we?” and that the number is probably 0.015 percent. Such research and clarification alone make the book worth reading.
As Byrne himself writes in both the Introduction and Coda, TWG is a book about sex—not sexual intercourse, but human beings as sexually differentiated creatures. Byrne’s thesis is that “using ‘gender’ to mean anything other than sex is to obscure important issues for no good reason.” In making his argument, Byrne provides a great deal of evidence from biology, history, sociology, and psychology. He carefully sifts through a great deal of nonsense that passes for research in the fairly new subject of “gender studies,” exposing the gender ideologues’ faulty logic. 
On this score, Judith Butler is Byrne’s main target: the title of the book is clearly aimed at Butler’s Gender Trouble, first published in 1990 and largely understood to be a foundational text for gender studies. There, Butler expands on Simone de Beauvoir’s famous proclamation from The Second Sex that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” and concludes that sex and gender are both socially constructed. Byrne criticizes Butler mostly on grounds of how unclear her writing is rather than any full examination of her first principles. Lack of clarity and precision seem, for Byrne, to be the deepest sin a thinker can commit.
Byrne explores cases of individuals to whom gender ideologues often point to demonstrate that “sex is a vast, infinitely malleable continuum.” These are generally people who have some sort of chromosomal or hormonal abnormality that leads to their being not immediately identifiable as their natal sex, and are thus raised by their parents as the opposite sex (the author makes it clear early in the book that such abnormalities do not result in a “disordered person: indeed, he or she may be the most wonderful human being you could ever hope to meet”).
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Whatever it is you most fear—you are giving that thing, that aspect of your life,worth. You are saying it is worth your time, it is worth your thoughts, it is worth your worries, it deserves your energies, your planning, and your deliberations. It is worth giving large swaths of your life over to serve it in your mind.

I speak this line to people all the time: “Fear is a function of worship.” And without fail, I get much the same response. They look at me with a side-turned head: “Okay…?” some of them say. Or, “I’m not sure what that means”, others reply. Still others quickly nod, not understanding, and proceed as though I’ve not said a word. And yet this concept, that fear is an aspect of worship, is a profound reality at the foundational level. Lest you too, dear reader, turn your head sideways or click away without understanding what is being said, please allow me to explain.
Fear Is a Form of Worship
In Deuteronomy 10:20, Moses tells God’s worshiping community: “You shall fear the Lord your God. You shall serve him and hold fast to him, and by his name you shall swear.” God’s people are called to fear the Lord and fear him alone. The people are to have no other gods besides the one true and living God—he only deserves our fear. The next verb in that verse is the word “serve”, which can mean work or labor, but also is translated “worship” in the Old Testament. So we are beginning to see God making “fear” and “worship” a parallel concept. What is more, notice the other words even in this verse, and how they carry with them the idea of wholehearted devotion to the Lord “hold fast to him” and “swearing by his name”. These are worshipful and reverential concepts, friends!
If we were to examine the larger context, though, the notion becomes even more apparent. Deuteronomy 10 is all about obedience to the Lord, serving the Lord with a whole heart, circumcising one’s heart unto the Lord, and to fear him alone (cf. Deut 10:12-13, “what does the Lord your God require of you, but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to keep the commandments and statutes of the Lord”). Clearly, fearing the Lord is a part of our larger devotion to God—fear is a function of worship.
Fear Parallels Worship
If Deuteronomy 10 leaves room for confusion, Deuteronomy 6 clarifies. In verse 13, notice the same idea, but perhaps stated more plainly: “You shall fear only the LORD your God; and you shall worship Him and swear by His name.” Do you see the parallelism Moses is highlighting for us? Fear God alone, worship God alone. Fear is an aspect of our worship.
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