Social Justice and The Gospel

Is social justice part of the gospel? What is our responsibility as Christians towards our society? Are we supposed to make sure everything’s equal? I’m Joel Fieri. That’s the question you’re searching for. I’m here to give you my thoughts, as usual. Stay tuned.

So, when we’re talking about social justice, there’s a few things I’d like to talk about. I’m not here to solve the question by any means. That’s going to take an awful long time and an awful lot of talking and effort on everyone’s part. The Bible does mention justice a lot. It doesn’t necessarily say social justice and a rule of mine is, whenever the word justice is accompanied by a modifier, whether it’s social justice, economic justice, racial justice, whatever it is, some red flags go up for me because the Bible doesn’t include those modifiers. The Bible strictly talked about God’s desire and requirement for us to do justly.

So, what does that mean when we think in terms of what’s being pushed now today as social justice? Well, when that term is pushed in Christian means or Christian areas, there’s three or four passages in the Bible that are generally stressed. And I want to deal with three of those today. And the first one that people throw up when they talk about social justice is the early church in Acts in Jerusalem, in Acts two and four, where the apostles, Jesus had ascended, he was resurrected, had ascended, the Holy Spirit had come and the apostles and disciples were in Jerusalem and they were all in one accord. They were selling all their possessions, laying them at the apostles’ feet. No one thought anything was theirs. They shared everything as anyone had need. And a lot of people say, well, that’s a social justice model right there. There’s a couple things though, when you’re talking about the early church and whenever anyone’s teaching on this or talking about the early church, I always try and keep something in mind, which is the biggest lesson I learned when you’re dealing with the early church.

The early church in the book of Acts was being disobedient. And that’s a key factor in this story, I think, because if you remember in the great commission, Jesus told them, go, I will give you my Holy Spirit, when he was talking to them about staying in Jerusalem, he said, stay in Jerusalem until the Holy Spirit comes. The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and then I want you to go. And if you read the story of the book of Acts, just like back in the Old Testament with the nation of Israel, there was a constant disobeying of God’s command by God’s people. And that’s exactly what the disciples were doing. They weren’t supposed to be in Jerusalem, having all things together. They were being blessed for sure, but God didn’t want them there. And later on, he sent a persecution to get them out of there. Okay. So keep that in mind.

And also when you look at Acts two and four, the government of Rome was not requiring the church to sell all their goods and give some of it to Rome and go through Rome while Rome kept some of it to itself and then gave it to the poor. No, they were doing it of their own accord. And if you look at Ananias later on, Ananias and Sapphira, in chapter five, this is one of the problems that came up because the church was being disobedient in staying there. They were getting into all kinds of little fights about who should serve who and who should wait on tables and who should be front of the gospel. And then Ananias and Sapphira came and they got caught up in the whole giving thing and see if they could look better than their neighbor at what they gave.

They sold some property, which they had every right to do, but they weren’t required to do. And they brought the money to the disciples’ feet, which they weren’t required to do. They didn’t have to. They brought part of it, which would’ve been fine. But they said, this is all of it, just to look better. They lied to the disciples and according to Peter, they lied to God. Satan got into Ananias and caused him to lie to God and Ananias fell dead. But one thing Peter told him, he said, it was yours to give or not give. We didn’t require this of you. So right there, that kind of breaks the argument of the church in Acts and in Jerusalem, being a model of social justice, because in social justice, there’s a redistribution model from authority. There was no authority telling the disciples that they had to give anything and they weren’t required to. It was theirs. It wasn’t community property. They didn’t consider it theirs, but it really was.

And that really goes all the way back to the 10 commandments. If you look at the 10 commandments, most of the 10 commandments boil down to, at least the first five or the second five, when it just talks about our relation to each other, one of the main themes is, your brother’s stuff is not yours. Your brother’s stuff is his stuff. And that’s pretty consistent throughout the Bible. You do not have a claim on your brother’s or sister’s things, their possessions. So that kind of breaks the argument of the church in Acts being a social justice model or some kind of collectivist model, which a lot of people are trying to make it.

Another example is the good Samaritan. A lot of people use that as an example of a parable Jesus saying as if we’re somehow responsible for our brother’s wellbeing. And if you don’t know the good Samaritan, look at Luke 10, the man is walking down the road and he’s set upon by robbers and left bleeding by the side of the road. And a priest walks by and some other people walk by. The only person that helps him is the Samaritan. The Samaritan binds his wounds, brings him to the inn, makes sure that he gets taken care of, pays the inn keeper and says, I’ll be back. And anything more you spend, I’ll pay for him.

The key to this story though, is that the good Samaritan left. He dealt with the immediate need of the man, but he had no responsibility to go further than that. And he did it, again, of his own volition. There was no Roman Legionnaire telling him, you take this man to the inn and you pay for his care. The inn keeper didn’t insist on it either, the Pharisees. There was no government oversight of him forcing him to do this. And as it is with the government and as it is with Caesar, the government always takes a little bit for their own. Okay? So even in the good Samaritan, we see that it’s not a requirement from authority. It’s not a read distribution scheme that someone is telling you to do.

All along when God talks about doing justice and showing mercy, going all the way back to the Old Testament again, where he is talking about gleaning the fields of a farmer. If a farmer has a field, he collects all of the harvest, but he doesn’t take everything. He leaves some in the corners and on the edges of the field so poor people can come and harvest themselves. He’s not obliged to harvest for them. They do the work themselves. It’s up to them. If they don’t come and get it, they don’t get fed.

So that’s really the difference between biblical justice and what we call social justice now, today, which is, let’s face it, it’s thinly disguised socialism and face it, Marxism. Okay? That’s not biblical. The idea with the socialist collectivist Marxist philosophy is that there’s no God, the state is the one that determines. Biblical justice and biblical mercy is God deciding and directing us to share our resources with our brothers as they come to us, as they have need, willingly, on our own, in obedience to God. There is no obedience to God in the collectivist Marxist model. So again, those two that are commonly used to say that somehow our obligation fits into the socialist model, they don’t.

And the third story comes to us from a group called, Let Us Reason, an article I read and I’ll put the link in the description below. And it’s not something we normally think would be something that argues against social justice. But it’s the story of the widow’s mite in Mark 12, when Jesus and his disciples are at the temple and they see the poor widow put in her mite, her dime, while all the other rich people are throwing all kinds of wealth, she comes up and puts in a dime. And Jesus said, that woman is going to be blessed, because she gave all she had. She’s blessed. She was obeying God, but she was the poorest person there. There was no thought of all the rich people having to give to her. She didn’t have that thought.

She didn’t have that expectation. There, there was no thought of hers that, I need some person in authority to take those rich people’s money and give it to me. She knew her obligation to God, even as poor as she was, was to give in obedience to him, to who he had designated that she give. And there was no governmental oversight or no obligation from greater society’s authority. It was an obligation towards God to be obedient to his command to give.

So again, I’ll put the link to this article on here. I think it’s some good thoughts. The question, again, it’s a big question that’s growing even more and more as we face pressure from outside society to conform our faith to what the world tells us it should be. We can’t do that. And if we look at these stories and we look at the Bible, look what the Bible really talks about justice, we can see that social justice, that modifier again, anytime there’s a modifier, that’s not a good thing. So if we look at these stories and see biblical justice, we can see that social justice is a poor, poor substitute for it.

So I hope that’s helpful. Again, I’m Joel Fieri. Like, subscribe, share, please, and go to christianpodcastcentral.com where there’s all kinds of good content just like this. We’ll see you next time. Thanks for listening.