God’s Whole Justice

When you co-write a book called Deep Justice in a Broken World, people expect you to know something about justice, and they expect what you know to be…well…rather deep.

In The Mission of God, Christopher J.H. Wright gives a great glimpse into God’s holistic justice.  In the Exodus account of God’s rescue of the Israelites from the oppressive Egyptians, God engages in fourfold justice:

1. God provides political justice by plucking the Israelites out of a culture in which they had no political voice and leading them down the path toward the establishment of their own nation.
2. God also brings about economic justice by removing them from a society in which they owned no land to giving them a land of their own.
3. God supplies social justice by rescuing the Israelites from a culture in which their fundamental human rights and family lives were constantly violated and helping them develop a society whose covenant with Yahweh meant sanctity of human life and rights.
4. God brings about spiritual justice by removing the Israelites from a culture of multiple gods and giving them the opportunity to worship the one true God.

One of my favorite quotes about justice comes from Nicholas Wolterstorff from Yale University who writes:

The state of shalom is the state of flourishing in all dimensions of one’s existence: in one’s relation to God, in one’s relation to one’s fellow human beings, in one’s relation to nature, and in one’s relation to oneself. Evidently justice has something to do with the fact that God’s love for each and every one of God’s human creatures takes the form of God desiring the shalom of each and every one.” ¹

May that be the type of shalom we offer to students in our ministries.  May that also be the type of shalom that flows from our ministries to people around the world.

1. Nicholas Wolterstorff, “The contours of justice: An ancient call for shalom,” in God and the Victim: Theological Reflections on Evil, Victimization, Justice, and Forgiveness, edited by Lisa Barnes Lampman and Michelle D. Shattuck (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 113. [↩]

©2008 Fuller Youth Institute