How Should Christians Approach Social Justice?

There's a lot of focus on social justice in today's society.

What's the biblical approach to social justice? That's just one of the questions we'll be answering on today's edition of Core Christianity. Hi, this is Bill Meyer, along with Pastor Adriel Sanchez, and this is the radio program where we answer your questions about the Bible and the Christian life every day. Our phone lines are open right now, and if you have a question for Pastor Adriel, you can call us at 833-THE-CORE.

That's 1-833-843-2673. You can also post your question on our Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter accounts and email us at questionsatcorechristianity.com. First up, let's go to John calling in from Deerfield, Illinois. John, welcome to Core Christianity. Hey, thanks for taking my call.

Hey, John, thanks for giving us a call. What's your question for us today, brother? So the question I have is, there's passages like 1 John where it talks about walking in sin, and often you'll hear Christians refer to living in sin. I'm curious how one might go about assessing whether or not we fall into that category, and what it looks like to walk versus to sin periodically or something like that.

Yeah, I appreciate the question. I actually just finished preaching through 1 John at my church, and I think that the passage that you're referring to is 1 John chapter 1, beginning in verse 5, where John said, This is the message we have heard from him and proclaimed to you, that God is light and in him is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. And then he adds this in verse 8, If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. And if we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar and his word is not in us. So one of the things we see here really clearly is that walking in the light does not mean that we are living perfectly and without sin. As Christians, we're always going to battle with sin. We're never going to be sinless until we're in the presence of the Lord. And so what John isn't teaching here is the idea that's sometimes put out there, this idea of sinless perfectionism. And yet at the same time, he's saying, Look, there is a pattern of behavior that could be categorized as living in sin, walking in the darkness. And it seems like the people to whom John is writing here, it seems like there was a group within this church that had left the community, essentially abandoned the church, begun to deny who Jesus was and what he had accomplished. There's this real confusion about the identity of Christ. And even essentially began saying things like we're sinless, we don't have sin. Sometimes people refer to this as the heresy of antinomianism. That is, they just rejected God's law.

They said, Hey, everything is fine. We're saved by grace. We're just going to live however we want. And so that certainly would classify as living in the darkness, as walking in the darkness. And again, that idea of walking in the light or walking in the darkness is just a figure of speech for this is the way in which we conduct our lives, what we're living in. And for the Christian, where we're called to something else, we're called to walk in the light. The opposite of walking in the darkness and the way in which we walk in the light, and I think this is what John brings out here in 1 John 1, is by confessing our sins.

If we confess our sins, verse 9, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. In other words, here's what we don't do with our sins as believers in Jesus Christ. We don't minimize them. We don't downplay them.

We don't pretend like they're not real issues. I mean, those are ways of continuing to walk in the darkness. We confess our sins and receive the grace that God extends to all those who turn from their sins to him. And so I think that's just in the context of 1 John, the best way to understand this idea of walking in the darkness and what an encouragement for each and every one of us to live in the light, to bring our sin into the light and thereby, I mean, put it to death. That's what Paul says in Romans chapter 8.

And so thank you so much for that question, brother. You know, as a pastor, Adriel, what do you say to a person who, let's say, has a friend or relative who claims to be a follower of Christ but seems to be consistently walking in the darkness? And they say, look, you know, I made that decision, I'm a Christian, but their lifestyle choices are directly, you know, antithetical to what the word would say.

Yeah, I mean, it's a heartbreaking situation, but I think it's one that many of us as believers have experienced. And of course, we want to call an individual to live in light of what it is that they claim to believe. And so I think in love, we speak the truth and we say, hey, there's this discrepancy between how you're living and what you claim to believe about God, about Jesus, about what it means to be a Christian. And so I think we have to be honest with each other and we have to essentially exhort one another. I mean, the author of the Hebrews said this in Hebrews chapter 3, that we ought to exhort one another day by day while it is called today, lest we're hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. And I think that there are a lot of people who confess that they're Christians, but whose hearts are being hardened because they're continuing in this pattern of, we might say, walking in the darkness. And it's a really scary place to be. And that's why they need Christian community and faithful brothers and sisters who are going to say, hey, snap out of it. Look at what's happening.

You need to turn to Christ. And so, yeah. A huge responsibility for all of us to admonish one another in love and always in love, of course, extending grace to people. But if we see that consistent pattern for not just to stand by idly and watch somebody self-destruct. Right. Yeah, absolutely. This is Core Christianity with Pastor Adriel Sanchez.

Let's go to a voicemail that came in from Susan in Northern California. Hi, I just listened to Core Christianity, which I generally really love. Yet I heard the response about God's view on social justice. And the example given was love your enemies and protect the vulnerable, for example, the unborn babies. I just wanted to highlight there might be more opportunity to reach out to the more marginalized in society and talk about where the scripture talks about justice and that it's always connected with righteousness. There's just more to that story, unless you're only talking to white Christians that you already know focus on abortion rights, which is also part of God's law and coming from a church that's multi-ethnic.

And I've watched a lot of people in our community suffering from racial biases, et cetera. We have such a need for reconciliation, biblical reconciliation, not just for this culture, but in a much deeper way. Thank you so much. Bye.

Wow. Susan, thank you so much for calling us and for interacting with the broadcast. I really do appreciate it when people call and ask questions about some of the answers that we've given. One of the challenges is, especially when we get a question, the question that we got on social justice came at the end of our broadcast earlier this week. And so we only had, I think, something like 60 seconds to try to tackle that really important subject.

There really isn't enough time to be able to say everything that you want to say in a situation like that, and certainly on a broadcast like this. But it is so important that we open up this subject a little bit more, thinking through what the Bible has to say with regards to justice and social justice. The first thing I think that's important for every one of us to understand is that God calls his people to justice. This isn't something we can avoid as Christians as those who claim to follow the Lord. I think of a passage like Zechariah 7, verses 9 through 10. Thus says the Lord of hosts, render true judgments, show kindness and mercy to one another. Do not oppress the widow, the fatherless, the sojourner, or the poor, and let none of you devise evil against another in your heart. This is really something that you see over and over again in scripture. Actually, God actually pronounced a curse on those who did not pursue justice. Deuteronomy chapter 27, verse 19, cursed be anyone who perverts the justice due to the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow, and all the people shall say amen. In other words, when it comes to this idea of justice, of loving, and serving, and guarding the rights of those who are marginalized often, that's the groups that we're hearing about here in those passages of scripture. It's something that the church should say amen to. The reason is because it reflects the very heart of who our God is.

Earlier in the book of Deuteronomy, in Deuteronomy chapter 10, verses 17 through 19, we read this, for the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God, who is not partial and takes no bribe. He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing. Now, one of the things I think it's so important for you to note when we're thinking about these various passages of scripture that come in the context of this discussion about justice, biblical justice, is that God is concerned with the care of the marginalized in society. Orphans, widows, immigrants. Why?

Because oftentimes these are the very groups that are vulnerable to injustice, that are often taken advantage of in our world. I'll give you just a story. I remember years ago when I was in college, we were renting an apartment in San Diego, actually a pretty bad area of San Diego, really a lot of poverty. There were actually two drive-by shootings on my street that year when we were living in this apartment.

It was just kind of a sad neighborhood. We were there, I had several college roommates, and when we moved out, we were trying to get our rent deposit back. We were emailing our landlord over and over again, trying to get our deposit back.

It was a lot of money for college students. We never got any reply. Finally, after a couple of months, we did a little bit of research and realized, hey, they actually have to give us our deposit back if they haven't told us what they've spent it on. We sent this legal information to them, and we finally got a response.

It was this sort of quickly put together Microsoft Word document that basically invented all of these things, fabricated all of these things that they said they spent our deposit on. It was really heartbreaking because essentially we were taken advantage of. For us, young college students, it wasn't that big of a deal. It was frustrating, but it really got me thinking about all the people that lived in that neighborhood, many of them single mothers, many of them on welfare or Section 8, just struggling, who could never fight that kind of a thing.

It just would have been impossible for them. They were going to work every day trying to put food on the table for their children. It just got me thinking about how many other people were being taken advantage of there. Oftentimes it is the widows, the poor, these kinds of communities that are vulnerable to injustice. God cares about them. Part of justice and this idea of social justice, we could say biblical justice, is caring for them as well. Christians are called to do and pursue justice as those who have been justified. We need to clearly distinguish there between the idea of social justice and what's called the social gospel. There's a lot of confusion about this in the church today. The social gospel is the idea that what we do in terms of justice is the good news of the Christian faith.

In other words, me loving my neighbor, so on and so forth. That's ultimately the essence of the gospel, the kernel of Christianity. It's love God and love your neighbor.

That's what it's all about. That's the gospel. Well, no, that's a false gospel.

The true gospel is that we're justified solely by grace through faith in Jesus Christ, but that as the justified, we pursue the good of our neighbors, not in order to be more justified or anything like that, but because of God's mercy to us. And so, look, there's so much more that could be said about this, but I really appreciate you, Susan, calling and asking about the idea of biblical justice, something that we should be concerned about and something that we really need more clarity on in these days, and we have to go to the scriptures to get it. Great counsel, Adriel, thanks so much. And thanks for your great question, Susan. This is Core Christianity with Pastor Adriel Sanchez.

If you have a question for Pastor Adriel about the Bible or the Christian life, we would love to hear from you right now. Here's the phone number. It's 833-THE-CORE.

That's 1-833-843-2673. Let's go to Tom, who's calling in from Washington State. Tom, what's your question for Pastor Adriel? Yeah, first, thanks for taking my call. I enjoy your show. I'm a new listener.

I've heard a few, and I enjoy it. My question is on the gifts of the Spirit. Now, and I'm talking more the miraculous ones, you know, like the tongues and healing and stuff like that. Do you think that they're still for today, or do you think the church has come into... You know, I hear people have different opinions, but when I read it, it sounds like there's a maturity in the church to where we don't need those things to back up what we believe and why we believe. Do you think that that's where we're at today, or do you think God's silent, or where do you think we're at?

Well, I certainly don't think that God is silent. I think He's always speaking to us through His Word and through the world around us, but when it comes to the sign gifts of the Holy Spirit, as you mentioned, you know, gifts like the gift of tongues or the gift of prophecy described in places like 1 Corinthians, chapters 12 through 14, I do believe that those were given for a specific time in the history of the church, in particular in the early apostolic period. And, Tom, this is a question that I, as a pastor, have really thought about. I mean, when I was a newer believer, I think I was more open to the idea of, oh, yeah, these sign gifts are still around ordinarily for the church today. And then as I grew and continued to study the scriptures, you know, my mind changed on this. I know that there are a lot of faithful believers and really godly people who have differences of opinion, but my view, based on what I believe the scripture teaches, is that, yeah, those gifts served a particular purpose for a period of time in the church, and namely that purpose was the advancement of the gospel.

They were sort of like these rocket boosters that helped launch the gospel into orbit, if you will. And one passage of scripture that I would go to that I think alludes to this is in the book of Hebrews. Now, I love the book of Hebrews.

It's one of my favorite books of the Bible. Over and over again, the author of the Hebrews is talking about the importance of Jesus and his gospel, how Jesus is better than everything. He's better than the old covenant sacrifices, the old covenant priesthood. He's the Lord.

He's the one through whom we have the forgiveness of sins. And the Hebrew church that's being written to there, they're missing the point. They're, some of them, being tempted to turn away from Jesus. And so the author of the Hebrews says to them in Hebrews chapter two, beginning in verse one, therefore, we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard lest we drift away from it. For since the message declared by angels proved to be reliable and every transgression or disobedience received a just retribution, how shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation? It was first declared by the Lord, and it was attested to us by those who heard while God also bore witness by signs and wonders and various miracles and by the gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to his will.

Now verse four there is what I want to focus on just for a moment. Listen to what the author of the Hebrews said. He said the gospel was being preached.

You heard it, you Hebrews, don't turn away from it. And God bore witness to that gospel, to the reality of the message, the truthfulness of the message by signs and wonders and various miracles and by gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to his will. In other words, those gifts, those sign gifts of the Holy Spirit served to attest to the gospel message. Now that doesn't mean that there aren't instances of God working extraordinarily today.

God might heal someone through prayer, that kind of a thing. We just don't expect God, I don't expect God to ordinarily work in the same ways that he was working during the days of the apostles in the book of Acts or that kind of a thing. And again, that's not to say that the Spirit isn't working today. The Spirit is working today, redeeming men and women, bringing people to himself, uniting us to Jesus Christ. I mean, the Spirit is very active.

It's just that those signs, those sign gifts in particular served a very specific purpose. And so, Tom, that's my answer and I appreciate your call, brother. Thank you, Tom. This is Core Christianity with Pastor Adriel Sanchez. And if you're a regular listener to our program, we want to let you know that we aren't supported by a particular church or denomination. We depend on people just like you to keep this program on the air. And if you believe in what we do, we'd love to invite you to join what we call our inner core.

Yes, please do. If you're blessed by this broadcast, if you've been encouraged by the answers that you hear, I mean, we're going straight to the scriptures. That's the goal, is to let God speak to us and to help you come into a deeper understanding of what the Word of God teaches. And if you've benefited from what we're doing, would you consider joining the inner core? For a monthly donation of $25 or more, you'll be a part of that group. We have a ton of really wonderful bonus material that we want to send to you.

There's actually an interview that I just did with my friend, a theology professor, Michael Horton, Dr. Michael Horton, where we talk about why so many young people are leaving the churches today and what we can do about it. You'll get access to that content as well as a monthly devotional that I put together for you, for you inner core members. And so, would you consider, brothers and sisters, prayerfully joining the inner core if you've been blessed by our work? Now, if you join the inner core, you'll also receive a signed copy of the book by Dr. Michael Horton that started this broadcast.

It's called Core Christianity, Finding Yourself in God's Story, just a marvelous book for you or for your small group to go through. Become an inner core member by going to corechristianity.com forward slash inner core to learn more, or you can call us at 833-THE-CORE. Again, that number, 833-843-2673. Let's go to Clint calling in from Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Clint, welcome to Core Christianity. Hello. Thank you for taking my call. I just want to say I listen to your show every day and I am fascinated by all your questions and answers that you have for everyone. So thank you for that. Thank you, brother.

My question, you're very welcome. My question is about, so I've been hearing a lot lately about replacement theology. So I've done some research and while I can agree with maybe some of it, I don't fully agree with most of it. I think that I was reading Matthew 2337 kind of speaks to that maybe, and the entire book of Romans, mainly Romans nine and the first part of Romans 10, and also John 14 six complained to that.

Could you maybe clarify some stuff for me on that? A lot of passages there, Clint, but I love it. I love that you're digging into the scriptures. Let me just say, so this idea, I mean that phrase is sometimes thrown out there, replacement theology, and it's the idea that the church has replaced Israel and so that God doesn't care about the Jews anymore or the Hebrew nation, that kind of a thing. Well, it does seem like, and again, there are differences of opinion on this question in the church. It does seem like when you get to places like Romans nine through 11 that God is still very much so working in the Jews and that he's calling them to himself.

And so that's what I believe. I mean, I think especially when you look at Romans chapter 11 where Paul seems to have this hope that the Lord is going to bring about this great restoration, but the reality is Israel under the old covenant was a type of the church now in the new Testament. We are, as the body of Christ, grafted into this one tree. Paul, again, talks about that in Romans nine through 11. So I don't know that the language of replacement theology is the best way of talking about it.

I think it's this sort of one organic family. We are, Paul said in Galatians chapter three, the children of Abraham by faith. Isn't that wonderful? I mean, when you read the Old Testament, I think a lot of Christians don't read the Old Testament because they feel like it doesn't apply to them. Well, Paul says that's our family tree. Abraham is my father, my great-great-grandfather by faith, if you will. And so we have been grafted into this one family through Jesus Christ who is himself the true Israelite. And you see some of this also in the book of Ephesians, very clear in the book of Ephesians where Paul said in Ephesians chapter two, verse 12, remember that you were at that time that is prior to your faith in Christ, separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ, you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ for he himself is our peace who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances so that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace.

Isn't that just absolutely beautiful, absolutely wonderful. You know, there are some people that sort of have this idea out there that God has two peoples. He's got the church, he's got Israel, and he's got these sort of separate plans for them. But here I think scripture makes it absolutely clear. We've been grafted into the family of God. We're no longer strangers to the covenants of promise. Through Jesus, we've been welcomed in. There's one church, there's one plan of salvation. And it's not that the church replaced Israel and God doesn't care about the Jews. Again, Romans chapter 11, it's that we've been brought into the story through Jesus, through faith.

And that's I think the way we need to approach this question. And by the way, one of the earliest controversies in the church, you see this in Ephesians, you see this in the book of Galatians, is how to relate to one another within the body of Christ. Jews and Gentiles, now one church. We still have problems like that in the church today, how to relate to people who are different than we are, different cultures. And it gets to the gospel. It's through the cross, through the work of Jesus, that we are united as one family. Thanks for listening to CORE Christianity. To request your copy of today's special offer, visit us at corechristianity.com and click on offers in the menu bar, or call us at 1-833-843-2673. That's 833, the CORE. When you contact us, please let us know how you've been encouraged by this program. And be sure to join us next time as we explore the truth of God's Word together.