In a world where injustice is so prevalent, the Bible offers insights and a pathway to understanding of our role as Christians in the pursuit of justice. Dr. Paul Nyquist expands on our role verses God’s role as it relates to bringing justice to an unjust world.
“God has provided us a standard and what He expects us to do in His Word. That’s what we have to use as the plum line. Once we start deviating from that, it becomes more like the ‘Days of the Judges,’ where everybody does what’s right in their own eyes.”
“God has entrusted the application of His justice to mankind. You find it first in the Old Testament with the judges that He raised up to judge people. That was His way of bringing that through to mankind. Now, He uses human government to do that. Romans 13, where He says He expects the human government to punish those who do wrong and reward those who do right.”
Dr. Nyquist points out that while we may have a deep sense of what is right in our hearts, we don’t always carry it out in the way God intended. That’s why it’s important for us to seek God wholeheartedly in this pursuit.
“We have a role in this and He expects us to carry out His justice. Human rulers often don’t do that because they don’t acknowledge their accountability to God, but that doesn’t change His expectations of what He wants man to accomplish.”
We can look to the Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector for further understanding of our fallible human nature.
“Luke 18 gives us that picture of an unjust judge; somebody who didn’t care for man, nor had any respect toward God. We certainly can have human judges that carry that same perspective and could care less about what God might say, they’re just going to rule in the way they seem fit.”
“When that happens, you end up then with the system that might be ruling according to human justice, but it’s not going to be ruling core into divine justice. It can be emphasized in the legal, but it won’t always be just. That’s when we begin to feel that grieving in our own spirit like, ‘This isn’t right, why is this happening?’ It’s because we have deviated from God’s standards.”
We all have been given a role in the pursuit of justice. Rather than going by our own standards, we need to look to God’s standards to identify what is just and right, and then pursue that to the best of our ability.
Dr. Paul Nyquist is president of Moody Global Ministries, a higher education and media ministry founded by evangelist D. L. Moody in 1886. He is the author of several books including .
Our role in the pursuit of justice
