Micah 6:8 "Do Justice"

Micah 6:8

He has told you, O man, what is good;
    and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
    and to walk humbly with your God?

 

If we are going to be God’s people –if we are going to be the kind of people that God desires us to be, it all boils down to three things.  Regardless of personal theological bent, whether Reformed, Charismatic pr anything in between, this is God’s bottom line –this is what God says is truly important –this is the way God says we can please Him.  It all comes down to these three things: Our outward conduct (do justice), Our inner character (love mercy), and our personal devotion to the Lord (walk humbly with God).

Over the next few posts, I will give a few thoughts on what I believe this means, taking it a thought at a time.  Today, we look at doing justice.

 
The first requirement that God has for us is to do justice.  As Believers, we are be the standard bearers for society.  It is not enough for us to avoid doing injustice.  I think that for the main part, the Church, the Body of Christ, has been marginalized in our society –we have been pushed to sidelines and no longer have any significant impact on our culture because we have bought into the lie that religion ought to be a private personal thing.

We have agreed with our culture that we are entitled to our own religious opinions so long as we don’t let those opinions out of the closet.  We can believe whatever we want to believe as long as we do not use our religious convictions to change society.  We have accepted the mandate of our culture to not force our beliefs on others. 

So, we have come to a place where we try not to do injustice ourselves, but we do very little to change the injustice we see all around us.  But that is not what God requires.  God does not simply require that we avoid injustice on a personal level and look the other way when we see it in society.  God calls us to be actively involved in doing justice and working to change our society.  Our country is, at least in part, in this awful state of moral decay because we as Christians have defaulted on our moral obligation to do justice.  We have chosen to hide rather than to confront.   

When it comes to politics we have chosen to vote based on economics and secular politics, rather than spiritual principles.  We have left the political arena open to the ungodly, and then we sit and wonder why these godless people have failed to provide us with a godly nation.  

I hope that we truly understand that as Christians, as God’s people, we are to be actively involved in our culture, working for justice.  But it’s possible that we don’t exactly understand what justice is.  True to his nature as the Father of lies and perversion, Satan is always working to pervert truth.  So, there are those who are political activists working for some perverted standard of justice that has nothing to do at all with what God is talking about.  There are those working to keep abortion legal in the name of justice.  There are those who value animal rights above human rights and animal life above human life in the name of justice.  There are those who defend human cloning and partial birth abortion and stem cell research and all kinds of horrific things in the name of justice.  So, I do want us to be clear on what our Biblical mandate is about.

In Zechariah 7:9-10 we are told, "This is what the LORD Almighty says: `Administer true justice; show mercy and compassion to one another.  Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the alien or the poor. In your hearts do not think evil of each other.'”

In Psalm 82:3,4 it tells us, “Defend the cause of the weak and fatherless; maintain the rights of the poor and oppressed.  Rescue the weak and needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.”

This, then, is God’s bottom line.  His people are to be actively involved in defending the weak, the poor and the innocent.  It must be our concern as both Christians and as citizens of this country and as participants in society to see that true justice is dispensed.  Where we see injustice, we must work to correct it.  And it is only through God’s truth that justice can ultimately be accomplished.  So if we do not want society to quit dispensing justice, we must not allow them to easily dispense with truth.  We have a divine mandate to make our voices heard and make God’s love known through the way we live.  This is what God requires:  do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God.