IF YOU’RE PAYING ATTENTION AT ALL, YOU’VE noticed that many people on our university campuses are actively protesting for “social justice.” Justice matters greatly, but does social justice have anything to do with biblical justice? That is the crucial question for Believers.

In the contemporary context “justice” is about freeing the oppressed from their oppressors. Misogny, racism, sexism, homophobia, fat shaming, etc. are examples of this goal. Justice means freeing women from the control of patriarchs, freeing blacks  from white oppressors, freeing women from “sexism;” freeing homosexuals from the disapproval of straight, white, males; freeing those with sexual disphoria to have a sex change operation; and freeing the climate from the horrors of poluting capitalist society. “Social justice” also means the equal distribution of goods and services—some form of economic socialism.

There is a problem, however. The concept of “justice”  implies the existence of a transcendant, objective, universal standard of right and wrong by which behavior can be measured. Justice then rewards or punishes based on adherence to that standard.

We have no such standard. Our standard is imminent, subjective, and personal to me. It is internal. It is ever shifting and changing. It is founded on my feelings. I am my own god. I create my own personal standard by which social justice is distributed. At the current moment the standard of right and wrong is sexual liberty. It is also anything that preserves the climate. The standard is the freedom to be whatever I identify as, i.e., I am whatever gender “feels” right to me.

It is therefore no exaggeration to observe that Social Justice Theorists have created a new religion, a tradition of faith that is actively hostile to reason, falsification, disconfirmation, and disagreement of any kind. Indeed, the whole postmodernist project now seems, in retrospect, like an unwitting attempt to have deconstructed the old metanarratives of Western thought—science and reason along with religion and capitalist economic systems—to make room for a wholly new religion, a postmodern faith based on a dead God, which sees mysterious worldly forces in systems of power and privilege and which sanctifies victimhood. This, increasingly, is the fundamentalist religion of the nominally secular left.

Pluckrose & Lindsay, Cynical Theories, Loc. 3504, Kindle edition

The standard of the social justice warriors is not God’s standard. God’s standard is the Ten Commandments. It is transcendent, objective, and applicable to everyone. Jesus summed it up with two simple commandments.

And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.

Matthew 22:37-40

Justice applied to this standard is the only “justice” that matters. On the last day God will judge everyone according to their deeds. These two commandments are the measuring line. Those that kept them will be rewarded. Those that ignored them will be judged. The deification of climate change and the pursuit of sexual liberty violate the standard to which everyone will give an accounting on the last Day. God’s standard is the only standard by which “justice” will ultimately be administered.

For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil…And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Then another book was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, according to what they had done. And the sea gave up the dead who were in it, Death and Hades gave up the dead who were in them, and they were judged, each one of them, according to what they had done.

2 Corinthians 5:10, Revelation 20:12-13

The Cross

The cross is the definitive display in time and space of God’s justice, and it condemns social justice. At the cross God gives his Son the punishment that we deserve for violating his standard. Jesus is a Substitute, taking the “justice” we deserve. The horrors of his suffering make plain the rigid, exacting nature of God’s justice. It is a picture of the Day of Final Justice telescoped back into human history. Fearing God is an intended fruit of watching his justice at work on the cross.

The cross is also a conclusive display of God’s grace and love. “God so loved the world that gave his only begotten Son…” God reveals his love through the justice visited upon his Son. Through that window we see the infinite beauty of God’s love which “surpasses knowledge” (Ephesians. 3:19).

So which will it be, social justice or God’s justice? Which standard will you adhere to? To whose moral standard will you subscribe, those of the social justice warriors, or those of Jesus Christ? Your eternal fate hangs in the balance.