[This is part 3 in a series on God and justice. See part one, two, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten]

Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris

The perversion of justice under political systems is both a sin, meaning a rebellion against God’s commands, and a judgment for that sin. When people trust in other men to rule over them rather than in God their King, they—unwittingly or not—give way to unjust and fraudulent legal systems that harass, assault, plunder, incarcerate, and even kill them. The law order around us becomes all-around corrupted, perverted, and backward when men abdicate responsibility as patriarchs of their families and ministers of their neighbor’s welfare over to human civil government to carry out the weightier matters of justice and law for them.

This injustice and legal corruption that stems from our rebellion against God should reveal something important: that God loves true justice. He allows the perversion of justice in human government as a sort of way of showing that He desires its opposite: for us to seek a truly just society. This divine justice of such evils as taxation and violence that come upon men who reject God as their King is meant as a wake-up call for people to seek true justice. 

Opposing the legal plunder of statism

Though it isn’t emphasized enough in a modern Christianity, which has spiritualized everything and removed the actual Kingdom-seeking we are to be doing from the Gospel message, anyone who has read their Bible can’t help but to see that the issue of justice and injustice is important to God and cannot be overlooked. Jesus himself listed justice as a “weightier matter” — as something, therefore, crucial for God’s people to uphold. If we hope to address the significant and inherent injustices of statism, we cannot neglect the pursuit of true justice, which is very bound up in protecting our brothers and neighbors from wrongdoing by others, such as the invasions of people and property that are carried out by the State under the name of “law.”

The injustices of man’s kingdom show us what we need to do away with in order to get on the right track again. To restore our social order and return to the Lord’s ways, we will have to abolish statism and the violent enforcement of its “laws” and instead embrace true justice, law, mercy, and faith. The so-called “laws” of human government often amount to great injustices against people who have never violated another person or their property. Such things as tax laws, licensing requirements, fines and fees, etc., are merely legalized means of extorting property from people by men who even have the audacity to call it “revenue,” as if such loot was gained through voluntary exchange as it is in the case of private businesses. This plunder which has been written into the human codes by the false gods that are human lawmakers are not “laws” at all, but merely the kings’ decrees, meant to rake in money for the extortionists who call themselves the “government.”

To do away with these injustices, we must move away from the legal plunder that is inherent to tax-funded “public justice” or “public safety,” where state agents extort “the people” they claim to protect and rob those traveling through their arbitrarily declared “jurisdictions” to buy new toys for their departments. We will have to fulfill our God-given responsibilities to protect our own families, neighbors, and communities and stop outsourcing these duties to tax-funded “public servants” who don’t even have a legal obligation to provide protection, and only use their control of “the law” as an instrument to rule over other people. 

God hates the unjust Egyptian plunder society we have established in rebellion to His law, which again has come as a punishment for turning away from the responsibilities He has called us to, such as looking after our people on our own. We are to correct the deviant system of justice and law that occurs under these statist law systems, which are all the evidence one needs that we have gone astray from His ways. Correcting the transgressions of God’s natural order, represented by the evils of these statist systems, requires that we abandon and abolish all such socialist forms “welfare,” “protection,” “law,” and “justice” that have naturally been perverted under human civil government.

God and justice 

If you didn’t actually know God, which is true even of many who profess His name, you might think that all He expects of us is simply some sort of “religious” rituals, like the things we may witness in the modern so-called churches of today — that God wants you to “go to church” and check off your Sunday attendance as your whole duty to the Lord. Yet God always mentions that establishing a just social order, unlike the sinful and backward one of man’s kingdoms, is an integral part of what He wants from us. 

“These are the things you must do: Speak truth to one another, render true and sound judgments in your gates, do not plot evil in your hearts against your neighbor, and do not love to swear falsely, for I hate all these things,’ declares the LORD” (Zechariah 8:16-17). 

The matter of justice cannot be neglected by those seeking to repair the breach in their society and restore things to the way God intended them to be. We see all throughout God’s word that He is deeply concerned with matters of justice, and deeply disturbed by the injustices we have brought upon ourselves through our own sinful quest for human rulers. Scripture frequently portrays God as interested in the justice (or lack thereof) in any given society, particularly as it pertains to protecting its lowest members, e.g., the poor who, under human government, are oppressed (Psa 82:3-4; Prov 31:8-9; Isa 1:3; Jer 22:3; Zech 7:9-10). The restoration of society is not just about getting men “going to church” again and singing songs in buildings with their distant neighbors, but about actually congregating with them as a “government” that provides for the welfare and social needs of their brothers. Justice, service, charity, and care for one’s fellow human beings are essential elements of God’s kingdom.

Voluntary services or idolatrous ones

Where men go wrong is that they hand the matters of justice over to the “Department of Justice,” the matters of defense over to a “Department of Defense,” or the education of their children over to a “Department of Education.” The reason we have all these departments of the State, which is an attempt to be a substitute god that provides all the things God says He will do for us, is precisely that men have abdicated their responsibilities to one another and, in their sloth and laziness, allowed human rulers to take on these things for them. The only reason private, godly forms of defense, justice, or education, etc., are not the predominant means of providing these things in society is not because they are not possible without a State, but only because men sinfully believe that they cannot have these things without one and cannot do them on their own. It is only their worldly thinking, which comes from neglecting the wisdom of God, that leads them into thinking that the provision of various social goods necessitates taxes and human rulers. 

It is true that all societies must address social issues like defense, poverty, and education. However, the methods men employ toward these ends are what matters, as they are the difference between actually achieving these things or corrupting them entirely, as anyone should be able to see in our statist society today. The means available to us are (1) either pure religion, where we serve our neighbors because we love them and Christ commands it; or (2) public religion, where we covet our neighbor’s property, and where men are bound in a system of tax-bondage by appointing human rulers to carry out their responsibilities for them. In short, there is either (1) voluntary charity of free men who serve their neighbors on their own, or (2) the legal charity of socialism where men abandon God and seek their welfare from the civil fathers of the world.

Those who decide to go the statist route of administering society through the violent political means are doing so contrary to God’s will. They are the people “who build Zion with bloodshed and Jerusalem with iniquity” (Micah 3:10) — who think that our people are to be fed and protected by having government agents do what we’re supposed to be doing for us.

These means, whether voluntary or involuntary, godly or ungodly, will produce different ends. When a people choose the latter model of tax-funded “public services,” which sells their brothers into slavery, they pervert the principles of justice, law, and welfare. These perversions of such goods and services under political control are no accident. Being that these goods now exist outside the nexus of voluntary exchange, and are controlled within the realm of socialist monopolization, there is no economic incentive for performance because there is no need to retain customers. The people who pay for these “services” are not customers at all, but men who fund such goods and services through compulsory taxation, whether they like it or not. Even as the quality of the goods deteriorates, and the performance of the monopolists declines, they still make their money regardless. Indeed, since the only apparent means of providing such goods and services to the statist is government monopolies, most often throwing more money at such failing agencies, under the assumption that lack of funds is the only explanation for these failures, is seen as the only “solution” to their problems.

What men often fail to see is that these problems are intrinsic to all political systems. When such things as protection and law are funded by stealing from the people (who are said to be protected by such agencies), naturally they are unable to produce genuine justice, and actually become the thieves themselves. The coercive nature of these government-provided services perverts their purpose and turns them into something different than what they appear to be. While the job of police plundering still bears the name of “law enforcement,” it becomes everything but upholding the divine law of not trespassing against other humans and their property. Indeed, the “law” itself becomes a legalization of all sorts of government trespasses. When justice and law is centralized into the hands of human government, it should be expected that the monopolists will use it to achieve their own self interests, such as transferring property to themselves and exempting themselves from being considered criminals under the law.

True progress toward justice can only be achieved by turning away from the law systems devised by man and returning to the ways and precepts of the Lord. To repair the breach in our society, where the expansion of state power has intruded upon our God-given inheritance, we must turn away from the injustices and lawlessness of so-called “law enforcement” and instead seek the Kingdom of God and the administration of genuine justice. The true justice God calls us to find can never be attained through political means, as such efforts inevitably devolve into a form of coercive extortion.

God’s love of justice

Though many Christians today are often more focused on matters of personal salvation, getting to heaven, or petty theological debates that divide them, those who take their Bibles a little bit more seriously as instruction manuals for righting the wrongs in society will see that God is deeply concerned with justice. The Bible condemns the oppressive political systems of the world and calls believers to work towards freeing the slaves and establishing God’s just kingdom.

“This is what the LORD of Hosts says: ‘Administer true justice. Show loving devotion and compassion to one another. Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the foreigner or the poor. And do not plot evil in your hearts against one another'” (Zechariah 7:9-10)

If we believe that God’s sole purpose is ensuring people get to heaven when they die and that it is futile to agitate the culture around us and work to liberate our brothers from the dominion of human government that we have found ourselves captives to, then we’re highly likely to diminish the importance we place on pursuing justice. Even worse, we are likely to think that such matters of justice and law are rightly relegated to the domain of secular governments, rather than recognizing it as a duty for Christians to uphold themselves.

The notion that we can simply hand over justice to a State to carry it out for us is a dangerous fallacy. True justice can never be restored through the violent, political administration of such matters. Rather, the restoration of a Godly society must include the restoration of justice and the recovering of these things as our responsibility and duties to God and neighbor. Again, the problems that we experience today—the grave injustices of statism—are due to the fact that we lazily outsourced these responsibilities to corrupt, thieving “governments” that inevitably distorted and undermined any principle of justice for their own personal gain and power. Just as we are commanded to care for our neighbors and assure they are fed and clothed and housed, we must take ownership of upholding justice ourselves, rather than abdicating this duty to the political institutions of the world. As the abolitionist Christian, Michael Plaisted, writes, 

“A better notion in performing the weightier matters of God’s Law, one that will establish justice and not pervert it, is to take personal responsibility for your neighbor’s righteousness and security from harm. In order for a free society to dispense justice under God, each man would have to be personally responsible for that endeavor.”

A restoration of justice, away from its political perversion, must be in order for those who are seeking the Kingdom of God, which requires us to walk away from the political injustice systems that prevail at this time. The perversion of justice we live under is a result of abandoning the righteousness of God for the unrighteous ways of man’s kingdoms.

In seeking God’s kingdom, as so few men have ever sought to do, we can turn back the curse of statism that had plagued humanity forever. We could make it to where God would no longer have to weep when looking down on our societies today, seeing that “the land is full of crimes of bloodshed, and the city is full of violence” (Ezekiel 7:23). Without the injustices of statism, we could make it to where God wouldn’t have to lament that “violence and destruction resound in her” (Jeremiah 6:7).

Just as God hates injustice and loves true justice, so should we. God’s children should hate the injustices of statism that they see around them, which has their brothers living in captivity to men. We should be railing against what we see just as much as the prophets were in their times, seeing as so many have turned away from God’s ways. 

“For whenever I speak, I cry out; I proclaim violence and destruction. For the word of the LORD has become to me a reproach and derision all day long” (Jeremiah 20:8).