Dieu — est’il juste?
This morning I awoke to the sound of voices on my radio alarm, but voices speaking words I did not quite understand. And then it came to me that I had tuned in to station CHFA (say ahsh eff ah) and that these young people were speaking French. It was modern non-stop talking and laughing much too rapid for me to hear or get the words. And that in turn reminded me of being in Haiti over 30 years ago.We were there helping some missionary friends with maintenance and joining with them in their mingling with the local Haitian people whose official language was French but all of whom spoke Creole which is a mixture of mostly French with some English and Spanish words but using African grammar. The time was when the Dictator Baby Doc was still in power and the local people would not even speak his name out loud because they feared for their lives. None of our people wanted to get involved politically so we never spoke of it either, in Creole. However there was an underground resistance led by a young priest named Jean-Bertrand Aristide who had been inspired by socialists to spread the idea they called Liberation Theology.
It was called Liberation Theology because Haiti was nominally a Roman Catholic country and everybody knew that the word theology was a church word so they accepted it without question. Today we would call it social justice, that is whatever our society thinks is right, not God’s justice, for it seems that nobody here cares what God thinks about justice. The idea of liberation from the corrupt and domineering dictatorship also appealed to the masses, so the idea soon started to move more and more people until they began to be heard like a distant avalanche. That is when it gained the Creole name Lavalas from the French L’avalanche.
However not everyone in the priesthood was taken with Liberation Theology knowing that the idea had come from communist Cuba, where that system ridiculed the God and tried to obliterate Him from the minds and memories of all Cuban people. We were confronted with this difference of opinion one day when we bought a copy of a local Port au Prince weekly tabloid paper. Of course the publishers were not really on the best of terms with the pagan Voodooist Dictator, but neither were they taken in by the Liberation Theology philosophy so they were getting their ideas out to everyone who the could sell the paper to. And the paper was only a dollar a copy.
In that paper one article had the headline, Is God Just? — in French of course as Dieu – est’il juste? The author of the article was a priest I had never heard of, but the title sounded interesting. And I was curious to see how he would answer this question , the accusation against God that Liberation Theology was shouting out? I wondered, so I began to read. Only now do I realize that he wanted to warn people away from the dangers of Liberation justice without endangering his life from either the Lavalas thugs or the Tonton macouts, as the Dictator’s enforcers were called. So he kept very close to the subject and wrote only of God’s justice.
Instead of a detailed description of social justice or even of the word justice he began with an illustration, a what if illustration. Suppose someone, he said, it really does not matter whether he is a leader wanting to do something good for those he considers in need by giving them something that would eventually do them more harm than good, like making them lazy or less lawful, or someone who was selfish and wanted to benefit only himself through robbery or other injustice to his fellow, or someone who just wanted to be left alone to keep on making the same mistakes that he had been in the habit of making, that this one would be directly reproved by God telling him out loud that He would not let him do it. Of course the person would be upset with this, to think that anybody, even God, could tell him that he could not do what he knew was best and what he really wanted to do,
His reply might well be “God, you made me a free moral agent with a will of my own. You said I am made in your image, free to make my own choices. How dare you tell me now that I can’t? That is not fair, and you are not fair!” Then what would God say?
His reply would have to be, “You are right, that would not be fair, it would not be fair or just for Me to deny you the right to choose. Indeed you are right, I did make you so you could choose to do either fair or unjust things to others exactly as you choose, however I am just and I will never act unjustly. You may go ahead, but there will be consequences. Others will be hurt.”
The real point is that God is fair and just in everything He does. Never in this life or the after life will anyone be able to accuse God that He would not let him make his own choices. No, not even one hint of it. So, is God just in allowing injustice? Injustice that does not come from Him but is a result of bad or immoral choices? Maybe not your own choices or choices by the downtrodden, but choices by someone who did exercise his own will and brought the result on them? Not God’s will, certainly, nor His injustice, but choices by people who will never ever to the end of eternity have any grounds at all for saying that God is unjust. No more can we blame God for being unjust. He always has been fair and just and He always will be.
That does not mean that God is not saddened or feels cheated when we are not fair or when we are unjust. It saddens Him that people whom He did make in His own image do bad things. So much so that He Himself paid the ultimate price of redemption for us. The good news is that Christ died for us as the Scriptures have said, and that he was buried and after three days He rose again for our justification. Believing that bromgs the new birth and it is the only way we can become just, to be justified from all our sins.
Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved.