Evaluation – What if Jesus was Serious About Justice?

The format of this book is the same as the others in the series. Each chapter has a picture that describes the concept in visual terms. The chapters are only 2-3 pages long. Each concept is explained in simple terms that are easy to understand. The concepts themselves are profound and challenging. Concise and profound is a rare combination.

Skye Jethani is able to boil down complex concepts to the essential truths and communicate them for a broader audience. This would be a great tool to use for family devotional times.

Book Summary – What If Jesus Was Serious About Justice?

For nearly two thousand years, Christianity had united loving God and loving neighbors. The church’s mission was both inviting sinners to repent by giving their allegiance to Christ and influencing corrupt societies to reflect the values of God’s kingdom more closely. But what God had joined together the modern American church put asunder.

What If Jesus Was Serious About Heaven? Introduction

Part 1 – Order and Chaos

Part 1 begins by describing the concept of justice as seen in the Old Testament. The words for justice in Hebrew have a relational aspect. Justice is living in harmony with others. It is when things are just as they should be.

Creation began unordered. God brought order, but the order became disordered when humans rebelled against God. The story of Jesus is one of redemption and bringing order back, i.e. justice.

God cares more about justice than identity. God rescued the Israelites from Egypt through the Exodus because they were oppressed, not because they were Israelites. When the Israelites later became unjust like the Egyptians were, God demonstrated justice by sending them into exile.

Justice requires a proactive and gentle noncooperation with evil. When we experience injustice, it should make us more just towards others, not less just.

Part 2 – Horizontal and Vertical

Our relationship with God is impacted by our relationship with others. We cannot ignore those around us who are oppressed and be in a right relationship with God. When Jesus was asked about the greatest commandment, he answered with both love God and love others. They cannot be separated.

True worship involves both justice and mercy. Worship should inspire compassion, not just emotions.

Part 3 – Judgement and Mercy

God is both angry and merciful. He demonstrates love and wrath, but we are only called to emulate his mercy, not his anger and wrath. When God talks about both his judgement and mercy, it is noteworthy that his judgement goes to the 3rd and 4th generation while his love goes to a thousand generations. His love is greater than his anger.

Those who try to minimize God’s wrath are usually coming from a place of comfort and power. Those who have experienced the worst of humanity are comforted by the promise of God’s justice.

God’s wrath is usually passive, not active. Passive wrath is when God steps back and lets the natural consequences of sin take over. It is rare when God demonstrates active wrath. God’s justice is restorative before it is punitive.

Part 4 – Victory and Defeat

There is cosmic significance to Jesus dying on the cross. Jesus died to restore all creation, not just individuals. This creates social implications for how we view God’s victory of sin and death. The cross brings both forgiveness and justice. Forgiveness without justice is cheap.

Part 5 – Reward and Punishment

The fifth part focuses on hell. This is probably the most controversial part of the book for most Christians. Skye Jethani makes many of the same points we made in our article Hell: The Surprising Truth About What the Bible Really Says.

Jethani distinguishes between God’s judgement and Hell. He points out how Hell isn’t mentioned in the book of Acts as the apostles share the gospel of Jesus in the early church. He proposes terminal punishment as an alternative to both eternal conscious torment and universalism.

Evangelism based on the fear of Hell isn’t as effective as evangelism based on a compelling vision of justice and joy that comes with God’s Kingdom.

Both And Instead of Either Or

My top takeaway is the effectiveness of the both and approach to understanding many of the debates in the church. It is easy to pick a side and argue for a winner. It takes nuance and careful thought to see where the underlying biblical truth combines many aspects into a coherent whole, but it is worth the effort.

I see this tension between the evangelicalism that focuses on personal salvation but often ignores social justice and the mainstream Protestantism that focuses only on social justice while throwing out the divinity and resurrection of Jesus. It seems clear to me that the most orthodox and biblical view is take both personal salvation and social justice seriously as a single gospel. We don’t have to pick just one!

The Cross is Bad News Before it is Good News

I typically view the cross as just good news. It is where Jesus defeats death, and my sins are forgiven. I often neglect to reflect on the fact that the cross first defeats me as an agent of evil in the world before it saves me. Evil is defeated on the cross, but it isn’t just an abstract evil out in the world or in other people. The cross of Jesus also defeated the evil inside of me.

My Critique – What If Jesus Was Serious About Justice?

Penal Substitution

Penal substitution is the concept that Jesus paid the penalty for the world’s sin through his death on the cross. He was the substitute that took our place and took the punishment that we deserved. Skye Jethani describes the problems that arise from the extreme of viewing the cross as “divine child abuse”. He finds arguments for and against the concept of penal substitution “misguided” and “flawed”. While it is clear what he has against the extreme side for penal substitution, it isn’t clear what is wrong with the arguments against penal substitution. I would have liked to hear more about this debate from his perspective and also what a better alternative would be.