God Loves Justice

God Loves Justice

I would like to talk to you a bit about the Bible. Not about a specific passage right this minute, but about the Bible in general.

The Bible is broken into several sections or categories.

Probably most of you know the biggest of the divisions, the OT and the NT.

The OT concerns God’s relationship with the people of Israel and (from a Christian perspective) prophesies and prepares the way for Jesus, whom we meet in the NT.

The Old Testament is broken into a couple of main sections, too.

The first five books are called The Pentateuch, or by Jewish readers, “The Law.”

There are a lot of well-known Characters in there: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses to name a few.

There are a number of books of history, there’s several books of poetry, like Psalms and Proverbs and a few others.

Then there’s the Prophets – the ones with the long books are called Major prophets and the ones with the short books are called Minor prophets.

Out of those 4 categories: Law, History, Poetry and Prophets, I feel very confident that I know which one you almost never read (except for a couple of favorite verses)

The Prophets

The Prophets are hard for most of us to read for a few reasons:

The first is because they assume you know a TON about all the other parts of the OT, especially the history – and most of us know very little about it.

The other reason is that these books can be, quite frankly, really depressing!

That’s because the Prophets were usually trying to get the people of Israel to turn away from their sinful ways and turn back to God.

So there are a LOT of pages with long lists of things they’ve done, with lots of references to all the history that we don’t know, and lots of threats about how God will judge (or has judged) them.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there’s also many passages of hope and many promises of God’s faithfulness in spite of how UNFAITHFUL His people have been.

There is ALWAYS hope for a better day.

But you have to read through a lot of tough stuff to get there.

You have to read through a lot of convicting stuff to get there, too – and hardly anybody enjoys that.

For the same reasons they’re hard to read, they’re also hard to preach.

It’s understandable that in private reading as well as public teaching, we shy away from the prophets.

But here’s the problem.

Here’s one of my Bibles:

I’ve clipped where all the notes are in the back and front and these pages are all the text of the Bible. (Showing number of pages in each section)

Here’s the OT, Here’s the NT

Obviously, there’s a lot more of the OT than the NT – about twice as much.

These pages are the Books of the Prophets.

There are a lot of pages there!

NT = 387 pages; Prophets = 310 pages

If you like numbers, that means JUST the books of the Prophets are 80% the size of the NT

I looked through my records and I’ve probably preached from the prophets less than 20 times over the last 20 years of pastoral ministry – so, less than once a year.

And quite a few of those times were based on some of the “favorite” passages, especially Christmas passages.

That means, I have to confess, that I have mostly ignored a pretty big chunk of God’s Word.

Imagine if, in 20 years, I had only preached the New Testament once a year!

I don’t think I would’ve been a preacher for 20 years!!

The books of the prophets give us some different perspectives about what it means to be God’s people, and I think our skimpy knowledge of this section of the Scriptures (mine included), has been detrimental to the church and to the world.

By avoiding the prophets, we are minimizing or avoiding altogether some things that are really important to God.

I’m not saying we should decide how important a section of the Bible is based solely on the page count!

But I do believe that the American church has developed some holes in our faith in places that might be greatly improved by paying more attention to the prophets.

One of the issues that is frequently addressed in the Prophets is the practice of JUSTICE.

I searched for the word “Justice” in my Bible software program and came up with 139 references.

Even after reading through each one and taking out verses that seemed less relevant for this message, I had 8 full pages of Bible verses, most of them in the Prophets.

They command justice; they proclaim God is just.