Take Up Your Cross: Why Christians Must Care About Justice
by Joel Miles
Incited by injustice, protests have broken out all over the country. And they have only grown in number. Media outlets, once flooded with news of the pandemic, are now consumed with stories about the response to our country's long-standing issues of racism, police brutality, and systemic injustice. How should Christians respond to these issues?
Most of us assume we should care that streets are safe for all people and that our local officials act justly. But, do we care because we inhabit the same streets and want to be good moral people, or is there a theological connection between following Jesus and the pursuit of justice? Is justice on a societal level something that we are called to care for as part of what it means to follow Jesus? Or is the church to be concerned primarily, or even exclusively, with evangelism and “spiritual” things?
I have heard many Christians ask these questions, and I understand why. It is not immediately clear when you read the New Testament that social problems are to concern the church. And because we get confused about this, we have a hard time even engaging the topic of racism and injustice in the church, because we are not sure if that’s where that discussion should take place. The tradition in which I grew up did not call Christians to engage in social issues because of Christ. Though no one spoke against these things, the subtext was that God primarily cared about spiritual issues. Teaching on morality was exclusively focused on personal, not systemic, societal problems. Any physical healing Jesus performed was explained as being for the ultimate purpose of spiritually healing. And the purpose of our lives was to personally commit to having a relationship with Jesus so that we could be saved to go to a spiritual heaven when we die.
As I have grown older, I have come to see that this view of Jesus and the gospel is far too narrow, and actually detaches Jesus from the full story given to us in all of Scripture. The Bible is the authoritative telling of the true story of the world. Like all stories, understanding the whole plot is necessary for grasping the significance of the climax and resolution. We must understand the setting, the crisis and the rising action in the Old Testament to understand the climax of history in the New. When we see that, justice is clearly a concern of the church.
The Setting, The Crisis and The Coming Hope
In Genesis 1–2 God creates the world. But far more than just creating, He organizes it. He structures everything intentionally, assigns tasks, and delegates responsibility. And when He is done, He evaluates all of his work as “very good.” In the midst of this, He creates humans in His image and gives us a specific task—to be fruitful, to multiply and fill the earth, to have dominion over the earth, and to subdue it (Gen. 1:26–28). This means that humans are created for the purpose of ruling over the world in a way that imitates our God.
Consider the implications of this. Our purpose was to be like God. Before sin ever entered into the world, we were made to work and shape the world. This implies a forward trajectory for creation that God commissioned us to fulfill. Jeremy Treat explains:
The logical implication, if one combines the general commission to “fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen 1:28) with the more specific task of “serving and guarding” Eden (Gen 2:15), is that humanity was to Edenize the entire creation, expanding God’s royal presence from the garden to the ends of the earth…God’s reign through humanity over all the earth is the telos of Genesis 1–2, not the reality. In other words, before the fall and redemption ever entered the picture, there was a creation-consummation story line aimed at God’s glorious reign over all the earth through his servant-kings [ie. humans].*
Our task—our purpose—as humans was the right ordering and development of God’s world. We were made, in part, to carry out God’s justice in the world.
Sin is our failure to fulfill this task. We rebelled against God’s ways and chose to go the way that looked “good” to us, as opposed to what God had said. The Genesis 3 narrative pictures humanity submitting to a creature over whom God had commissioned us to rule. Adam and Eve should have exercised judgment on the serpent. He was defying God, and it was their responsibility to enact justice. Instead, they submitted to his words and their own desires and, in so doing, unleashed God’s curse on the world. However, it is important to note that the curse does not remove our commission to image God in the world. But it does make it a lot harder, more painful, and seemingly pointless since we will all die.
This is the state into which sin has plunged our world. We are still to image God and pursue justice, but instead, we produce sin. This is why the true end of the fall narrative is not the curse of God in Genesis 3, but the curse of Cain for the unjust murder of his brother Abel. Humans have turned from those who are called to image their creator and good God, to those who destroy God’s creation. This is the unjust reality we still feel. But there is hope.
In Genesis 3:15—the beginning of God’s curse—God says to the serpent, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” This verse is known as the protoevangelium, or the “first gospel announcement.” This is because, in these verses, we get the first glimpse of God’s promise to overthrow the work of the serpent. God is promising that one day the serpent will be defeated through the painful work of the seed of the woman. It is a foretelling of the victory of the cross. But again, we must think of the implications of this understanding of the gospel. What would it truly mean to overthrow the work of Satan according to the narrative in Genesis 1–4? It would certainly not mean a kind of “spiritual” salvation in which humans are rescued out of the world. That kind of salvation would essentially mean that the serpent won, and God had to come up with a different plan for humanity and His creation. Salvation, in the way that the Bible introduces it, must mean a restoration of God’s original intention for humans and all creation.
This makes a lot more sense of the other narrative aspects of the Bible. If God were merely interested in the “spiritual,” why the flood? Why Israel? The flood is clearly a recreation story. God judges the world because of sin, recovers it with water (see Genesis 1:2), and then recommissions Noah and his family in much the same ways as Adam and Eve (see Gen. 1:26–28 and 8:20–9:17). It is a story of salvation, not through spiritual escape, but through a new creation and humanity’s recommissioning to rule justly over this world.
Israel is similar in that they are set aside to be God’s people for the sake of the world (see Gen. 12:1–3). God does this by saving them out of unjust slavery, giving them His law so that they might be a just and holy people, and commissioning them to be a Kingdom of Priests and a Holy Nation to mediate God’s presence to the world. They are elected and saved to be a picture of a new creation on earth and fulfill what it means to be human in the world. Israel was to display to the world what it means to live for God, and so draw others to themselves. This was clearly not about making a “spiritual escape,” but rather about being a just society. God gave Israel a civil order with laws, judges, and kings that were meant to be just and a prophetic voice to call out other nations for being unjust.
The Climax of the Story
Now, of course, Israel fails. But this narrative alone should make us reconsider the way we view the salvation God gives us through Jesus. If our salvation is at all related to the beginning of the story, then the idea that its primary function is “spiritual” is confusing at best and wrong at worst. The sins for which Israel is most often judged are idolatry and injustice. They worship the wrong God, and they oppress their people. Their sins—our sins—were a failure to “love the Lord your God, and to love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus came to forgive us of these failures, but also to call us to repent. He came to usher in the Kingdom of God, not to help us escape from the world. This is why our prayer is not: “Let us go to your Kingdom in Heaven,” but rather “Your Kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Jesus came to restore us to what we were meant to be, by crushing the head of the serpent through the pain of the cross. Forgiveness is not a ticket to heaven, but a call to action. It is a call to deny ourselves and take up our cross in fighting to see people and the systems of our world to reflect Christ’s coming Kingdom.
Like many, I have been influenced by our individualistic culture and tend to interpret bearing my cross as primarily related to my personal holiness. But this interpretation is not big enough. We are certainly called to individual holiness, but the cross was not just a personal sacrifice for Jesus’ own spiritual growth or gain. The cross of Christ was the weight of everything wrong in our world placed on His back. The cross was the result of Jesus’ life of love, justice, and mercy. Jesus denied himself and bore in His body the crushing impact of sin, pain, and the injustice of our world. Through that act, we are both forgiven of our sins and promised that His just and righteous Kingdom will come. But as we await that day, we are sent into the world as He was sent (John 20:19–21). We too are called to take up our crosses, bearing the weight of the world’s problems, and follow him.
This in no way excludes evangelism! The Great Commission is still given to us. But it should expand our grasp of things like the Great Commission to see that when Jesus says, “Go and make disciples of all nations baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you,” (Matt. 28:18–20) that he actually expects us to disciple converts to be people who do what he says. Jesus is calling us to be people and to make disciples who take up their cross (Matt. 16). He is calling us to be people and make disciples who feed the hungry (Matt. 25). He is longing for a people who “thirst for righteousness and justice” (Matt. 5:6), and are willing to be persecuted in that pursuit (Matt. 5:10). He wants a people that, like him, call out the powers for exploiting the poor (Matt. 23), and endure the cost. He is recommissioning us to be God’s image bearers in this world, seeking to make everything, from our co-workers to our civic systems, reflect and follow our good, merciful, loving, and just King.
So, should we pursue justice because we are Christians? Yes. As the church, we must proclaim the lordship of Christ and the salvation found in Him to every person! But as we make these proclamations, we are also to put on display and work for that reality to be seen and felt in our world today, as we await its full realization when Christ returns. We must pursue justice even at our own cost, because we have been so fully saved by Jesus Christ, that we have been restored to our original calling. We are the image bearers of God who are called to follow Jesus on the path of the cross, proclaiming His salvation and fighting injustice until He returns.
*Treat, Jeremy R.. The Crucified King (pp. 55-56). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.
Joel Miles is an Associate Pastor of Holy Trinity Church, where he has served for 6 years. He lives on the West Side of Chicago with his wife, Anna, and four children.