Quotes about Justice

Contrary to nature's rule of "survival of the fittest," we humans measure civilization by how we respond to the most vulnerable and the suffering.

What would it look like if a Christian took literally Jesus' sweeping commands and acted on them. What would a Good Samaritan look like today, in urban America?

At last I understood: in the final analysis, forgiveness is an act of faith. By forgiving another, I am trusting that God is a better justice-maker than I am. By forgiving, I release my own right to get even and leave all issues of fairness for God to work out. I leave in God's hands the scales that must balance justice and mercy.

I leave in God's hands the scales that must balance justice and mercy.

Most importantly, he countered violence with nonviolence, and hatred with love. "Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred," he exhorted his followers. "We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.

Gary Haugen, founder of the International Justice Mission, say something similar: "God has a plan to fight injustice, and that plan is us — ?his people. There is no Plan B.

Grace is unfair, which is one of the hardest things about it.

Grace, however, is not about fairness.

Legalism lowers, rather than raises, God's standards. Loving your neighbor as yourself, caring for the poor, bringing about justice, forgiving enemies—none of these reduces to a set of rules. Indeed, any list of rules narrows the breadth of what God wants done in the world. It moves the emphasis away from dispensing God's grace to sinners toward a pointless competition with pseudo-saints. It makes faith petty and irrelevant, not something that urgently matters.

Forgiveness is not the same as pardon, he advises: you may forgive one who wronged you and still insist on a just punishment for that wrong.

Forgiveness has its own extraordinary power which reaches beyond law and beyond justice.

Justice has a good and righteous and rational kind of power. The power of grace is different: unworldly, transforming, supernatural.