The book has resonated with many, especially younger, evangelicals who have sensed but have been unable to adequately express what they feel has been conspicuously missing from the mission and vision statements of evangelical churches around the world. What has been embarrassingly absent is the teaching about and practice of biblical justice.

Having grown up within the evangelical church, I recall only occasionally hearing about the issue of justice. And, almost always, any discussion on the topic was related to God’s wrath and judgment upon sin. So, in other words, I was basically familiar with the idea of justice as far as punishment is concerned but had no idea that justice is also about mercy.

Mercy, of course, is about the withholding of punishment, something that I had always understood, but real mercy is also about the providing of restoration. In other words, mercy is about more than just not giving wicked people what they deserve. It is also about giving hope and healing to those who suffer innocently.

This conception of justice as mercy was something completely new to me, and it literally shook me to the core when I realized that I had been missing it for most of my life. My reaction to this revelation was a mixture of sadness, anger and regret not only over the time that was lost in my life but over the opportunities that have been missed by the church.

Over the last few years I have sorted through the range of emotions, and I have also untangled myself from the mistaken views regarding biblical justice that I had inherited by default. One of those assumptions that I unfortunately held to was the misunderstanding of what social justice really is.

For most of my life I had accepted the idea that there were two kinds of gospel: social and biblical. The so-called “social gospel” was considered the unbiblical kind because it emphasized social action over spiritual salvation. And, to be fair, a gospel only related to social action is an indeed an incomplete gospel.

However, the same is also true of the so-called “biblical gospel”. A gospel that is only related to spiritual salvation is equally incomplete. After all, any gospel that ignores either the physical or the spiritual suffering of people is really an incomplete gospel.

The truth is that there is no such thing as a “social” or a “biblical” gospel. There is only “the gospel”. And, the gospel of Jesus Christ has both spiritual and social implications for the world. To ignore one or the other is to preach and to practice a partial gospel.

If one were to do a cursory study on the subject of justice, he or she would find that justice actually comes in three forms: retributive justice, distributive justice and restorative justice. The retributive kind is the one we are most familiar with in evangelical churches because it is about wrath and punishment for evil.

In pulpits around America, though, there has been a dearth of teaching on the other two kinds of justice, at least until recently. The distributive form of justice is about providing freedoms and rights to all people fairly. And, the restorative kind is about helping people to heal and recover from victimization.

Distributive justice refers to the allocation of provisions and protections to people regardless of their social status, and it guarantees a certain level of respect and appreciation for all human beings. This stream of justice is pervasive not only throughout the Bible but also throughout the foundational documents of our country.

Restorative justice refers to the remediation of offenders and their victims, and it works to foster peace and healing for the abused and violated in our culture. This vein of justice is especially directed toward the health and wholeness of the oppressed and marginalized in society, and it is expressly evident throughout Scripture.

Because justice comes in three forms, we would be remiss not to familiarize ourselves with and contend for all three, especially when Scripture clearly calls us to do so. It should not escape us that after the issue of idolatry, God actually confronts His people throughout the Bible the most for the sin of injustice.

God roundly denounces injustice among his people both in the Old Testament and in the New, and his divine derision is directed toward all three kinds of injustice. In other words, God calls us into account for ignoring or tolerating any kind of injustice in our midst.

And, I am quite sure that He is just as concerned about injustice in our world today as He was then. For that reason, far be it for us to turn a blind eye to the various injustices around us now especially when God has clearly called for us to intercede in them.

Now, injustice takes many forms in our world, and it isn’t always easy to define it. But, we could probably get our minds around the idea that injustice is any form of oppression or abuse that violates the inherent worth and value of human beings who universally bear the image of God.

If we live by the motto that all human beings have dignity because of the Imago Dei, then we can more easily see for ourselves the abuses and injustices all around us. The most obvious offenses against humanity are murderous acts such as abortion, genocide, and euthanasia and abusive acts such as slavery, human trafficking, and exploitation.

When we observe heinous offenses against human beings, we not only should be disturbed by them but also stirred to do something about them. To care is only part of the witness that we have in the world; the other part of our witness is to actually do something.

The gospel that Jesus came into the world preaching was a whole gospel, one that ministered healing not just to the souls of people but also to their bodies. In fact, if we look at Jesus’ public ministry, He usually ministered to the physical needs of people before He ministered to their spiritual needs.

The gospel that Jesus preached and practiced on earth was good news for the lost, but it was also good news for the broken. In other words, Jesus came to bring not only redemption for those who were lost in spirit but restoration for those who were broken in body.

Don’t get me wrong. Jesus absolutely preached, but He also healed, fed, and cared for the people around him, and He often did so prior to calling them to repentance. The reason why should be obvious to us. After all, how could people be ready to receive the message of forgiveness if they are understandably preoccupied with their immediate hunger, blindness or pain?

Jesus, in his wisdom, recognized the physical obstacles to faith and removed them before attending to the spiritual ones. By filling the stomach of a hungry child, by healing the bleeding of an ailing woman, and by restoring the sight of a blind man, He earned not only their respect but also their ear.

We can learn much from the wisdom of Christ in this regard. We too must realize that we often should minister to the physical suffering of people before we minister to their spiritual suffering. In fact, in most cases, I think we must.

The reason why is because evangelism depends on it. We live in a culture that doesn’t listen much to the Christian witness anymore. They have been largely inoculated to the spiritual aspects of the gospel because of our neglect of the physical aspects.

In many ways we have lost our voice in the culture because we haven’t earned the credibility to speak. Credibility is earned, and our credibility in this world is earned through action. Is it any wonder that people don’t want to hear what we have to say about Jesus until we actually act like Jesus?

As Friedrich Nietzsche once told a group of Christians, “If you want me to believe in your Redeemer, then you are going to have to look a lot more redeemed.” This Nietzschean philosophy is ubiquitous in our postmodern culture, and it is a legitimate indictment of our presently hollow gospel.

The truth is that if we want to be effective evangelists with the gospel in our society, then we first need to be effective practitioners of the gospel. This means that we must both teach the whole gospel in our churches and also practice the whole gospel in our communities.

I knew I was living in a different world when I met her. She was a young woman in her late 20s who seemed to be anything but unusual. She walked into the church reception area seeking some spiritual guidance, and the next thing I knew we were sharing a conversation in my office. Early on I asked her if she was a Christian, and she enthusiastically replied, “Yes!” There was a slight pause, and she added, “And I’m also a Buddhist.”

I panicked for a moment as I searched my mind for the right response, but it wasn’t coming to me. I froze because I didn’t know what to say next. I mean, I had a lot of things to say to a Christian who was sliding back in their faith, and I had a lot of things to say to a Buddhist who was reaching out for spiritual answers, but I didn’t know what to say to a “Buddhist Christian.”

Since that conversation, I’ve had many more of the same. What I encountered that day and many times since is a rudimentary blending of different religious faiths, and that blending is becoming more common today in a world that lampoons the notion of absolute truth and champions the humanist ideal that you can believe whatever you want as long as you’re not hurting anyone else.

When people really do begin to adopt the popular idea that all roads lead to God, then they begin to pave their own spiritual path with whatever seems to be expedient for them. The end result is a world in which religious faith is personalized like a workout routine or a personal diet program. What’s most intriguing is that it doesn’t seem to matter to the person if the traditions they draw from contradict or even deny each other as long as their personal faith suits their own tastes, styles, and preferences.

Ready or not, this is the world we find ourselves living in today. Currently, we are seeing a fundamental shift in how people view the world—a shift away from objective understanding toward subjective experience—and this fundamental shift is forcing us to rethink how we communicate to and share the gospel with people in this new world.

In this new world we live in, spiritual interest is up, but church attendance is down. In light of this trend, we’re going to have to find a way to communicate the gospel in a meaningful way to the emerging generations of people in our culture or else we face the dire risk of becoming marginalized or even obsolete in a progressively humanistic culture—as is already the case in much of Europe today.

If we’re going to survive in and reach out to a relativistic world, then we’re going to have to make a fundamental change in how we present to gospel. Namely, we’re going to have to present the old truth about Jesus in a new way. For the last few hundred years in the modern world, we have emphasized the supernatural power and position of Jesus as Lord in our presentation of the gospel, and in the past those impassioned presentations have persuaded many people to believe, but today people are less impressed by power and position than they are by character and compassion.

We live in a culture that in general distrusts those who are in positions of power and authority, and their distrust has been fueled with all of the recent displays of scandal and corruption in the marketplace and in the church. So, if we’re going to communicate the truth about Jesus in a world that is suspicious of authority and resistant to objective truth, then we aren’t going to effectively win them over with impressive homilies and seasoned apologetics but rather with genuine explanations and demonstrations of Jesus’ character. In other words, in today’s world we need to emphasize and imitate the person of Jesus even more than His position. That doesn’t imply by any means that we don’t passionately communicate the truth about His divinity; it simply means that we must emphasize His humanity.

Interestingly, in today’s world people seem to be drawn more to the character of Jesus than to His power. In my own experience as a pastor in postmodern America, I have found that the more I have tried to convince people with declarations of truth about the power of Jesus, the less responsive they have been. At the same time, the more have I tried to explain and show people the character of Jesus, the more responsive they became. In fact, I used to think that the most convincing proof of the living Christ was in the presentation of the empty tomb, yet I’ve come to believe that the most convincing proof is actually in the personal testimonies of real people. Nothing moves the hearts of people today like a personal story of real life change.

The reason, I believe, that people respond so positively to the person of Jesus is that His character strikes a chord deep inside. Facts about Jesus touch their minds, but His displays of compassion and grace touch their hearts. Today, I have found that people are more impressed by how Jesus fed the 5000, healed the bleeding woman and forgave his killers than they are by how He walked on the water or calmed the storm on Galilee.

Once people are drawn to the character of Jesus, then they begin to investigate His supernatural power. It used to be the other way around. One interesting insight about many people today is that they don’t necessarily need to understand something to believe it. There was a time when people needed to see the logical, argumentative proof for faith to believe, but now people, especially younger people, are able to live with the tension of mystery. In fact, it’s the mystery of the Christian faith that tends to draw people to it. People are not so much looking for an explanation of the trinity or the hypostatic union in order to believe. They are looking for the movement of God in real people’s lives.

Furthermore, if we’re going to present the person of Jesus in a new way, then we are also going to need to present His message in a new way. In the past we have presented Jesus as the Savior who has come to save lost people from their sins. Throughout the last several decades, that message rang true for those who had an understanding of sin and a sense of their own rebellion against God. There was a general ethical code that seemed to govern society, and people knew when they were in violation of it. Today, however, there is little awareness of or even concern about personal sin. People need to feel lost in order to want a savior, and people today do not feel lost.

J.R.R. Tolkien penned the popular phrase: “Not all who wander are lost,” and this phrase has been used to describe a generation of people today who are wandering but don’t feel lost. How can we expect people to want a savior if they don’t realize they are drowning? Gone are the days when we could expect people to turn to Jesus out of personal guilt because guilt has virtually evaporated in our contemporary world. Instead, we need to capitalize on the message of reconciliation in order to reach people today.

In 2 Corinthians 5:18-19 Paul writes: “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And He has committed to us the message of reconciliation.” This is the message we need to spread today about Jesus. As Paul said, we have a message of reconciliation to bring to the world, and this message is meaningful to a world of people who above all else cherish healthy relationships. People today are relationally focused, and they understand clearly what it means to seek reconciliation in a fractured relationship. To present the gospel as the opportunity to restore a broken relationship with the living God through a relationship with Jesus is the message we want to communicate.

Going back to the beginning and explaining how that fracture occurred and then fast-forwarding to our present condition is an effective way to present the gospel. Tell people that Jesus came to the earth to mend a fractured relationship between us and God by dying on the cross and that He proved He was qualified to do that by rising from the dead. People are genuinely interested in hearing that they can live life today in relationship with a holy God because of Jesus’ death and resurrection.

People want to know that Jesus came to make life different for them today, and they need to know that their eternal life in Jesus does not begin after they die. Jesus came to bring His kingdom to this earth, and that means that we can experience aspects of that kingdom even now. This all means that Jesus came not just to save us from death but to save us for life! The truth is that the opportunity to experience the supernatural wonders of the kingdom here on earth is simply too appealing for today’s generation to resist.