Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript: Justice and Sexual Holiness

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. I think we get this verse wrong an awful lot of the time. And this is talked about the positional righteousness usually, hungering and thirsting for right relationship with God. And while that’s a proper application of it, I don’t think that’s really the major sense of what this is all about. I think this is about what this series on doing justice is about.

That is a hungering and thirsting for righteousness, which is a synonym for justice in the scriptures—for a world in which it is acting in relationship to God, his character as reflected in his law in right ways. And we see a termination, a dwindling away of injustice and the expansion of justice. Don’t you hunger and thirst for justice? I know I do. And in a world that is increasingly moving away from Jesus, it increasingly moves away from justice. And Christian, you know, if we’re not those who hunger and thirst for justice, then we don’t really find ourselves in these beatitudes.

What I want to do today is talk about another aspect of our lives in relationship to justice. Just before this beatitude was the beatitude blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the world. Meek—the meek ones. What is meek? It’s not weak. It’s not, you know, being wishy-washy. Meek means broken to harness. It means strong, but a strength that comes from not being wild, but from being channeled under the master, under King Jesus.

And I want to talk in the second half of the sermon today about sexual meekness, being broken to the harness of sexuality as described in God’s law. Because interestingly enough, as we’ll see in a few minutes, and as we saw in the text today, there is frequently in the scriptures a relationship between a call for sexual purity on the one hand and a call for justice on the other.

And in fact, I think that—and we’ll end the sermon with this as I get to the end of it—we’ll see that justice and sexuality is an important aspect. If we can’t be just in the bedroom that we share with our spouse, in the most intimate of human relationships, if we can’t be just there, don’t you think we’re going to have a lot of trouble with everybody else? The person we’re most committed to, most closely covenanted to, that we love the most, we could say.

If we don’t exercise justice in that relationship—you know, in every bit of it, but in terms of its intimate portions as well—what hope is there for us being satisfied as we hunger and thirst for justice in the world? We’re having a conference with Caleb Davis, for a young man here in about a month. And I think there may be some flyers around that Angie made up. And the name of the flyer says at the top, “Man up.” I want us to man up. Let’s do justice.

And let’s begin that understanding of what justice is in relationship to God’s law by seeking moral purity in the context of who we are and what we do. You know, the early church understood that justice was central to its task. Paul told the Corinthians, “Why are you going to unjust pagan courts to try to get matters settled? Forget it.” He said the Roman courts were unjust. They were long, tedious affairs. People would have cases go on for forty years and never get justice. And Paul said, “Set up your own courts. You’ve got godly men, you know, who can make judicial determinations. Set your own courts up and settle matters in the context of the body of Christ.” And they did that. The early church did that. And we know from the historical records that they did it so well that non-Christians started coming to their courts because they saw they hungered and thirsted for justice and they saw in the body of Jesus Christ courts of justice and they came to them.

R.J. Rushdoony—I’d forgotten this. I saw a video this last week. I’d forgotten that Rushdoony was interviewed by Bill Moyers, I think in the late 80s, maybe mid-80s, on one of his many shows that he’s had on television, the public television version of national public radio. And he was talking about this very thing—that for the Christian, justice is very significant. The courts were set up, and when Constantine comes around—you know, that’s the fourth century—so when Constantine comes around, the courts, the Christian courts, are working so good and the Roman courts are not giving justice. Constantine calls—because, according to Rushdoony (I don’t know if it’s what he said, and he seemed to know his history)—he said that Constantine gathered the bishops together of the city of Rome. He said, “Look, you guys have courts of justice. We don’t. I want people to go to your courts.”

“And what I want you to do is start wearing magisterial robes. I want you to wear the robes that our justice guys, our ministers of justice, our judges wear, so that people will know. And I’ll make an edict, you know, putting my stamp of approval on you, and that stamp of approval will be demonstrated in your robe.” And according to Rushdoony, that’s where bishop’s robes came from. And now today, you know, a bishop’s robe is certainly no longer a sign that a person is necessarily committed to doing justice in a way that is actually exemplary above the city and the county and state in which we live.

We need to hunger and thirst after justice. And as we live in a world that increasingly is falling apart, justice will continue to fall apart. And we need to supplant—not overthrow the state—by setting up, by doing justice in whatever small ways we can in our families, in our workplaces, in our communities, and even eventually, you know, having these courts of justice when, if necessary, because the civil government refuses to be reformed.

Now, what we’re doing in this series is there’s a progression that I’m going through, and there’s sort of—on your outline, I call it preconditions to doing justice. And the first is identity, right? We’re unbreakable. We’re like Bruce Willis in that movie. Our identity is found in Jesus Christ and in his church. That’s where the body is. The church is unbreakable, and the church needs to wake up, as Bruce Willis did in that movie, to its mission, its call to do justice.

That’s what Bruce Willis had to open up his soul to. That’s what he woke up to. And we need to get out of the dream of Christian quietism and retreatism and all that stuff. And we have to understand that we’re here to do justice. Yeah, we’re here to do mercy. That’s great. We’re here to set up Love, Inc. That’s great. But we’re also here to do Justice, Inc.—justice in the name of Jesus Christ. And we’re to wake up to that, to our essential identity.

It’s a difficult thing to do, moving through, as we talked before, in the great Exodus that was accomplished after Passover, moving into the sea even though it was parted by God miraculously, took faith and it took courage. We need to man up to do difficult tasks. And God wants us to move ahead as a body of Christ here, specifically in Oregon City or whatever city you live in. He wants us to do justice. And that’s moving into dangerous territory.

I want to read a quote from a woman named Ruth Foster. And I don’t even know who she is, but I read this in an article. She said this: “The waters of justice and righteousness are dangerous to those of us who have promised to follow Christ and to live in covenant with his people. God’s justice is dangerous because first, to ignore it reveals we are not truly his. I think that’s absolutely correct. To ignore it means we’re not really his. Jesus said that he came to effect justice in the world, to put the world to rights.

Secondly, she says it’s dangerous because to misunderstand it can lead to depersonalizing and compartmentalizing those made in God’s image. Well, I think that maybe we could put a little different wording on that. And to get it wrong will create injustice. I’ll throw this in now. It’s actually a little bit later in the outline, but Paul says justice is defined by God’s law, which is a reflection of his character. Law is love in God’s way of looking at things. And Paul says an element of justice is this: if a man won’t work, neither shall he eat? That’s biblical justice.

But when we separate out justice into some kind of abstract human conception of what justice is as opposed to God’s law, then we have—right now—that’s developed in the context of many Christian social justice people. There’s some kind of right to food, right? But that’s injustice. So it’s dangerous stuff, because if we get justice wrong, we’re going to increase injustice in the world. Got to do it, but we better do it right, because when we do it wrong, the world is damaged. The world is not put to rights. It’s put into more wrongs.

Third, she said, to rationalize away its demands hardens our heart to God. If we don’t want to get involved with it and we’re not, then what we’re doing is hardening our heart to God, because his heart, his passion—as we’ll see in a couple of minutes—his passion is to do justice in the world, to put the world to right. That’s why Jesus came. She says another reason why it’s dangerous is to seek to live out the demands of God’s justice is risky and goes against the grain of normal behavior and cultural norms. Absolutely. That’s what the Christians did. It was to go against the cultural norms of Rome and seek justice. And it’s risky to do that. And it’s even riskier in our time, because you know, the church as it gets involved in social justice—a lot of them are going about it in a humanistic way.

And so not only are we going to get flack from the communities in which we live if we talk about the justice of not giving people food if they won’t work, we’re going to get a lot of flack from other Christians. So it’s risky business. It’s dangerous business. And then she says, to pray for and to seek God’s justice calls us into involvement with those who need justice. It’s risky, because when you see people who are being treated unjustly and you try to apply direct justice to them, it means you got to get involved with people who may not be the kind of people you’d want to get involved with.

So it’s dangerous because of the demands that it places on us and what it will cause us to do. Lots of reasons why it’s dangerous to walk into that sea that’s been parted for us by Jesus. But that’s where we belong. That’s where we belong. We run to the roar of the lion. We don’t go away from controversy. We go into those areas where God says the need is greatest, even though those are the same areas frequently that are the most dangerous for us as individuals.

**Passion. The grand story of exile and Exodus, right?** We talked about this last week, but remind yourself, remember this is the great narrative of the scriptures. We’re exiled. We’re kicked out of the garden, and then we’re brought back into the garden city. That’s the whole movement of the scriptures. And so we’re exiled in Egypt. We’re not doing things right. We have an exodus from Egypt into the promised land, right?

What do they do, by the way? What do they do as soon as they get to the promised land? They worship as preparation for what? Doing justice—and in that case, military justice. They have to wipe out the tremendous depth of iniquity and rebelliousness that was in the promised land that they were going to occupy. The very first thing they do—worship—is preparation for doing justice, right? And there’s a particular masculine cast to that dangerous waters.

But you know, in the military, which is what had to go in and conquer the evil, wicked, nasty pagans, women couldn’t go about doing that task. So right away there’s a differentiation of the roles, and the men go about doing this work of justice. Now women do justice too. There are these accounts, right? Women get involved—Deborah, Gideon, et cetera. But this—the story of exile and then exodus from exile coming back—is the narrative, and it’s immediately connected in that text to doing justice where God wants us to go.

We talked—I think I mentioned this last week, but maybe I didn’t. Isaiah 9:6 and 7. To us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government shall be upon his shoulder. His name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and of peace there shall be no end on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and forevermore. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will accomplish this.

Advent is a season of remembering why Jesus came. He came with a passion and a zeal. And that zeal was to do justice in the world, to create just people through his death and resurrection and the atonement for our sins and to create a people who would do justice. Now the heart of Jesus Christ, the zeal of the Lord of Hosts, is to do justice and in the text of the particular text to establish his kingdom and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time forward and forevermore. That’s the passion of Jesus, and it better be a significant passion to us. We ought to be those who hunger and thirst for justice, for righteousness in the context of the world, because that’s who we are and that’s the grand story of Exodus—to go into the places where we live to be prepared by the worship of the church to go back to our jobs and our families and our communities and where we live and breathe and have our being right in Jesus, in those areas, and to do justice, to seek for the manifestation of justice, and to roll back the evidences of sin which are injustice.

So the zeal of the Lord of Hosts will accomplish this. Jesus is about bringing justice to victory. Last week’s text—bringing justice to victory. And if that’s what Jesus is about and our identity is in him, then our passion should be involved in bringing justice to victory. It’s who we are. The injustice traced out in the early chapters of Genesis are being reversed by the second Adam. And that’s who we are.

**Our justice has to be word-centered.** And I mentioned this earlier. The text here is from Thessalonians. If we get this wrong, we’re in big trouble. It’s God’s word, his law. That’s what justice is. Let me give you an example of the relationship of law and justice and love. And this is in Leviticus 19. Leviticus 19 is the heart of the book of Leviticus. It’s a section on the Ten Commandments. It’s all about law, and it’s about the law. And at the center of this—the center of the Pentateuch, the center of the central book of the Pentateuch, the very heart of this thing—has this final statement in the middle of the chapter rather, says, “Love,” or says, excuse me, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.” That’s the center of a section of stuff on law.

And Paul tells us the same thing in the New Testament. Love is the fulfilling of the law. We take that verse and say, well, yeah, we don’t need to do law if we just love enough. No, that’s not the point. Love and law are connected in Leviticus, and leading up to this statement to love your neighbor as yourself tells us how to do it. And it’s a text that we need to hear, I think, particularly in our context right now.

Leviticus 19, verse 16. You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people. You shall not stand up against the life of your neighbor to gossip, to talk about people apart from their presence in negative ways, and to spread views of who they are. That’s to take the life of someone, the text tells us. And the law says don’t do it. You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason frankly with your neighbor. That way of being, no matter why, what motivates it—fear, malice, whatever it is—that cowardly way of being ends up not helping you either. You end up hating your brother in your heart. And you know how do you fulfill that? It ends up with a very dissatisfying relationship.

And the answer to it is given here. The law tells us—the law of God, the love of God—towards your neighbor is not to slander him and become bitter against him. It’s to reason frankly with him. Not talking to him about somebody else, what somebody else said about him, but your experience with him, what your problem is with what he’s doing, right? You’re to reason frankly with your brother. And we don’t want to do that. We’re cowards or whatever it is. And so we end up talking to other people. We end up moving against the life of one another. We end up actually hating our brother because we’re not doing the very simple basic steps of what God’s law says, what justice demands.

To do these kind of actions is radically unjust. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. See, when we don’t do the simple things of law and justice, then we’re not loving each other. And in fact, we’re doing the very things that end up producing hatred in our hearts for one another. So when we talk about biblical justice, it’s justice is defined by God’s law, which is a description of how we are to love, how God loves us, and how we are to love one another.

That’s a precondition for doing justice and which we’re leading up to more specific ways of doing justice in the next few weeks. But a precondition of it is having a passion for it. Recognizing who you are and then committing yourself to seeing justice not as a way that’s defined by man apart from God’s word, but justice is tied to the word of God because it’s tied to his character.

Social justice is basically a good term. It just means a biblical standard and its effects on society. That’s what social justice can be. Now today, social justice more often than not means it’s been redefined to be justice based on humanistic assumptions apart from God, based on society. Social justice is justice that’s defined by the society as opposed to what we would say. Social justice is justice that benefits the society. The right actions of people in relationships with God, themselves, others in the created order, in relationship to others and to the society. That’s biblical social justice. And perverted social justice says, “No, it’s justice as defined by society, societal norms which change and move.” Biblical justice is real cool because, you know, it’s the same thing. You got to apply it to different situations through history, but it’s the same justice that was applied in those early courts of law in Rome by the early church. So biblical—now the third problem we have, and this is what’s going on right now, is these first two definitions of social justice are being confused.

So biblical terminology is being used by Christians and others, but really they’re using non-biblical standards and methods for trying to achieve social justice. Next week we’re going to talk about oppression. So, how do you help the poor? What injustices should you be trying to combat? And see, if we think, okay, the Bible says you got to help the poor, and therefore we got to get rid of private property, you see, that’s blending true biblical social justice and humanistic social justice and calling it biblical social justice. So we have to—we want to avoid that—and that’s why it’s tricky waters, dangerous waters, but waters that we have to walk into.

Social justice. Another requirement is to remember it’s spirit-empowered. Jesus goes from a place of spirit-empowerment into his city the last week of his life in the triumphal entry, right? That’s what he’s doing. He’s going from an environment, the Mount of Olives. That whole last week is spent in that environment that is emblematic, it’s symbolic of the spirit. Olives and olive oil is used throughout the scriptures to be references to the spirit of God. Jesus is clothed in the spirit. That’s where he lives. That’s where he has his being. And that’s what prepares him to go in and bring justice into the city.

We come together in an environment that the spirit has created in worship. And we leave this place to go back to our cities to do justice. That’s who we are. The spirit of God is absolutely essential for this. And it’s, and I like the way our sermon series is progressing, because we’re leading up to Pentecost and a celebration of the gift of the spirit, which is absolutely a critical condition for doing justice—is to have right relationship with God and Christ by having the Holy Spirit understood and not grieving the spirit.

So the spirit is central to this. We’re grafted into what? Into an olive tree, right? We’re grafted in to the spirit’s world, his work. And so the spirit of God is absolutely essential. And again, when Jesus—it talks about Jesus doing justice in Isaiah 11—it begins by saying, “The spirit of the Lord is upon me.” So the spirit empowers us to do that justice and to try to accomplish justice apart from the work of the Holy Spirit, tied to God’s word and his presence in us, is to go about doing justice with nothing and no power, no dynamic that you can apply.

The spirit is the one creating this renewed world through the body of Christ that we’re part of. And so the spirit is absolutely essential and critical to it. And that’s pictured by the events we’re we’re basking in, you know, the glow of remembering the resurrection of Jesus, right? This is the third Sunday in Easter, fourth Sunday, whatever it is. We’re meditating on it. And part of that meditation is Holy Week and remembering that Jesus Christ was empowered by the spirit for the work he was going to do. And he calls us in the same way to be driven by the spirit environment, to be those who go out and do justice in our lives.

**Holiness.** That spirit is holy, right? And again, on your outline, I say these are not a sequence of steps. These are all preconditions for doing justice, but they’re all related. And holiness is absolutely essential for doing justice. And that leads to our topic for today, which is sexual holiness.

Without holiness, you’re not working in the context of the Holy Spirit. If you think the Holy Spirit is setting up opportunities and giving you a passion to have an illegitimate or an illicit sexual relationship outside of marriage, that isn’t the spirit of God. That’s the spirit that Martin Luther said he would slap that spirit on the snout. When the enthusiast came to Martin Luther and wanted the spirit, the spirit apart from God’s word and law, Luther’s response was, I slapped spirit on the snout because that’s not the spirit of God. The spirit of God is the Holy Spirit and he creates holiness in his people, and we’ll talk about that today.

So sexual purity is a very important precondition or aspect we could say of doing justice, righteousness. On your sheets I’ve given you a whole bunch of scriptures, and I printed them all out. We’re not going through them all. There’s a section in there on doing justice. We read those last week. I know it was tedious for me to read those most of them. But you see, I really—it’s so important that we see that over and over and over and over we’re commanded by God to do justice. It’s all who we are.

And there’s another section in there on justice and the law and the word. We won’t look at those either. But there is a section on justice and righteousness. And I want to talk just about a few of those scriptures for a couple of minutes as preparation for talking about justice and sexuality. Yeah, which can you find it? Okay. I think it’s page three. You know, I do this too because I had them all. This is how I had to find them. I did my Bible search this way. It comes up and I could have cut out all the words and just put the references. That’s a lot of work for me. And it seems like it’s useful to you to keep this in your file, right? All these texts. I had to study it up and produce the list. And you’ve got the list. You can just do your own personal topical study on the doing of justice from page two and three, and then this list, justice and righteousness, on page four.

And the big point of all these verses here is again to drive home this point: that justice and righteousness are synonyms, because we think of righteousness differently from justice, and in the Bible they’re linked together all the time. And I want to just mention a couple of these scriptures. The very first one is significant. You know, early uses of words in the Bible are significant for determining what they’re saying. And in Genesis 18:19, God says that he chose Abraham that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice.

So they’re synonyms. They’re things to be done, not things just to be, right? They’re things to do. They’re related here with the way of the Lord, and they’re the condition of Christian parenting. We’re going to talk about justice and the family in two weeks on Mother’s Day. But you know, think about it right now. You can think about this for the next couple of weeks as you get ready for that sermon. The family is specifically a place where God chooses Christian parents, gives his children to those parents in stewardship, because they are going to keep the way of the Lord. And the way of the Lord they know is to train their children to do righteousness and justice.

It’s a summary statement of our Christian walk—doing justice. And so the synonym here is useful. But beyond that, the teachings of this verse are useful as well. Now, now you know, so we don’t lose sight of the rest of this. It is certainly true as well that earlier in Genesis, in Genesis 15:6, it says that Abraham believed the Lord and He counted it to Abraham. God counted it to Abraham as righteousness. Now there’s the first use of the term righteousness in the Bible. And the second one is the text we just looked at—doing righteousness.

So what does it tell you? It tells you that yes, there is this positional righteousness. There’s this imputation—we can say—and I know these words are difficult these days—but there’s a righteousness that we have that is not our own. It’s alien to us. It’s the righteousness of God’s faithful servant to come. And Abraham believes in God, and that faith gives him the righteousness of Christ. He’s seen in that, right?

So there is that. If you’re, you know, if you’ve been born into Adam’s family, if you’re a child from Adam, your central identity is in Adam, you’re lost. You’re going to hell because of the sin of Adam, because that taint has come upon all humanity. We’re all, you know, birthed, you know, we’re all created in the fallen state. “In Adam’s fall, we sin all”—the New England Primer. And we need salvation. And specifically, that word can be used for a lot of things, but we need saving from hell because that’s where we’re going if all we are is the product of a human family.

If our genetic structure and our modeling and all that comes from fallen people, we’re fallen. Everybody is born fallen, and we’re going to hell. And we need righteousness before God to go to heaven and to live eternally when Jesus brings heaven to earth with him. And so faith in the work of Jesus Christ is certainly the means of that salvation, the means of receiving the righteousness of God.

So I’m making a really big deal about the synonymous nature of righteousness and justice and these things over and over again being actions. But these first two uses tell us about that. But they also tell us the first use is having this relationship with God through Christ. And if you don’t haven’t come to believe on the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ for his people, I would urge you today not to have a righteousness of your own that comes from your works, but to believe in the work of God as Abraham did, to believe in the work of Jesus to save you from your sins and from that belief, God gives you the righteousness, the perfectness of Jesus Christ, his conformity to every bit of his own standard.

And that’s salvation. And you know, so we know that’s taught here, but we also know that Genesis goes on three chapters later to talk about doing justice and doing righteousness. And so that text is a significant one at the top of that set of verses.

So I’m going to, I think, just going to leave those verses. I may return to them next week again or throughout this series. But if you just read those verses to see the synonymous nature of righteousness and justice and then look for yourselves what else is going on here. For instance, in 1 Kings 10:9, a little bit couple verses down your text there, it says, “He has made you king.” I’ve underlined this portion for you. “He has made you king that you might execute justice and righteousness.”

If we’re kings and priests under Jesus, he’s made Jesus king, but he’s made us kings with him, and we’re made kings for the particular purpose of exercising righteousness and justice. So these texts give us the synonymous nature of those two, but they give us more than that. They give us kind of a broader understanding as we meditate upon these particular verses of the significance again of doing righteousness and doing justice.

So a precondition of doing justice is understanding its relationship to righteousness—that these are synonyms. And so what we’re going to do today or now is talk about sexuality. Next week, oppression. What does it mean when it says you know that injustice is oppressing people? And then the following week we’ll talk about justice in the family. Then that’ll prepare us for Pentecost and Ascension and the relationship of the gift of the spirit at Pentecost and the Ascension of the Lord Jesus Christ. So those will be the topics of the next four Sundays as we work through this series on doing justice.

**Today: sexual holiness.** Returning to Job. So you know, I don’t want to get into a big in-depth analysis of this, but you know this is a section as I said—this chapter is 40 verses, 11 uses—where Job says, “If I have done this, then bad things should happen to me.” And so what Job is doing is he’s saying he didn’t do that. Job was probably a king, a king to do righteousness and justice. And he did that. And so he wanted to make sure that he wasn’t being punished for things he didn’t do.

Job had a sense of justice that was strong enough to plead his own case to God, which is what he’s doing here. And by way of application to us, it helps us to see that what happened to Job wasn’t because of his violation of these things, right? He’s pretty good guy. He’s perfect. God says in the early chapter—the first chapter of Job. And so this gives us an understanding of what Christian maturation and perfection should look like, right?

And the very thing he begins with—and this is very interesting to me—he begins a statement of his own justice by talking about his avoiding lustful looking at women. That’s how he starts. And I guess that’s what I’m saying in this series, doing justice, with the commitment to it. And I want you today to make your next step as we seek to do justice—justice in terms of sexual meekness before God, avoiding sexual sin, being holy and spirit-filled to that holiness so that you’ll be in a place to exercise the sort of justice that Job talks about.

Job talks about justice by beginning to talk about sexual matters. And again, you know, it’s not because sex is some weird deal. It’s because sex is the most intimate of human relationships and justice is about human relationships. How are you going to do justice if in the most basic, you know, the most intimate of relationships, you’re unjust? You know, just can’t happen.

So he starts by doing that, and he makes some opening comments. I think that are summary at first through verse 6, or through actually through verse 8. I think 1 to 8 are kind of a summary statement of all the specifics he’ll talk about. And then he gets to specifics in verse 9. If my heart has been enticed toward a woman—so he goes back to sex, okay? If I’ve been enticed to a woman and I have lain and wait at my neighbor’s door, if he’s committed adultery, in other words—now let my wife grind for another, et cetera. Let others bow down on her. So he’s saying he should be judged if he doesn’t have sexual justice, okay? He’s pleading his justice and their sexuality.

And then he goes on in the next if I have done this in verse 13 to say this. If I have rejected the cause of my manservant or my maidservant when they brought a complaint against me. So now he’s talking about matters that we would normally think of in terms of justice. If he has acted justly toward complaints brought to him, if he hasn’t acted justly, then God, he wants God to punish him. So this is about his relationship in judicial matters with people.

And then the third thing he says in verse 16 is if I have withheld anything that the poor desired or have caused the eyes of the widow to fail or have eaten my morsel alone and the fatherless has not eaten of it. So and he goes on to talk about that. So what Job is talking about there is he’s got three things at the beginning of his list that define justice. The first is sexual justice. The second is trial justice, we could say—complaint justice, what we normally think of in terms of criminal justice or some kind of complaint against him. And the third thing is the justice that actually we would identify more with mercy, with mercy—it’s acts of benevolence to others.

Now we’re focusing in this series on, you know, the first two and not so much on the third one, but the third one is part of living a just life. Justice is comprehensive. It’s a term that really includes mercy. And yet we can differentiate them as God does as well. And so they’re differentiated here. But I want you to see here the purpose of this text from Job is to see the relationship of social justice to what we normally think of as justice in terms of hearing a complaint from someone else. And so Job does that.

This tying together of sexual justice and other forms of justice is common in the scriptures. You know, we think of Sodom and Gomorrah—sexual sin, sexual injustice—but that’s not their only sin, right? In fact, it’s not what God says in Ezekiel 16 is what results in their judgment. Ezekiel 16 says this, “This was the guilt of your sister Sodom. She and her daughters had pride.” Now, that word pride probably means majesty. It’s not a negative thing. They had majesty. They were gifted by God. God blessed them. They had excess of food and prosperous ease. Nothing wrong with any of that. You got blessings from God. He says, “But did not aid the poor and needy. So their lack of justice and particularly benevolence justice toward the poor and needy is what God calls them to account for. They were haughty and did not—and did rather an abomination before me. So I removed them when I saw it.”

So the sexual abomination that we normally think of in terms of Sodom and Gomorrah is related—God says—to a lack of justice toward the poor and needy, even though they were blessed. So again, a linking of sexual injustice to what we would normally think as injustice. Apart from that, this same thing is true in Amos chapter 2. Amos is a big book about injustice. And in Amos 2, he says, “For three transgressions of Judah and for four, I will not turn away its punishment because they have despised the law of the Lord.” So the first evidence of injustice against Judah is a transgression of God’s word, his law. And he says he’s going to send forth judgment to them.

Verse 6 says, “For three transgressions of Israel, for four, I will turn away. I will not turn away the punishment because they sell the righteous for silver and the poor for a pair of sandals. Now, that’s not a charge that they didn’t help them. This is a charge that they actively oppress them. They sold them for a pair of sandals. They have injustice, right, in their actions—social injustice. They don’t apply God’s word, not in terms of benevolence. That’s what Sodom did. But here the term is used. Here’s what’s being talked about is they didn’t seek out justice for the poor. Actually, they actively oppressed them and sold them into slavery.

They pant after the dust of the earth which is on the head of the poor and pervert the way of the humble. A man and his father go into the same girl to defile my holy name. Sexual impurity again—sexual injustice linked to crime, you know, social injustice in terms of the oppression of the poor—linked together. Again, you see, sexuality is an important part of doing justice.

In 1 Thessalonians 4, the same thing is true. He says you know what instructions we gave you through the Lord Jesus. Verse 3 says this: this is the will of God your sanctification, that you abstain from sexual immorality. The will of God is justice. And justice the first aspect of justice that he talks about is sexual immorality. And then he says, that each one of you know how to control his own body in holiness and honor. Sexual meekness—broken to God’s harness and instructions—not in the passion of lust like the Gentiles who do not know God.

Then verse 6 says, that you don’t transgress, go beyond, and defraud. The word is a business term, not a sexual term. Defraud your brother in this matter. Well, the word this isn’t really there in a matter. I think what’s going on in verse 6 is no longer talking about sexual justice. It’s talking about economic justice. You’re defrauding somebody in any given matter. And so Paul, as he begins to talk about what sanctification and the will of God is, addresses sexual injustice and he addresses business injustice. So again, linking those two concepts we don’t normally think of together, and yet in the word of God that’s what God says.

Verse 7 of that text says, God has not called us for impurity but in holiness. Therefore whoever disregards this disregards not man but God who gives his Holy Spirit to you. Now, think about that. Remember what impurity is. Impurity is a manifestation of the fall. It doesn’t mean you’ve sinned necessarily. The word really is broader than that, right? You’re unclean for particular reasons. And that uncleanness was an evidence, a manifestation of the fallen world that it needed being put to right, right?

Okay. So that’s what impurity is. And he says we’re not called to impurity, to manifestations of the fallen world. We’re called to holiness. And this is why the spirit has been given to us. What’s the spirit doing? Just like at the original creation, the spirit’s creating a new world, right? We’re in new creation time. And the Holy Spirit is rolling back the effects of the fallen state. And he’s making us holy in right relationship to him, to ourselves, to others, and to the created environment.

So what he’s saying is new creation life is who we are. So don’t have to do with old creation life. Be just, don’t be unjust. And specifically, don’t be unjust sexually. And don’t be unjust in terms of business fraud, right? So those are like two headers again that are used over and over again—economic matters and sexual matters in terms of oppression or non-oppression.

Hebrews, same thing in Hebrews 13. As Paul (or the writer of Hebrews) is giving a list of what we’re supposed to be like, he says in verse 4 two things about sex. He says, “Let the marriage be held in honor among all and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous.” Keep your life from love of money and be content with what you have, for he has said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.”

Again, see, they’re linked. He begins by sexual justice—protect marriage. Fight for it in the culture—and keep the marriage bed undefiled in your own personal, you know, society. Honor marriage, and personally have sexual justice in the context of your relationships with your spouse. So that’s the first matter of justice he talks about here in these two verses. And the second is don’t defraud anybody in your business relationships, right? Don’t be covetous, don’t want more money.

Okay? So again, linked together. So the point is this, you know, the big ticket here is that the big idea is that if we’re going to do justice—which we have to do or we’re not Christians, really—if we’re going to do justice, then we have to see the great significance that text after text after text places upon sexual justice as a precondition or an accompaniment to the other kinds of social justice that the scriptures talk about.

How do we keep the marriage bed undefiled? That’s the question, right? That’s what we’re required to do in terms of sexual justice according to Hebrews 13. How do we go about doing that? Well, I think there’s some specific things that we can do. Okay, we know how to defend marriage. We know some things about that, and it’s related to that. The second phrase, the idea of keeping your marriage bed pure, but they’re somewhat distinct.

How can we do it? Well, we can do it first of all by the first half of the verse, by honoring marriage. So seeing that, you know, a pure bed means a marital bed, and for, and sexual relations outside of marriage of any sort are just plain wrong. And so we can commit ourselves to see that sexual meekness happens in the context of Christian marriage. Okay? So marriage itself should be a really big deal that we should be aiming for and doing and engaging in and encouraging one another towards.

And if we don’t do that, you see, if we don’t promote marriage, what we’re doing is running people into their 30s and 40s with strong sexual temptations. You know, guys, you feel that way because God wants you married. That’s why you feel that way. Sex isn’t a bad thing. Sexual desire isn’t a bad thing. In fact, it’s a very good thing, because you boneheaded young guys—I was boneheaded too, once. Maybe still am. But you know, we, you sort of think you’re independent. You get by in life, whatever’s going on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And God gives you this thing that you cannot ignore. It makes you feel like a complete idiot—sexual urgency—and it humbles you, and you don’t know what’s going on, and you fight it. But it’s there not just to be fought against, not even primarily that.

It’s there to drive you to marriage. And the longer you prolong that period before you get married, the more screwed up you’re going to be when you finally do get married in all likelihood, because the more opportunities you’re going to have to fall sexually. And you know what happens when you sin sexually? You set up sexual sin in the marriage bed.

Another way you keep the marriage bed pure is to avoid sexual sin prior to getting married. You know, we’re creatures of habit. We’re not first and foremost thinking people. We’re first and foremost doing people—homo adorans, worshiping God. Homo liturgicus, ritual patterns affect us. You know the story. I think I’ve told you this. Got these heroin addicts coming back from Vietnam after the Vietnam War. Go through a heroin addiction recovery program. They all get cured. Almost none of them go back to heroin. Take the same program, deal with a group of inner city people, run them through the exact same program, right? And they all go back to heroin after the program’s over. Why?

Because the liturgical cues of their world have remained the same. The soldiers got into it in a place that was different—different weather, different heat, different buildings, different kind of people. The whole thing has a whole set of cues around us. We’re not, you know, walking through life as somehow autonomous, isolated people. We come together and we do things in community, we do things in the world. All those cues are liturgical actions. They’re habits, right? And they kind of—they’re related to what we desire.

To break a heroin addict, you got to get him away from his environment. Put it simply. And that’s not environmentalism, but it’s saying that man is a ritualistic habit-forming guy. Our liturgies, the ritual actions we engage in, okay, creates our desires. Let me say that again: the ritual actions we engage in, the habits, the liturgies, tend to create what our hearts desire and love, okay?

Now, there’s some desire and love that lead you into ritual actions of pornography. But when you do those ritual actions of sexual impurity, you are creating a desire for something that is wrong and will never be right, okay? You see that? And what you’re going to do then, what guys do is they go through sexual sin and then they get married and they wonder why they’re having trouble in the bedroom. It’s because of the patterns that were established, the desires of your heart being trained to look in a particular way for satisfaction.

And a lot of that happens as a direct result of your failure to discipline yourself and to not engage in looking at pornography, engaging in sexual sin in any particular way. The longer you prolong marriage, marriage is honorable, it’s to be defended and promoted. The more prone you’re going to be, and the more incidences of sexual sin you’ll engage in. And the more ritualistic incidences of sexual sin you engage in, the worse—the more impure your marriage bed is likely to be.

Now, God is gracious, right? We can repent. We can turn away from that. But God is also—he made us this way. Don’t expect him just to wipe out everything you’ve ever done in your life in terms of its effect on what you’re doing now, okay? God can do that. He can do that, and he does sometimes, but usually not. Usually, a failure to come to grips with sexual justice in your own relationship to yourself and what you should be doing creates sexual injustice in the bedroom where what you’re looking for is not, you know, the kind of intimacy of relationship, the self-giving to one another that biblical sexuality in marriage is supposed to be.

Instead, it’s a taking. It’s, you know, objectifying women, all that stuff we hear about today. That’s what results. And don’t think you can just do something and then your mind can be different about it. You’re not like that. You’re not homo sapiens first and foremost. You’re homo liturgicus. Your ritual patterns will determine to a great degree what you’re going to desire and what your future activities to achieve those desires will be like.

So you know, the call today is sexual purity as a precondition or the first element of doing justice. You know, another thing we can talk about is that it’s hard today, harder than when I was a kid, you know, because it’s everywhere. And it’s hard in this state. We need to do justice. You adult guys, we need to man up. We need to call the church of Jesus Christ to man up in this state over the next six months.

And we need to elect members to our state house and our state senate who will change the Oregon Constitution so that we could get rid of pornography in neighborhoods and in cities. We can’t do it now. There are more strip clubs in Portland, with you know, like 15 times more than in Seattle because Oregon has the worst constitution in the state and no communities can do anything to protect our young people from sexual impurity so that they can be sexually just as they move into their adult life.

We need to do something about that. Time’s ripe. You know, the liberals are willing to talk about it now because they’re talking about human trafficking and they’re talking about the fact that, you know, 80% of women in pornographic magazines and websites are being sexually trafficked in some way. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but that’s what they say. So they’re anxious to do something about it too.

The time is right. We can do justice in this state by acting in a state manner to change our Constitution, and we can then help encourage our young men in our particular communities to avoid the kind of pornography and stuff that comes at them all the time. So sexual justice is what I’m calling us to do.

And it’s not just the young men in pornography. It’s all of us who have grown up in an age that didn’t think about sexual meekness, being broken to the harness of the Lord of the Dance in our sexual relationships. All too often, you know, even in the context of marriage, even in the context of fidelity in marriage to one another, sexual injustice is happening. Oppression, objectification, weird roleplaying in stuff, you know, to try to, you know, improve whatever is going on.

Let me read a comment that I read from an article this week by a person named Noel Bucher, who has written this article and he’s involved with something called Pure Hope. But this article is called “The Virtue of Justice: Why Sexual Purity is Central to a Just Life.” And I’m just going to read a couple of quotes from this article. He says tragically today the foundation of justice has crumbled in our society. We are surrounded by promiscuity, pornography, prostitution, trafficking, and sexual violence. Commercialized sex is channeled relentlessly into our homes and consciousness in the digital age. Headlines shoot at us the latest scandal involving a public figure sexing, cheating, buying sex, or otherwise behaving not just boorishly but also unjustly—like the shameful acts of the Secret Service that was incredibly unjust all the way down the line. And it’s the sort of thing we hear over and over and over again. We live in great times of sexual injustice.

So he goes on to say that this contemporary reality has the terrible effect of commodifying women and girls as sexual objects and degrades men and boys who are portrayed and groomed to be neurotic, narcissistic, self-indulgent buffoons who are addicted to crass and vulgar sex. Addicted to crass and vulgar sex. You got friends who engage in crass and vulgar sex language? Dump them. Get rid of them right now. Now, that’s not what you want as you prepare for adult life. You won’t be a man who can man up and do justice if you’re going to be affected by people and have contacts with people that meet this description. And don’t you be it. May God deliver us from these things.

He goes on to say, instead of today’s sexual union being defined by justice—meaning mutual rights and duties and love, self-giving surrender of one’s rights for the highest good of the other—it’s become a transaction divorced from obligations. That’s a great line, isn’t it? It’s a transaction now divorced from mutual obligations, an unabashed pursuit of immediate self-gratification. Man, that’s right. And it’s horrible. It’s the source of much societal injustice in America—sexual injustice.

So he asked the question beyond fidelity, what does the justice of sexual purity look like within marriage? He says, caring for and sharing with rather than using and doing to our partner. I was at a political conference once and a state program was being given—they were going to be doing some program they were going to be doing—and there was some lower income people there. And I remember this woman getting up and she said, “Well, what we want is we want you to do it with us. Don’t do it to us.”

Now, she was talking about some government program. But that’s right, isn’t it? Of course, it’s right. And yet all too often in Christian circles as well, that’s not what’s going on. There’s a selfishness. There’s an objectification. There’s sin going on. There’s sexual injustice going on. Nurturing, listening to, respecting, and being honest and generous with our partner. There’s no room for shame, deception, or degradation in sexual purity. Where they creep in, repentance and forgiveness are the remedy.

Now, I want you, you know, let me move over here and get real serious. This is the day. This is the moment. We want to do justice in this city. We want to do justice in this state. You know, if you’re a person here today, man or woman, and you know that you’re not involved in sexual justice in your own personal life, your relationship to the opposite sex, your marriage life, repent right now.

Wonderful movie, “A Passage to India,” years ago. And this woman has falsely accused this Indian man. It’s a woman from England. And when she finally breaks on the court on the stand in the courtroom, all this pressure on her because she knows the story she’s telling isn’t true, she finally breaks and confesses her sin. And there’s this rain, big rainstorm coming down, right? You can see that as judgment, but it’s rain washing away sin. You can begin right now today with a renewed commitment to sexual justice.

If you confess your sin and when you get home or later on today, confess it to your partner. If it involves your partner, you confess it. You break with it right now. You man up so that we can do justice and that this city, our county, this state, eventually the world can be put to rights again through the Lord whose passionate zeal in life was to bring justice. And that includes bringing justice to your most intimate of relationships.

Whether it’s you singly, cleaning up your sexual sins that you’re involved with and your sexual language, or whether you’re married and it’s cleaning up improper unjust sexuality in the bedroom. May the Lord Jesus Christ grant every person right now the grace to understand what they’ve done wrong, what they’re doing right, and to move to do justice, to commit yourself to an increasing sense of justice in the most intimate of human relationships.

If you don’t do it there, how are you ever going to do justice to anybody else?

Let’s pray.

Lord God, we thank you for today. We thank you for your Scripture. We thank you for this tie that we see in them between sexuality and other forms of injustice. We pray, Lord God, that as a precondition and actually as a first step of doing justice, you would, Lord God, by your Holy Spirit cause us to repent of sexual sin, to seek to do justice there and there first, and be empowered by you through forgiveness and assurance of salvation and for assurance of forgiveness of our sins with renewed commitments to be just with one another and in the delightedness that you prepared for biblical sexuality.

Bless us, Lord God, as we commit ourselves to that and to training our young men and women in the same path. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.