Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Do Christians Care About Justice? | Torah | Exodus 2:11-22

Episode Date: May 9, 2022

Should Christians care about modern-day justice issues? Are they even a part of the conversation? Should religion stay out of these kinds of conversations? In today's episode, Keith uses Exodus 2:11-22 to start a conversation about the way Christians should care about justice. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Exodus 2:11-22 Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. My name is Keith Simon, and right now we're going through the Book of Exodus. You might remember that early in the pandemic, Pfizer, the big pharma company, ran an ad on YouTube that showed scientists from all around the world working together to create a vaccine for the COVID-19 virus. In the middle of the commercial, they asked the question, in uncertain times, where do people turn? The answer that they gave was science. According to Pfizer, science is the most certain thing there is.

Science will always win. Science will fix our problems. Now look, I think Christians should value science. We believe science is a gift from God. It's an important discipline in learning about our world. Science and Christianity are friends, not enemies. A Christian scientist is not an oxymoron. And science is the right tool to search for medical treatments

and a vaccine for viruses and diseases. But when we ask the question of where to put our hope during uncertain times, and the answer is science, then we're asking science to be something it was never intended to be. At that point, we've left science and entered into scientism. Scientism is different than science. Scientism is a worldview that says scientific knowledge is the answer to every question, that the only objective truth is scientific truth, that science is more valuable than any other discipline. Science answers how questions, not why questions. It wasn't designed to answer

the ultimate questions of life. That's not a knock on science. No one discipline can answer every kind of question. Don't ask the church about quantum physics and don't ask science about the meaning of life. The Pfizer commercial rightly put its finger on something that we all want, hope in the midst of uncertainty. We need answers to the problems our world faces. And let's be honest, we have lots of problems, from injustice to health crisis, to inflation, to family breakdown, to immigration, to geopolitical instability, to abortion, to consequences of climate change, to political corruption, distrust of media, and that's not even naming all of them. When things are uncertain, when there are huge problems in the world, where do we turn?

Pfizer's answer with science, does Christianity offer an alternative answer? Is Christianity even participating in the conversation. I've been asking people, what's Christianity all about? How would you answer that question? Most people say that Christianity is about how to get your sins forgiven and go to heaven when you die. Now brace yourself. That's not what Christianity is about. Christianity definitely teaches about sin and forgiveness in Jesus and eternal life with God. But Christianity is about renewal, the transformation, the healing, the fixing of what's wrong with us and our world. Many non-Christians won't even consider Christianity, not necessarily because they think it's false, but because they think it's trivial. It doesn't address the issues we're facing.

The world is having a conversation about how to stop war in Ukraine, or how to hold Russia accountable, or how to teach U.S. racial history in schools, or how to deal with immigration, or new ways of working, or gender, sex, inflation, and lots more. And what are Christians talking about? How to escape the world and go to heaven. At least that's how it comes across. Now, that wouldn't be such a big deal if Christianity didn't have anything to say about the big problems we face. But the crazy thing is that it does. Christianity is not a privatized religion that only helps you find peace or meaning in your personal life. We're missing an incredible opportunity to be in dialogue with people in our world about the things they are rightly concerned about. The reason we're not part of that

conversation is Christians have misunderstood the Bible, they've misunderstood their own faith. That misunderstanding has led them to privatize their faith, to narrow the biblical story so that it's only about having your sins forgiven and going to heaven. That's strange because the Bible never teaches that kind of escapist approach to life. That kind of thinking sounds more like Plato than Jesus, more like Buddhism than Christianity. There are several biblical passages that call Christians to pursue justice in this world. We see that justice is important to Moses in Exodus chapter 2. Here's verse 11. One day after Moses had grown up, he went out to where his own people were and watched them hard at their labor. You probably remember that Moses was raised by Pharaoh's

daughter. We don't know what age he was when he went to live in the Egyptian court, nor how he discovered his Hebrew origins. But this verse tells us that he went out to see his people working as slaves. He wasn't there as a spectator eating popcorn. He was looking into their situation, inspecting the conditions they lived in, and he was grieved by what he saw. Now, Moses could have prayed and left. He could have said that God wasn't concerned about their physical condition, but only the condition of their heart. He could have said that God wasn't concerned about their physical life, but only their spiritual life. But he doesn't. Moses tried to bring about justice. back in Exodus chapter two.

He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his own people, looking this way and that, and seeing no one, he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. So Moses sees an Egyptian unjustly using his power at the expense of one of his fellow countrymen, so he intervenes. But before he does, he looks around but sees no one. Some people think that this indicates that Moses knew that what he was doing was wrong, and so he was looking around to make sure no one. one was watching. That might be right. But there's another place we find the phrase, He saw that there was no one. It's in Isaiah 59, says this. The Lord looked and he was displeased that there was no justice. He saw that there was no one. He was appalled that there was no one to intervene. So his own arm achieved salvation for him. This indicates that maybe Moses

looked around and saw that no one was going to come deliver the Hebrew slave from unjustive, So he intervened and in the process killed the Egyptian aggressor. Either way, Moses is presented as someone who saw injustice. In this case, it was the abuse of power. He was troubled by it and he did something about it. I bet Moses thought that the Israelites would love him for his actions. But it says in verse 13, the next day he went out and saw two Hebrews fighting. He asked the one in the wrong, why are you hitting your fellow Hebrew?

The man said, Who made you ruler and judge over us? Are you thinking of killing me as you killed the Egyptian? Then Moses was afraid and thought, What I did must have become known. So first Moses encountered an Egyptian beating a Hebrew. This was wrong, but to be expected, the Egyptians didn't know Yahweh.

But then Moses found two Hebrews fighting. This surprised him, but it shouldn't have. Violence always begets more violence. Moses got another surprise. After he rescued the Hebrew from the Egyptian, I'm sure he thought his own people would be thankful and rally around him, but they didn't. Instead, they asked, who made you ruler and judge over us? There will be a day God appoints Moses as ruler over his people, but that time has not come yet. This is the first time, but not the last time, that Moses finds himself rejected by the people he was trying to help.

It kind of reminds you of Jesus, doesn't it? In John 111, it says of Jesus, he can't. came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Moses cared about justice, but he thought he'd do it his way. He's going to find out that God cares about justice too. Moses tried to bring about justice by violence. He tried to do it the way of the Egyptians, and he found out that's not God's way. We should care about justice too, but we can't take things into our own hands.

We have to wait on God. brings about justice in his time, in his way. Hey, thanks for listening. If you want to go deeper, sign up for the 10-minute Bible Talk newsletter. You'll get a short email once a week. It'll challenge you to grow in your faith, give you interesting background on today's passage, and a lot, lot more. Just click the link in the show notes to sign up.

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