If all your friends were jumping off bridges, would you jump, too?

Do not follow the crowd in doing wrong. When you give testimony in a lawsuit, do not pervert justice by siding with the crowd, and do not show favoritism to a poor man in his lawsuit. (Exodus 23:2-3)

 

            There are calls for social justice ringing across the land. In some cases, some have claimed victory for justice as the result of a vote or a poll. If Fifty point five percent of the voting or commenting population say something is right, some say it must be right. Right, that is, unless they disagree with it, in which case the fifty point five percent are stupid. In some cases, some have claimed victory because the courts have declared something right or wrong. More often than not, the reason for the celebration is that supposedly justice has come to all those poor, oppressed people who are their raison d'etre (reason to exist.)

         On the 15th, I shared another verse about not showing preference for the poor. I thought it was the only verse. Today I was simply looking for verses about justice. and found this one. We need justice, desperately, but I'm not sure that social justice is the same as justice. When social justice exercises its bias in favor of the poor, it shows itself to be unjust just as much as a bias against the poor is unjust.

         The reason following the crowd, relying on courts or showing favoritism to the poor are all flawed ways of finding justice is because they are all moving targets. Public opinion changes. Legal opinions change now because they follow public opinions. Who is considered poor and oppressed changes with public opinion. What is right cannot be a matter of feelings or fairness because these, too, change.

           Just because "everyone else" is going mad over current events doesn't mean you have to, too. Remember what your mom said about your friends jumping off bridges?