Overtime: Know God? No Justice! with Pastor Clayton Tyner

All right.

Well, welcome to Overtime Episode Three.

My name is Clayton Tyner.

I'm the lead pastor at MetaCurch and the host of the Clayton Tyner podcast.

We are in a series at MetaCurch called No God, where we are asking the real questions of our faith, the questions that lie at the foundation of our belief, and we're having real conversations around them.

We just finished week three this last Sunday.

Over the last three weeks, we've tried to make the case for a God in week one, theism, a creator God who's spaceless, timeless, immaterial, all-powerful, personal, and perfectly moral.

In week two, we really looked at evidence for the resurrection of Jesus to see if the resurrection is in fact reasonable.

Because if Jesus really did walk out of that grave, then that gives evidence not just for a God, but for the God of the Bible and therefore the God of Christianity.

And then in week three, this Sunday, we looked at if God is good, why would he let bad things happen?

We have these beliefs and the characteristics of God, that he is all powerful and he is all good, that he is omnipotent, all-powerful, and omnibenevolent, all good, perfectly good, perfectly moral, perfectly loving.

And so if he's perfectly good and he is all powerful, then why can't those two things combine into a world where things are always good all the time?

Should he not have the power out of his goodness to make all things good all of the time?

Now, what we're doing in these overtimes is we are taking some of the content that ended up on the cutting room floor and uh just bringing it back up and adding to the conversation and trying to get lots and lots of content out there.

Now you can get fully caught up to our previous sermons and our previous overtimes anytime at metachurch.tv slash knowod.

That's www.metachurch.tv slash kn o w god.

Week three, we called no justice.

If God is good, why do bad things happen?

And these are one of those sermons.

This was one of those sermons that uh you don't really have to build a lot of tension in there.

I don't have to convince anybody that this is a problem because everyone is suffering.

And what's happened is in these arguments, these apologetic arguments where we're trying to defend our faith and where people who do not believe in Christianity or don't believe in God at all, like the new atheists, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris and Matt Dillahunty and others, these really, really brilliant guys who have brought in their presuppositions or their lived experiences and have looked at the data and have come to the conclusion there is no God.

These guys use the argument from suffering against God with greater efficacy than any other argument that they have because it's so visceral, it's so deeply felt.

And so what we have to have is a proper theodicy.

In theological terms, this is your defense for the goodness of God in a world of suffering.

It's your beliefs about God, evil, suffering, and pain in the world.

And I'm not going to go through this at length because I did that on Sunday.

You can watch that at metachurch.tv slash know God.

But we did look at a simple as I know how to put it, basically two-line theodicy.

And it goes like this rules establish relationship, and love requires freedom.

God created the world, and because God is love, that's what scripture tells us, he created the highest form of his creation, humanity, set us apart from the rest of creation in order to be in relationship with us.

And in order to have relationship, you have to have rules.

And that's because rules establish relationship and not just interpersonally, although it does interpersonally.

You have to have rules to set boundaries around a relationship, or you don't have a relationship.

But rules also just establish the relationship of how the natural laws work.

The rules of gravity establish how gravity works and interacts and reacts.

And the uh the rules of any kind of system or game establish the relationship between your action in that endeavor and the outcome.

The rules inside of your workplace will let you know how to be successful in your workplace.

The rules inside of a sporting event will let you know what actions you can take in that event in order to get the outcome of winning the game.

Rules establish relationship.

That's just the way the world works.

However, the atheist response will be well, why couldn't God have just created humanity to not break those rules?

And the reason is because that would be God taking away our natural freedom.

So God created us with contra causal free will.

That means that we get to make real decisions limited within the scope of what is possible for us.

And so the fact that I can't decide I want to fly and start flying doesn't mean that I have lost my free will.

It means that flying isn't an ontological or inherent reality inside of me.

However, if I was unable to choose to follow rules or not follow rules, then that would be limiting my free will.

And God did give us a libertarian, a libertarian free will, the ability to really choose in any given circumstance beyond a host of options.

And so we're not saying that we can choose to do the impossible.

And we're also not saying that over time your ability to choose cannot become limited by a causal chain of past choices.

So a good example would be someone who is an alcoholic, truly an alcoholic.

And while it is true that hypothetically they could choose to drink or not to drink, because of a causal chain, maybe of their own devices and maybe not, you know, maybe they were in utero and they had uh a mother who drank and they came out with this addiction hardwired in them.

I mean, there's all kinds of things that can happen, but there's a series of choices that over time will limit our choices and things like addictions.

But we do have choice, and choice matters.

And scripture tells us that God created us in his own image.

God is a creator and we are creators, we make things happen.

We have power with our words, with our minds.

We can think about our futures, we can create strategies, we can make things happen.

We are conscious creatures.

So rules establish relationship, and love requires freedom because God created us in love, he created us with freedom, including the freedom to break the rules that establish relationship.

And so God, who is the source of all that is good, had perfect relationship with his creation and with humanity, who he gave dominion over creation to.

And when we broke our relationship with God, it wasn't God walking out on us, it was us choosing to live apart from him.

And when create when creator, creation separated themselves from creator, uh the world fell into significant chaos and the suffering and pain that we see around us.

That is our simple theodicy.

It is why God is all good and all-loving and all-powerful, and bad things happen.

Because if God would have made us anything less than free, he wouldn't have created creatures, he would have created puppets, robots.

Uh, we would be living as slaves to God, not as children of God, hoping to be in relationship with God.

And so I go through that in a much more thorough sense in the sermon, if you want to look at that.

And the the reason that we call the weekend know justice is because this is the claim that is leveled against God in a world full of suffering, that God is violating justice by being all good and all powerful and still permitting pain, evil, and suffering in the world.

And so, what I want to do is I want to look at some of the ideas around justice that we didn't have time to get to.

First, we have to define it.

We did this in the sermon.

Justice is getting what you deserve and not getting what you do not deserve.

That's about as simple as it gets.

Justice is getting what you deserve.

If you get what you deserve, that is a just end.

And it's not getting what you do not deserve.

And so if you get punished for something you didn't do, that is unjust.

You should not get punished when you do not deserve to.

What that means is that justice can't really exist in a vacuum.

Justice has to be backed up by some kind of worldview.

And what we did on Sunday in the sermon is we looked at the four primary worldviews that all other uh nuanced worldviews are kind of subsumed under.

And that would be works-based religion, the karmic cycle, atheism, and Christianity.

And we saw which of these worldviews actually, when you follow it intellectually honest, honestly follow uh these worldviews to their conclusions, which of those can map out the kind of justice that we are looking for today?

And we found that truly, Christianity is the one worldview that can get us to the kind of justice that we're crying out for in our world today.

And when we look historically, we see that before Jesus, justice was based on a completely different foundation than what we are seeking to base it off of today.

And what we're watching happen in real time is a world that's crying out for the Jesus kind of justice, for an AD justice, the Jesus time period justice, are beginning to organize ourselves in society in a BC fashion, a before Christ.

And that's a real problem because without Jesus, there isn't the kind of justice we're looking for.

So let's unpack that a little bit.

To understand this, we have to talk about equity versus equality, equity versus equality.

For most of the American experiment, you have heard a lot about equality, um, that all men were created equal and with certain unalienable rights.

And if you notice something is happening in real time and it's it's such a small sleight of hand that you may not have caught it, we've stopped talking about equality and we've begun talking about equity.

And this can be confusing because people are using these words as if they're interchangeable and they're not.

Um, they do, well, I'll say this, they have historically had very different meanings, although even the standard definitions of equity are beginning to change.

They're really just defining it like the word equality has generally been defined.

But when we look at what these words have actually meant and how this actually played out, for all of human history, before Jesus, justice was based on equity.

And equity is justice based on extrinsic power.

Something that is extrinsic to you means that it is not inherent to you.

It develops outside of you.

It comes to you from the outside in, not from the inside out.

And so before Jesus, equity was decided, or justice was decided based on equity, which means it was based on power.

So whoever had the most stuff, whoever had the most money, whoever had the most land, whoever had the biggest army, whoever came from the right family, whoever was born into the right class, whoever had the skin color of the majority in that uh region or in that state, whoever had the most equity, equity is just really what you own.

You know, if you bought a$200,000 house and you've paid off 40 grand of it, then you have 40 grand in equity.

Or if you bought a$150,000 house five years ago and now it's worth$300,000, well, that's$150,000 in equity that you have in your home.

That's how much of your home that you own.

The other half is still owned by the bank.

Equity is how much stuff you have.

And so what you saw in an equity-based society is people fracturing and setting themselves apart based on their in-group, because your in-group, which is the people who number one, most importantly in the ancient world, look like you.

And then second to that, who think like you, whether that is politically or socially, and who live in close proximity to you, that is your in-group.

So you look like me and you think like me and you live near me.

And so we circle ourselves off and we have to protect our equity.

We have to protect what we have.

And so if we don't have the biggest army, we better have the biggest guns.

Uh, if we don't have the most land, we better have the most money.

And everything is based on equity.

And so this is how you segment and segregate.

And when you segment and segregate, then justice becomes based on equity.

And when you read about the ancient world before Jesus, when someone had more equity than you, it was seen as just for them to put you down.

It was seen as injust for them to help you up.

This is how upside down the world has become since Jesus.

The natural order of humanity was equity-based justice, where everyone segmented and segregated, and that's just how it worked.

If you were bigger and you were stronger, then you had the power, you were on top.

And if you were on top, it was actually seen as correct for you to hoard that power to yourself, to protect yourself at all costs, and really to just not care about anybody else who was in a lower place than you.

That was equity-based justice.

In this world, anyone who is marginalized, so if you were the minority race inside of a region or state, um, then you were just in trouble.

Um, more than likely, you were enslaved.

And slavery was the de facto way of life for basically every civilization of humanity throughout human history.

Uh, slavery isn't something that was invented by Americans or by people in the UK in the modern world.

Slavery was a part of life, and slavery took all kinds of different forms, and they had all kinds of different rules and the different regions that you can read about historically.

But slavery was an institution that is how the world ran.

Um, all of these things took thousands of years to begin to shift as the movement of Jesus began to grow and infiltrate, and as areas became Christianized, the way people thought about slaves, the way people thought about women.

In the ancient world, to be a woman was a very difficult place.

At best, you were a second-class citizen, and uh and more than likely you were seen more akin to property.

And we live in a world now where um, you know, we are fighting for equal rights, we are fighting for human rights, and things aren't perfect, they're far from it.

And yet, if you look within the scope of humanity, women are flourishing right now in the West in a way they have never done in all of human history.

You can't find, I mean, it's virtually non-existent where women were anything but at best second-class citizens.

And so if you were a minority in the population, if you were a woman, if you were born into a lower class, you were going to stay lower class.

Upward mobility didn't exist, it wasn't an idea back then, and that was seen as just.

This is how crazy it is.

And that's why remember, justice is getting what you deserve and not getting what you don't deserve.

And so, in a world that decides that what you deserve is based on equity, then if you're born lower class, then it is just for you to stay lower class.

If you live in privation, starving every day of your life, then that's what you get.

It's what you deserve.

If you're born as a woman and you're seen as an inferior sex, then that's just how it goes.

You're gonna get sold off to marry someone, you have no say in the matter, you're gonna stay at home, you're gonna have a bunch of kids.

If if if for some reason you cannot have kids, which is a very, very common and heartbreaking thing, then you're gonna be seen as worthless in this society and there's absolutely no understanding for it.

And then your husband will probably just go get another wife, and you'll just kind of be more like the maid.

And I mean, it was just it's unbelievable.

It was a barbaric world, and this is what the pre-Jesus world looked like, and it was a world based on equity.

And hold that thought because equity is what we've begun calling for again, and I don't think we understand exactly what we're saying.

Equity versus equality.

Equality is justice based not on something extrinsic and not based on your power or how much you can hang on to.

Equality is justice based on the intrinsic value of every person, the intrinsic value of every person.

We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men, and if this was written today, we would say all people are created equal.

They're endowed by a creator, by something outside of us, with certain unalienable rights, that there are rights that we have just because we are valuable as humans.

These rights aren't given to us by the state, they're not given to us by the government, they're not given to us by mandate, they're not given to us by force, they're given to us by God.

The rights like life, the right to be alive, the right of liberty, the right to be free, and the right to pursue happiness, which is an idea like upward mobility and being treated equally by social institutions and by society at large.

By the time 1776 came around and America began as this grand experiment, that idea was so ingrained in the hearts and minds of modern people that we believed those truths were self-evident.

And I love that statement.

And they seem self-evident to me, and they probably seem like self-evident truths to you.

But if they were self-evident, then why are there thousands and thousands of years of documented human history where no one saw those as self-evident?

The historian Tom Holland says that.

He says, for this to be uh self-evident truth is laughable to ancient people, right?

They would not have seen that.

And so what happens is in the scope of human history, Jesus comes and he stands.

If you just look at history, he stands as the catalyst for changing the foundation of justice from equity to the equality of all people in the whole scope of human history.

So everyone, everywhere, at all times throughout all of human history lives on the principle of equity.

If you have the most, you win.

If you don't have the most, it sucks to be you.

Your life is going to be unbelievably miserable.

You are going to be more than likely enslaved.

And if you are a woman, you are going to live in a nightmare for your entire life.

So that's history.

And then Jesus comes along.

And as the movement of Jesus grows after Jesus' resurrection, the apostles start the church and they spread the church across the known world, and the gospel of Jesus eventually spreads to the other side of the world.

It circles the globe.

And everywhere that has become Christianized over time has come more and more and more in alignment with the teachings of Jesus.

Now, sometimes this takes way too long.

I mean, how just embarrassing, frankly, uh, to write in 1776 the equality of all people endowed by their creator with these inalienable rights.

And to not actually have that check cashed, that's the metaphor that Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

used.

That the declaration wrote a check that it's time to cash for all people wasn't until the 1960s.

Way, way too long.

What is that, 190 years later?

And so it can take us some time, and we're going to talk about that at the end.

But it is Jesus, uniquely, uniquely Jesus, that brings us this idea of equality-based justice.

And what equality-based justice does is it moves from in-groups of people where we segment and segregate to justice actually being founded in every human individually.

And so it is justice per individual, not justice based on your group identity.

And this is what Christianity did.

The apostle Paul wrote in Galatians 3, there now is no Jew or Greek.

And by Greek, he means Gentile, no Jew or Gentile, which means non-Jew.

And the reason, if you're not familiar with the Bible, is that up until this point, the message of God has been carried by the Jewish people in the Old Testament, which is the Jewish scriptures.

And Paul is a Jew, and most of the early believers in Jesus were Jews.

And so he's saying this is no longer a Jewish thing.

Um, it's no longer Jew or Gentile, in other words, all people.

It's no longer slave or free, that's classism.

It's no longer male and female, that is sexism.

It is now all one.

He says we are all one, unified.

We are all equal, equality.

Not just because we are, we're all equal in Christ Jesus.

The foundation of the justice we're looking for, the right that we're looking for, started when Jesus hung on a cross, God in human flesh hung on a cross and died equally for all people in all places.

That is the bedrock principle.

And so Jesus, when he was on earth, he taught the great commandment.

And people began to pick up on this because Jesus was uh kind of like this itinerant preacher, this evangelist, and he would go all over.

And um, odds are he had a few sermons that he would preach over and over and over again.

And in these sermons, he would teach the great commandment, the greatest of all of the commandments.

In fact, he said that these commandments, which it's really two, summarized all of the law and all of the prophets.

That means all of the Old Testament of the Jewish scriptures.

The great commandment was to love God and To love your neighbor, to love God and to love your neighbor.

And the great commandment ends up becoming the great reversal of how we view justice and moved us from equity to equality.

And even the Jewish audiences that he was preaching to at that time, who clung to Judaism, who sought to follow the Jewish law given by God to Moses thousands of years earlier on Mount Sinai, even they had an equity-based mindset.

It was the Jewish people against the world.

They hated the Romans, they hated the Samaritans, they no longer saw themselves as the vehicle that God was going to use to bring revelation and salvation to all nations.

Instead, they just saw themselves as a one nation who needed to defend themselves from all others.

And Jesus says, Love God and love your neighbor.

And he keeps preaching that love God, love your neighbor.

And he goes to another town and says, Love God and love your neighbor.

And then people get wise and they say, Well, who's my neighbor?

And what they want to know is it's like, how many people exactly am I supposed to love here?

Because to a Jewish person, the neighbor was a fellow Jew.

That's what it meant.

So I have to love all of the people who are exactly like me, even the ones I don't really want to love.

And Jesus is like, You have no idea.

And so he tells a very famous parable, the parable of the Good Samaritan, and a Jewish traveler is going down to Jericho.

And on the way, he gets robbed and uh and beaten almost to death.

And he's laying on the side of the road, and um a priest comes down, and that's a Jewish religious leader and passes by on the other side.

Doesn't help who everyone knows should be his neighbor, right?

Love God, love your neighbor.

And then uh a Levite comes, and the Levite is kind of like the cultural standard, right?

So the Levites descended all the way from Aaron, who is Moses' brother in the Old Testament and uh the very first high priest.

And so the Levite comes, and that's definitely his neighbor, right?

He is the cultural standard for the Jewish people, and he goes to the other side of the road and passes by.

And then Jesus just heightens the tension.

I mean, people are on edge, they're getting frustrated, they can't believe that he's gonna do this, he's gonna bring this up.

He says, then a Samaritan goes down the road.

Now the Jewish people hated the Samaritans.

Uh the racism wasn't even really a content, uh, didn't really a concept because everyone just hated everyone who wasn't them.

Like everyone was racist, and when everyone's racist, kind of no one's racist.

So it's like, but it was racism.

That's what was in their heart.

They hated them, hated them.

They called them half-breeds and dogs and terrible things.

And Jesus says, the Samaritan sees him and he stops and he bandages his wounds, and he puts the Jewish man who he hates on his donkey and he walks, and he takes him to a hotel, and the Samaritan pays his own money to put him up.

And then he says, Let him stay here, take care of him, and I'll come back to check on him.

It's like above and beyond, right?

Jesus is just just he's got that open wound of racism, and he is just pushing on it and pushing on it.

And at the end, he says, So who acted more like his neighbor?

The Great Commandment Commandment was the great reversal.

Jesus said, The question isn't who's my neighbor, it's who's whose neighbor am I?

Who am I going after?

Jesus started a movement that almost immediately started making plans to branch out and become this cross-section of nations.

He started a movement where there was an organizing principle that was greater even than your skin color, which was the greatest organizing principle for humanity for all of human history.

Now there was a higher purpose, a higher mission, a higher vision.

And the fact that when these apostles who started the church went out and started preaching the good news of Jesus, and non-Jewish people believed in Jesus, and then they saw evidence of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God who is in them as believers in Jesus, also in the Gentiles.

They knew once and for all that every single person has inherent value, worth, and dignity because Jesus died for every single person.

The great commandment was the great reversal.

Jesus is the catalyst.

He is that moment at his cross and his resurrection, the movement that he started, that we began to understand equality as this intrinsic value inside of people.

And that changed what we believe people deserve, not based on their group identity, but based on the fact that they were created by a God who loved them.

And if they were created by the same God that created me, and if they were died for by the same savior who died for me, then that changes drastically what I believe people do and do not deserve.

And what people do and do not deserve is how we define justice.

And so what you are seeing right now, which is really interesting, is we have quit talking as much about equality and we've begin, we've begun talking more about equity.

And that can be a real problem because equality is based on the individual level and the intrinsic worth, the ontological worth, the worth and dignity that you're born with as a part of God's creation.

And it changes it to equity.

And what equity does is it's about who has what.

And who has what has to be decided by external factors.

And so you find things to identify people, and we go right back to where we've always been in all of human history, which is the easiest way to find your in-group is to look at the skin color that looks like yours.

And the easiest way to find your in-group is to look at the political persuasions that match yours.

And the easiest way to find your in-group is to find the lifestyle choices that look like yours.

And so we actually begin to cut down on the value of things like diversity and inclusivity, and instead of the equal value of all people, regardless of their political persuasion, regardless of their skin color, uh, regardless of their worldview, background, where they're from.

Instead, we start looking at things like equity.

And, you know, just watch because it's happening right now.

And at the same time that we're beginning to reorganize ourselves among lines of equity, we are marching with burdens on our hearts for things that we see as unjust.

And so I just want you to try to see the picture of us marching in the streets and crying out on our platforms and social media, saying that we want justice, and justice comes from Jesus, and Jesus moved the world from equity to equality.

And once we have equality of all souls before God, all of a sudden we have a real foundation for calling for true justice.

And yet we're wanting true justice, Jesus justice, and we're organizing ourselves in a before Jesus pattern.

We're organizing ourselves for equity.

So Jesus changed the world.

Um, you know, I I had this thought when Easter came up this year.

I thought every everyone, uh, at least everyone in the West or in the in the everyone in the modern world, you know, who is living in developed countries, everyone should celebrate Easter.

Atheists should should celebrate Easter, uh, because Easter is the moment that changed the world forever.

Because if it wasn't for Easter, if Jesus just would have died, then his view of the world, the view of equality, not equity, his view would have died with him.

Really, some of the facts we're about to talk about, I think, are some of the greatest evidences that Jesus actually rose from the dead, because Jesus' view of the world became the dominant view of the modernized world.

And we don't even see it.

We don't see that we are standing on a foundation of justice that was built by Jesus.

And so on Easter, man, like we should all celebrate.

Even if you don't believe, you should celebrate because you wouldn't have the same world that we have today.

Uh, where do we see evidence of Jesus' form of justice in our world today?

I want to go through uh a few different things, a few different areas that we see this, um, that undeniably, even that this isn't a theological view, although my theology will be present in everything I talk about.

This is a historical view of the world.

Here are some things that would not exist today if it were not for Jesus.

Number one is humility.

Uh, humility would exist, um, but it wouldn't be seen the same way that it is seen today.

John Dixon, he put together a research team, and their goal was to look at all of the writings of all of ancient history, right?

So just the small task of looking at all writings that have been preserved throughout all ancient history.

And what they were looking for were uh patterns of vices and virtues.

And they actually had an easier time than you might imagine because one of the things that uh princes and kings and emperors and philosophers like to do, it's very popular at the time, is they would write out their ideas of virtue.

And so they would make a list of their top virtues, their like top 10 list or top hundred list and their vices.

And this was still happening even in like the 18th century.

Benjamin Franklin would do this.

You know, he he would write out the things that he thought were the most important characteristics to have, virtues and the most important things to avoid, vices.

And what they found is that throughout all of the ancient writings, humility was always seen as a vice.

Vice is the bad one, if you're keeping score here.

Uh, if you look at the Latin, it is humilitas.

And humilitas means to be made low.

Um, to be humble was a vice.

It meant to be embarrassed.

That's kind of hard to even wrap our minds around because if you had a hundred people at random, a hundred of your friends, make a list of the top 10 most important virtues that we should have as humans.

Odds are maybe even a hundred out of a hundred would put humility somewhere on that list.

And yet, it was always a vice.

It was to be made low.

And of course it was, because everyone was living in an equity-based society.

If you were made low, it meant you didn't measure up, you didn't have enough.

Humility was always, always, always bad until Jesus.

Jesus, in his famous Sermon on the Mount, he went through what's called the Beatitudes, where he said, uh, you know, blessed are the meek, blessed are the peacekeepers.

And then he said something that would have stopped everyone in their tracks.

We read it and it seemed obvious to us.

The hundreds or thousands of people gathered on the mount with Jesus that day, they would have been like, I have some questions here.

Jesus said, Blessed are the humble.

No, no, no, no, not blessed, miserable are the humble, embarrassed are the humble, uh, regretful are the humble.

Jesus said, No.

Blessed are the humble.

Jesus, the night before his crucifixion, gathered all of his disciples together, and uh he sat them all down, and then Jesus would have taken off his upper tunic, which is something you don't do.

It's a way to disgrace yourself, especially as the rabbi, the teacher, the leader of the bunch.

And then he knelt down in front of them, which is like disgrace number two, and then he got the water that the servants at that time would use to wash the feet of people before they entered the main room of the house.

And Jesus began to wash the feet of his disciples.

Jesus made himself low physically and socially.

He got to the apostle Peter, and Peter was like, Heck no, man, like you will not.

If anything, I'll wash your feet.

I'm lower than you.

Uh, you're not washing mine.

You're Jesus.

You do miracles, you show up, and thousands of people show up.

You ride into Jerusalem, and people break off palm branches and throw their coats in front of your donkey.

You're not getting low, I'll get low.

And Jesus said, This is the new way.

The way up is down.

In Philippians, the apostle Paul writes, and he says that Jesus, who is seated at the right hand of God and clothed in all glory and honor, is in that position because he humbled himself and became obedient to death, even death on a cross.

The apostle Paul said he did not see the fact that he was God as something to be leveraged against people.

He didn't see that he had the highest position of any human who's ever walked the earth.

He didn't see the height of his power as something to be leveraged against people.

Instead, he humbled himself, he made himself low.

And as John Dixon and his team are investigating, trying to investigate every ancient writing, what they see is for the first time in the Christian scriptures, the word humility is being used as a virtue, and not just any virtue, the preeminent virtue.

Blessed are the humble.

Jesus exalted through humility, made high, the name above all names, the king of all the kings, because he was willing to get low.

We hold humility as perhaps the preeminent virtue in our society today.

We're amazed by acts of genuine humility because we see it as such an amazing characteristic to have.

And yet, if we were living in pre-Jesus justice, not only would humility not be something to be applauded, it would be something that would bring disgrace.

And this is really, really important because to understand Jesus justice, equality-based justice, requires humility.

Everywhere that you stand in the dominant position in society and don't use that, leverage that against those who are not in that position, requires humility.

It requires breaking the idea of equity-based justice.

Every time you are in a higher social standing or in a higher tax bracket, or just happen to be in the majority of thought or opinion or skin color.

And what Jesus taught was instead of using that and leveraging it against people, because if they are humilitas, if they've been made low, then that's what they get.

Pre-Jesus, that's justice.

They should stay right there.

Anything else would be unjust.

Jesus's form of justice says if you have an advantage, it is your job as an ambassador of Jesus to lower yourself and to use whatever advantages that you have on behalf of those who are vulnerable.

That is a massive, massive, massive shift.

And it's the beginning of getting us to the kind of justice that we want to see in our world today.

Here are some other evidences that we see of Jesus' form of justice in our world.

Um, without Jesus, there would be no science.

Um before Jesus, people uh just kind of had a very um mysterious or religious view of everything, of volcanoes, of lightning, of stars, of everything.

And uh what Jesus came and showed is that God is actually deeply interested in his creation because Jesus, as God, became a part of his creation, he humbled himself and uh science started um through Christianity.

And uh, Dr.

Paul Davies, who is an atheist, he said this all the early scientists, such as Newton, were religious in one way or another.

They saw their science as a means of uncovering traces of God's handiwork in the universe.

And so not only did they see science as something that was worth pursuing and formulating, because they believed that God had actually created all of this.

And if God created it, then we could investigate it and see traces of God in it.

But they use that science for the benefit of others around them.

Another thing that we wouldn't see if it wasn't for Jesus' form of justice are hospitals.

Saint uh Basil or Basil of Caesarea founded the first hospital in 396 AD to be the hands of God to the sick and the hurting.

Now, there would be some form of very ancient physicians within different people groups, but their job really was just to focus on their people and really the upper class of people.

If you were lower class and you were sick or hurting or injured, then you just stayed sick or hurting or injured and probably died.

But Christians began to take a vested interest in the communities around them.

They would even travel as missionaries and set up hospitals to serve people who didn't look like them or think like them or act like them, talk like them.

All of the things that are equity-based, they would break through because they saw the equality of all people before God.

So hospitals began popping up and they were started by Christians.

And we see still see evidence of this.

I mean, just pay attention to the majority of large hospitals' names, like Mount Sinai, right?

That uh Mount Sinai is where God spoke to Moses.

We see Methodist hospitals and Baptist hospitals and Presbyterian hospitals.

We see all of these things that were started by the Christians in order to take the science that was begun by Christians and began to discover things like modern medicine and different treatments and ways to actually help people and heal people, not just assume that every malady or illness was some kind of evil spirit, but they're actual scientific solutions to things.

And so they could take that science and they could start hospitals, and they would start these hospitals to bring people in and to speak into them and to help them and to help those who are down and out and to give care to people who are on the bottom end of society.

So these are the kind of things that Christians started doing.

Uh, the other thing that Christianity began to shape was education.

Most of the ancient documents that we have, the reason they weren't lost to history is because uh Christians, especially the early monks, would take these, preserve them, and protect them across time.

We also have the universities that began to spring up.

The early universities in London, as well as the first 120 120 universities in America, were all started by Christians.

And they believed what Jesus taught and what the Bible teaches, um, that we should pursue knowledge, that we should be learned, that we should have reason.

And not only that, but the universities were seen as a way to shape their Christian beliefs as well.

And uh, of course, that is something that most of our universities have kind of given up on.

But um universities were started primarily by Christians, and the value of education and the ideas of science and the other disciplines that our world can be understood, that there are natural laws and order, that because we believe there was a designer to this world, that there is design in this world.

And then maybe uh most pressing based on the conversation of justice is without Jesus in his form of justice, we would not have human rights.

Human rights developed out of the idea of equality of souls before God.

Friedrich Nietzsche, who is kind of the grandfather of modern atheism, said this.

Another Christian concept, no less crazy, is the concept of the equality of souls before God.

He goes on to say this concept, the concept of equality of souls before God, this concept furnishes the prototype of all theories of equal rights.

All theories of equal rights, human rights, women's rights, minority rights, all rights that we are looking for and searching for, that are burdens on our hearts, that we are marching for and crying out for, all of them are furnished, are found in the concept that is uniquely Christian, which is the equality of souls before God.

You see, before Jesus, who came down and claimed to be God, called his own death and resurrection and pulled it off.

Before Jesus, Rome had their gods, and Greece had their gods, and Egypt had their gods, and everyone was kind of okay with like this is our God.

It's not your God, it's just our God.

And the Romans, they have their pantheon of gods, but those aren't our gods, those are their gods.

And Jesus said, No, no, no.

I'm the God of all gods, like all your made-up gods, um, those are localized to you and they help you have some superstitions that give some order to your to your world.

I'm the god of all of it, the whole world, which means I'm the god of all people, which is why I died for all people and I create all people.

And because I'm the God of all, all have equality.

It is a uniquely Christian idea.

And so what we see early in the Jesus movement is we see the dignity and worth of women elevated.

We see women who are given significant roles inside of some of the churches, we see women inside the teachings of scripture, we see women who were followers and disciples of Jesus.

Early Christianity was so attractive to women that some in the ancient world called it a women's cult.

Women flocked to the teachings of Jesus because it was the one place where they could go and actually hear that they had value before God, that they weren't somehow uh inferior beings to the men who dominated their society.

So women's rights were birthed out of Jesus, his view of humanity and his movement that he started.

Now, look, I understand that many Christians, even in the modern world, have not done a good job.

And in fact, many have done a horrible job of actually living this out.

But just because somebody doesn't make it from the teachings of Jesus and the implications of his movement to the application of it, doesn't mean that the movement itself is flawed.

It means that flawed People are not executing on that movement correctly.

So women's rights, um, the rights of children and of babies.

Uh, see what equality does, and equality which requires humility, a uniquely Christian concept, is again, it says whoever has the most power is responsible, just like Jesus did, to humble ourselves and to use that power for those who are actually most vulnerable in life.

And no one is more vulnerable than children and babies.

One of the ways that Christianity spread in Rome was due to their response to Roman exposure.

Rome was far from the only place that had this law.

Um, many places did, uh, but Rome had an exposure law.

And what it said is you couldn't kill your kids, right?

So you couldn't like, you know, you give birth to your child and then you whatever, actively kill it.

But what you could do is you could go to the edge of town and abandon your three-week old and let it die from exposure, and you wouldn't be guilty of murder, but you wouldn't have to deal with putting up with that kid.

And I could be wrong, but I believe in Rome, the actual rule, and this just highlights women's place in society back then, was that you could do that with your daughters, but not with your sons.

And so what Christians started doing when Christianity came to Rome, the gospel of Jesus came to Rome, and people began to believe and follow Jesus, is they would go to the edge of town and find these babies left uh to be killed through exposure, and they would adopt them.

And these are um some of them Roman citizens, many of them not, who are adopting Roman citizens into their lives, taking care of them and raising them up in the church.

And it's like, look, you can talk all day long about how your faith makes you different, but it is your actions that prove it.

It's what James says.

He says, faith without works is useless, it's dead.

It means nothing.

It does nothing to justify your faith to the outside world.

And so um, we see orphanages that came out of Christianity.

Um this idea that there were many, many kids who needed help.

And in America, especially uh post-Civil War, when there were many parents killed, you saw orphanages beginning to start.

And those orphanages were started by Christians, and they were started by churches because they believed that there were these children who were more vulnerable, who had less power.

And it is the job in a just society that is based on equality to come down, see the dignity, worth, and value of those orphans, and take them in and provide a place for them.

And we have a bad taste in our mouth for orphanages, and we largely have gotten rid of orphanages.

We now have, you know, children's shelter and we try to push adoption.

And of course, this is important to me as someone who has, you know, adopted kids.

And so um, this is something that is is new.

The rights of children.

If you look in the ancient world, children didn't have rights, and more than that, there are many, many societies across the ancient world who sacrificed children to appease their gods and make their lives as adults better.

They would sacrifice, not like a few people would sacrifice children, like there would be mass slaughter of children.

This is one of the things that's happening in the story of Abraham and Isaac, a very confusing biblical story.

I just read it in the Jesus Storybook Bible, which is an incredible, incredible thing to read to your kids.

I just read the story of God telling Abraham he had to sacrifice his one and only child.

And uh, and so, you know, Abraham takes Isaac up the mountain and he places him on the altar and he gets ready to kill him, and God stops him.

And then God provides a ram.

And there is the scapegoat, right?

There's the replacement.

Um, and they they sacrifice the animal, which was customary.

And one of the things that God was doing is he was highlighting the difference between the movement he was going to start through Abraham and all of the movements around him, all of the religions around him, all of the nations around him, because they all sacrificed children.

And that's not what you do.

In an equity-based society, you sacrifice the vulnerable for the sake of the powerful.

In an equality, Jesus-based justice, the powerful sacrifice for the vulnerable.

That's a massive, massive difference.

That's why they made hospitals, that's why they pursued the sciences to make the world make sense and help the people around them.

That's why they started orphanages.

It's why they rose up the dignity, value, and worth of people.

In the pre-Jesus world, peaceful diversity across races was virtually non-existence until cultures were Christianized.

And when you go to cultures that have not been Christianized, which doesn't mean that everyone living there is Christian, it means everyone there is, whether they know it or not or like it or not, holding on to Christian values as a huge part of their worldview, you will still find that this peaceful diversity doesn't happen.

We now see diversity.

The vast majority of people in the West see diversity not just as something to tolerate, but as something that is a significant good.

It's a significant advantage that we actually need diversity, that it makes all of us better.

We all get to learn from each other, we all get to share our lives and our worldviews that didn't exist before Jesus.

So we have women's rights and children's rights and the rights of minorities, the rights of people who are uh are immigrants coming into a new place.

Just didn't exist.

Some of these things uh showed early signs in Judaism, um, but nothing like we saw with Jesus and the movement that he started.

And so here's the challenge.

The challenge for Christians is to traverse this giant chasm between the truth of Jesus and the application of that truth.

And I say this all the time at MetaCurch, but the grand experiment of whether or not millions and millions of Christians can sit in churches on Sunday and get good information, and that will change the world, that experiment has failed spectacularly.

What will actually change the world is what the early followers of Jesus did.

They didn't just hear the truths of Jesus, but they went out and they did them.

They applied that truth.

There's a massive gap between what the movement of Jesus both teaches and implies, and the application of those truths into our real world.

The application of humility to actually lower ourselves to the benefit of others, the application of truly seeing the equality of all people.

There's nothing easier than equity-based worldviews.

There's nothing easier than getting around a bunch of people who look just like you and think just like you and talk just like you and grew up just like you.

That's easy.

That's what everyone has done forever.

But what changed the world and led to more human flourishing and to the picking up and lifting up of the dignity and worth of value and value of the marginalized and most vulnerable in our world.

What did that was the equality of all people.

And that starts and is founded with Jesus.

And if we're going to remove Jesus from the equation, we will go back to equity.

We're already, we're a post-Christian United States.

We're already walking back towards the very thing that divided and destroyed the world in the first place.

And so listen, if you're listening to this and you're not a believer, I hope, I hope you can see the value that Jesus and his teachings bring to things.

And if you are a believer, it is it is just like imperative for us to begin to understand this.

It is imperative for us to quit to try and break out of an equity-based mindset.

It's imperative for us to understand that following Jesus is doing the hard work of humility and justice.

And justice isn't always easy to put down in a few bullet points and to blast all over your social media.

It's about making conscious decisions day after day to try and follow Jesus, to live like Jesus, and to love like Jesus.

And when you see what he did and what his movement started and the way that it changed the world forever, we embrace it to such a degree that we think those truths are self-evident.

And if you think that, read history.

Find out that for the rest of human history, it was a brutal and divided world.

And Jesus, his movement, his love and his teachings, it brought the world together.

And together we are better.

It's how the world was created to be.

It's what heaven will look like.

And so it is to our great advantage to wake up and realize that while the world fights for equity, we better fight for equality.

And if we can do that, then we can make the kind of difference that the early Christians made.

This week we talked about justice.

No justice.

If God is good, why do bad things happen?

Bad things happen because God loved us enough to create us free.

And in our freedom, we broke the tie to all that is good in this world.

Our world is in chaos, it is full of suffering, it is divided along lines of equity.

And yet Jesus, God in human flesh, came to this earth to start a movement to regain what the world was meant to be, a place of equality of souls before God.

Let's remember that.

Let's live that out.

Hope this is helpful to you.

Again, you can catch up fully on the series we're in at metachurch.tv slash know God.

Make sure you are subscribed to the MetaCurch YouTube channel that you're following MetaCurch on Instagram and on Facebook.

You can also subscribe to our audio podcast.

You can subscribe to the Clayton Tyner podcast, where this is also coming out uh on YouTube or audio podcast subscriptions.

I just appreciate all of you who are listening and following along.

I hope it is helpful to you.

We're going to continue this series for three more weeks.

If you are in the San Antonio area, I would love for you to come out to MetaCurch.

We meet at 1207 Richland Hills Drive.

It's right off of 151 in Petrenko, or you can just throw MetaCurch into Google Maps and you should be able to find us, no problem.

I love you guys.

I hope to see you next time on Overtime.