A Debate (Part Two) - Justice or Fairness?

You may remember that in my last post I mentioned an attempt was made at distinguishing justice from fairness.

Now, when it comes to justice and fairness, I don't believe there is a difference. And there doesn't seem to be a distinction between the two in God's Word: different versions of the Bible translate the same Aramaic word as either "just" or "fair", implying that these words mean the same and are interchangeable. Similarly, the Oxford Thesaurus* list "just" and "fair" as synonyms for each other and the Oxford Dictionary* defines the word "just" as "right or fair; deserved".

Case closed. Yet there is still doubt as to God's true justice.

An example used in our Life Group session to explain God's justice was as follows:

"If you picture God as a parent (which He in fact is, in a supernatural, heavenly sense – something to ponder), at dinnertime He will stand with a big bowl of dessert and dish up equal amounts for each of His children."

Now, while I fully believe that God loves each of us equally, I do not agree with this analogy.

I know that we live in an imperfect world and we are not all going to get the same opportunities, talents or rewards. For that matter, we are not all going to experience the same challenges, setbacks or heartaches either.

But God does promise that we will never get more than we can handle (good – Matthew 25:29 & Luke 12:48 – or bad – 1 Corinthians 10:13).

God also gave us free will for us to make our own decisions and so much of what we experience is due to the choices made by ourselves and others.

God does not micro-manage our lives. He does not tell us where to work, who to be friends with or who to marry.

Going back to the example of earlier, God as a parent at dinnertime will hand the whole bowl of dessert over to His children and say, "Here you go, divide this up amongst yourselves and make sure you all get an equal amount".

Whether we listen to Him and share equally is up to us.

*Oxford University Press. 2007. Oxford Paperback Dictionary & Thesaurus. Oxford, Great Britain. 331, 502.

A Debate (Part One) - Blind or Blind?

So here's that post on the phenomenal Life Group discussion* I mentioned in my last post.


We started out with John 9:1-5, the account of Jesus healing a man who'd been born blind. The focus was supposed to be on the difference between the disciples' reaction to meeting the blind man and Jesus' reaction.


The disciples immediately assumed that the blind man was being punished for sin - his parents or his own - but Jesus, who for obvious reasons had a better understanding of God's true nature, said that "this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life".


At this point we all got side-tracked with a debate over the fairness of God. How can God be fair if He made this blind just so that His glory could be revealed?


(An assertion was made that there is a difference between fairness and justice – so that God could be just, but not fair, which is a whole other discussion about one's understanding of language and one's definition of "fairness" and "justice".)


But I believe that the crux of this debate boils down to a misinterpretation of Scripture:


After Jesus said that this had happened so that God's glory could be revealed, he began speaking about his own role, and the disciples' roles (indeed our roles, if we are followers of Christ), in doing what they'd been called to do.


This would suggest that when Jesus said, "this happened so that God's glory might be displayed," the "this" he was referring to was not, in fact, the man's blindness, but Jesus' actual encounter with the man.


The man was not made blind so that he could be healed and so reveal God's glory.


Jesus meeting and healing the blind man happened so that God's glory might be displayed.


The man being blind was merely a result of living in a fallen world that is imperfect and flawed. How many other blind people have there been on this earth that never got healed? Does that mean that God "made" them blind for nothing? Of all the blind people in this world, Jesus met this man and healed him. It was not his blindness that glorified God, but his healing.

*On a side note: using Twitter and Facebook gets you so addicted to certain things. I find myself wanting to "Like" or "ReTweet" every comment I see on the Web, and I totally wanted to #hashtag the #phenomenalLifeGroupDiscussion!

A Debate (Part Two) coming tomorrow.