Social Justice - Genesis - September 27th, 2026 (Sermon Transcript)

Well, last week, our focus was on God and his awesome and powerful and mysterious nature. As the Bible says, his ways are not our ways. His thoughts are not our thoughts.

So this often leads to questions and mysteries as we go through life as Christians. We know that God is acting in the world, right? God is doing things in our lives.

And the Bible teaches that literally everything that happens this next week, this next month, for the rest of your life, literally everything that happens will be the result of God's plan for your life.

But the hard thing is, is that God is not like us. He doesn't think the way that we think. And so when his plans are unfolding in our lives, we often struggle to understand the things that he does.

We have difficulty understanding why God allowed this to happen, or why this occurred, or why this person came into my life, or why that person's not in my life anymore.

We struggle to understand God and what he's doing because his ways are not our ways. His thoughts are not our thoughts. One verse, Deuteronomy 29, 29, says that the secret things belong to the Lord our God.

So I've got a mystery for you this morning. I think it's a pretty good one. Why didn't Jesus stay on earth to build his church?

After the resurrection, Jesus ascended back to heaven. But what if he had stayed? Why didn't God do it that way?

We know that he chose for his reasons to not do it that way, but if you think about it, for us, I think the way that we normally think, in our thoughts, in our ways, we would think, well, Jesus should have just stayed, right?

He could have, you know, taken up residence in Jerusalem, and everybody would have perfect proof of his resurrection, or Jesus could have stayed and traveled all around the world, doing miracles and preaching the gospel.

Seems like more people would have gotten saved, and God's kingdom would be growing much faster and much better. It sounds great to us, but Jesus had something else in mind.

2:46

Abrahamʼs Divine Partnership

Well, our passage this morning is Genesis 18, verses 16 through 21. And in many ways, I think it's the Old Testament version of what Jesus had in mind. It's like a preview of the New Testament plan, because as we know, Jesus did not stay on earth.

Instead, he invited his people into his plans for the world. He gave us a mission, he gave us his spirit, and he gave us authority and power, and then he ascended back to heaven so that we could work with him for his purposes.

So yes, Jesus could have stayed, but instead, he's sending us out to do the work with his power and with his spirit. And this morning, we're going to see God doing something very similar with Abraham.

And what you'll see is that God's plans and purposes are often surprising, and sometimes controversial. Please stand for the reading of God's word. I'll read the text for us, Genesis 18, verses 16 through 21.

Then the men set out from there, and they looked down towards Sodom. And Abraham went with them to set them on their way. The Lord said, Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do?

Seeing that Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him.

For I have chosen him, that he may command his children and his household after him, to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice so that the Lord may bring to Abraham what he has promised him.

Then the Lord said, Because the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is great and their sin is very grave, I will go down to see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry that has come to me. And if not, I will know.

This is the word of the Lord. Please be seated and join me as I pray for us. Father, I pray that you would illuminate your word so that we can understand it and believe it and live in light of it, God.

I pray that you would just draw us close to you, that you would give us wisdom and understanding, that you would just make these things clear for us, God, and help us to live accordingly. We pray in the name of Jesus. Amen.

Now, it's very easy to miss just how surprising this passage is. What God does here is truly unexpected, but you'll miss it if you're not paying attention to what happens right before this.

So we're going to go back to the beginning of Chapter 18 for a second. We went over this last week, but I'm just going to remind you and summarize it for you. At the beginning of Chapter 18, we see God and two angels take on human form.

So God and two angels take on human form, and then they come to Abraham's house. This is not expected, and Abraham is shocked by this. He sees God come to his house, and he literally runs out, and he throws himself on the ground bowing before God.

And you have to remember that Abraham is a great man. He is a wealthy and powerful and noble man. He has many servants, but before God, he is the servant.

Before God, he is utterly humbled into the dust. He literally bows face down in the dirt. And then he prepares a meal, because in his culture, if you had an honored guest come to your house, you would prepare them a meal.

And so we read throughout the earlier parts of chapter 18, he frantically begins to prepare the finest of food for God and these angels to eat. And the picture that you get through all this is of a man who recognizes the majesty and greatness of God.

And he responds accordingly. All throughout the first part of chapter 18, you are reminded of God's greatness and power. And then you get to verse 17, and the most unexpected thing happens.

This great and majestic God, holy and righteous and awesome, he decides to share his plans with Abraham. He decides to invite Abraham into his plans for the world.

And in many ways, it's like the CEO sharing the company's patent applications with the janitor. This is like the president inviting random tire salesman to the oval office to talk foreign policy.

It's like, who is Abraham to talk justice and righteousness with the almighty God? As great as Abraham is as a human being, he's just a human being.

What business does he have knowing the plans of the Lord, being invited to participate in God's work in the world? We read in verse 17, the Lord said, shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do?

Seeing that Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him. And what we learn very quickly is he asks that rhetorical question, shall I hide these things from Abraham?

And he decides not to hide his plans. He invites Abraham to see what he's about to do. He invites Abraham into this partnership with him.

What we've seen with Abraham and throughout the Book of Genesis is various people are connected to God or Abraham comes into this relationship with God where God calls him, God gives him these great promises, Abraham puts his faith in God, and God

declares him righteous. But it's one thing to be saved, it's one thing to have that sort of experience with God, but it's another thing altogether to enter into like a partnership or a friendship with God.

And in the Bible, this is how friendship with God works. Jesus talks about this in John chapter 15, and it's very interesting because Jesus does the same thing with us.

This partnership that Abraham's being invited into with God, we are invited into that same partnership. This is what Jesus said in John 15, 15. I want you to notice the parallels to our text as I read this.

Jesus said, this is the last discourse, the night of the last supper, the night before the crucifixion. He's speaking to the disciples, and he says this to them.

No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing, but I have called you friends. For all that I have heard from my father, I have made known to you.

You see, by telling Abraham what he was about to do in destroying Sodom and Gomorrah, God is establishing a friendship with him. God is inviting him into a new level of relationship.

10:36

Impact Through Obedience

Now, why would God do that? Why would God invite fallible, flawed, finite little beings like us into friendship with him? Is he bored?

Is he lonely? Well, we know from the Bible that a God exists in Trinity, meaning he has existed in relationship for all of eternity. He's not lonely.

He's not bored. He doesn't need our help. But we get some of the reasoning in verses 18 through 19.

Verse 18 says that Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him. Therefore, because of that fact, God wants Abraham to know his plans. Do you see the logic there?

The logic is this. God recognizes that Abraham is going to make an impact in the world. So God wants him to know how he thinks and operates.

God wants him to make the right kind of impact in the world. In verse 19, we get a little more insight into this, into this reasoning.

It says that God 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.

Abraham is going to have this impact in the world, and God wants him to have the right kind of impact. And the reality is, all of us are going to have an impact in the world. Every single one of us.

Do you have kids? If you have kids, then you are making an impact in the world. Do you have grandkids?

Then you are making an impact in the world. Do you have friends? Do you talk to people at church?

Do you interact with other human beings? Then you are making an impact in the world. And God designed it that way.

And he invites us into partnership with him so that we can have the right kind of impact. You see, God doesn't just save people so they can go to heaven when they die. That is one of the great myths of modern Christianity.

That the whole point is that you get saved so that you can go to heaven when you die. And as far as the time between now and then, well, just do your best to be nice to people. No, no, it's much, much more than that.

God saves people so they can live in a close relationship with him. And through that relationship, they can make the kind of impact in the world that God wants them to make. And you never know what kind of impact you're having.

When I was in high school, I played on the golf team, and golf takes a long time. So we would go out to play nine holes after school.

The matches were nine holes, and we'd partner up with a couple of guys from the opposing team and we'd all go play our round. And that gave us a lot of time to talk to other people.

And so I tried to always make it a point to share the gospel with the kids that I was playing against.

I played for a Christian high school, and we played a bunch of different kinds of high schools, and so we'd have all these non-Christian kids we were playing with, and so I would share the gospel with them.

And I remember one particular conversation, sharing the gospel with this kid, and the conversation didn't really seem to go anywhere. Did my best, tried to explain it to him.

He didn't seem very interested, and so we finished our match, and that was that, or at least it seemed that way. And then the next year, we played that team again.

And I wasn't there for that match, but later on, my teammates told me what had happened. That same kid came back, and he was looking for me. He was asking around, like, where's Conor?

I want to talk to him. And unfortunately, I wasn't there, and so he explained to my teammates that he had gotten saved.

And after our conversation, God had used that to bring him to Christ, and he got saved, and he was now a leader in his high school youth group, and he was on fire for the Lord.

And all of that, when I had thought that my conversation with him had failed to make an impact. And how many stories have you heard like that where you think that nothing really happened? You think that your efforts were in vain?

You think that you're not having an impact, but you might be completely wrong about the significance of your impact in the world. So here's the question that all of us need to answer this morning. What kind of impact are we having?

What kind of impact is God calling you to have? As I've been saying, what we see in our text is that God is calling us to have a very specific kind of impact.

Verse 19, God wants his people to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice. By doing righteousness and justice.

And that, in many ways, is why God is now inviting Abraham into his plans, because God is about to do righteousness and justice. In verse 20, we learn that the people of Sodom and Gomorrah have been crying out for justice.

We learn that their sin is out of control and it's an abomination to God. In verse 21, God speaks anthropomorphically in order to help Abraham understand justice.

If you haven't heard that term before, anthropomorphically means he's speaking as if he's a human, when obviously God is not really a human. So he describes like going down to Sodom and Gomorrah to check it out, to see if the reports are true.

Well, God obviously, he doesn't need to go down there to see, he sees everything, right? He already knows if the reports are true or not. So why is God saying that?

Why is God doing that? Well, it's because he's inviting Abraham in and he wants Abraham to know, to see clearly, that if he punishes Sodom and Gomorrah, it will be based on a thorough and direct knowledge of their wickedness.

And in chapter 19, we are gonna see that God does in fact punish Sodom and Gomorrah. He utterly annihilates those cities.

And he wants Abraham, he's inviting Abraham in to be a part of this whole process, so that Abraham can learn about righteousness and justice from God himself. That word righteousness generally means keeping the commandments of God.

So again, big picture, God's inviting Abraham in to a new level of relationship, a partnership with him, and he wants Abraham to do righteousness, to teach his kids to do righteousness, to teach his grandkids to do righteousness, and he wants

Abraham's descendants to become a people that do righteousness. And righteousness means keeping the commandments of God. This is what God's people are called to do.

So when you think about your impact in the world, you need to think first and foremost, am I keeping the commandments of God? Do not lie. Do not steal.

Do not covet. Do not be greedy. Do not gossip.

Do not get drunk. Love your neighbors, yourself. Love God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength.

Just to name a few, are you doing those things? That's where our impact as a Christian starts.

It's far too easy to get distracted with the fancy stuff, to think like, well, I've, you know, if in order to make an impact, I've got to go out and share the gospel with a bunch of people.

And I'm going to focus all of my attention and all of my efforts on that. And I'm going to do this amazing ministry stuff, and I'm going to tell the gospel to all these people.

Well, if you go and do that, but you failed to keep the basic commandments of God, you're not going to have the kind of impact that you think you're having.

You're going to end up like Ravi Zacharias, or any number of big name ministers who have been found out as frauds, who have been behind the scenes living in disobedience to God, and it's going to utterly destroy your impact in the world.

Real impact always starts with obedience, basic obedience to God. When you walk in obedience to those commandments, you'll impact the world in a certain way. When you teach your kids to obey those commandments, you'll extend your impact even further.

And for all the dads in the room, especially dads with little kids, that's your impact right there. That's priority number one. Obey and teach your kids to obey.

This is what it means to keep the way of the Lord. And the text shines some light here and shows us that this is how we bless the world. Look at verse 18.

This is how we bless the world. God had originally called Abraham to be a blessing to the world. And when you start to think about it, it makes total sense.

Everybody knows this. Everybody knows this or understands this intuitively. Imagine for a moment that we lived in the world, in a world where nobody ever lied.

Wouldn't that be nice? A world where literally everybody always told the truth all the time. Wouldn't that be great?

Imagine a world where people were always completely faithful to their husbands or wives. Imagine a world where there was no greed whatsoever. Imagine a world where there was no gossip, no injustice.

That would be incredible. I'm talking about a world where people obey the commandments of God. That'd be amazing, right?

Well, we as Christians have an opportunity to bless the world by obeying the commandments of God. We make the world a better place when we do that. That's the vision that God has for us.

21:39

Worldly Justice Critique

Another part of the vision that God has for us includes justice. Not just righteousness, but also justice. This includes being just people, fair people, doing just things and fighting for justice for the sake of others.

And the word justice here implies social justice. And I know that's a bit of a hot topic in our culture, social justice.

When I hear social justice, I think of like Black Lives Matter or something like that, and like 2020 and all the George Floyd riots and all of that stuff.

Or when I hear social justice, I think of so-called liberal Christians, people who want to claim the name of Christ, but they don't care about sin, they don't care about the gospel, they don't really believe the Bible.

They just want to do ministry to people who are oppressed, and say that Christianity is all about love and helping people who are oppressed, and that's what it's all about. I've known people who are like that.

So really, I think in my experience, Christians usually handle this one of two ways. They handle the issue of social justice in one of two ways, and neither of them are good. Some Christians really love the idea of justice and even social justice.

So as I was saying, they latch on to that, and they make being a Christian all about that.

So much so that they end up losing sight of the gospel, they lose sight of Jesus, and why he came to live the life we should have lived and die the death that we deserve to die.

I know one woman who is passionate about social justice issues, and she asked at one point, what is the purpose of the resurrection?

So this is a woman who is a Christian, she's married to a pastor, she's big into social justice issues, and she asked at one point, what is the point of the resurrection? Like, I don't get it. Why did Jesus have to rise from the dead?

Why does that matter? And she genuinely did get it. And at their church, they held seminars where everybody would come in and learn about their white privilege and how they as a church can heal the racial injustice and all of that kind of stuff.

But they had no idea what the point of the resurrection was. Some Christians go that route, and it's obviously very, very unhealthy. But we also have to acknowledge the fact that some Christians go to the other extreme.

They view social justice as just a bunch of garbage, and they completely ignore it all together. And they don't really care about widows. They don't really care about the fatherless.

They don't really fight for the oppressed. But here's the truth. The Bible commands Christians to participate in social justice.

But we would be utterly foolish to accept the world's definitions of social justice. We would be stupid if we just jumped on the justice bandwagon, the justice train of the world around us.

We have to recognize that the world that we live in is filled with fraudulent, fraudulent claims of justice. I did a little digging this week, and I looked into various justice organizations that are popular in our world today.

One of them is the Equal Justice Initiative. The Equal Justice Initiative. Apparently, their goal is to abolish the death penalty and confront the historical legacy of racial terror in our justice system.

Their founder, Brian Stevenson, says that the true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned. And there's always a bit of truth mixed with some lies.

That is a good measure of our character, how we treat the poor, the disfavored, and so forth. That is important. But he goes on to say, not just the poor and the disfavored, also the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned.

And I think the idea is that most racial minorities in America who are in prison, they are there because of racism. But that's simply not true. And how should you treat somebody who has been incarcerated for a crime?

Well, if they've been shown to be guilty, you should punish them. That's what justice is. And I'm afraid Bryan Stevenson does not understand that.

What should you do when somebody commits murder? You should condemn them and punish them accordingly. Sometimes people are condemned because they deserve it.

And they don't deserve compassion or empathy. They deserve justice. They deserve punishment.

In the Bible, for example, when people committed murder, they were put to death. And that's the very penalty that the Equal Justice Initiative is fighting to abolish.

So as Christians who know that we should care about justice, that we should fight for justice in this world, should we jump on board with the Equal Justice Initiative? Obviously not. What about the ACLU, another big justice organization in our world?

Well, let's think about this for a second. Some of the core causes of the ACLU include the right to abortion, protections for LGBTQ people, and the right for anyone to vote without identification. That's not justice.

That's foolishness and wickedness. Maybe the best example is the Lindsey Clancy case. Raise your hand if you know about the recent trial of Lindsey Clancy.

Anybody? I think just about everybody does, but I'm seeing a lot of hands not go up. So let me just talk about this for a second.

Because what I'm saying is we as Christians in this world, I've said this like five times, but I'll say it one more time, we've got to be involved in justice, pursuing justice in this world. But our world has no idea what justice really is.

We live in a culture, accepting Christians who have stayed faithful to God in his word, we live in a culture that abandoned God, abandoned the legacy of Christian values that they inherited, abandoned the truth of the Bible a good 50, 60, maybe even

70 years ago, our culture departed from that way. And so here we are 50 plus years later and what's happened. People abandoned all logical, rational foundations for morality and went off into the distance. And where are we now?

We are now at a place in our culture, in America today, where people are completely lost in darkness. People are completely, morally incapable of making like any kind of sound judgment. They do not understand what is good and what is bad.

The Bible says that they will call wrong right, and they will call right wrong. That's our world today. And I think the Lindsay Clancy case is an amazing example of this.

If you don't know, Lindsay Clancy was a young woman living on the East Coast who murdered her three children. She strangled them in her basement. And then she later went on to plead insanity to try to escape punishment for her crime.

It's just an utterly unthinkable act of evil.

Even if you're insane, that's still an evil thing to do, to murder your own children, to systematically strangle them over the course of 18 minutes, to send your husband out to run errands and take your children to the basement.

It's hard for me to even talk about. And strangle them one by one. And when your husband calls in the middle of it, you answer and pretend like everything's fine, and then you hang up and you continue to murder your kids.

And then she tried to commit suicide and failed. And then later on, she says that she was insane. And so she goes on trial just recently.

And the trial's all about whether she was insane at the time of the murders or not. And there's lots of evidence to say that she wasn't insane. I don't think she was.

And I think she is morally culpable for those crimes. But the crazy thing is, thousands of women came out to support Lindsey Clancy. They put on shirts.

They organized rallies. They went to support Lindsey Clancy. Even if you were certain that she was insane, why would you do that?

She murdered her kids. But these women somehow had gotten it into their minds that the system failed her. The men in her life failed her.

She didn't have enough support. And that's why all of that happened. And it was an issue of healthcare.

Sounds like abortion, right? It's an issue of healthcare. For Lindsey Clancy, she didn't get the healthcare she needed as a woman.

And so they went out there to fight for Lindsey Clancy, to stand in solidarity with her. And women would post videos on the internet holding their kids, crying, and they would say, me too, Lindsey. What are you trying to say?

That you want to murder your kids like she murdered her kids? What is going on? I understand being an advocate for mental health.

That's a legitimate thing. I understand making sure women get help when they have three kids, and they're struggling to handle all the duties of life on their own. That's a legitimate thing.

But rallying for a woman who murdered her kids, that's not justice. That's insanity. That is a world gone insane, where you can't in your head realize she murdered her three children.

And no matter what we say about health care, no matter what we say about mental health, or no matter what we say about supporting women, this is not the way to do it. Think about the kids. How about them?

But our world does not get it. That's what goes for justice in the world that we live in. But God's vision for his people is that we would make an impact for real justice, and goodness, and truth, and righteousness.

And the world has stolen this cause from us. It's all the non-Christians out there who think that they're really about justice. But we shouldn't give up and just say, well, all that justice stuff is a bunch of baloney.

We should take it back. This is what the Bible says about justice, Ephesians 5 verse 11. It says, take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them.

Instead expose them. So when a baby is murdered in the womb, because the mom found the child to be inconvenient, that's unjust. We should, we should call it as it is.

When the government takes money from people who work hard and gives it to Planned Parenthood against their will to pay for abortions, that's unjust. We are being forced to participate in the unfruitful works of darkness.

When somebody is denied access to opportunities at school or work just because of their race or gender, that is unjust.

Whether they are white or black, male or female, making decisions based on race or gender or sexual orientation, it's not only unjust, it's illegal. But we have to be wise enough to recognize all the garbage that comes along with this stuff.

If you think that white people and men can never be the victims of injustice, then you've bought into the lies of our culture. You've let the world define justice for you. We need to define justice on God's terms, not on the world's terms.

Isaiah 117 says to learn to do good, seek justice, correct oppression, bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow's cause. Part of our problem today is our inability to determine who is actually being oppressed.

In the world of Abraham and the world of Isaiah, all throughout the Bible, the fatherless and widows were the most helpless and oppressed people. They had fewer, if any, economic opportunities. They had very little status in society.

People would take advantage of them. And so the Bible, over and over and over again, says fight for those people. But it's not necessarily the widows and fatherless who are the most oppressed in our world today.

So we need to identify whoever it is that's the most oppressed, whoever it is who needs somebody to fight for justice on their behalf. We need to identify those people and do that for them. Sometimes they'll be fatherless, sometimes they won't.

Sometimes they'll be black, sometimes they'll be white, sometimes they'll be, you know, male, sometimes they'll be female. Christians need to be wise and discerning in these things.

36:31

Gospel Justice Mandate

So let me say it again. If you believe in the Bible, you have to believe in justice, and you have to believe in social justice. Sodom and Gomorrah is an example of social justice.

And that's something our world would find utterly absurd. Because do you know what happened in Sodom and Gomorrah? They were guilty of the sin of homosexuality.

And so God destroyed, utterly annihilated those people. Men, women, and children wiped the whole city out due to the sin of homosexuality. That's what the Bible holds up as an example of social justice.

And we're gonna talk a lot more about that in the next couple weeks, because that's what the passage is about in the next couple weeks. We're gonna talk about the justice of God annihilating a whole city, men, women, and children.

How could that be just? Well, we're gonna talk about that. We're gonna talk about the justice of God punishing people for practicing the sin of homosexuality.

That's not very popular in our culture, is it? But according to the Bible, that's justice. We don't have to accept how the world defines justice.

We can use our brains, we can read our Bibles, and we can discern for ourselves. God is calling us to fight for justice and to do righteousness. And this, in part, is how we bless the world as Christians.

This is something that I've been navigating in my own conscience, in my own life over the past few years, because over the past few years, I think along with everybody else, I've seen the world spiraling deeper and deeper into darkness and

wickedness. And things just seem to get worse and worse and worse and more and more absurd and outrageous. And is it my job as a Christian to talk about that?

Is it my job as a Christian to fight against injustice and darkness, or is it my job to just simply preach the gospel? And I'm becoming more and more convicted that it's my job to call out wickedness and to oppose wickedness.

It's my job to live in accordance with God's commandments, to teach my kids to do the same, to fight for justice, to call out wickedness, and in that way, I hope I can be a blessing to the world around me. But there's an even greater blessing.

So do justice, live righteously, and preach the gospel, because the gospel is the ultimate blessing we can bring to the world around us. As we've seen over and over again in the Book of Genesis, the ultimate end of all these things is Christ.

All of it is pointing forward ultimately towards Jesus. So absolutely obey the commandments, do justice, but that's just the appetizer. The meal is the gospel.

In our passage, we see God giving Abraham this commission to do justice and righteousness. But Abraham's commission ultimately reaches its culmination, its fruition in the great commission, the great commission of Christ to his people.

And so I'm going to close with that. Matthew 28 verses 19 through 20.

Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always to the end of the age. Amen.