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Courageous Justice

By S. George Thomas

The day he read about President Lincoln’s emancipation of the slaves in elementary school, Gary Haugen knew he wanted to become a lawyer. Then, when he was in junior high, he picked up a Reader’s Digest biography about Martin Luther King, Jr. and quickly became obsessed with finding out all he could about the Civil-Rights Movement. After high school, Gary studied at Harvard where he became convinced that out of all the religions and faiths out there, Christianity offered the clearest answers on how to live life justly.

After graduating, he served as an intern at the National Initiative for Reconciliation, a church-based organization in South Africa dedicated to ending apartheid. During his time there, Gary talked with several pastors who had been beaten and thrown into jail for speaking out about injustice. As he spent time with them, he said, “What struck me the most about these pastors was their surprising absence of fear. They just did the right thing because they actually believed that what Jesus said was true. And I found out that when I acted as if I believed what Jesus said was true, I, too, lived without fear.”

When he returned to the States, Gary enrolled in law school at the University of Chicago and then went on to work as a trial attorney in the civil-rights division at the US Department of Justice. He met his wife, Jan, while she was working as a staff assistant at a law firm, and after marriage, quickly settled into the routine of his new life. Soon, Gary’s primary concerns consisted of taking care of his pregnant wife, trading in his car for a station wagon and figuring out how to keep the attention of the sixth-grade boys in his Sunday School class. But then the UN contacted him and asked him to head up their field investigation into the genocide in Rwanda.

Gary hopped on a plane and headed to Rwanda to look into the atrocities that had recently taken place there. He talked to a father who was forced to watch as his three small children were hacked to death by machetes. He visited a church piled high with the charred bodies of those who had come seeking sanctuary but instead met their deaths. And while digging through a mass grave full of rotting corpses, he rolled back the decaying body of a woman only to find her baby lying dead beneath her.

Gary spent six weeks gathering evidence for the UN so they could set up a tribunal to prosecute the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide. By the time he returned home to the US, he was completely sickened by all he had seen and heard. While sitting in church one Sunday, Gary began to think about how injustice is running rampant in the world today. He realized that although there were several great organizations like World Vision and the Salvation Army that focused on sheltering the homeless and feeding the hungry, he couldn’t think of a single Christian organization solely dedicated to carrying out God’s call for justice in the world.

Over the next few days, Gary spent all of his spare time extensively studying the Bible to find out what it had to say about God’s view of justice. He concluded that while Christ expects all who follow Him to pray for victims of cruelty and injustice, He wants us to do more. He also calls us to help rescue them. Gary said: “The God I read about in the Bible isn’t a God who simply offers sympathy and best wishes. This is a God who wants evildoers brought to account and vulnerable people protected—here and now!”

That Friday, Gary quit his job at the Department of Justice. Three days later, he launched the International Justice Mission, a Bible-based human rights agency that secures justice for victims of slavery, sexual exploitation and other forms of violent oppression. Today, 13 years later, the International Justice Mission employs more than 300 Christian attorneys, criminal investigators, social workers and advocates who tirelessly fight on behalf of innocent victims of slavery, trafficking and injustice around the world.

When the Bible speaks of injustice, it’s not talking about those times when you’re at the grocery store and the woman ahead of you goes through the express checkout line with 13 items instead of 10. The biblical concept of justice goes well beyond our courts of law and notions of fairness; it extends into our everyday lives. Whereas we tend to speak of “getting justice,” the Bible speaks of “doing justice” (Psalm 82:3, Proverbs 12:3).

God is passionate about justice. Listen to His words: Do not pervert justice (Leviticus 19:15). Follow justice and justice alone (Deuteronomy 16:20). Cursed is the man who withholds justice (Deuteronomy 27:19). Blessed are they who maintain justice, who constantly do what is right (Psalm 106:3). Evil men do not understand justice, but those who seek the Lord understand it fully (Proverbs 28:5). The Lord is a God of justice (Isaiah 30:18). I, the Lord, love justice (Isaiah 61:8).

If God is so passionate about justice, shouldn’t we be?

The book of Amos gives us a little insight into how God feels when we don’t incorporate justice into our lives. Speaking to the children of Israel, God says, “Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps. But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream” (Amos 5:23–24). Here you get a sense of God’s anger and broken heart at these people who were singing all the right songs and doing all the right things when they came to worship in the Temple, yet their lives weren’t matching up—they weren’t living out God’s justice. They failed to see that caring for the broken, the oppressed and those on the fringes of society cannot be separated from our worship of God.

Injustice is running rampant around us. As God’s agents of change here on earth, we cannot afford to sit idly by. Micah 6:8 says, “He has shown you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” There are several ways you can help to carry out God’s passion for justice: You can pray for individuals who are enslaved, wrongfully imprisoned and trapped by human trafficking. You can make personal appeals to the government or corporate officials. You can volunteer your time and services or donate money to organizations that are combating injustice and evil in the world.

Ask God today to give you His passion for justice and to show you what you can do to play your part in fighting the evil of injustice in the world today.

Memory Verse

He has shown all you people what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. Micah 6:8 (TNIV)