Healing The Wounds Of Injustice – Part 3

Review

We began to break down the title: Healing the Wounds of Injustice.

Key Ideas:

• Injustice requires that you respond to it with a healed soul.
• Addressing the external effects of injustice does not necessarily heal the internal effects of injustice.
• When your soul is wounded, you can be the beneficiary of decades of progress, but still feel defeated.
• When your soul is wounded you can experience a victory but lack the capacity to enjoy it.
• This does not mean we should stop addressing the practice and effects of injustice
• We just need to understand that (three things)
  • There is no singular political or economic action that will heal our wounds.
  • Legislative and monetary responses can only ever be settlements.
  • A settlement is an incomplete healing.

The God Cure

When our soul is wounded, we must turn to God.

Justice, A Natural Desire

Psalm 43:1(ESV) – 1 Vindicate me, O God, and defend my cause against an ungodly people, from the deceitful and unjust man deliver me!

But God, Why?

Psalm 43:2 (ESV) – 2 For you are the God in whom I take refuge; why have you rejected me? Why do I go about mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?

• • 1 Peter 5:8 (ESV): 8 Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.
  • Genesis 3:4–5 (ESV): 4 But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. 5 For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

I Never Thought of It Like That

Psalm 43:3 (ESV) – 3 Send out your light and your truth; let them lead me; let them bring me to your holy hill and to your dwelling!

• • Ephesians 1:16–18 (ESV): 16 I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers, 17 that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, 18 having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints,
    • • You are not a causality of history, politics and economics.
      • Ephesians 1:3–5 (ESV) – ³ Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, ⁴ even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love ⁵ he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will,

What meaning will you assign to the tragedies and traumas in your life? Here are some possibilities:

Romans 8:18 (ESV) – ¹⁸ For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.

Pain is not your whole story.

Pain always has a narrow vision and will insist that its version of your life is the correct one.

Acts 17:26–27 (ESV) – ²⁶ And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, ²⁷ that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us,

Romans 8:28 (ESV) – ²⁸ And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.

I Command My Soul

Psalm 43:4-5 (ESV) – 4 Then I will go to the altar of God, to God my exceeding joy, and I will praise you with the lyre, O God, my God. 5 Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God.

© Joshua D. Smith, Ph.D., 2023