WOKE SOCIAL JUSTICE…. WHAT IS IT? WHY IS IT DANGEROUS?

Woke Social justice is this idea that certain groups of people due to race or gender or sexual preference or economic status or personal choices, personal ideology, have been and still are abused by our society. That calls for a realignment in our society because that’s unjust. So we need social justice. We need to adjust our society so that people of all races, all genders, all sexual preferences, and all economic status, and all personal ideologies are all treated equally. In particular, there is a concern for those that are weak, those that have been and still are oppressed by those in power.

We understand all of those social inequities do exist, they’ve always existed. Even our Lord Jesus said, “The poor you’ll always have with you.” It is the nature of life in a fallen world that it’s never going to be perfect. No government will ever dispense justice perfectly, it’s not possible in a fallen world. There will be difficulties, there will be challenges. “As sparks fly upward, so man is born unto trouble,” says the Bible. You’ll never be in a perfect world, a just world, a righteous world, until Christ comes and sets up His kingdom. But what is happening is this understanding of the dispossessed or the oppressed or those who have been treated in some ways unjustly because of one of these things that we mention are now being defined as a kind of victim class. They are victims of societal injustice.

And the victim class keeps growing larger and larger and larger. Every time I turn around there’s a new class of victims. The latest one that I’ve heard is what’s called Christian privilege. If you are a Christian you are a part of a privileged class that has been for centuries oppressing non-Christians. Non-Christians have become victims then of Christians.

This is a new victim class. Anyone who is offended by someone’s words or someone’s looks or someone’s actions or someone’s clothing or someone’s opinion can designate that offence as a microaggression, and they can claim that they’re being victimized by that microaggression, victimized by offensive words, which become labeled as hate speech. This dominates university campuses in a massive way. They whole culture is rushing into victim status. Everybody wants to find victim status in some way, because only victims are empowered in the culture, only victims have moral authority. If you’re not a victim you have no moral authority. So everybody’s got to find a victim status.

Am I surprised at this? Not at all, not in the least. It is the most natural thing for sinners to designate themselves as victims. This is the default position of all fallen human beings. It’s the most natural thing for us to do, blame someone else for our condition, blame someone else for our issues, blame someone else for our troubles. This is exactly what happened in the very beginning.

If you go back to Genesis chapter 3, mentioned this last week, I’ll just reiterate it. The Lord confronts Eve who sinned. And what does Eve say? “The serpent deceived me, and I ate. Not me, a talking snake deceived me, and I ate.” And the man, when God confronted him, Genesis 3:12, “The woman You gave me to be with me, she gave me from the tree, and I ate.”

Only two people existed, both of them blamed someone else. It wasn’t either of them, it was really God. “God, I don’t know anything about creation, but You made a talking snake; it’s Your fault. And then You made a woman, and that’s Your fault.” I went to sleep single and woke up married!This is the sinner’s default position. Sinners most naturally blame someone else, and ultimately blame their circumstances. And since God is the sovereign over all of history, they blame God.

People believe that they are good, but other people mess them up. You have to be a victim, because sinners need to pass blame off, because it has a superficial way of salving their guilty conscience. So they hold tightly to the deception that they are good, but someone bad influenced them, or some bad group influenced them, or some oppressive race, or all men, or all heterosexual people, or all rich people, or whatever.

Here’s the problem with letting sinners think that way. You’re aiding and abetting their disavowal of their sinfulness. This is why it assaults the gospel, because that’s the entry point of the gospel. You don’t come to the gospel until you have come to the full realization that you are the reason you have problems, that you are who you are, the race you are, the gender you are, and even the economic status you are, because God providentially put you there. And the reason you have problems there is because not only are there sinners all around you, but you’re a sinner of equal guilt.

The problem with letting people redefine themselves as victims is they disavow responsibility for their own sins. People don’t come to true salvation. I say that again: they don’t come to true salvation until they realize that salvation is about being delivered from their sins.

Now I understand that this generation of evangelicals has truncated the gospel in really serious ways by saying, “The gospel is designed to make you happy,” or, “The gospel is designed to make you feel better about yourself,” or, “The gospel is designed to give you purpose in your life.”

No, the gospel is designed to save you from your sins, which will put you in hell forever. That’s what the gospel is designed to do. It is not designed to tweak your life and make you more successful or more prosperous; that is a lie. It is designed to rescue you from hell and to take you to heavenly glory.

If we justify the idea that people are victims and then doubly justify their bitterness and anger over being victims, we are allowing them to push their sin away onto someone else.

To do that is to agree with the sinner’s deluded comfort, that he or she is a victim, “Somebody did something to me,” or, “Some group did something to me,” or, “The government did something to me,” or, “My school did something to me,” or, “The world did something to me.” I’ve heard it so many times.

If that is true, and I’m not responsible for my sin, and God rules the worlds, then God got me in this mess. And why would I ever go to that God to get me out of it when He got me into it? If God is at all responsible for the mess that I’m in, then why would I go to Him? He’s already demonstrated His injustice. Why would I look to Him as a Savior?

So conceding to sinners that they are victims is a very dangerous thing to do. And I’m not saying that they aren’t, in a human sense, fighting in a very tough, fallen world; we all are. But when it comes down to sin, each of us is personally responsible for our sins and the complicated mess that they make out of our lives.

The conversion of sinners depends on their recognition that they are not victims of someone but responsible for their own sin and to repent. John Macarthur.