But social justice seems to be the demand that somehow or other through some coercive means we need to reduce the inequalities among people. And that rests on an understanding of justice that really reaches back historically to Karl Marx and other people before him, but as far as influence on 20th and early 21st century thought, Marx is probably the prime mover on that, so to speak. And that is a totally unbiblical understanding of justice. I've spent thousands of hours studying every single usage of the Hebrew and Greek terms for justice and the New Testament, carefully looking at the context of them. And that time has persuaded me that an appropriate definition of justice, biblically, is rendering impartially, we play no favorites, and proportionally, the punishment must fit the crime, the reward must fit the behavior, right?

To everyone who is due, that is, it's a matter of what is earned, not what is claimed, not even what we in compassion want to give, right? In accord with the righteous standard of God's moral law. That is, there really are objective criteria out there for what is due to such and such behavior. And we learn that from the moral law of God revealed in the scripture, especially the Ten Commandments. Now, what that means is that since people's behavior differs, the outcomes must also differ.

And In fact, in order to equalize the outcomes, we have to violate the criteria of justice, of partiality and proportionality. And so real justice is far from social justice, indeed, social justice is injustice.