What If Salvation Was Never About a Ticket to Heaven?
You prayed the prayer. You got the ticket stamped. So why does Monday feel so empty? A lot of people who grew up in church know this quiet exhaustion. The faith got reduced to a list of things you do not do. Do not cuss. Do not drink. Do not watch the wrong movie. Stay clean enough to keep your spot in heaven. On episode 213 of the podcast, Daron sat down with author Wayne Jacobsen to ask a question that rattles that whole framework. What if the point was never the afterlife? What if it was always about right now?
The one word that changed how Wayne reads the whole Bible
Wayne’s new book, Just Love, makes a bold claim right in its subtitle: how one mistranslated word distorted the gospel. The word is righteousness. Wayne and his co-author Toby argue that the Greek word behind it, dikaiosyne, gets translated as justice in nearly every other text from that era, including Plato’s Republic. Their case is that putting justice back in changes the weight of almost every verse where righteousness appears. Instead of a faith built around personal piety and sin management, you get a faith built around living rightly with the people around you. It is a heavy idea, and Wayne is the first to say you should be skeptical of anyone who wants to move a word that load-bearing. That is exactly why he and Toby spend the book showing their work.
Love that fills you, then spills out as justice
Here is where it gets practical. Wayne is not handing you a new set of rules to perform. His point is the opposite. Justice is the fruit of a life that has been filled up by the love of God, not a task you grind out on your own. When you actually experience how deeply the Father loves you, you start to see other people differently. You cannot look down on them. You cannot exploit the deal. As Wayne’s co-author puts it, love fulfills the law because it fills us. So the first step is not a three-point plan. It is learning to recognize the love of God in your everyday life and letting it sink in until it reshapes how you treat your spouse, your neighbor, and the stranger you used to walk past. Want to keep wrestling with this one? Reach out anytime at daron@daronearlewine.com.
Episode Summary:
What if a single mistranslated word quietly bent the way the church has understood the gospel for 500 years? Most of us were handed a faith built on personal piety, sin management, and a ticket out of hell, and then left wondering what to actually do on Monday.
In this conversation, author and former pastor Wayne Jacobsen sits down with Daron Earlewine to unpack his new book Just Love and the claim at the center of it: the Greek word we translate “righteousness” was translated “justice” everywhere else. Daron and Wayne explore what changes when love, not performance, becomes the source of transformation, and how living loved produces real justice toward the people around you.
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
⚡️ How one Greek word came to be translated “righteousness” instead of “justice,” and why that single shift reframes nearly every verse where the word appears.
⚡️ Why salvation was never meant to be amnesty for personal sin, but a doorway into the Father’s love that changes you from the inside out.
⚡️ How being filled with God’s love makes you a giver of life instead of a seeker of it, so justice becomes fruit rather than religious work.
Connect with Daron on Social Media:
If this episode hit you in the messy middle, share it with someone who needs the reminder, leave a comment with where you’re feeling stuck, and hit subscribe so you don’t miss Part 2.
Links to the Daron Earlewine Podcast
YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Libsyn
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Wayne: Generosity is one of the ways we counteract injustice. Being loved is not “then I should go do these things.” Love makes me see people differently. And when I see them differently, I can’t help but respond. It’s not fair for me to have medical care for my children and grandchildren and have a friend who comes over to my house once a week who can’t afford medical care and doesn’t have it. It’s unfair for me not to help with his medical bills. I want to. Now yes, I would love for government to fix that so I don’t have any responsibility. That’s often why we want government to fix these things. Instead, no, it’s asking me to live in a different way. And love makes that fun, not onerous.
Daron: Created on purpose and for purpose. Hey, welcome back to the Daron Earlewine Podcast. I am so excited about this episode. I think I say that every episode, but I think that’s a good thing. We’d probably have to stop the podcast, Coop, if we ever started one with no motivation. But I’m very excited about this one. I get a chance to sit down with someone who has changed my life over the past 20 years in my understanding of the love of God in so many different ways. And it’s an unbelievable honor that I think, Wayne, you’d let me call you a friend at this point. We spent time with my parents a couple of years ago and took a three or four mile walk in the frigid morning air of Indiana. I’m just so grateful, Wayne, to have you back on the podcast.
Wayne: It’s great to see you again, Daron. Thanks for having me.
Daron: Wayne Jacobsen, you have done many things. You’ve written tons of books. He Loves Me was the first book of yours I found that absolutely began to reshape my understanding of God’s love. We were talking off camera before this. Then I found a teaching series you did called The Jesus Lens. Is that still on your website, Wayne?
Wayne: It still is, yeah.
Daron: What’s the website for a listener?
Wayne: lifestream.org.
Daron: lifestream.org. If you’re looking for something to completely reshape the way you read the Bible, the way you understand the New Testament and the Old Testament, go check out The Jesus Lens. After that, Wayne, I’ve read just about everything you’ve put out. And you just came out with a brand new book called Just Love. I’m sitting at my son’s baseball game with my parents and my mom says, “Have you heard about Wayne’s new book?” I said, “What? He’s got a new book?” She said, “Yes.” So over a baseball game, my mom did her best to explain the concept of Just Love. She hadn’t read it yet, you hadn’t released it yet. She just heard you talk about it on your podcast, The God Journey. And she got close. I’m not throwing stones at my mom, but as I read the book I understood why it was a difficult concept, especially if you’ve grown up going to church your whole life and been in the Scriptures your whole life. What you and Toby, your co-author, began to explore has seismic impact on people’s understanding of God, of righteousness, of justice. The book is called Just Love, which gets right to the point. But it’s a heavy theological, biblical deep dive. I’m glad you went with a short title, because you couldn’t have captured the journey you take the reader through. Talk to us about the book and how it came to be.
Wayne: The subtitle draws people into it: how one mistranslated word distorted the gospel. That’s where we want to take people. This came out of the blue for me. I had just finished a book called It’s Time, Letters to the Bride of Christ at the End of the Age. I didn’t even get time to unpack that before I got a very strange email from South Africa. A guy tells me, “I want to share something with you that I can’t find anybody who will really listen to me about.” His opening statement was, “The word righteousness is not in the Bible.” I go, okay, this one’s a kook. I hear a lot of kooks from time to time. But as I began to read what he was saying, he wasn’t saying it’s not in the Bible we have, because all of our Bibles contain the word. It’s one of those anchoring words of the Christian faith. The preoccupation with righteousness. “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things will be added to you.” So I’m going through the Scriptures in my head, writing him back, “I don’t know what you’re saying.” But what he was unpacking was that it’s a mistranslation. In no other Greek text of the day, when the Bible was originally written, do we translate this word as righteousness. The word comes out as justice in every other non-biblical text of the day. The one he anchored in most was Plato’s Republic, which is about the just man living in a just society with just laws and just leaders. This is Toby, my co-author. He was trying to read it in the original Greek and it made no sense, because the word dikaiosynē, the Greek word we all translate righteousness, he kept translating as righteousness and it made no sense. So he looked at other translations and realized everyone else was translating it justice. Every other language translation of the Bible uses their word for justice. They don’t have a word like we do for righteousness. As I explored that, I realized what he was talking about is how love has been teaching me to live for the last 25 years. Suddenly Scripture made a whole lot more sense if we could move the word righteousness out of there, which preoccupied us with personal piety and sin management, instead of the justice that love produces in our hearts through the work of Christ.
Daron: As my mom tried to explain it to me a couple of weeks before the book came out, I found myself wrestling with the idea before I’d even read any of it. It was almost like I was arguing with the theological police in my own head. Like, I don’t know who this guy is, I trust Wayne, but who’s this other guy in the mix? I don’t know if we can mess with that. That can’t be the case. I’m sure you’ve already had pushback. What is it in us that creates that? “I have to defend this” or “this can’t be true,” even though as I read the book, I’m thinking this opens me up to understand the love of the Father and my role in the kingdom tenfold. Why is it so hard for us to let go of an old paradigm?
Wayne: It’s not just an old paradigm. We’ve used righteousness, along with forgiveness and justification, to negotiate a sense of standing with God, with Jesus accomplishing it on the cross. So in one sense we think, “Am I righteous enough?” We worry about our sin, we pray confession. On the other hand, we have 500 years of the Reformation teaching us our righteousness is what Jesus declares over us when we get saved. So I don’t have to be righteous, he gives me that righteousness. How we’ve negotiated this word has bedrocked so much of Christianity. So when you talk about moving a word like that, we ought to be skeptical. We ought to be suspicious, because this is an easy thing for someone to drag in here and take us astray. So we tried to be careful to draw the lines and show how it got mistranslated. It wasn’t anyone’s malicious intent. Although the Catholic Bible has justice, because the Protestants were translating this word as righteousness, one of the Catholic writers said, “You’re changing the very nature of the gospel by changing that word to righteousness instead of justice.” So we were warned 500 years ago. But by then Martin Luther and some of Calvin’s ideas had taken hold. “Well, we’ve taken care of righteousness. Jesus accomplished it for us, so we don’t have to worry about it.” But then we’re conflicted about how sanctification happens. How does transformation happen? If I’m already declared righteous, then I have amnesty, I’m going to get into heaven without anything. So how do I have the motivation to let godliness appear in my life? That’s the conflict in most Christian traditions. Is it works if we try? Is it being a couch potato if we don’t try? And our best righteousness always fails. That’s what Luther was trying to deal with. Trying to be righteous doesn’t work, so we do need some way Jesus resolved that on the cross so we don’t have to worry about it. But when it’s justice, it changes the nature of almost every Scripture where we find righteousness.
Daron: For so many Christians it’s like, “Oh, the whole point was Jesus died to give me the ticket.” My ticket’s been stamped, righteous, so when I die I get to go to heaven. That must have been the main thing Jesus was after. Then for so many believers it’s like, “Okay, that gives me peace and hope. But then what do I do on Monday?” The process is over. I don’t know how to make walking in the love of Jesus practical. If the whole point was the afterlife, I don’t know what my purpose is now. It becomes so trivial. Okay, so now the point is I try not to cuss, I don’t drink or smoke, no R-rated movies. Growing up in a very legalistic background like I did, your life becomes trying to not do bad stuff, or at least nothing bad enough to lose heaven. It can feel like a hopeless purposelessness. And then it collapses on itself into spiritual narcissism if we’re not careful.
Wayne: That’s very insightful, Daron, because that was the same conflict I had. How much of this walking with God do I need to do to stay in his favor? If it’s not about heaven or hell anymore, then I just want to be a good Christian. So I’m given things I should do, shouldn’t do, should think, shouldn’t think, and I find myself powerless against those things. We are powerless in the self-effort work of righteousness. So we default back to, “Well, I hope God’s covering it the best he can,” or we get frustrated with the whole thing. A lot of deconstruction is people frustrated with a religious faith that doesn’t work for them. But the invitation of salvation, as Paul talks about, is to rescue us from the kingdom of darkness and let us live in a kingdom of light. The purpose was not eternity. The purpose was right here, right now. John 3:16 talks about us perishing. We’re perishing right here, right now in the power of sin and darkness and in the way we treat each other. That’s why our religious communities often aren’t any different than the world’s, because we just resolved salvation. Here’s how Toby says it, which I love. Salvation was about rescuing us from the narcissism of our own flesh so we could live freely in the love of God. We missed that because we wanted the get-out-of-hell-free card. That’s all I was looking for. And evangelism was always based on that. “You want to die and go to hell and burn forever?” We distorted the gospel because we made it about righteousness and eternity instead of about freedom in the present.
Daron: Two quotes I pulled from the book that I loved. “What if we had grown up in a faith focused on love and justice instead of personal piety and religious performance?” And, “God invites us to exchange love, to experience love, not as a reward for change, but as the very source of change.” They jumped off the page. How would modern Christianity look if the whole time we had said this is about love and justice instead of personal piety and religious performance?
Wayne: According to Jesus, the whole world would know who he is and who we are as his followers. The one charge he gave his disciples was love one another as I have loved you. So it begins with the love God gives us. When we talk about switching righteousness for justice, it’s a justice born of love. Justice is not the goal. It’s the fruit of a life lived in love. Salvation is not “Am I righteous enough to get into heaven, did I jump through the right hoops?” Salvation is, “Am I coming to know how deeply loved I am by God?” If I’m coming to know that I’m loved and I learn to live in that space, it would be very different than how we’ve taught people. This is not the theology of love. It’s the experience of love in the presence of God in your life, even when you’re failing and struggling. That’s what people needed. If we taught people how to live in love, they would know how to treat each other. Our religious communities wouldn’t be political, fighting over power and who gets to choose the worship leader or the color of the carpet. It would be people who in honor prefer one another, because Jesus has settled in me everything I need. So I don’t need to get it from you. That’s the kind of people I’ve been fortunate to hang out with over the last 20 years after writing He Loves Me and watching people go on that journey of living loved. Being with those people is low maintenance. It’s fun. No one’s fighting for a power position. No one’s trying to make an income off other people. It’s amazing what would have been true if love had been at the center of our faith instead of fear, which is really what salvation has mostly been about. It’s resolving the fear and shame of “I know I’m not a good person.” Instead of being preoccupied there, if they had been growing in love, they would be free of a lot of those things, because love rewrites God’s justice in our hearts, not on the outside.
One thing we want to say, because justice is not a great word, particularly among conservative Christians these days. The social justice talk has made us skittish about the word. Or we’re so focused on the legal application of justice, where someone gets their child murdered and the murderer gets sentenced and we say they finally got justice. We see justice as vengeance.
Daron: I want to interrupt you there. When I was reading the first couple of chapters, I was out mowing and listening. You made the point that so often our only imagination for justice is legal and usually cloaked in vengeance. I found myself wrestling with that emotion. If I get the justice of God, my brain immediately goes to, “You’re getting the wrath, the punishment, the vengeance of God.” That took me a couple of weeks, and I’m still asking God to help me reimagine it. You guys did a great job constructing that. But my only imagination for justice was legal and vengeful, which is not what God is trying to say and not what Jesus was teaching or living.
Wayne: It’s not. And yet that’s the way it has been taught for 2,000 years. The justice of God is something we fear. We talk about God’s judgment. The basis of justice and judgment is God setting things right. I want God’s justice in my heart. I want you to set things right. I am powerless in sin, powerless in these appetites and desires I’ve struggled with on my own. I need your justice to make right in me. The word I think people would wrap their hearts around better is the word just. When we think about a just God, if we set aside the judgment side, “he’s just” means what? He has integrity. He’s inside the truth. He’s merciful. He’s kind. When we think of the people in our life we’d call a just man or a just woman, we mean they’re honest, you can trust them, they’re not going to abuse or misuse you, they care about things being right between us. We sold an RV recently. We bought one, did some travel, and Sara was done with it, so we sold it. As I’m writing this book while we’re selling it, I’m thinking, here’s what justice is. I don’t want maximum dollar for me. I want to find a buyer and a price where it’s a blessing to him and a blessing to us, where we find what’s right, not how I can exploit the situation. The flesh has us exploiting almost every situation for our own gain, and we even call it business tactics instead of living a just life that’s fair to my neighbors, not lying, not deceptive, not exploiting. That to me is the heart of “just.” Micah talks about what God requires of us, to do justice, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. To do justly. That’s the word we need to recover. A just man or a just woman is much different than getting justice for my hurt. I had a conversation yesterday where we said, if we just took the word fairness for justice, we all know when we’re being unfairly treated. We feel it viscerally when somebody lies to us or cheats us or betrays us. But we don’t always recognize when we’re being unjust to people around us. We don’t recognize it when we benefit from it. So learning to walk in justness is as attractive as it can be. That’s the kind of person I want to be.
Daron: One of the quotes from the book. “Justice is relational and communal. It has to do with integrity and fairness in relationship. It is not something you can practice on a desert island. When we made salvation about qualifying for heaven, many lost the passion to embrace his love and transform here and become the kind of people who reflect his glory on earth.” I was reading this morning. I’m doing a training course in January with Jamie Winship and his identity exchange ministry, so I have four books to read. One of them is by Richard Rohr. He’s unpacking the idea that we’ve seen sin so much as what I do and my struggle in my own personal piety, but we’ve lost what Paul talks about, the principalities and powers of the age, the devil’s involvement in this fallen world. As I was reading this morning, I was connecting it to our conversation. When our whole focus is that God is caught up on us being perfect in our own performance, we miss, especially when we benefit from injustice, how the community or city or country I live in is involved in injustice that hurts other people. Do I see my role as a follower of Christ that I have a role to play? I can’t practice this life of love and Jesus on a desert island. When I’m benefiting from injustice, I go, “Oh, that’s the policies and the politics, and God just really wants to make sure I make it into heaven and don’t do bad things.” But if I step into it and say, “No, I’ve been transformed by the renewing of my mind and by the love of Jesus so that I can become an instrument of his justice, his love, his fairness, his compassion.” So many of us are still caught in an imaginative application where I’m just going to do my best to be a good Christian on my own personal desert island, and I miss the invitation of what it means to seek the kingdom in every sphere of my life. How do we begin to expand that, Wayne?
Wayne: I think love has to teach us. The one thing we didn’t want this book to do was make people think, “Now I’ve got to be preoccupied with justice. How do I do justice?” And now we’re back into religious work again. What we hope, on the back end of the book after we get past the translation error and reconsider what salvation looks like, is to ask how justice gets written on our hearts. Take the Ten Commandments. The law was God’s desire to teach us how to honor him for who he really is and to honor the people we live beside. That was the whole context of the law. We just couldn’t keep it. As Toby says, and I love this, the first nine commandments forbid an action. The tenth commandment forbids a desire. You shall not covet. Not killing, not stealing, okay, I try to do those. But not covet? How can I not? That’s what Paul says in Romans 7. He couldn’t stop coveting. Even the focus on not coveting produced coveting of every kind. So what Jesus comes to do, he says in the Sermon on the Mount, “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the Pharisees.” That’s always the Scripture where I go, I don’t know what to do with this. I don’t know how my righteousness would ever exceed theirs. And Jesus said don’t think I’ve come to abolish the law, I’ve come to fulfill it, and if you teach against even one aspect of the law you have no part in the kingdom. You read that as a product of the Reformation in the 21st century and you don’t know what to do with the passage. But if he says, “Unless your justice exceeds that of the Pharisees,” I’d put in there your sense of justice. Here were the most righteous people on the planet in Jesus’ day, going to murder the most innocent human being who ever lived by defrauding him, lying about him, exploiting him, and killing him. They had no sense of justice for all their righteousness. And that’s true of many Christians I know today. All the piety and righteousness doesn’t lead us to a greater sense of justice for people around us. When love gets into us and we realize how God sees me, I begin to see people differently. I begin to see them as worthy of love and worthy of justice. If you’re a white male in the Western world, you swim in injustice. You just do. You have privileges other people don’t have. Even when it gets challenged and women or other racial groups begin to get power, the white male freaks out. “You can’t take power away from me to help somebody else.” No sense of fairness that says, okay, that person gets treated differently in the world, so what do I do about that? Do I go to DC and try to change the laws? I don’t right now, because I don’t feel I have the power to do that. But when I begin to live in justice and become aware of people around me who aren’t being treated equally, I can speak up for them. We have a project in Kenya. We’ve helped a lot of people because we’re convinced that putting resources in the developing world is a way to counteract injustice. Capitalism is not a great way to distribute resources to people who lack them. It puts it in the hands of a few who get an opulent lifestyle. Generosity is one of the ways we counteract injustice in the world. Being loved is not “then I should go do these things.” Love makes me see people differently, and when I see them differently, I can’t help but respond. It’s not fair for me to have medical care for my children and grandchildren and have a friend who can’t afford it. It’s unfair for me not to help with his medical bills. I want to. Now, I’d love for government to fix that so I don’t have any responsibility. That’s often why we want government to fix these things. Instead, no, it’s asking me to live in a different way. And love makes that fun, not onerous.
Daron: Sorry for the interruption in the podcast, but I wanted to take this moment to invite you into something. If you’ve ever been in a place where you felt stuck, like you’re spinning your wheels, thinking “there’s got to be more for me,” that feeling is right. You do need to discover your purpose. And I want to help be a guide for you to step into who God created you to be. That’s the purpose and design of what we do with Rogue Collective Coaching. So if you’re curious, or if you know it’s time to take action, here’s your call to action. Go to RogueCollectiveCoaching.com. Click the button that says book a discovery call. Jump on a 30 minute conversation with me. We’ll talk about where you are, and whether Rogue Collective Coaching is your next step to becoming who you were born to be. RogueCollectiveCoaching.com, book a discovery call. Can’t wait to chat with you. Let’s get back to the episode.
After you say something like that, I feel like the listener and I need a good ten minute pause just to wrestle with it. This is why we have Selah in the Scriptures. That’s what the psalmist is doing. Selah. You just can’t move on from that. What it makes us struggle with, Wayne, is this. If I’m having an emotional, visceral reaction against the idea of justice and a just responsibility of fairness, rather than it being the golden rule, the golden life of treating others how I would want to be treated, if I’m having a negative reaction against that, it invites me to explore: do I really understand and have I really experienced the love of God?
Wayne: That would be powerful. That would be a great place to start.
Daron: Not as an indictment, not as condemnation, but as an invitation from God. “I want you to understand, you have to experience my love.” When I’m stuck in the old translation of righteousness, it’s almost like I’ve already received it, so why do I need more of it now? I experienced God’s love when he forgave me and I got salvation. I’ve got my golden ticket, so I know God loves me, and I’ll just wait until I die and hope it works out. Rather than, no, the invitation here is to be yoked with Christ, to walk in love with him and be as he was on this earth. For that I need an ocean full of an experience in his love, day in and day out. And that gives me practical steps.
Wayne: That’s probably why Jesus was big on “abide in me as I abide in you,” because without it you can do nothing. To me that’s the beauty of this. Romans 3:21 says, “But now a righteousness of God has been revealed apart from the law,” which sounds like more work. But what he’s really saying is now a justice of God has been revealed apart from law. If people hearing this are saying, “I would love to live that kind of just life,” well, that’s been revealed apart from law. So it’s not getting a standard of justice from Wayne and Toby that I’m going to live up to. It’s just what you said, the golden life. If I began to think, “I want to treat this person the way I would want them to treat me,” and that goes to everybody, not just other Christians. I want to treat their philosophy the same way I want my faith to be respected by them. That changes the nature of our conversations. Jesus said, “We’re going to take all the law off. I’m going to fulfill that so I can come inside you.” One of my favorite lines in the book is Toby’s. “Love fulfills the law because it fills us.” When I’m full on the inside, there’s nobody I want to defraud or take advantage of. There’s no privilege I want to use for myself at someone else’s expense. I want to take whatever’s in my hands because of what life has given me. Too much has been given, much is demanded. So if I’ve been given much, now I get to give much. I get to look at people in the world who could benefit from my presence, my love, my finances, because now I’m a giver of life in the world, not a seeker of life. Without God’s love filling our hearts, we’re seekers of life. We seek entertainment, vocation, legacy, something to be fulfilling. But when love fulfills us, those things become irrelevant, and we live differently, not because we’re trying to, but because love has shaped us. If we just started there, not “salvation is praying a sinner’s prayer and getting baptized,” but salvation as opening to the love of God as he reveals himself in you. I wish everybody had gotten that training on day one. I didn’t. I got a list of do’s and don’ts. That’s where my whole life went for the first 40 years. I was involved in sin management, trying to be as pure for God as I could be. Now, to live in love and let the fruit of love be justice, this is the gospel that would have transformed the world if we hadn’t sidetracked it into performance and sin management and trying to get a ticket into heaven and scaring people to death with hell. No. Come to God because he’s the most endearing presence in the universe. But most people don’t see him that way, because it’s almost like Stockholm syndrome. I’ve been brought to him under the threat of eternal torment, and I’m supposed to make nice with that. You can appease that, but you don’t want to sit down to coffee and enjoy that presence, because it’s terrifying. But Jesus made that presence accessible, where we could be confident and comfortable and relaxed in God’s presence. That would change us. If we don’t have that and we’re trying to change on our own, we’ll fail, and we’ll give up or just get the get-out-of-hell-free card punched.
Daron: This is how you say it in the book. “When we came to view salvation as a benefit we gained from God to avoid judgment, we lost sight of what it really is, an act of grace that allows us access to him so we can drink freely of his love. That exchange will shape us internally so that we love others, and his kingdom will take expression in the world. Salvation was never meant to be amnesty for personal sin, but a doorway into God’s life that shapes us from the inside.”
Wayne: It’s so hard to imagine we’ve spent 2,000 years still trying to change people from the outside. That’s the religious approach. What you just read is available to everybody listening to this. It’s available to you. But helping people discover that, it was easier to do a sinner’s prayer and a ritual, come to church every Sunday, go to confession. It was easier to give people rituals instead of giving people presence. This is where we should have been all along. Let’s give people presence. Let’s give people a loving Father in the middle of their mess, loving them to freedom, to truth, to wholeness.
Daron: That’s really good news, Wayne.
Wayne: It is for me. That sounds like the gospel.
Daron: Made me emotional just thinking about it. We need PJ here to cry on this episode, Coop. PJ is our other co-host. He always cries. Usually it’s not me. I filled in for him today. Wayne, let’s talk about another concept. This was interesting to me. The idea that we have a notion of self-righteousness, we can see that, but there’s no such thing as self-justice. You write, “I find it fascinating that while self-righteousness is incredibly destructive, there’s no such thing as self-justice. It makes no sense, because justice can only be lived out in relationship with others.” Unpack that.
Wayne: I don’t know how to unpack it more than it was simply said. Self-righteousness is something I’ve battled a lot of my life, because when you feel like you can perform well, particularly as a good Pharisee, it gives you a sense of arrogance and superiority, and it produces the very opposite. The only thing worse than unrighteousness in our lives is self-righteousness. So how would you be self-justifying? You could do that, justify yourself. But the whole idea of living in justice is that it’s communal. It involves my neighbor, my spouse, my children. It’s not something I can put off somewhere else. It’s right there. I know people who are incredibly pious individuals and incredibly dishonest individuals when it serves their needs, because they haven’t learned to live in the absence of need, in the fullness. That’s what Jesus talked about, fullness of joy, life abundantly. He was going to fill you up with life on the inside so you’re not needy on the outside, so you’re not, as we say in the book, a thorn, somebody who draws life from somebody else. You’re there to impart life. That’s ultimately what love is. Love is how I give life to someone. So when I go into a relationship or out to dinner with somebody, or just interact with my wife during the day, how can I impart life to her? It might be something I’ve discovered, or just a shoulder to lean on. Thinking about imparting life rather than “What do I need today? What do I have to get?” Yet mostly in a sin-tainted world it’s raised a bunch of narcissists. That’s what sin does. I’m going to take care of me, no one else is going to. Once Jesus takes care of you, love and life become real, and that’s how love translates into justice. You can’t get life from anything in this world. So when I have these unmet needs, I’m reading a book now called Thirsting, written by a man from New Zealand. It’s one of the best books I’ve read in five or six years. He talks about a deep aquifer of desire for God and God’s love in our hearts. We often don’t even know what’s there, but we’re always trying to fill this unmet something inside by going to the right concert, getting the right group of friends, the right job. No matter what we do, drugs, alcohol, whatever, it doesn’t fill it. It makes it more distant. When Jesus fills that part of us that wants to be loved and cared for and respected, it doesn’t matter if you disrespect me. Okay, that person doesn’t get it, that’s fine. Fullness lets you live differently than scarcity and demand. And I’m not talking temporal terms, I’m talking spiritual. You can be in poverty and live full spiritually. You can be under Roman oppression and have fullness flowing out of your innermost being.
I wonder why these early disciples were so cavalier about injustice. You hear 1 Peter 3 about women as the weaker vessel and slaves obeying masters. Why so cavalier? Part of it is they weren’t being cavalier. What they realized is, unless love makes the change there, they don’t have agency. Women didn’t have agency in that day. Slaves didn’t have agency. So when love penetrates the culture, all of a sudden a slave owner can’t own slaves. Not because the law says he can’t. He can’t. He can’t look down on someone because of the color of their skin. Not because “I won’t and I’m going to choose to be a better person.” Love means you can’t, because they’re a person just like you. The way we keep conflict alive in our world is seeing other people as less than us. That’s true in our political parties right now. It’s true in how we look at Iran or Gaza. We look down on people. Are there evil leaders doing horrible things? Yes. But we look down on the people, the Iranians, the Palestinian Christians in Gaza. If you don’t know one of those, it’s easy to hold a stereotype and be comfortable with injustice. Love won’t let you do that. Love is a beautiful way to change people, because it’s not imposed from without. It’s intrinsic from inside us.
Daron: Talking about some of that conflict, I believe it’s one of the chapters Toby wrote. He talks about growing up with a self-righteous spirit that did not translate to justice. He says, “My friends and I were schooled in the theology of the Reformation from the time we could read. Our catechism textbooks were as thick as our school textbooks. Yet we never wondered why the black people working in our kitchens and gardens were prohibited by law from setting foot in our churches. It didn’t matter. What mattered was whether I could escape the fires of hell by being one of the elect, and whether I understood the process that underlay my election. I began to see that this binary worldview of salvation led to a binary worldview of others.” Us, them. In, out. Elect, not. Black, white. How is that still present? People studying theology, walking around feeling “I’ve been declared righteous by Jesus,” yet not seeing the lack of justice and love engulfing everything around them.
Wayne: The sad reality of 2,000 years of Christian history is that the greatest injustices on the planet have been perpetuated by people who thought themselves righteous. Slavery here, apartheid in South Africa. My wife and I are watching a World War II retrospective, and how much the religious ambition of the Germans, who were hurt after the first war, Hitler tapped that to build the most unjust government that ever existed. You can tap that religious ambition in people, and it’s not the same as the fruit of being a disciple. That’s the sad truth of our history. We’ve perpetuated injustice in the name of love or righteousness. You can’t do that in justice. Read the Old Testament, even without translating righteousness as justice, and see how aware God is of justice, of justly or unjustly treating the people we interact with. He’s very concerned about it. That’s why Jesus knew we couldn’t do it from the outside. You can’t impose this on people, not through government, not through religion. You have to give rise to it as the fruit of a person who’s come relaxed inside the love of the Father. That person will live justly.
Daron: Last question, and I’m going to read a couple lines first. Somebody has paused this episode multiple times to soak it in. Maybe they’re on the second listen. I want to give them a practical next step. In the book you write, “Jesus had become a partaker of the divine nature, the perfect expression of love, manifesting itself as justice. He became an image bearer, carrier, and eventual distributor of that life, offering the same reality to us. The only way to do that is to receive the life spirit of the Father.” I need a first step, Wayne. You’ve blown my mind. I’m feeling unstable in my theology, my righteousness, my justice. What’s my next step?
Wayne: We don’t do steps. That’s why we publish ourselves. Every publisher would ask us to put three steps to justice in the back of the book, which would undermine it.
Daron: I don’t want three. I just want one.
Wayne: I think what would help is to get our focus set on how we live loved. How do I recognize the love of God? How do I invite people who care about that into a conversation, whether exploring this book or anything else? Where do I sense him? Where do I see him? Where does God make himself known? Because this is about presence. It’s not theology. It’s not in the head, it’s in the heart. The golden rule, which we call the golden life, is when my awareness of the other rises to the awareness of myself. That’s where I become free in being just. It’s not trying to be just. So the focus needs to be on love. How do I recognize it? How do I participate in it? How is God making his love known to me so that love fills me from the inside? I just described probably a five-year process. It’s not something you do in an afternoon. It’s not something you do at an altar, where we pray and you all go away different. This is letting God’s light and life and love sink into our hearts, being in conversations with people who stimulate that in me, reading books that stimulate it, and then watching God make himself known. Then my awareness of the other rises to the awareness of myself. Things I could walk past before, because it’s not me, it doesn’t matter, now I can’t walk past, because that person right there needs help and I can help them. The more privileged we are, the more generosity we have to give of time and love and care. When you parse it out as individuals, that’s where it works. We try to make a national program out of it, and it doesn’t end up being loving. Love has to come from a person to a person. That’s what the gospel was meant to do. So get involved in the conversation of love, the conversations God is having with you about love and with others, recognize it, and let that comfort you in his love. That’s where our assurance is. Our assurance isn’t “Jesus did something so I get the get-out-of-hell-free card.” My assurance is that the Father who loves me is determining my future, not me, not my activity, not how good I can be.
Daron: There’s a lot there to unpack. I wish we’d all been unpacking this for 2,000 years. Can you imagine?
Wayne: I’ve only been seeing it biblically this way for a year and a half. I learned to live this life because love was transforming me, and then Toby opened up the language of Scripture, from law to salvation to transformation. Justification is not “I get declared righteous.” Justification is Jesus actually making me just. It’s the process of justness. And that leads to kingdom. God’s kingdom is evident in the world because there are just people living in an unjust world, and they’re conspicuous, because everyone else is living for self.
Daron: Wayne, I can’t thank you enough. You don’t know it, but we mow my lawn together every Saturday.
Wayne: I have heard that from you before, so I do know that. I’m surprised you’re still doing it.
Daron: Yeah, I am. Thank you for participating with the Father in humility and obedience on your journey, because there’s no way I would know the love of the Father the way I have come to know it if it weren’t for you and the words he gave you to communicate. I’m deeply indebted. Thank you for coming back on the podcast. Thank you for writing this book and all your books. Thank you for all The God Journey episodes. Don’t stop listening to my podcast, but the just thing to do would be to start mixing in The God Journey when you mow. Wayne, what’s the best way to find you?
Wayne: lifestream.org is the website. The God Journey is the podcast. All my books are everywhere you get books. There’s a website called thegodjourney.com, but you can also get it from almost any podcast feed.
Daron: If you have questions, send them to me first. I don’t want to bombard Wayne. You can reach me, daron@daronearlewine.com. I’d love to hear what God is teaching you through this conversation. Wayne, we don’t always close with prayer, but I feel like today’s the day. Would you pray for us to close out?
Wayne: Father, this is such a big deal, and it’s so easy to blow past this understanding you want to give us, because we have too much going on. We figure you’ll cover everything at the end of the day. And you’re standing right there saying, “I want to be your best friend. I want to walk with you through this day. I want to hold you in your cancer diagnosis. I want to walk you through the trauma that detoured your life. I want to hold you in the midst of your religious fears and find you at rest in my love.” So Father, thank you for offering that to us. I pray for everyone listening, that they could melt into that place of saying, “Jesus, walk me down this road,” and not try to figure it out in their head until they sense it in their heart. In the name of your beloved Son, who did such great work on our behalf. We’re so grateful. Amen.
Daron: Amen. Wayne, thank you. I hope this isn’t the last time we get a chance to talk on the podcast. I need to get out to your neck of the woods and go on a walk where it’s warm, not freezing in Indiana.
Wayne: That would be ideal. I’d walk with you anywhere, Daron.
Daron: Thank you, Wayne. I appreciate it. Guys, thanks for downloading this episode. We’d love to hear your questions. Thank you for being part of this community until we talk again. Remember the three things we always tell you. God’s for you, he’s not against you. He is near you, not far away. And he created you on purpose and for purpose.