In the Beginning… 

When I first heard the phrase ‘Justice is Redemption’, it didn’t make much sense to me. That was because I didn’t know what those words truly meant and how they were used in the Bible.

Therefore, the search for what ‘Justice is Redemption’ began with discovering what these words mean.  I found that justice was: just behavior or treatment. In the Bible it was commonly rendered as the word ‘righteous’ or ‘righteousness’. I found that redemption was: the action of saving or being saved from sin, error, or evil. It comes from the Latin word redimere, which means to buy back.

With understanding of these words, we can continue on to the story they tell. Understanding this story begins in Genesis with the creation account in chapters 1 and 2, as God creates the heavens and the earth. We know that all that God created was perfect, without flaw, as the Bible states in Genesis 1:2,

“God saw all that he had made, and it was very good…”.

God then created Adam and Eve, another part of what was good, and gave Adam a command not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

In this command, we see that God’s plan was for us to live without ever knowing there was anything other than the perfect world that he had created. In all of this, God gave Adam and Eve an ability to choose what they were to do. It is in that choice, in Genesis chapter 3, that Eve chose to eat from the tree, making them both guilty by disobeying God’s command, bringing sin and the knowledge of evil into the world. This pivotal event was called the fall. We know there is a switch when the fall occurred, as Adam and Eve both realize they were naked, which they had not noticed before (Genesis 3:7).

In this evident change of knowing that the world was different, we soon discover all men were susceptible to sin- wrongdoing in the eyes of God. The story continues in Genesis 6:5:

“The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time.”

At this point, God decides He would transform the world and bring justice by flooding it. The Lord did not give up on redeeming his people. He chose one righteous man, Noah, and his family to continue the story by building an ark to preserve the good things that God had created in the beginning. After the flood, and the cleansing of the earth, God made a covenant with Noah to never flood the earth with water ever again.

Thankfully, the story does not end in our rebellion and sin against God. In this covenant, we see that God’s plan for redemption is to be discovered, as he brings the human race a new beginning.

To be continued…