Looking for justice?

One of my favourite ways of winding down at the end of the day is watching Castle. Castle is one of the many identikit US crime dramas in which a glamorous team of detectives solves a murder with a minimum of fuss and a sprinkling of humorous one-liners. Of course, every murder is solved within the hour and no one ever gets away with it – this is how justice should be done! But it isn’t, is it.

Many of us will have been horrified by the abhorrent murder of the American journalist by the terrorists of ISIS. Our government is busy trying to identify the British man guilty of the crime. But when they know who he is – what then? What would justice look like in his case? Is prison enough? How likely is it that he will be brought to justice? And what about the myriad other murderous acts of ISIS? Will justice ever be done? It seems humanly impossible in the face of such widespread wickedness…

But in the Bible God says, “I, the LORD, love justice,” (Isaiah 61:8) and Psalm 96:13 declares that God “will judge the world with righteousness and the peoples in his truth.” And so we can rest assured that even if justice is not done in this life, everyone will stand before the Lord God to be judged, and they will receive exactly what is right for the life they have lived and the things they have done. This guarantee of justice is not, however, something over which to gloat. Let us still pray for these damaged young men, that they might turn from their ways and turn to Christ for forgiveness.