Article January 15, 1996 ISSUE

True justice

Paul Douglas White

As I stood by the police car that Saturday afternoon, it was a timely moment for me to consider what true justice is and how we bring it into our lives. The teenage boy confined in the back seat had just been apprehended by me as he tried to set fire to my school. The policeman who answered the call and placed the young man under arrest had pulled me off to the side and was encouraging me to just let the boy go and not press charges. His reason? In spite of the boy's obvious guilt, the officer said that the local court system was so backlogged that the boy would probably receive little or no punishment. The policeman's radio crackled incessantly with calls more serious than mine. He needed an immediate answer.

What a choice! Could I really let someone who had tried to commit a serious crime go free? Was this truly my only option? I knew that God's law can be appealed to for healing, and I realized that this same law could lead me to the right answer—one that was just for both me and the young man. In other words, instead of accepting a limited, human sense of justice appearing as an overburdened material system, I chose to follow what I knew of divine justice.

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