Unshakeable #2 - Justice (2 Thessalonians 1:6-12) | Dr. Kurt Bjorklund

Dr. Kurt Bjorklund explores 2 Thessalonians 1:6-12 to reveal how God's unshakeable justice isn't just a future promise but a present calling for believers today. Discover how you can be an instrument of God's justice right now by living worthy of your calling and bringing His glory to your everyday situations.

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Transcript

Unshakeable #2: Justice          

Scripture: 2 Thessalonians 1:6-12
Speaker: Dr. Kurt Bjorklund
Date: August 9-10, 2025

We are in week two of a series that we're calling "Unshakeable," looking at the book of Second Thessalonians. But before we jump into that, I just want to highlight something. So every year we have Kids Fest. And during Kids Fest, we give the kids a chance to contribute to what we call "campers for campers," where we help make Kids Fest happen in Haiti. And I think we have a video here of this year, what is happening in Haiti at one of the churches that we help support.

What happens is when the kids give money, that money is given to a church that we've partnered with there who will provide lunch for all of the kids who come. They'll give them all T-shirts, they'll pay the leaders to come and be there for a week—very similar to Kids Fest here. And we supplement it from the budget here as well in order to help make that happen. But I just wanted you to see that what that is about extends well beyond Wexford, Butler, Pittsburgh, and Bridgeville area, to Haiti as well.

Let's take a moment and just pray for that and for our gatherings this weekend.

God, as we're gathered here, we thank You that we get to be a part of Your work in some small way in another part of our hemisphere. And God, we pray that the students and the kids who've been a part of Kids Fest in Haiti, that You would utilize that in an amazing way in their lives, just like we hope and pray that it happens here. And God, we thank You that we get to just be a small part of helping people find and follow You, not just here, but literally in one of the most desperate places in our hemisphere. And God, as we're gathered today as Orchard Hill, I pray that You would speak to each of us. I ask that my words would reflect Your word in content and in tone and in emphasis. And we pray this in Jesus' name, Amen.

The Dream of Justice

Several years ago, a well-known author wrote a book called Simply Christian. And in it he had a section on justice. As he was writing about justice, he said that justice is a little bit like a dream that you can't quite remember. His point was this: You know how when you wake up in the morning and you have this dream and you think that was really something significant, and you can't quite remember all of the different elements of the dream, so it seems faint, and then you just say, "Well, it's time for me to go about my day and forget about my dream." He said justice is a little bit like that because we have a sense that things should be different, should be better in many ways in our world. And yet at a lot of points, we feel like it's not accessible, it's beyond us. We don't know how to get there, how to account for it, how to even address it. And so we just sometimes move on with our lives.

You know how this works if you just pay attention to stories around us. For example, you see a picture of a child starving to death in Gaza, and you say, "It shouldn't be that way," but that's way beyond my ability to do anything about it. And so, you know, there's geopolitical forces, there's corruption, there's all kinds of things. And so we just kind of move on, even though we say it shouldn't be like that. Or you hear a story about somebody who, because of their race, is held back from an opportunity, and you say it shouldn't be like that. Or you hear about the refugees that are trying to make their way from one continent to another—they're on a boat and the boat capsizes and they drown, and you say, "That's not how it should be." Or you hear about a woman in Cincinnati who's beaten because she didn't look like the other people around her when she was in a certain part of the town. You say, "That's not how it should be."

And it isn't just the global kinds of stories like that. Many of us have our own stories. Maybe we were in business with somebody and we had extended kindness and opportunity to them, and the first time they had the chance, they stabbed us in the back. Or maybe you were married and the spouse that you were married to didn't treat you well and things ended poorly and you feel a sense of betrayal. Or maybe you have a friendship that's gone south with somebody because of the way that they treated you, and you say, "That's not the way that it should be."

That longing is a longing for the justice of God. But we live in a world that isn't always just.

Unshakeable Justice

So today we want to just consider this idea of unshakeable justice from 2nd Thessalonians, chapter 1, verses 6 through 12. And the basic idea is this: God is just, and God will bring justice.

Here's where we see this—verse 6. It says, "God is just." So I'm not just making this stuff up. There it is. "God is just. And He will pay back trouble to those who trouble you and give relief to those who are troubled."

So what I'd like to do is just simply look at this by asking some questions and answering them today.

What Does Justice Look Like?

Justice is, as it says here, that God will pay back trouble to those who trouble you and will give rest to those of you who are troubled as well. The picture that God gives here is He says, "I am going to make sure that somebody who troubles you will be troubled."

Now, the book of Second Thessalonians was written by the Apostle Paul, presumably to the church at Thessalonica. And the issue for this particular letter was two things. One, it was that they were experiencing some form of persecution. And so he was writing to comfort them. And then secondly, they were concerned about the coming of the Day of the Lord, that somehow they had missed it. And so now he takes this idea and he says, "God is just. The people who are troubling you"—and this isn't just a blanket statement that God says, "Hey, anybody who troubles anybody is going to get it." He was talking specifically to the church here, to people who believed and were being persecuted because of their belief, were being mistreated because of their faith. He says, "I am going to make sure that those people get paid back as well and that you have rest."

So the promise from God is to say, if you've experienced a personal injustice, I want you to know that one day there will come a day when my justice will prevail. That when you see injustice in the world, there will come a day when one day He will make it right. He will put the world to rights, where things feel off in the world for us.

But not only that, He goes on and He talks about this idea of eternal punishment. And this is one of the things that if you maybe haven't been around church, maybe you've been around church, that troubles a lot of us because we say, "How can eternal punishment feel like it's justice from God? Because if God is a good God, then how can something done in a temporal world in a moment deserve eternal punishment?"

But look at these verses that speak to this very clearly. Here's what we see in verse 7: "This will happen when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven in blazing fire with his powerful angels." Verse 8: "He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might."

Now, like I said, this troubles many of us because we say, "This is not the kind of God that I like to think about or conceive. I like to think of God as all love, not as a God of justice." But in order for God to be a God of love, there has to be a sense in which He's just. And one of the ways that He portrays His justice is by saying, "I will settle the score, and I will settle it with an eternal punishment."

And the reason this is justice in many ways is because what He's doing is He's saying, "When you have sinned against me, there needs to be some kind of a punishment." Jonathan Edwards, who was the first president of Princeton, a pastor of a previous generation, wrote one of the more famous messages in American history. It's called "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." And his picture that he painted was this idea of God dangling sinners over this abyss, basically by a thread of grace, and saying, "This is what you deserve, but it is God's grace that holds you apart from it."

And the problem for many of us is we don't see the need for justice for us personally as being that great. What we feel like a little bit is, "Well, I may have done some things that aren't ideal or maybe are even sinful, but they certainly don't constitute eternal punishment."

Maybe a way to think about it is this. If you've ever sped in your life, you could say, "Okay, that's a violation of the law, right?" So, you know, you drive five miles an hour over the speed limit—that's a violation of the law. And what happens is if you do that, you probably, at least in part say, "Well, I mean, everybody does it. I drive right by a police officer at that number, and they don't pull me over. So is it really speeding? Is it really an issue? Is it really a problem?" And so you kind of get in this zone where you think it isn't that big of a deal.

But the picture biblically is much more serious than that. It would be like this: It would be like you were driving past a school for the hearing impaired children of our community, and there were signs that said, "Drive slowly—visually hearing impaired children ahead." And there were many of them. And the sign said, "Drive 15 miles an hour." And there were speed bumps. And you came up to it and you just said, "I don't care. I'm driving 75 miles an hour down this street." That kind of recklessness and disregard for other people is more what's in view when it comes to our sinfulness and God's picture of saying there is a need for punishment, than the idea of simply, "I just exceeded the limit a little bit."

And this, by the way, is why the cross is so central to Christianity. Because in the cross you have both the justice of God and the love of God coming together. The justice of God, because a penalty had to be paid, God paid it through Jesus Christ. And the love of God, because you and I can't pay the penalty, we can't be good enough to offset it. And so it's paid by God.

So the idea of justice is tied to this idea of God's eternal punishment. And in our day and age, there's a lot of churches that won't even talk about it. And that's part of why I think this has become such a foreign idea even in the church context. Because even when people will come to passages, if they're teaching through books like Second Thessalonians, what a lot of times will happen is we'll just jump over it and say, "I don't really want to talk about this because it isn't pleasant." But when you read through your Bible, you can't take out the idea that God says, "In order for there to be justice, I have to have this, but because of my love, I've offered a way." And so there is justice coming one way or another.

And what's challenging is to say, sometimes we cry for justice because we say, "What about those who have perpetrated war and hunger and starvation in different parts of the world? Like, surely they deserve justice." But we don't often see ourselves as needing justice. We say they sped past the school for the hearing impaired. I just went a little over the limit. But before God and His holy standard, if we have come short in any way, He says, "This is what you deserve." And therefore the only way out of it is to come and say it is on the basis of Jesus Christ, not on my basis that I have standing.

So justice is something that is God's way of saying, "I'm not going to allow the egregious things of this world to be unaddressed in time."

Why Is This Justice?

Well, in verse eight, it says this. It says, "He will punish those who do not know God and who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus." And the gospel here means simply good news. And so He's saying, there are those who don't know God and don't obey, and these are probably synonyms. Meaning it's about not knowing who God is and not obeying. And the reason I say they're synonyms is because belief, genuine belief, leads to genuine action.

I talked last week a little bit about this. I wasn't here on Sunday morning—I was in Butler. But I talked about gravity and this idea that you don't need to try to obey gravity. You know that gravity is. And so you just naturally follow the ideas of gravity. You don't have to say, "Well, will I obey gravity or not?" You just do because you believe it's true.

And the reason I say these are synonyms is because when you actually believe who God is, what God has said, what happens is the more clear you are on belief, the more clear you will be in obedience and behavior. And the less clear you are in belief, the less clear you will be in terms of behavior.

In some ways, this is analogous to the speeding thing. But let me just give you another analogy. I believe that eating sugar in significant quantities is not healthy for me. But do you know what I still do? I still eat sugar, because I've made the calculation and I'm like, "Well, you know, it's going to shorten my life a little, I guess, maybe the quality of my life at the end of my life. But I'd rather have a piece of cake with friends now and then than maybe live a long time and not have a piece of cake with friends." Okay, so do I not believe that? Well, I believe it, but if I actually believed that sugar was completely devastating to me, I would change the way that I live.

And my point is, belief here is more like belief in gravity than belief that sugar isn't a good substance for us. And so what this is driving at is that when we or somebody says, "I do not follow the ways of God," God says, "Then it is my justice to say I am going to do something about it."

When Will There Be Justice?

If you look at this, you see that He says, "Those who trouble you, I will trouble, and you will have rest." And then He tells us when. He says, "This will happen when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven." And He's talking here about the second coming of Jesus Christ.

John Stott, writing about this very idea, says it this way. He says that the coming of Jesus will be personal. And he says, "It's the same Lord Jesus, He Himself and no other, who lived, died, and rose and ascended. He will come again." He says it's visible, "Having disappeared from sight at the ascension, he will reappear." And it's glorious. "His first coming was in weakness and obscurity. His second will be in power and public manifestation." When you see the phrase here "coming in his glory."

So here are the three ideas that John Stott puts forward that have been affirmed by many Christians over time. It's personal. Jesus, who came once to be the Savior, has ascended into heaven, will come back to make the world right. It will be visible. It won't be something that you have to say, "Has Jesus come back or has he not?" Remember, these people were living with the fear that they had somehow missed the coming of Jesus. And so they were feeling as if the persecution they were enduring was so unjust that they had no way to see it be made right. It will be visible. You won't miss it. And it will ultimately be something where when He comes back, it will be glorious. You will see Him not just simply come in a stable and in obscurity, but you will see Him in glory.

And this is when the Bible tells us justice will come. Now, that doesn't mean justice doesn't come before that. There won't be moments of payback and rest in the time before that. But what it means is that the ultimate time of this justice is still in the future.

And here's why that's important. Because often our problem with injustice is a timing problem. We want everything now. We want microwave justice. I put it in a microwave, I hit it—not crock pot. That takes some planning and some time. And the idea is that there will come a day when God will make things right, but that day is not necessarily today.

And the reason that's important is because if you and I don't see it that way, we will get the sense that God isn't actually just. And then we'll start to say justice is just a fantasy. You see this idea that you have this sense like a dream that there is something to justice, there's something to the way that the world should be that isn't quite right. What that is, is you're longing for the justice of God. But if you say that that day is never coming, then you'll just say this is a fantasy that the world could be better. And you'll start to say the world that we live in simply is the world that is. And there will never be a day in which God will make it right.

Or what you can also do is say, since God is going to do it in the future, you can have almost an escapist mindset that says, "Well, since today is not the day, I don't need to worry about anything. I'll just simply say someday in the future I will experience the justice of God. And therefore at that day I will get there. So all I need to do is survive. And who cares what happens now?"

But the author of Simply Christian, when he writes about this, says, "But the real approach is to say I recognize the voice. And I know that the voice of justice isn't just something for the future, but it's something for now." And you see this even in this passage.

Now What?

And this is really another question in a sense. And that is, well, now what? And in verses 10, 11 and 12 we see how Paul answers this after he says, "God is just. He will bring justice. It is coming." He says, "Here's what you do because of it."

Verse 10: "On that day he comes to be glorified. On the day he comes to be glorified in his holy people and to be marveled at among all those who believed. This includes you because you believed our testimony to you."

So his first thing very simply is to say, because you've believed, you will share in it. And what this means is that the first element in terms of what do we do with this idea of justice is we say I want to be one of the people who believe. And the expanded Bible's rendition of this says it is because you have believed. In other words, having faith that God is just, that He will settle the score and that you are somebody who needs grace then pushes you to Jesus Christ. And your belief means you share in this.

But it doesn't just stop there, because then he says verse 11: "With this in mind, we constantly pray for you that our God may make you worthy of his calling." This was something he said in verse five, that you're worthy of the calling. Now he comes back to and he says, "I pray that God will make you worthy of his calling and that you basically will live and may bring to fruition every desire for goodness and your every deed prompted by faith."

So what does he say? Here's what I want you to do. He says, "I want you to embrace the calling that God has given you. Not just to simply say, 'Well, one day God will bring about justice,' but to say, 'I can be an instrument for justice here and now. I can be part of bringing every desire, every good deed to fruition because I'm going to live worthy of his calling.'"

And the picture here is really this idea of God will come in glory. This is in verse 10. And His people will be glorified. That's in verse 11. But His glory is currently being seen through His people. Verse 12. If you trace this word glory, it's right here, verse 10: "On the day he comes to be glorified," so He will come and be glorified. "With this in mind," verse 11, "We constantly pray for you that our God will make you worthy of his calling and that you, by his power, he may bring to fruition every desire for goodness that's in every deed prompted by faith. We pray this so that in the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you."

So He's coming in glory, but He wants to see glory in His people today. And He tells us that it's through this idea of every desire for goodness and every deed prompted by faith is a way forward with justice.

I mentioned earlier the boat that capsized with the group of immigrants who were crossing a body of water to get to a new home. Imagine that you knew a different way for those people, and you simply said, "Well, you know, God will do justice someday." The idea is God says, "I want you to live worthy of your calling, to be an instrument for my kingdom, for my glory. Where you are today, in your school, in your neighborhood, in your place of work, in your family, that you are somebody who is saying, 'I want to see the kingdom of God, the justice of God demonstrated here and now.'"

Now, I haven't given a really good definition of justice yet of this idea. I mean, I said what it was that God is going to bring about. And justice is actually not the easiest word to define. But Bruce Waltke, who wrote a commentary on Proverbs, said that righteousness in the Old Testament, especially in the wisdom literature, so Psalms and Proverbs is really this idea of saying this is somebody who's willing to disadvantage themselves for the good of the community. And he says that unrighteousness, wickedness is generally the idea of somebody who will disadvantage the community for the good of themselves.

And if you think about justice that way, the justice, righteousness means I am willing to say, "I will give a little bit of my good for the sake of others, and I won't gain something at the expense of others." You're getting close to a definition of justice.

And what would happen if the thousands of people who normally are part of Orchard Hill on a weekend said, "Wherever I live, wherever I have influence, I will disadvantage myself for the good of others. And I will not advantage myself at the expense of others." Do you think it would make a difference in our schools, in our businesses, in our hospitals, in our neighborhoods, in our families?

And that's part of saying, "I'm going to be one who lives worthy of the calling. I'm going to be one who says, 'My every desire for a good deed, my every prompting of faith, I'm going to respond.'" And what this really points to, this "every time" means, every time that you see an opportunity to extend the goodness of God, instead of walking past it, you say, "I'm going to step into it."

I mean, what would that look like? Somebody sent me a thing a while ago, and it said, "Every time that you feel the spirit of God prompting you to do something, do it within 10 seconds." And I thought about that for a little bit, and I thought, "How many times do I feel like I have just this little prompting to say, 'You could do something about this?' And I say, 'I'll do it later.' And later never comes."

See, every desire for goodness is that moment where you say, "Okay, God, You've placed me here right now for this moment to speak something, to do something, to love on somebody, to ease suffering in some way in Your name, for Your glory, to be worthy of Your calling."

See, unshakeable justice isn't just a future justice, it's a present justice. Because the glory of God that will be revealed one day, He says, "I want it to be revealed today in my people."

And I know that for some of us you can say, "Well, it's overwhelming. I can't make a global difference." It reminds me of an old story about a boy who was walking on a beach. A host of starfish had washed up on shore. And he felt the despair for them because he said, "All of them are going to die if we don't get them back into the ocean, if the tide doesn't come up in time." And so he started picking up a starfish and just throwing it into the sea. Then he picked up another one, he threw it into the sea, picked up another one, he threw it into the sea. And he kept doing this for a while.

And soon an older gentleman came down on the shore, and he's like, "What are you doing?" He's like, "Well, I'm trying to throw these starfish back into the sea." And the older man said, "Well, you'll never be able to throw them all back in. You can't possibly make a difference." The little boy thought about it. He bent down, he picked up another one. He threw it into the ocean. He said, "Maybe not, but it made a difference for this one."

You know, wherever God has placed you, whatever things He's put in front of you are your place to bring the glory of God, the justice of God, the kingdom of God to bear. Yes, there is unshakeable justice that is ahead. God is just. He will bring justice. But He says, "I want you to be part of it now."

And this is the point when Paul says, "I pray that those of you who believe that you will live worthy of your calling and that every desire for goodness, every deed prompted by faith, he said, would be something that you would bring to fruition."

And how does he end it? He says, "And this is about the glory of God."

So justice is something that matters to God. And it isn't just a faint longing in our head every time you say, "This should be different." It's your longing for what will be ultimately made right. And God invites you, invites me to be part of it right here and now.

Closing

Now, just before I close in prayer, I think it would be an oversight, not just to come back to this idea of punishment, eternal punishment, and say, belief in Jesus Christ is the factor in saying, "I'm not getting what I deserve. Jesus took what I deserved." And so faith, according to how we understand faith here at Orchard Hill is what gives us the standing of grace instead of justice. Justice was served in Jesus Christ's death on the cross. So justice has happened, and we access it by faith.

And so if you're here today and you have not believed in the past, maybe this is just your moment to say, "I do need grace, the grace of Jesus Christ." And you can believe today by saying, "God, I have violated Your law, so I need grace. I need Jesus, and I trust Him as my Savior."

And if you've trusted Jesus as your savior in the past, what this passage tells us to do is to live worthy of our calling and to bring the glory of God to our situations. Because that is us saying, "I believe in unshakeable justice, and I'm going to be an instrument of it here and now."

Let's pray together.

God, we ask today that You would help all of us who call Orchard Hill our church home in Wexford and Butler and Pittsburgh and Bridgeville and online and all over the place, many who listen in other parts of the country, that You would help us to reflect Your glory in the world in which we live, and not to simply either say, "Justice is a fantasy that can't be attained," or "One day we'll get there, so I just escape and ignore today." But instead, "I will be a part of bringing Your glory to bear." And we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.

Thanks for being here. Have a great week.

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