What is justice? If God is just and God is love and God is beauty, what is justice? Can justice exist in a vacuum any more than love-for love can't exist in a vacuum-or does it cease to be justice without a relational context with which to contain it?

When I think of justice the first things I think of are rules, laws, and "fair" but does that actually have anything to do with real justice, or is that just what God uses to show us justice and give us justice in this fallen world?

What if justice, at its core, is a relational concept? What if true justice has more to do with right relationship than "right" or "wrong"? What if true justice is simply being in perfect relationship with God, not about conforming to a system of rules? How dramatically would this change life, religion, and spirituality?

What if justice is about freedom to be in right relationship with God and others, freedom from the kind of sins that enslave us and imprison us? The "rules" and "laws" then become a kind of anti-slavery protection for us, rather than becoming their own kind of bondage, bondage to the "other side."

What if God's justice and God's love and desire for relationship are all tied up together, rather than God's characteristics being separate parts of Him that somehow manage to coexist together even when they are very different? What if God's "just love" doesn't mean "He loves me but..." but rather means "He loves me and...this is how He loves me!" Wouldn't this picture of God make much more sense than a picture of a God who has to struggle to be just and to love us, a God who swings between His desire to "give us what we deserve" and "love us unconditionally"? Isn't this the kind of God we really want, a God whose justice is a justice of love, not a love of rules and a desire to make us all behave for the sake of keeping us in line?

So what is justice? Is justice about moral right-ness, keeping rules and laws, behaving and being good? Is justice about punishing (or even just "disciplining) the bad, making people repent, and rewarding the good? Isn't this a rather shallow human definition of justice? Doesn't it seem like we are missing something?

I'm not saying there's no hell; I know better than to get into that debate with Christians even if I did hold that belief, and I really want the focus of this hub to be somewhere else anyway. What I am saying is that our easy explanations for God's justice and love seem cheap and shallow to me compared to the deepness of God. We can't have even really scratched the surface yet, and still so many of us claim to have answers to questions that are way too big for us to answer alone.

I, for one, don't want God to be "fair" like the world is fair. I want God's justice to be defined by His love, mercy, grace, compassion, and forgiveness. And really, when we encounter "justice" in this world that has not room for mercy and forgiveness, there is something cold, unloving, and - yes - almost unfair about that kind of justice. Justice without love and mercy cannot be of God. And that rather leads me to believe that True Justice cannot be separated from the other characteristics of God, from His love, mercy, and forgiveness. True Justice looks like God, and God looks like love, beauty, mercy, tenderness, and yes, justice too.

I'm still refining my thoughts on all this, so it's subject to change and refining, but I find it helps me to think things out in words on paper (or a computer screen, I guess).