In the flow of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5, He preaches the requirement for entrance into His kingdom (5:1-12) and then the present identity on the earth of its citizens, salt and light (5:13-16).  Salt presents the negative identity of influence against decay or corruption (5:13).  Light presents the positive identity of the declaration of God, speaking righteous doctrine and living the righteous life, all in accordance with the kingdom of Jesus Christ (5:14-16).  Saltiness is distinctiveness, the sacred life impeding the profanity of the world, and light provides the revelation of the knowledge of God for others for their salvation and sanctification.  What is the basis for salt and light?  It is the Word of God (5:17-19).

For my entire lifetime, liberal theology has presented an alternative to the biblical story.  Man arises progressively through naturalistic origins.  The Christian story is superstition, proceeding from mythology in various cultures with hopes of explaining the past and the present.  Instead of taking the Bible literally, use it as an allegory, a source of archetypes for the physical well-being of mankind.  Truth that might spring from the metaphor parallels with conventional thinking, so the message can change.  Since man advanced progressively, improvements for man come from progressivism.  Cultural change mainly in the way of equaling social outcomes is salvation.  Liberalism is religion in all the ways I’ve just described.  For instance, ‘presenting your body a living sacrifice’ is enduring personal loss as an object of change through education, government, psychology, etc.Before the coronavirus, I talked every week to liberal Methodists, liberal Lutherans, liberal Catholics, liberal Presbyterians, liberal Congregationalists, and liberal Baptists.  My next door neighbor, an elderly man, who just died in the last two years, was a conservative Lutheran, who grew up in a Missouri synod church in Northern Wisconsin, but lived his adult life in California.  There was no Lutheran church for him in our area, because all of them had turned liberal.  He lit up when I talked to him.  It made sense, except for the salvation by grace through faith alone.  He would not accept that he couldn’t be saved through his good works.Social justice could be said to be a branch of the larger denomination of liberalism.  Liberalism accepts social justice in its hierarchy.  Membership of a certain generation within evangelical or fundamentalist churches would not accept liberalism, it’s denial of the bodily resurrection of Christ, the virgin birth, miracles, and the blood atonement.  The door stays closed to classic liberalism, but it opens to social justice, which is a denomination within big liberalism.  In fact, liberalism makes its way into churches through social justice.  Evangelicals have made way for the denomination of social justice into its churches through the lies it has told about social justice to pander to potential constituents.  For instance, they leave out the liberalism of Martin Luther King, Jr.  They embrace to a degree a Mother Theresa as if she were a saint.Even conservative evangelicals present themselves as a face of social justice with stories of stands taken during the civil rights movement against the racism of Southern Baptist churches.  Those types of stories are confusing, because they don’t give a clear delineation for who is preaching what.  There was racism in the United States, but did that mean that the black church leaders were preaching the same message as the white churches?  Even if the varied factions could have put aside the racial differences, would they still be meeting together, aligned with a common doctrine?  Common ground should not be attained by ignoring doctrinal error, including on the gospel.A good source for racial history in the United States is the massive amounts of writing found in the fourteen volumes of the Booker T. Washington Papers (look at the index here).  C. Vann Woodward called them “the single most important research enterprise now under way in the field of American black history.”  Many years ago, I read large chunks of these for hours in order to write a docudrama that our school performed on the life of Booker T. Washington.  Washington was relentless and harsh in his criticism of black clergy.  You can read this even in the classic Up from Slavery, which should be required reading in schools and especially Christian schools.  Washington and George Washington Carver would not be receptive to the social justice movement and its actual, real effects on black people in the United States.How is social justice even infiltrating conservative churches?  It comes into the church with themes similar to and apparent counterparts to orthodoxy.   Those themes fall on the ears and minds of younger members through school and media, unprepared to diagnose the counterfeit.  In many, if not most cases, they also might just be unconverted.  They are thorny ground, raised with the acceptability of worldliness, because their leaders did not inform them well enough on cultural issues.  They even attacked those who did in order to indulge potential members for church growth.  They covered for this with the concept of “gospel first importance” or “essential doctrines,” not found in scripture.  The church lost saltiness on the earth and dimmed light to the world.  It’s probably too late to do anything about the damage, but the churches and leaders should repent, and take the true Christians they have left and stand where they didn’t.  I’m not hopeful.The infiltration of social justice occurs with first a well-known theme of sin.  It is a perversion of the doctrine, but the sin and guilt relates to apparent injustice, which really is differing outcomes based upon socio-economics.  The law broken isn’t the law of God, but political correctness.  There are even standards that must be kept like the Pharisees or the Judaizers of the day of Jesus and the Apostles.  If those standards are not kept, separation occurs like not eating with the Gentiles.  These are almost never real sins that are committed.  Judgment comes on not accepting political correctness or following its standards.  They are changing standards, called progressive ones, but they can change based on progressivism.Younger church members embraced the idea of group guilt for an entire race of people.  Sin and guilt doesn’t work that way in reality.  Sin and guilt are individual, so this is a perversion, an important one.  God says the “soul that sinneth, it shall die” (Ezekiel 18:20-24).  Group sin and guilt then changes the nature of redemption.  If no one committed a sin, just found himself already guilty for lacking in pigmentation, then there is also no individual redemption or forgiveness.  He must attempt to do penance by showing all the indications that he is woke.  He must use the correct language, take the correct posture, which might include kneeling, and then perhaps to pay an indulgence in the way of reparations, a kind of tithe to the system.  Redistribution of wealth is part of membership in the new group of the redeemed; however, never really finding redemption because the indulgence must keep being paid.The canon of social justice isn’t scripture, except for allegorized scripture.  It is leftist propaganda and psychology.  Members become duped in psychology and sociology.  Members of the Supreme Court have already joined this church by calling transgenders a sex.  There is no outcry in the country, even from evangelicals, because of the fear of retribution of some kind, a shaming way past the level of the shunning of the Amish.Psychology and sociology have been canonized even in churches.  My father hit me when I was a child.  Social justice would shun him.  If I mouthed off to my dad or my mom, one or the other might smack me in the mouth, not in an injurious way.  I am a victim.  I could claim victim status.  This is part of the psychology.  The fear actually kept me from evil.  It wasn’t sufficient, but it helped me in the short term, until my beliefs were settled.  The next generation resents spankings and if it received any physical discipline beyond spanking, that stands as justification for almost any behavior choice in contradiction of authority.Saints in social justice are victims, even if they are wicked criminals, who have robbed and raped.  Victimhood itself is a form of sanctification, where blame shift occurs.  Someone is released from all blame as a victim, a kind of redemption from guilt.Patriarchy is a social construct as a doctrine of the denomination of social justice.  Women are elevated in their position, so that any criticism is also a violation of political correctness in the canon of social justice.  Anyone who says a woman should take a required role is misogynist.  Men themselves in the general canon are misogynists.  Any man who continues on male patriarchy should be shunned.You can see that the doctrine does not center on the condition of the heart.  It is external behavior.  The kingdom teaching would be progress until there is a classless, sexless, completely equal society.  As you might know, this won’t or doesn’t happen.  It will be turned into an oligarchy much like the nation of Chaz up in Seattle right now, ruled by violence.What I’ve described in this post won’t end well.  It is against God.  God is still in charge.  There is a real, true God with a real, true Bible, that is the standard by which He judges.  Someone can invent his own world in his head, but he still lives in God’s world where God is the judge.  True saints should reject the denomination of social justice in the religion of liberalism.   Yes, today you will be persecuted.  You really are salt and light and you are being persecuted for righteousness.  Standing against the religion of social justice is righteous.

The background of Psalm 30, written by King David, was his numbering of Israel.  2 Samuel 24 and 1 Chronicles 21 mention the event.  God offered David his choice of punishments: three years of famine, three months of war with Israel’s enemies, or three days of pestilence. David chose pestilence.  About 70,000 people died in three days.

In Romans 1:28, the Apostle Paul writes, “And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind.”  The flow of Romans 1 is that men knew God, but they suppressed that knowledge.  God turned them over to what they wanted, as His act of judgment.  An indication of God’s turning them over, is their “reprobate mind.”  “Reprobate” is depraved.