Pere finished the post at ten minutes past one in the morning. He read it through twice on his phone, his thumb hovering over the button, and felt the heat of it in his chest. It was the best thing he had ever written.
It was about Mrs Oduya, the widow who lived two doors down from his parents and who had taught him to read in her front room when he was six. Her husband had been a vice-principal for twenty-nine years. He retired, fell ill and died within eighteen months, and since then his widow had been trying to collect the pension and gratuity he had earned. For three years she had taken two buses to the same office. For three years she had been told that the file could not be found. On her last visit, a young man at the counter had leaned forward and said quietly, “Mama, if you can do something for the boys, the file will appear.”
Pere had gone with her that day. He had taken a picture of the young man from behind a pillar. And now, with that picture at the top, he had written six hundred words that he knew would travel. He called the clerk a bloodsucker. He repeated what someone at the bus stop had told him, that the man had built three houses on bribes. He wrote a line about “people like him” that was meant to point at more than one man. He ended with a curse: may he never find rest until he pays back every kobo.
He had over eleven thousand followers. He knew how these things went. By morning there would be shares, outrage, perhaps a journalist’s call. Somebody would find the man’s address.
Something made him stop. Perhaps it was that the post was about Mrs Oduya and she had not seen it. The next morning he knocked on her door and handed her the phone. She put on her reading glasses and read slowly, all the way to the end. Then she looked up.
“Pere, is it true that he built three houses?”
“Everybody says so, Ma.”
Punchline“Then everybody can write it.” She handed the phone back. “You will not write it for me.”
Injustice has a face and an address
Before we talk about how to speak, we should settle that we must speak. Some believers have been taught to treat every complaint against wrongdoing as a kind of unspirituality. They say “God is in control” in a tone that ends the conversation, and they leave the widow at the counter to manage on her own. Indifference can wear the clothes of piety very convincingly.
Injustice is never abstract to the people who suffer it. It is the pension that does not come, so the medicine is not bought. It is the trader whose goods are seized by people with no lawful authority to seize them. It is the young man stopped at a roadblock, beaten and made to transfer money from his phone before he is released. It is the housemaid who has not been paid for eleven months, the land that a family has farmed for three generations sold from under them with forged papers, the child whose school fees vanished into a scheme that promised to double them. It has names. It has addresses. It has a cost that someone is paying this week.
That is why the first thing biblical concern for justice does is look at the harm and at the people who carry it. Before it asks who is to blame, it asks who is hurting and what would actually help them. Mrs Oduya’s question to Pere was a question about purpose. Will this get her the pension? Or will it only make the writer feel righteous for a day?
Hold on to that question. Truthful advocacy keeps the injured person at the centre. Anger, however justified, tends to move them out of the centre and put an enemy there instead. When that happens, the cause can grow louder while the widow grows poorer.
Worship that God refuses
The opening chapter of Isaiah is one of the most startling passages in the prophets. Judah was a religious nation. The Temple was busy. Sacrifices were offered, feasts kept, solemn assemblies called. And God says through His prophet that He is weary of all of it. “When ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood” (Isaiah 1:15). Then He tells them what He wants instead:
Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil; Learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.
Notice the order. “Cease to do evil; learn to do well.” Before anyone can plead for the oppressed, they must stop being part of the oppression. That includes the small, private ways we profit from systems that crush others: the bribe we pay to jump the queue, which teaches the clerk that queues can be jumped; the wages we delay because the worker cannot complain; the gossip that ruins a reputation because the person cannot answer.
Then come four verbs. Seek judgment: go looking for what is right, as though it were something lost. Relieve the oppressed: the Hebrew carries the sense of setting right, of straightening what has been bent. Judge the fatherless: give the orphan a fair hearing, the hearing nobody else will give. Plead for the widow: take up her case as an advocate takes up a case in court.
Isaiah’s audience would have known what he meant. In their world the widow and the fatherless had lost the man who would normally speak for them at the city gate, where disputes were settled. They were exposed to anyone who wanted their field or their inheritance. God’s instruction is that His people should stand where that missing voice used to stand.
The next verse is the famous invitation: “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow” (Isaiah 1:18). The call to justice and the offer of cleansing sit side by side. God is not demanding that Judah earn forgiveness by good works. He is showing them that a people washed by Him will care about what He cares about. Amos said the same thing to the northern kingdom: “let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream” (Amos 5:24). A river is not a decoration. It reaches dry places.
Open thy mouth
Proverbs 31 begins with words a king remembered from his mother. Before she describes the virtuous woman, she warns her son against the habits that ruin rulers, and then she tells him what his mouth is for:
Open thy mouth for the dumb in the cause of all such as are appointed to destruction. Open thy mouth, judge righteously, and plead the cause of the poor and needy.
“Open thy mouth for the dumb.” The dumb here are people who cannot speak for themselves, either because they have no standing, no education, no connections or no strength left. “In the cause of all such as are appointed to destruction”: people who are on their way to being ruined unless somebody intervenes. “Plead the cause of the poor and needy.”
Lemuel’s mother was speaking to a king, and the duty falls most heavily on those with power. But the principle reaches every believer who has more voice than the person beside them. A graduate who can write a formal letter has more voice than a market woman who cannot read. A church with a lawyer in the congregation has more voice than a family with none. A Christian with eleven thousand followers has more voice than a widow with a broken phone.
Psalm 82 pictures God standing among the judges of the earth and calling them to account:
Defend the poor and fatherless: do justice to the afflicted and needy. Deliver the poor and needy: rid them out of the hand of the wicked.
Notice how concrete it is. Defend. Do justice. Deliver. Rid them out of the hand. Concern that never becomes action is not what the psalm describes. “The righteous considereth the cause of the poor: but the wicked regardeth not to know it” (Proverbs 29:7). The wicked man’s sin in that proverb is a refusal to know. He prefers not to hear the details, because details create obligations.
So the believer is called to know. Read the documents. Listen to the whole story. Visit the family. Find out what has already been tried. Those who do the patient work of knowing are usually the ones who end up actually helping.
Who are the voiceless near you?
It is easy to care about injustice at a distance and miss it next door. Let me name some of the people Scripture would have us notice in our own setting.
The widow whose in-laws have taken her late husband’s property, or whose entitlements are stuck in an office somewhere. The pensioner who has served the nation for thirty-five years and now waits on a bench. The awaiting-trial detainee who has been in custody longer than the sentence for the offence he is accused of, because his file has not moved and he cannot afford a lawyer. The domestic worker, often a young girl from a poor family, who is overworked, underfed or abused behind a closed gate. The labourer cheated of wages. The citizen harassed, extorted or beaten by someone in uniform who has forgotten that his authority exists “to thee for good” (Romans 13:4). The community whose public funds have been diverted, so that the clinic has no drugs and the school has no roof.
None of these is a party matter. Nigerians of every faith, region and political persuasion suffer these things, and people of every background commit them. A Christian who speaks up only when the victim belongs to his church, his tribe or his preferred party has not yet learned the justice of Isaiah 1. God told Israel to plead for the widow and the fatherless, not for their own widows only. Jeremiah adds “the stranger” to the list (Jeremiah 22:3), the person with no local connections at all.
The same impartiality applies to the wrongdoer. Corruption, cruelty and abuse are wrong when they are committed by people we dislike and wrong when they are committed by people we admire, including people in the church. Scripture gives no believer licence to shout about the sins of one group and stay silent about the sins of another.
A false report helps no one
Here we come to the heart of Pere’s dilemma. He had a real injustice in his hands, and he was about to wrap it in things he did not know to be true. The law of Moses addressed exactly that:
Thou shalt not raise a false report: put not thine hand with the wicked to be an unrighteous witness. Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil; neither shalt thou speak in a cause to decline after many to wrest judgment.
“Thou shalt not raise a false report.” The ninth commandment had already said, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour” (Exodus 20:16). Here the command is widened to include the report: the story passed along, the rumour repeated. And then comes a warning that might have been written for social media: “Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil; neither shalt thou speak in a cause to decline after many to wrest judgment.” When the crowd is already shouting, it is very tempting to add your voice to whatever the crowd is saying. God tells His people not to let the volume of others decide what they will say.
The next verse is surprising: “Neither shalt thou countenance a poor man in his cause” (Exodus 23:3). Even sympathy must not bend the truth. A poor man’s case must be judged on its facts, not decided in his favour because he is poor. Compassion does not authorise falsehood, even on behalf of the people we are trying to help.
Proverbs adds a piece of practical wisdom every advocate needs: “He that is first in his own cause seemeth just; but his neighbour cometh and searcheth him” (Proverbs 18:17). The first version of a story always sounds complete. Then the other side speaks, or the full video emerges, or the documents are examined, and the picture changes.
Think about what this means in practice. Before you share a video of an alleged injustice, ask what you actually know. Who recorded it? What happened before the clip begins? Is it from this year, this city, this country? Has it been confirmed by anyone with nothing to gain? Before you name a person, ask whether you can prove what you are saying about them. In many countries, including ours, a false accusation published about a person can also expose you to legal action, and rightly so.
Falsehood does not merely risk harm to the accused. It damages the cause. When a single invented detail is exposed, people stop believing the true parts. The clerk who really did ask a widow for a bribe becomes a sympathetic figure, a victim of online lies. Mrs Oduya’s pension recedes further. The person who most needed the truth is the one who loses when it is mixed with rumour.
NuggetTruth is the strength of the oppressed. When anger adds one false detail to a true complaint, it hands the wrongdoer the very defence he needed and leaves the victim worse off.
Anger without hatred
Some readers will say, “But surely we should be angry.” Yes. There is a holy anger at injustice, and a believer who feels nothing when a widow is cheated has a hardened heart. Nehemiah heard the cry of families selling their children into debt slavery and wrote, “I was very angry when I heard their cry and these words” (Nehemiah 5:6). Jesus Himself looked on the hard-hearted Pharisees “with anger, being grieved for the hardness of their hearts” (Mark 3:5).
But look at what Nehemiah did next. “Then I consulted with myself, and I rebuked the nobles, and the rulers” (Nehemiah 5:7). He thought before he acted. His anger became a plan. He called a public assembly, stated the facts, appealed to their consciences and asked for specific restitution, and they agreed.
Paul wrote, “Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath” (Ephesians 4:26). Anger is permitted. Anger that settles in and becomes a resident of the heart is not. James is blunter still: “the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God” (James 1:20). Human rage, however righteous its trigger, does not produce the kind of rightness God is after.
One of the clearest signs that anger has crossed into hatred is the way we describe the person we oppose. We stop calling him a man and start calling him an animal, a demon, a parasite. We say “people like him” and mean a whole town, a whole tribe, a whole faith. We wish him dead and call it prayer. James saw the absurdity of it in the church: “Therewith bless we God, even the Father; and therewith curse we men, which are made after the similitude of God” (James 3:9). The man who wronged Mrs Oduya still bears the image of God. His sin is real, and so is his humanity.
Dehumanising language is dangerous because it prepares people for dehumanising acts. Nigerians have seen what happens when a crowd decides that someone is no longer a person: the burning tyre, the mob that will not wait for evidence. Believers must refuse to supply the vocabulary that makes such things possible. We can name a wrong precisely and still speak of the wrongdoer as a human being who will answer to God.
Lawful and peaceful means
How, then, should a believer act? Paul’s experience at Philippi is instructive. He and Silas had been beaten with rods in public without a trial and thrown into prison, in clear breach of the rights of Roman citizens. The next morning the magistrates sent a quiet message that they could leave. Paul refused to slip away:
But Paul said unto them, They have beaten us openly uncondemned, being Romans, and have cast us into prison; and now do they thrust us out privily? nay verily; but let them come themselves and fetch us out.
Paul did not riot. He did not curse the magistrates. He also did not pretend that nothing had happened. He insisted on what the law gave him, and he made the officials who had broken it come in person and acknowledge it. It was firm, public and entirely lawful, and it almost certainly gave some protection to the young church he was leaving behind in the city. Later, when he could not get a fair hearing in Judaea, he used the legal right of a citizen and said, “I appeal unto Cæsar” (Acts 25:11). Paul used the law as a tool for justice.
There are many such tools available to us, and believers should learn to use them well:
- Keep records: dates, names, receipts, letters, photographs, witnesses.
- Write formal complaints to the officer’s superiors, and keep copies stamped as received.
- Use the oversight bodies that exist for this purpose, such as the Public Complaints Commission, professional disciplinary bodies and the complaints units of security agencies.
- Seek legal aid through legal aid councils, law clinics, human rights organisations and lawyers in your congregation who will give time.
- Speak to responsible journalists with documented facts, and take part in peaceful, lawful public advocacy.
- Pray, persistently, and fast if you are led to.
Jesus told a parable about a widow who kept going back to an unjust judge until he gave her justice, simply because she would not stop coming (Luke 18:1-8). Persistence through proper channels is often slow and unglamorous. It also works more often than people expect.
Safety matters too. Some injustices involve people who are dangerous. Where someone is being abused, especially a child or a domestic worker, the first step is to get them safe and involve the authorities and qualified help. Where speaking out could endanger you or the victim, take advice before you act. Courage and recklessness are different things.
And the believer refuses violence. We do not burn, loot, attack or threaten. We do not take the law into our own hands, because Scripture has already told us whose hands the final judgement is in.
Overcome evil with good
Paul’s instruction at the end of Romans 12 is one of the hardest in the New Testament, and also one of the most liberating:
Recompense to no man evil for evil. Provide things honest in the sight of all men. If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men. Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord. Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head. Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.
“Recompense to no man evil for evil.” That rules out revenge, and it also rules out the smaller, more respectable forms of revenge: the humiliating post, the campaign to destroy someone’s family along with his career, the pleasure of seeing an enemy fall. “Provide things honest in the sight of all men.” Even in conflict, let your conduct be the kind any fair observer would recognise as honest.
“Avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.” This verse is often misread as passivity. In fact Paul assumes that wrongs matter so much that God Himself will deal with them, and He will do it more justly than we could. In the very next chapter Paul describes the governing authority as “a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil” (Romans 13:4). So Romans 12 does not cancel justice. It moves vengeance out of our private hands and places it with God, who works through lawful courts in this age and will judge perfectly in the age to come.
That frees us. If I do not have to make my enemy suffer, I can seek what is right without needing him destroyed. I can push for the pension to be paid, for the officer to be disciplined, for the stolen funds to be recovered, and still pray for the person I am opposing.
“If thine enemy hunger, feed him.” The coals of fire are probably the burning shame of an enemy who is met with kindness he did not expect, a shame that may yet lead him to repentance. “Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.” Hatred is one of the ways evil wins. When injustice turns its victims into people who hate, it has conquered twice.
Behind all this stands the cross. “When we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son” (Romans 5:10). We were not neutral parties when Christ came for us. And when Jesus Himself suffered the greatest injustice in history, He prayed for His executioners and “committed himself to him that judgeth righteously” (1 Peter 2:23). He did not pretend His suffering was just. He entrusted it to the Father. People who have received that kind of mercy can fight for justice without needing to hate.
Pere did not post it.
He sat in Mrs Oduya’s front room that afternoon with a notebook, and she told him the whole story from the beginning, with dates. She brought out a plastic folder: her husband’s appointment letter, his retirement letter, the death certificate, the receipts for every form she had bought, a list of every visit. Pere typed a two-page letter to the head of the pension board, setting out the facts and nothing else. They copied it to the Public Complaints Commission. A lawyer from their church read it and added a paragraph.
Then Pere wrote a different post. It had no photograph. It named no junior officer. It described a widow, a three-year delay, a missing file and a request for money, and it said that a formal complaint had been lodged and gave the date. It was calm. It was shared less than the first one would have been, but one of the people who shared it worked in the state’s head of service office.
PunchlineWithin five weeks the file was found. An internal inquiry followed. The pension began, and the arrears were paid over the next year in instalments.
When the last payment arrived, Mrs Oduya asked Pere to drive her to the board one more time, to deliver a thank-you letter to the director who had taken her case seriously. On their way out, they passed the young clerk, now at a different desk in a different department. Mrs Oduya stopped and greeted him by name. She asked about his mother. He could not meet her eyes.
In the car, Pere asked her why.
“I wanted my husband’s pension,” she said. “I never wanted that boy’s blood.” She looked out of the window for a while. “God will deal with what he did. My business was to tell the truth and keep going.”
That is the calling. Open your mouth for the voiceless. Tell the truth. Use every lawful means you have, and keep going. And do not let anger take you somewhere love would never go.
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- Who are the “dumb” in Proverbs 31:8 in your own community, workplace or church, the people who cannot easily speak for themselves?
- When you last shared a story about an injustice, how much did you actually know about it? What would you check next time?
- Is there anyone you have begun to describe in language that strips away their humanity? What would it mean to name their wrong without hating them?
- Which lawful means of advocacy listed here could you learn to use, or help someone else to use?
- What does Romans 12:19 free you from, and what does it leave you still responsible to do?
This Week
Choose one concrete injustice affecting a real person you know, and commit this week to the patient work of knowing. Sit with the person, write down the facts with dates, gather the documents, and find out which lawful channel could address it. Help them write one clear, truthful letter or complaint. Before you post or speak about any injustice this week, ask Mrs Oduya’s question: is it true, and will it actually help the person who is hurting?
A Prayer
Righteous Father, You defend the fatherless and plead for the widow, and You see every wrong done in secret. Open my eyes to the people near me who have no voice, and open my mouth to speak for them. Keep my words true. Guard me from the false report and from following the crowd. When I am angry, let my anger become wise action and not hatred. Help me to remember that those who do wrong are still made in Your image and will answer to You. Teach me to use every lawful means with patience, and to leave vengeance in Your hands. As Christ committed Himself to You who judge righteously, let me overcome evil with good. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.