You Cannot Create Justice Through Injustice
- Michael Fierro
- Jun 19
- 3 min read
Updated: Jun 21
What I Tell My Children—And Why It’s the Heart of the Gospel
A Simple Rule
I tell my children something I hope they carry into every corner of life:
You cannot create justice through injustice.
It sounds obvious—and it is. But this basic moral truth is denied every day. We deny it in our politics, in our conversations, in how we treat one another—and even, sometimes, in how we talk about God.
We think if the end is good enough, we can justify the means. But the truth is eternal: evil cannot heal. Injustice cannot restore.
The Danger of Substituting Injustice for Justice
This principle is one reason I could never accept the version of penal substitution proposed in some strands of Calvinist theology. That model says God’s justice is satisfied by punishing Jesus in place of sinners. But this is not justice. It's injustice done in the name of righteousness.
The guilty go free.
The innocent is condemned.
And this is supposed to satisfy divine justice?
But if God punishes the innocent instead of the guilty, then He violates the very justice He claims to uphold. That is not the God revealed by Christ.
The Catholic understanding is different. Jesus is not punished instead of us—He offers Himself freely. He bears our sin, not as a scapegoat cursed by the Father, but as a Redeemer who steps into our brokenness to heal it with love. That is justice: not a divine bookkeeping trick, but a real restoration of relationship, truth, and dignity.
As St. Gregory of Nazianzus wrote,
“To ransom us from the curse, He who is not cursed became a curse—not by being cursed, but by taking on Himself the curse for our sakes.”
The Cross is not God venting wrath. It is divine love poured out.
Injustice in the Name of Progress
This isn’t just a theological problem. It’s a human one.
We silence people to promote free speech.
We cancel people to build community.
We bully others to defend kindness.
We dehumanize in the name of justice.
But you cannot lie your way to truth.You cannot hate your way to healing.You cannot punish your way to peace.
Injustice may feel satisfying for a moment. But it always leaves a wound behind.
“Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”—Romans 12:21
What Justice Really Looks Like
Justice, in the Christian tradition, means giving to each what is due. But it is never separated from mercy, truth, and love.
The Cross is not the place where God's wrath was poured out on an innocent. It is the place where divine love poured itself out on a guilty world. Jesus did not suffer so we wouldn’t have to—He suffered so our suffering could be transformed.
This is the foundation of redemptive suffering. Jesus did not cancel justice. He fulfilled it—not by punishing someone else, but by offering Himself.
“Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”—John 15:13
Love that is willing to suffer with and for the other—that is where justice and mercy meet.
Why I Tell My Children
I tell my children not just to be good, but to love truthfully. And part of loving truthfully means rejecting the lie that we can build anything good on a foundation of harm.
“You cannot create justice through injustice.”
Not in theology.Not in politics.Not in family life.Not in how we treat those who hurt us.
Real justice requires courage, repentance, and sacrifice. It does not take shortcuts. It does not trade places. It does not crush the innocent to save the guilty.
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