Calling a Bible passage “political” is a reading decision. It sorts the text before the text has said anything, and it lets the reader decide how much the passage is allowed to ask of them. That brings up the question behind this guide: when Scripture speaks to race and injustice, do you let it read you, or do you hold it at arm’s length? The answer here is to read the passage in its own context first and decide what kind of passage it is last. The main practice is a label test you can run on any justice text. You can work through it alone with a notebook or with a group around a table.
The material comes from a Jude 3 Project conversation between Lisa Fields, the founder of Jude 3 Project, and Nona Jones, who leads faith partnerships at Facebook and founded Faith and Prejudice. Jones describes her organization’s method plainly: “we use the Bible, like the Bible is our framework.” She reports that sharing Scripture with no commentary still drew charges of Marxism, socialism and critical race theory. This guide studies that labeling reflex, beginning with yours.
A label inventory
Before you open your Bible, list the words you hear most often when race comes up at church, at home or online. Next to each word, note where you learned it: a sermon, a parent, a news channel, a podcast, a feed. Mark the ones you use yourself. You will hold every passage in this guide up against that list.
Ezekiel 20: an answer the visitors did not ask for
Jones’s example was Ezekiel 20:4. She read it from a modern translation that tells the prophet to “make them know accurately and understand fully the repulsive acts of their fathers.” The KJV is shorter: “Wilt thou judge them, son of man, wilt thou judge them? cause them to know the abominations of their fathers” (Ezekiel 20:4). The older word “abominations” names detestable acts, especially idolatry. Other translations render it as detestable or repulsive practices.
Read Ezekiel 20:1-8 slowly, then read verse 30. Answer three observation questions in writing:
- Who comes to the prophet in verse 1, and what do they come to do?
- How does God respond to their request in verse 3?
- In verse 30, is the question about the fathers or about the people standing in front of Ezekiel?
Certain elders of Israel come to inquire of the Lord, expecting a word they can use. God refuses: “As I live, saith the Lord GOD, I will not be enquired of by you” (Ezekiel 20:3). The history lesson that follows is his answer to their request, not a detour from it. By verse 30, God is asking whether the present generation is defiling itself the way its fathers did. The elders came to consult the text, and the text consulted them.
Be honest about what the passage does not say. Ezekiel addresses Israel’s covenant unfaithfulness, chiefly idolatry. He is not describing American racism. Applying the chapter today is reasoning by analogy, and the analogy rests on a principle the text states: a people that refuses to understand its inheritance tends to repeat it. Jones used the verse to answer people who told her the matter was over and asked why she kept talking about it. She kept talking, she said, “because the Bible compels us.” Whether or not you accept her application, the passage at least shows that God’s people are sometimes made to face their inheritance, even when they came hoping to talk about something else.
Psalm 139: a confident label, then a turn
Lisa Fields named a habit that keeps texts like Ezekiel 20 at a distance. Many people pray, she said, “without asking God like to search me.” She described believers who pray earnestly for the nation, yet “they never ask God to like search them and know their thoughts and show them who they are.”
Her language echoes the close of Psalm 139: “Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting” (Psalm 139:23-24).
Read verses 19-22 first. The psalmist labels others with full confidence. They are the wicked, God’s enemies, people he hates. Then, with no transition, he asks God to examine him by the same standard. This is a prayer, not a doctrinal statement, but the order is worth copying. Write down what might go wrong in a person who prayed verses 19-22 and stopped there.
Isaiah 1 and Micah 6: worshippers who ask the wrong question
Jones described a woman who told her, “Jesus never said seek justice. He said, cast your cares on him.” When Jones asked how that fit with choosing candidates based on abortion, the woman answered, “well, that’s different.” Jones saw this as reasoning bent to fit a conclusion already reached. Two prophetic texts show what that kind of reading leaves out.
Read Isaiah 1:10-17. Before verse 17, list what God says he is tired of: sacrifices, gatherings, appointed feasts, even prayers. These are acts of worship he himself had commanded. Then read the remedy: “Learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow” (Isaiah 1:17). Where the KJV has judgment, many modern translations have justice.
Now read Micah 6:6-8. A worshipper asks what offering would satisfy God, moving from burnt offerings to thousands of rams to his own firstborn. The answer ends the bargaining: “He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” (Micah 6:8).
In both passages religious people frame the question as one about worship, and God answers by talking about how they treat others. The prophets do not set worship against justice. They refuse to let worship stand in for justice. A reader who files these texts under politics has to explain why the prophets placed them inside a conversation about worship rather than the state.
Keep the genre in view. These are oracles addressed to Israel and Judah, not policy programs, and they give no voting instructions. What they establish is narrower and harder to escape: concern for the oppressed belongs to the covenant itself, as something God requires, not an agenda brought in from outside.
Matthew 7: reading that never reaches the hands
Jones said she had been thinking about Matthew 7, where Jesus warns that some who did great works in his name will hear, “I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity” (Matthew 7:23). She admitted she could not imagine “that you could know Jesus and not care when someone is killed in the street.” Then she checked herself: “Of course I can’t judge it.”
Read Matthew 7:15-27 as one unit. It moves from fruit that reveals a tree, to people who say “Lord, Lord” without doing the Father’s will, to two builders. Notice what the builders share. Both heard the same words, and both houses took the same rain, floods and wind. The only difference is the foundation, and Jesus defines the rock as hearing his sayings and doing them. The foolish builder heard everything and simply never built on it. The passage closes the Sermon on the Mount as a warning to hearers. It does not give anyone a tool for ranking other people’s salvation, and Jones’s restraint respects that.
Jones described the gap Jesus warns about in one line: “we’re reading Bible, but the Bible isn’t reading us. That’s what’s happening.” She also named the standard: “we have to be the ones who are representing Christ in deed and in Word, not just in Word.”
A practice for this week: the label test
Choose one passage above, or another justice text you tend to skim. Over the week, work through four steps of about ten minutes each.
- Catch the label. Read the passage once and write down your first descriptive word for it. If the word appears on your label inventory, circle it.
- Read the unit. Read the full surrounding chapter. Write two sentences: who is speaking to whom, and what problem the speaker is addressing.
- Find the evidence. Return to your circled label. Underline any word in the passage that justifies it. If you find none, write down where the label actually came from, using your inventory.
- Turn the light around. Pray Psalm 139:23-24 slowly, then write one specific way the passage addressed you rather than someone else.
Jones’s challenge to her critics gives step three its edge. She told them, “we’re giving you nothing but Bible,” and asked, “So ultimately, are you saying that God is Marxist?” The test does not assume you are wrong. It asks you to locate your label in the text or admit that you can’t.
For groups: have each person complete steps one and two before meeting, then compare labels before comparing interpretations. Some will find no label and others a strong one. Let both stand until everyone has read the passage aloud together. If someone shares a family history connected to these passages, do not treat it as material for debate. Thank them, and let the group respond to the text rather than to their story.
What stays open, and what does not
The strongest objection deserves a hearing. Political movements on every side recruit Bible verses, and wariness about that is not cowardice. Some people who say “Marxist” may be reacting to sources they met elsewhere, not to Scripture. That is exactly why this guide keeps returning to context. The answer to misused texts is closer reading, not less reading.
Faithful Christians still differ on how a congregation takes up the subject, how fast it moves, which vocabulary helps, and how conviction becomes public policy. What the prophets do not leave open is whether God’s people may treat justice as optional. Isaiah 1 and Micah 6 ground that demand in what the LORD requires, and that is the footing Jude 3 Project holds: justice measured by God’s character and Scripture, not by any political ideology of the left or the right. On that footing, the fear of politics is no more a reason to skip Ezekiel 20 than partisan zeal is a reason to bend it.
Questions for discussion
- In Ezekiel 20, the elders came to inquire and were answered with their own history. When have you come to Scripture wanting one kind of answer and found it addressing something else?
- The psalmist labels the wicked confidently before asking to be searched. What does that order suggest about how to approach injustice you see in others?
- Isaiah 1 and Micah 6 both answer a worship question with a justice answer. What would change in how your church gathers if it read those passages as being about worship?
- Jones distinguished between seeing a troubling pattern and judging an individual’s salvation. Where is that line for you, and why does it matter in a conversation about race?
- Which step of the label test was hardest, and what did it show you about where your labels come from?
- Name one question about race and the church that you believe faithful Christians can disagree on, and one you believe Scripture does not leave open. Reason from a specific text.
At the end of the week, set your label inventory beside the passage you studied most closely. Cross out any word the text gave you no grounds for, and write in the margin the word the passage itself would use.