I just recently finished Timothy Keller’s book Generous Justice. A profound and wise look at what it really means to “do justice,” I highly recommend giving it a try.

Through this book, Keller provides a great argument for the necessity of both legislative and relational justice. His ending, however, struck me most. You can program and legislate justice to change people’s situations. But only relationships can truly restore peace, because they change people’s hearts.

Take a look at how he explains it:

“As a result, the world is not like a lava cone, the product of powerful random eruptions, but rather like a fabric. Woven cloth consists of innumerable threads interlaced with one another. Even more than the architectural image, the fabric metaphor conveys the importance of relationship. If you throw thousands of pieces of thread onto a table, no fabric results. The threads must be rightly and intimately related to one another in literally a million ways. Each thread must go over, under, around, and through the others at thousands of points. Only then do you  get a fabric that is beautiful and strong, that covers, fits, holds, shelters, and delights.

“God created all things to be in beautiful, harmonious, interdependent, knitted, webbed relationship to one another. Just as rightly related physical elements form a cosmos or a tapestry, so rightly related human beings form a community. This interwovenness is what the Bible calls shalom, or harmonious peace. ..

“Specifically, however, to ‘do justice’ means to go to places where the fabric of shalom has broken down, where the weaker members of societies are falling through the fabric, and repair it…How can we do that? The only way to reweave and strengthen the fabric is by weaving yourself into it. Human beings are like those threads thrown together onto a table. If we keep our money, time, and power to ourselves, for ourselves, instead of sending them out into our neighbors’ lives, then we may be literally on top of one another, but we are not interwoven socially, relationally, financially, and emotionally. Reweaving shalom means to sacrificially thread, lace, and press your time, goods, power, and resources into the lives and needs of others.”

—Generous Justice, pg. 173, 177