Is justice prior to God, or does justice proceed from God’s choice?
To me, the answer is unambiguous. God is bound by justice, not exempt from it.
Ọfọ k’ájá. Justice is greater than sacrifice. Greater than ritual. Greater than everything.
Ọfọ is an objective moral principle that governs divine and human beings alike.
Authority does not confer legitimacy; alignment with ọfọ does.
Where a claim, action, or outcome contradicts justice, it cannot be sustained indefinitely, regardless of ritual, status, or divine invocation, intervention or non-intervention.
When injustice appears to prevail, ethics is not expelled. It is deferred; the story is incomplete and moral equilibrium will, one day, assert itself.
Simply put, justice is ontologically prior to the divine.
That was not simply put. I’ll try again.
God’s trustworthiness rests on fidelity to justice, not on unconstrained will.
Ah!
Let me break it down.
In Christianity, grace is the primary legitimising mechanism of our being. By God’s grace, we are saved. Grace is capable of overriding natural justice or perpetuating moral discontinuity. It is not our righteousness that qualifies us. It is God’s grace.
This theological framing has far-reaching consequences. Once justice is subordinated to grace, legitimacy no longer requires ethical coherence. Power may enter the faith without submitting to its moral demands, provided it can claim divine sanction. Think Saul. He wakes up one morning and becomes Paul. From villain to hero of the faith. No discipleship required, no apprenticeship mandated. No recompense. No process. No justice. Just grace.
But, Ọfọ k’àjà. God must be bound by justice.
Peter, James and John derive authority from direct discipleship and shared life with Jesus.
Paul theologically surpasses them, deriving authority from a private revelatory claim, validated by grace alone. He bypasses formation, imitation and accountability and replaces them with calling and grace. What begins as soteriology becomes infrastructure.
In any ethical theology grounded in justice and righteousness, Paul’s path to the top would be insufficient. One should not be able to, or allowed to, self-legitimise outside an impartial moral hierarchy. In Christianity, you can. It is the order of the day. What God cannot do does not exist.
Ọfọ k’ájá directly contests the Christian architecture built on grace. No sacrifice, no divinity, no grace can neutralise injustice. Power must remain accountable to natural justice. God cannot bless falsehood. Authority without justice is void. Ritual cannot cancel wrongdoing.
Time cannot sanctify injustice.
This does not mean that God is limited.
No. God’s supremacy is a function, not a feature. God is supreme because God is just, not because God is all-powerful. God is trusted because God is just, not because God is unchallengeable.
And when I leave something to God, I’m not just counting on divine grace or praying for God’s unrestrained power. I am anticipating and trusting in the supremacy of God’s justice.
I’m expecting that justice remains operative, even when deferred. Justice may stay cooking for what feels like forever, but it must be dished out in due time. As long as eji’m ofo.
God is tethered to justice, not agnostic of it.
Challenging the primacy of grace and God’s unconstrained will does not mean I’m denying divinity. I’m simply insisting that the divine operates within justice, not in place of it.
Divine grace cannot replace divine justice. For his sin of murder, David should have directly served justice, even if tempered with divine mercy. Saul should have gone to disciple under the apostles, even if, by divine grace, he later rises through the ranks. It’s man’s immorality that enabled them sidestep justice and due process.
Divinity will never abuse natural ethics, because they’re of the same being.
I’m discussing theology. But I’m really talking politics.
Thousands of years ago, the overemphasis on divine grace functioned as a theological escape hatch that allowed the West (Saul was Roman for all intents and purposes) to co-opt a new Eastern revolutionary faith. Grace enabled power to reshape the Christian faith without submitting to its moral demands. Think Constantine. Reflect on Christmas.
Today, grace has been virtually severed from righteousness and made infinitely pliable. Abstracted and anonymised, it is detached from moral consequence and leveraged to excuse, explain and validate all forms of human evils: racism, colonialism, imperialism, corruption, crime. Now, grace does not discipline or question power; it protects it.
The result is material. Socio-economic inequality and inequity is now a function of partitioning by grace. Unexplained or illicit wealth is laundered by divine favour. Capital accumulation is a product of providence. State capture is sanctified as blessing. Structural injustice is rendered untouchable by invoking God’s inscrutable will.
The instruction “do not question God” now functions not as humility, but as a technology of moral disarmament. It dissolves accountability upward and outward. If God cannot be questioned, neither can those who claim to act in God’s name. This is not just theology.
It is politics and the consolidatory alignment of power structures.
Pentecostalism, in particular, represents the most extreme moral evacuation within Christianity. Righteousness is no longer even assumed. Process and discipline are hoops to be miracled over. Wealth itself becomes proof of divine alignment, regardless of its source. Ethics are not merely secondary; they are suspect. Poverty is a symptom of insufficient grace, not an infliction of societal injustice. Justice is jealousy and envy. Grace is immunity.
Corruption, exploitation and subjugation manifest no theological discomfort as long as they succeed.
Saulian fruits of injustice constantly undergoing a Pauline metamorphosis engineered by grace.
To reclaim the chair, we have to scatter the table.
Justice needs to be restored to its rightful height; above power, above narrative, above convenience. Ọfọ k’ájá offers a framework for theology that resists capture by power, and by extension, a society that recenters justice as the ultimate. Grace must answer to righteousness, not the reverse. Faith must place justice above ritual and retain the capacity to critique authority, including sacred authority.
We must begin to hold God to account. And by holding God to account, we are holding ourselves, our elites, our institutions and our accumulations to account. We must say with our full chest, what God cannot do DOES exist. This is not blasphemy, it is fidelity to justice.
God could not have sanctioned slavery, colonialism and imperialism for they are unjust.
God cannot be the source of the blessings for drug dealers or their accountants, thieving politicians and their associates. God is not the source of monopolies and aggressive and dehumanising business practices. God cannot ordain a society where so many have so little and very few have so much.
Ọfọ k’ájá means no leader is above moral scrutiny, no wealth is manna from heaven, no blessing is unquestionable; no theology is exempt from ethical evaluation. Doing this collapses the theological shelter that protects injustice. More importantly, it reframes our social and political agency.
If you are rich where most people are poor, if you survive where many are dying, if you thrive in a system manufacturing failures at scale, you are not a manifestation of divine grace, you are evidence of a societal injustice that needs addressing. And divine justice will not sustain this forever. For God, even God, cannot bless or sanctify injustice.
Justice is not negotiable. Not for humans. Not for the powerful. Not even for God.
Ọfọ k'àjà 
Leave a comment