Do We Really Want What We Deserve?

I was born and raised in Minneapolis. The city's changed plenty since I left, but some things remain constant—one of them being a peculiar capacity for mistaking lawbreaking for martyrdom. Recent headlines tell the story in stark relief: YouTuber and street journalist Nick Shirley exposed significant welfare fraud in the Mini Apple's Somali community, documenting systematic abuse of public assistance programs—yet when ICE enforcement operations follow up on documented violations, protests erupt framing deportations as injustice rather than consequence.

Now, I am deeply skeptical of this framing. When fraud is documented and deportation follows, that's not persecution; that's procedure. The protests strike me as fundamentally misguided, confusing enforcement with oppression. (Though I suppose that's what happens when decades have been spent teaching folks accountability = cruelty.) But I'm not here to relitigate Minneapolis politics or debate immigration policy. Those conversations matter, but they're not my point today.

Because, even if we set aside the merits of this specific case—even if every single protest sign were justified, every grievance legitimate, every claim of injustice valid—there's still a deeper problem we're all avoiding. It's the actual question almost nobody wants answered: What if we got the justice we truly deserve?

That's not a hypothetical I'm lobbing at protesters in Minneapolis. It's the question that should terrify Every. Single. One of us.

Be Careful What We Wish For

We live in a culture obsessed with fairness. "No justice, no peace" isn't just a chant; it's become a moral framework. We demand equity, accountability, reparations for wrongs both ancient and recent. We measure every policy, every interaction, every outcome against the standard of fairness. And honestly? Some of that is warranted. Injustice exists, systems fail, and people do suffer, unprovoked.

But here's where it gets uncomfortable: If we're going to invoke justice as our measuring rod, we need to be prepared for what happens when that rod measures us. Because the cosmic irony is this: if GOD gave us the justice we're demanding from everyone else, we'd be utterly, irreversibly destroyed.

The Bible's diagnosis is unambiguous: "None is righteous, no, not one" (Romans 3:10). Not the protesters. Not the fraudsters. Not the policy makers. Not you and not me. We're all lawbreakers before an infinitely holy Judge, and the penalty for that lawbreaking isn't a fine or community service or even deportation. It's eternal separation from the source of all goodness, beauty, and life itself.

That's what justice demands. Not what we think justice demands, but what actual cosmic, ultimate, transcendent justice as required by the holiness of GOD. And if that sounds harsh, it's because we've spent so long sentimentalizing Christianity that we've forgotten what the gospel actually addresses. GOD isn't primarily interested in making us feel better about ourselves. He's interested in reconciling the irreconcilable: His perfect righteousness and our complete unrighteousness.

The Great Exchange: Cosmic Unfairness in Our Favor

This is where the great exchange comes in—and why it's scandalous.

Jesus Christ, the GOD-man, lived the perfectly righteous life none of us could manage. Then, on the cross, He bore the penalty that our lawbreaking earned. He took what we deserved: wrath, judgment, and condemnation. In return, we receive what He deserved: righteousness, mercy, acceptance before a holy GOD. That's not fair, not justice in any sense we normally use the word; it's cosmic unfairness working in our favor for once.

The theological term is "imputed righteousness," and it means exactly what it sounds like: Christ's righteousness is credited to our account, and our sin is charged to His. It's a legal transaction, a divine exchange that makes no earthly sense. Why would GOD do this? Not because we earned it, for sure. And, not because we deserved it—we've already established we deserve the opposite. He does it because He is, to use His own language, "merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love" (Psalm 103:8).

Here's what strikes me about this: the same culture demanding fairness in every human interaction desperately needs unfairness from GOD. We need Him to not give us what we deserve. We need Him to extend mercy we haven't earned, grace we can't repay, forgiveness for sins we actually committed. The moment GOD starts treating us fairly—by the cosmic standards of justice that actually matter—we're finished.

And yet much of the church has become just as confused about this as the culture. Many have absorbed the world's obsession with human worthiness such that they're preaching a gospel that emphasizes man's effort, man's goodness, man's inherent value. They've forgotten—or maybe haven't grasped—that the stark reality of human undeservedness is just as extreme as the mind-boggling generosity of divine mercy. One doesn't work without the other. You can't understand grace until you understand what you're being saved from.

What We Actually Deserve

I think back to those protests in Minneapolis, and I'm struck by the theological parallel. People claiming they don't deserve consequences for documented fraud. And you know what? On a cosmic scale, they're absolutely right—none of us deserves what's coming. But not in the way they mean it.

We don't deserve mercy. We don't deserve grace. We don't deserve the great exchange where GOD credits us with righteousness we never earned and charges His Son with sin He never committed. That's the scandal of the gospel: it's unfair in the most grand and most glorious way imaginable. Justice would condemn us all. Fairness would leave us in our sins. What we need—what every person on earth needs, whether protesting in Minneapolis or smugly judging from a distance—is for GOD to violate the very principle of fairness we keep demanding from everyone else.

The question isn't whether we deserve better treatment from earthly systems. Maybe we do; maybe we don't. The question is whether we understand what we actually deserve from the GOD before whom "all have sinned and fall short of the glory" (Romans 3:23). And if we're honest, genuinely, brutally honest, the answer is terrifying.

Unless, of course, we're willing to receive what we don't deserve: unmerited favor from a merciful GOD who accomplishes through divine initiative what we could never achieve through human effort. That's the gospel. Not good advice for better living. Not a spiritual self-help program. It's the greatest news precisely because it offers what we need most: cosmic unfairness working eternally in our favor.

So yes, I'm skeptical of protests framing consequences as oppression. But I'm far more concerned with the deeper blindness—the one that demands fairness from everyone except GOD, the one that forgets we're all standing before the Judge with empty hands and guilty consciences, the one that misses the scandal at Christianity's core.

We don't want what we deserve. Trust me on this. What we need is exactly what the gospel offers: the great exchange, where the great exchange, where justice kisses mercy and somehow, impossibly, we walk free. and somehow, impossibly, we walk free.