By Anil Netto
We live in a world often filled with intolerable justice. Often many might be tempted to ask, if there is a God, why does he allow this to happen?

Just look at those detained without trial around the world, held in internment camps, and tortured; think of those sick and dying, many of them needlessly, from starvation and easily treatable diseases.

How could a god that is just and compassionate allow such things to happen?

In a way, God is helpless because he intervenes directly in human history through human agency, whether it is asking Mary to accept her destiny or giving the disciples the choice of whether to follow Jesus.

At critical times, like when Jesus was crucified or when the disciples were martyred or tossed to the lions, it must have all looked so hopeless. “Where is God in all this?” the disciples must have wondered, as they mourned the death of yet another martyr.

Their persecutors would have sat back, mocking the foolish faith of the early disciples.

Where is God? How long will it take for him to act?

And yet, we can be sure God is watching, silently biding his time. Just when the oppressors or self-styled “lords” or “superpowers” of the world think that nothing can stop their “mean machines”, they are brought down to earth.

Truth and justice have a way of winning out in the long run, when oppressors least expect.

As civil rights leader Martin Luther King said in 1965:

Truth crushed to earth will rise again.

How long? Not long!

Because no lie can live forever.

How long? Not long!

because you shall reap what you sow.

How long? Not long: Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne.

Yet that scaffold sways the future and behind the dim unknown standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch over his own.

How long? Not long!

Because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.

Today, the Roman Empire is no more. Even the mighty British Empire — upon which at the height of its powers it was said the sun would never set, so huge it was — has disappeared into the dark night of history.

After World War Two, the United States and Soviet Union took over the role of global superpowers. The Soviet Union was the first to collapse and today, the United States itself has been brought to its knees by the global recession and its huge deficits despite all its military might and bases across the world.

Closer to home, some might remember what it was like during Operation Lallang, when over a hundred Malaysians were detained under the ISA and our nation appeared to be plunged into darkness. Similarly, late last year, when a few Malaysians were arrested under the ISA.

Many must have asked God where He was in all this.

But God has his own time, when a thousand years is like a day. Twenty two years after Operation Lallang, truth and justice prevailed. The ISA today stands discredited in the eyes of many Malaysians. Tens of thousands of Malaysians gathered in August in KL to show their opposition to this unjust law, prompting the government to take steps to “amend” the law.

And yet, for many justice-loving people, no amendments can camouflage such as an unjust law. Detention without trial is intrinsically unjust. If something is unjust, it will never stand the test of time.

Where is justice? Justice can be found wherever people are working for justice and truth to prevail. Like a pebble thrown into a pond, its ripples will spread out until the kingdom spreads across the world.

God’s vision for the world, this kingdom, can be summed up in Isaiah 65:

“17 For look, I am going to create new heavens and a new earth, and the past will not be remembered and will come no more to mind. 18 Rather be joyful, be glad for ever at what I am creating, for look, I am creating Jerusalem to be ‘Joy’ and my people to be ‘Gladness’. 19 I shall be joyful in Jerusalem and I shall rejoice in my people. No more will the sound of weeping be heard there, nor the sound of a shriek; 20 never again will there be an infant who lives only a few days, nor an old man who does not run his full course; for the youngest will die at a hundred, and at a hundred the sinner will be accursed. 21 They will build houses and live in them, they will plant vineyards and eat their fruit.”

Let us work together to usher in this just, new world.