The following is an excerpt from Just Love by Wayne Jacobsen and Tobie van der Westhuizen. It’s a featured Speakeasy selection, and there are still limited review copies available for qualified reviewers.
Excerpt from Chapter 2 & 3 of Just Love:
How One Mistranslated Word Distorted the Gospel
In my early forties, after a betrayal of a close friend and ministry colleague, I found myself on a different trajectory. God began to reveal how much he loved me, even in my feelings of failure and confusion. Over the next few years, he took me through a remarkable transition, from seeing God as someone I had to appease by my good behavior to a Father who already loved me, even in my struggles. Instead of waking up every morning trying to be loved by God, I started waking up as his beloved, a journey I chronicled in my book He Loves Me.
As that transition took place, I began to discover the relational joy and transforming power of engaging in an affection-based relationship with the Father through the Son. This was the life of Jesus I had long sought but my vigorous religious activities had failed to produce. I was amazed to watch struggles and temptations I’d fought for decades slowly fade away as love took hold. I found myself thinking and living differently; the joy I found in him displacing the temptations that I once wrestled with so stringently. This connection to his love became the predominant influence in my life, shaping how I treated myself and those around me.
For the past thirty years, I’ve traveled the world, helping people explore a relationship with Jesus that grows out of a confidence in his love for them, even in their darkest struggles. I want people to discover the joy of an affectionate relationship with God the Father, which is both personally liberating and redemptive for those around them. We can’t do that through our own efforts; it results from God’s love and goodness transforming how we think and live inside a growing relationship with him.
Then one day, I received a fascinating email from South Africa. I had no idea who Tobie van der Westhuizen was or why he wanted to share with me a discovery he had been exploring for eight years. He wanted to know if his conclusions resonated with me.
Did they ever!
But it did take us some time to get there. His initial statement made me wonder if he was yet another kooky amateur theologian with some half-baked theological novelty. Tobie’s initial email cut right to the chase: “The word righteousness is not in the Bible.”
Of course it is, I thought and immediately recalled two dozen Scriptures off the top of my head that speak of righteousness. However, I was intrigued enough to keep reading and discovered that his point was not that our English translations don’t include the word righteousness, but rather that it is a mistranslation of the original Greek. Then he laid out a compelling case that the word should have been translated to justice or justness, not righteousness.
At first glance, that would seem a minor distinction, but throughout this book, we will show you it is not. Why translators got that wrong and what it did to diminish our view of the life in Jesus is a compelling tale and opens the door to a more powerful gospel than what many embrace today. If true, this wouldn’t change the Gospel we’ve come to know, but it would give it a very different emphasis, making it richer and more transformative.
Did Jesus say, “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well?” Or did he say, “Seek first his kingdom and his justice, and all these things will be given to you as well?” (Matthew 6:33) The first naturally draws our eyes inward, focusing on our personal piety and individual morality. The second focuses on how we consider others around us. Am I seeking to be just in my dealings with them, or do I exploit them to get what I want?
That’s how we’ll speak of justice in this book. Many people think of justice as punishment for crime. When someone is convicted and sentenced to death, we say the family of the victim got justice. Others think of it negatively because it has been co-opted by the political left to talk only about their view of social justice. But the Bible speaks early and often about being just in our dealings with people, and all the more so if righteousness is a mistranslation.
C. S. Lewis provided a powerful definition of the justice we’re discussing by listing his seven virtues in Mere Christianity: “Justice means much more than the sort of thing that goes on in Law courts. It is the old name for everything we should now call fairness; it includes honesty, give-and-take, truthfulness, keeping your promises, and all that side of life.” This is the justice of God that cannot be institutionalized in governments or religion by simply encoding it in rules.
The more Tobie and I explored this together, the more I realized that over the previous thirty years, love had already taught me to live in harmony with Tobie’s discovery. He offered a piece that has gone missing since the Reformation, when Protestants became more focused on imputed righteousness than on treating others justly.
Many follow the rituals and disciplines without ever discovering the fullness of joy that comes from living in tune with his presence in us. What I’ve been most struck by is how Tobie’s research unites the Old and New Testaments in a breathtaking way as one continuous story of God’s purpose unfolding in human history by connecting the coming of God’s kingdom on earth with the purpose of salvation. It also shows how Jesus transforms people from the inside out, not steeped in human effort but through the power of love to rewrite our story inside God’s redemption.
What Tobie shared with me highlighted in the Scriptures what I’d come to discover over the previous thirty years. Love had already taught me the reality of what he described, and now I had the Scriptural thread that brought it together. As we spoke, we both sensed that God had brought our two stories together to share something with the world that could help us embrace a more vibrant faith that expresses the kingdom of God.
As we’ll see, only the love of Jesus working in us can make us just. This isn’t something we can accomplish through human effort. When we experience his love, we’ll find ourselves increasingly treating others with compassion, integrity, honesty, fairness, and mercy. This is how the kingdom of God becomes visible in our world. The just person living in an unjust world will carry a weight of character and graciousness wherever he goes and will also scandalize a world built on selfishness.
What if one mistranslated word split the Gospel in two — and kept it broken for five hundred years?
In a high school chemistry classroom in Bloemfontein, South Africa, Tobie van der Westhuizen asked his students what “karma” meant. They leaned forward. They had opinions. They argued. Then he said: “There’s another word that means the same thing.”
Silence.
“Righteousness,” he said.
The class slumped back in their chairs. Faces twisted. Murmurs of protest went up across the room. “No, sir.” “That’s about entitlement.” “That’s when people think they’re better than others.”
And Tobie realized something seismic had just been confirmed: the very word English-speaking Christianity has used for five centuries to translate the heart of the Gospel is unintelligible — even repellent — to the people the Gospel was meant to reach.
Just Love: How One Mistranslated Word Distorted the Gospel is the fruit of that classroom moment and the decades of linguistic, theological, and personal reckoning that preceded it. Written by Tobie van der Westhuizen and beloved author Wayne Jacobsen (He Loves Me), it makes a case that is at once scholarly and devastating in its simplicity: the Greek word dikaiosynē, translated as “righteousness” in every major English Bible, is rendered as justice in every other language — German, Afrikaans, Spanish, French, Dutch. Every single one. The English deviation traces directly to the Norman Conquest of 1066, which severed English legal vocabulary from its Germanic roots, creating a religious word — “righteousness” — that conveyed personal moral status instead of right relationship, inner purity instead of just action, individual salvation instead of communal transformation.
In short: what we call the “social gospel” and the “personal gospel” were never meant to be two things. The split was a translation accident. And its consequences have been catastrophic.
This is not a book about scoring theological points. Wayne Jacobsen opens with one of the most vulnerable passages you’ll read this year — the story of discovering that his wife of forty-seven years carried buried childhood trauma that had nearly destroyed their marriage, and how finding that “missing piece” transformed everything he thought he understood. That’s the register of this book: personal, pastoral, luminous with grace, and quietly revolutionary.
Tozer sensed it. N.T. Wright and Nicholas Wolterstorff have written about it in academic papers few will ever read. Just Love brings it home — not to theologians with PhDs, but to the “plain man and woman, the insignificant, the widow and the orphan, the poor and oppressed” for whom the justness of God was always intended.
What changes when you read justice instead of righteousness?
Everything. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice.” “Seek first the justice of God.” “The Golden Rule” becomes the Golden Life — not a rule to follow, but a love to inhabit, overflowing into the world.
Perfect for readers who:
- Have felt the tension between “personal salvation” and “social justice” — and suspected it was a false dichotomy
- Are drawn to N.T. Wright, Dallas Willard’s critique of the “Gospel of Sin Management,” or Scot McKnight’s kingdom theology
- Hunger for a Gospel that transforms from within rather than managing behavior from without
- Find “righteousness” language alienating, moralistic, or weaponized — and want to know why
- Work in justice ministry and want deeper theological roots for what they already know in their bones
- Are tired of Christianity that produces converts but not transformed lives
Praise for Just Love
“Not since Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of the Church has there been such an important rediscovery of truth. This changes everything!”
—Brad Cummings, co-author, publisher, and movie producer of The Shack
“Perhaps the most important spiritual discovery during my time on this earth. Prepare to be challenged and hopefully, changed.”
—Bob Prater, co-author of A Language of Healing for a Polarized Nation
“A most helpful, readable, wonderful book. You thought you knew it, but Wayne and Tobie offer eye-opening insight into the layers of God’s justice and love.”
—Dr. Stephanie Bennett, communication professor and author
About the Authors
Wayne Jacobsen has traveled the world helping people embrace a relationship with God deeply rooted in his affection for them. His numerous books include He Loves Me, So You Don’t Want to Go to Church Anymore, and A Language of Healing for a Polarized Nation, and was coauthor of The Shack. A former pastor, Wayne hosts Lifestream.org, which provides resources for spiritual growth, and a podcast at TheGodJourney.com.
Tobie Van Der Westhuizen is a Bible teacher, educator, and learning designer from South Africa, holds a PhD in Higher Education and has spent decades teaching, writing, and communicating complex ideas with clarity and imagination. He is the owner and principal of Ridgefield Academy and blogs at JusticeofGod.com.
Just Love on The God Journey Podcast
Insight Interview with Wayne Jacobsen and Tobie van der Westhuizen
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