We all have a desire for justice: for the world to work the way we think it should, for nothing to be amiss, and for nothing to go wrong. When it does we inevitably feel uneasy and upset. What’s worse is that no matter how hard we try we can never quite seem to make the world as just as we feel it should be. This is true even when there’s nobody to blame (as is the case in natural disasters), but more often than we would care to admit, we ourselves are the source of the problem: We know what is right, and yet we fail to act on that conviction.

Sometimes we retreat into cynicism, denying that there could ever be true justice in the world and that to desire such a thing is childish nonsense. At other times we hope for a world of true justice and peace but convince ourselves that if it does exist it’s certainly not here and now. There is another option, though, and that option is precisely what the major Abrahamic religions of the world claim: that our thirst for an otherworldly justice is in fact a calling card of the God who brought the world into existence and desires that it be a place of harmony and love.