A girl in Gaza may live in a family that has lost almost everything.
Her father may have lost work, a home, relatives, security, and any realistic sense of what tomorrow will look like. He may be trying to feed a family in conditions of displacement, scarcity, and social collapse. In that sense, he may be genuinely suffering under forces far larger than himself.
And then he may force his fourteen- or fifteen-year-old daughter into marriage because the family can no longer support her.
What category do we put him in?
Victim?
Oppressor?
The uncomfortable answer is that he may be both.
This is not a hypothetical problem invented to make a political point. In September 2026, UNFPA reported that reported forced and child marriage in Gaza had increased 123 percent from January through June. UNFPA also noted that the increase reflects two things at once: a deteriorating protection environment and expanded access to services that made it possible for more survivors to report what was happening.
The longer trend matters too. UNFPA reported in April 2026 that child marriage in Palestine had fallen from 26 percent in 2009 to 11 percent in 2022. Yet partner organizations reviewing emergency court records found at least 400 girls ages 14 to 16 granted marriage permissions during just four months of 2025.
We need to be careful with those numbers. Case-management reports are not the same thing as a population-wide prevalence study, and statistics cannot tell us the motives of every father or every family.
But they do tell us something we dare not ignore.
War, poverty, displacement, fear, and social collapse can create terrible pressures.
Those pressures matter.
They still do not make a destructive choice righteous.
Those facts matter because they resist easy moral sorting.
The father’s suffering can be real.
The daughter’s suffering can also be real.
His circumstances may help explain why the decision became conceivable.
They do not make the decision righteous.
And that exposes a much larger problem in the way we increasingly think about human beings.
The categories we prefer
A great deal of our moral conversation today is organized around power, oppression, privilege, and marginalization.
And there are good reasons for that.
People do not enter life on an empty field. We inherit families, neighborhoods, histories, economies, institutions, legal systems, cultural expectations, advantages, disadvantages, and wounds we did not choose.
Scripture has no difficulty recognizing this.
The prophets condemn rulers who exploit the weak.
James condemns favoritism toward the wealthy and employers who withhold wages from laborers.
The law repeatedly protects widows, orphans, immigrants, debtors, and the poor.
The Bible is not radically individualistic. It does not imagine that people are untouched by the structures around them.
But Scripture also refuses the opposite error.
It refuses to reduce human beings to the structures acting upon them.
That gives us a distinction we desperately need:
Explanation is not exoneration.
Understanding why a person was powerfully tempted does not make the temptation righteous.
Understanding why destructive behavior became more likely does not make the behavior harmless.
Understanding the social forces surrounding a decision does not make the decision disappear.
Human beings are influenced creatures.
We are also agents.
Scripture insists on both.
When circumstance becomes excuse
We can see the same tension in contemporary debates about criminal responsibility.
Some scholars argue that severe social adversity should reduce how we judge culpability. Federica Coppola, for example, has proposed a “situational partial excuse” for some offenses committed under chronic social hardship. Jesper Ryberg has examined a related argument for sentence mitigation while questioning whether diminished social opportunity necessarily establishes diminished responsibility. His critique is worth reading precisely because he takes the argument seriously rather than caricaturing it.
But I want to be careful here. It would be unfair to say that criminal-justice reform simply denies agency. Restorative-justice approaches often make accountability central. The U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention describes accountability in terms of recognizing choice, acknowledging harm, accepting responsibility, making repair where possible, and changing future behavior. That is hardly a denial of moral agency.
So the question is not whether circumstances matter. Human justice already considers coercion, intent, age, knowledge, capacity, and duress.
The harder question is:
At what point does explaining the pressures surrounding a person become a way of dissolving the person as a moral agent?
Compassion requires us to understand circumstance.
Dignity requires us to preserve agency.
Suffering and the moral power of victimhood
Human beings do not merely suffer. We interpret our suffering.
Research on collective victimhood suggests that the way people interpret shared suffering matters. A meta-analysis by Marko Kljajić, Nadav Shelef, and Ethan vanderWilden, drawing on 745 estimates from 103 articles, found an important distinction: more inclusive understandings of collective suffering were generally associated with more conciliatory attitudes, while more exclusive forms of collective victimhood were associated with more conflict-enhancing attitudes.
That does not mean suffering produces hostility, or that naming injustice is “playing the victim.”
It means something more ordinary:
We can turn real suffering into a moral story about ourselves.
We were wronged. Therefore our anger must be righteous. Our side must be morally superior. Our wrongdoing deserves a different explanation than theirs.
Eventually, what was done to us can begin to function as justification for what we do to others.
That is where suffering becomes spiritually dangerous.
Ezekiel: inherited consequences are not moral destiny
Israel knew what it meant to live inside consequences produced by earlier generations.
By the time Ezekiel addressed the exiles, Judah’s catastrophe had become their world. They were living with the accumulated consequences of covenant rebellion that stretched back before them. The proverb they repeated—
“The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge”
—was therefore not absurd on its face.
There was truth underneath it.
Scripture itself recognizes that one generation can suffer because of another. Families inherit patterns. Nations inherit histories. Children can live inside consequences they did not personally create.
The problem was what the exiles were doing with that truth.
The proverb had become a theology of fatalism.
Our fathers did this.
We are paying for it.
Nothing we do can change anything.
And underneath that was another implication:
This is not really our fault.
Ezekiel refuses that conclusion.
He does not deny the guilt of previous generations. He denies the present generation’s claim to innocence and helplessness.
The chapter’s three-generation case study makes the point.
A righteous man practices justice.
His son rejects that way and chooses violence, exploitation, idolatry, and oppression.
Then that man’s son sees “all the sins that his father has done”; he sees them, considers them, and refuses to do likewise.
That detail matters.
The grandson does not escape history by being ignorant of it.
He sees it.
He inherits a family story he did not choose.
But he is not morally compelled to repeat it.
Ezekiel therefore preserves two truths at once:
The past can shape our circumstances.
And:
The past does not determine our righteousness.
This is not modern individualism inserted into the Old Testament. Ezekiel is still speaking to the “house of Israel.” The people remain a covenant community with a shared history and shared consequences.
But covenant solidarity does not erase personal responsibility.
The corporate story is real.
So is the moral agency of the people living inside it.
Then Ezekiel takes the argument one step further.
A person is not only more than his father’s past.
He is also more than his own past.
A wicked person who turns from wickedness can live.
A righteous person who turns toward wickedness will be judged for it.
The point is not that history is irrelevant.
The point is that no human biography is a moral prison from which repentance is impossible.
That is why God’s appeal near the end of the chapter matters so much:
“Repent and turn from all your transgressions.”
And again:
“Make yourselves a new heart and a new spirit!”
Ezekiel can command repentance because the people’s present response really matters.
Yet even here we should not mistake the chapter for a celebration of autonomous human self-reformation. Elsewhere Ezekiel promises that God himself will give his people “a new heart” and “a new spirit” (11:19; 36:26).
The tension is important.
God addresses people as responsible agents.
And the renewal they ultimately need is a gift of God.
That means Ezekiel 18 is not merely a chapter about judgment.
It is also a chapter about hope.
If the past absolutely determines the present, repentance is meaningless.
If inherited circumstances dictate moral destiny, change is an illusion.
But Ezekiel’s message is that the future does not have to be a photocopy of the past.
We can inherit consequences without inheriting moral destiny.
Jeremiah takes up the same sour-grapes proverb in Jeremiah 31.
Again the point is that God’s judgment is not morally arbitrary: each person answers for his or her own sin.
But Jeremiah does not stop with a clearer assignment of responsibility.
Immediately afterward comes one of the great promises of Scripture:
“I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts.”
And then:
“I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”
That sequence matters.
Biblical anthropology does not end with, You are responsible, so do better.
The same God who refuses our excuses also promises what sinners cannot produce for themselves: inward renewal, true knowledge of Him, and forgiveness.
Ezekiel makes the same movement elsewhere when God promises to give His people a new heart and a new spirit.
So Scripture holds together what we are often tempted to separate.
Our histories matter.
Our choices matter.
Our guilt is real.
Repentance is meaningful.
And the deepest remedy does not come from explaining ourselves more successfully.
It comes from God changing the heart and forgiving sin.
That is a profoundly biblical alternative to both denial and fatalism.
We do not have to deny what has been done to people in order to affirm their agency.
And we do not have to deny their agency in order to take seriously what has been done to them.
James sees systems and sinners at the same time
James gives us an equally important balance.
In James 2, wealthy people are treated with honor while the poor are humiliated.
In James 5, laborers have worked, wealthy landowners have withheld their wages, and the cries of those workers have reached “the Lord of hosts.”
James can see power.
He can see economic relationships.
He can see exploitation.
He can see injustice embedded in the way people are treated.
And then James 1 says:
“Each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire.”
James can see what is outside us and what is inside us at the same time.
That is a far richer anthropology than either extreme.
One error says: circumstances do not matter; you simply made your choice.
The other can drift toward: circumstances explain the choice so completely that meaningful moral agency begins to disappear.
James gives us another answer:
External injustice is real. Internal desire is real.
The Bible can see systems and sinners at the same time.
The deeper problem is self-justification
But even this is not yet the deepest issue.
Jesus gets there in Luke 18.
Luke tells us why Jesus told the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector:
“He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt.”
I think that sentence gets remarkably close to the heart of our cultural moment.
The Pharisee’s righteousness is comparative.
He knows who he is because he knows who he is not.
“I thank you that I am not like other men.”
That is the deeper human impulse underneath the moral power of victimhood.
Victimhood is not uniquely corrupt.
It can simply become another tool in the ancient project of self-justification.
We can justify ourselves by wealth.
By education.
By poverty.
By suffering.
By activism.
By political identity.
By religious identity.
By doctrinal correctness.
By being more compassionate than someone else.
By being more courageous than someone else.
By being the people history has wronged.
By being the people who are finally willing to tell the truth.
The categories change.
The human heart does not.
We find someone beneath us and build a case for ourselves.
There are no righteous tribes
That is why Romans 3 matters so much.
Paul has spent the opening chapters of Romans discussing Jews and Gentiles. Their histories are not identical. Their privileges are not identical. Their relationship to God’s covenant revelation is not identical.
Paul does not flatten those differences.
And yet he reaches a conclusion that sweeps across them:
“For we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin.”
Then:
“None is righteous, no, not one.”
That does not mean everyone commits the same sins.
It does not mean everyone has equal social power.
It does not mean every group has suffered equally.
It means none of those categories can become righteousness before God.
Oppression may distinguish our circumstances; it cannot establish our righteousness.
There are no righteous tribes.
And then the mirror turns toward Christians
This is where Christians need to become especially careful.
Many American evangelicals believe there is a growing conflict between historic Christian convictions and mainstream culture.
That perception is measurable. In a Pew Research Center survey conducted February 3–9, 2025, 80 percent of White evangelical Protestants said they felt at least some conflict between their religious beliefs and mainstream culture, compared with 58 percent of U.S. adults overall. In another Pew survey conducted in April 2025, 43 percent of Americans said evangelical Christians face at least some discrimination.
Some religious-liberty conflicts are real.
Christians should not pretend otherwise.
There are situations in which governments, employers, institutions, or individuals may treat people unfairly because of religious conviction.
But four different experiences must not be collapsed into one:
Disagreement: someone believes my convictions are false or morally wrong.
Cultural marginalization: my convictions no longer carry the social authority they once did.
Discrimination: I am materially treated differently because of my religion.
Persecution: I suffer serious hostility or coercion because of allegiance to Christ.
Those categories can overlap.
They are not identical.
A 2026 survey experiment by political scientist Michele Margolis adds another caution. She found that White evangelical respondents were especially attentive to discriminatory treatment directed toward a fellow Christian, while being significantly less likely to classify the same behavior as discrimination when it targeted someone from a religious out-group.
That does not prove that discrimination against Christians is imaginary. It does not tell us how often such discrimination actually occurs.
It tells us something much more ordinary—and much more uncomfortable.
Our group loyalties can affect how clearly we see the treatment of ourselves and others.
Christians should already know that about the human heart.
And then Scripture asks the uncomfortable question:
Suppose we really are being treated unfairly.
What follows?
Not moral exemption.
If Christians are mocked, mockery does not become righteous.
If Christians are lied about, exaggeration does not become righteous.
If Christians lose cultural influence, contempt does not become righteous.
If Christians are genuinely persecuted, hatred still does not become righteous.
Christian persecution is never a moral blank check.
Being wronged does not make our response righteous
Peter writes to Christians who knew what it meant to live without much earthly power.
In 1 Peter 2, he speaks directly to household servants, some of whom were suffering under unjust masters. Peter does not deny the injustice. He does not tell them that their suffering is imaginary, insignificant, or deserved simply because someone in authority inflicted it.
In fact, Peter carefully distinguishes two very different kinds of suffering:
“For what credit is it if, when you sin and are beaten for it, you endure? But if when you do good and suffer for it you endure, this is a gracious thing in the sight of God.”
That distinction matters.
Suffering by itself proves very little about our righteousness.
A Christian can suffer because he has done what is right.
A Christian can also suffer the consequences of his own sin.
Pain does not automatically make us martyrs. Opposition does not automatically make us faithful. Being mistreated does not automatically make everything we do in response righteous.
Peter’s question is not simply, Are you suffering?
The harder questions are: Why are you suffering? And what are you becoming while you suffer?
And then Peter takes us to Christ.
“Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps.”
The language is stronger than vague inspiration. Peter presents the suffering Christ as the pattern into whose steps believers are called to walk.
And what characterized those steps?
“He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth.”
Peter is drawing from Isaiah 53. Christ’s suffering was not punishment for His own wrongdoing. He is not merely innocent of the accusations brought against Him. He is the sinless sufferer.
Then Peter describes what that righteousness looked like under pressure:
“When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten.”
Notice what Peter does not say.
He does not say Jesus’ enemies were right.
He does not call evil good.
He does not pretend injustice was justice.
Instead:
“He continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly.”
The ESV supplies “himself,” but the Greek leaves the object unstated. Peter’s point is larger than Christ simply enduring inwardly. He entrusts the matter of justice to the righteous Judge—His cause, His enemies, the wrong done to Him, and its final judgment.
There is a Judge.
There is right and wrong.
There is guilt and innocence.
There will be judgment.
Christ’s refusal to retaliate does not arise from moral confusion about His enemies. It arises from perfect confidence in the justice of His Father.
The evil done to Christ does not determine the character of Christ’s response.
That is an enormous distinction.
The world says that what has been done to me may explain what I now do.
Sometimes it does.
But Peter will not allow explanation to become moral permission.
Jesus was slandered, but He did not answer with deceit.
He was hated, but hatred did not produce hatred in Him.
He was threatened, but He did not answer with sinful threats.
He suffered injustice without becoming unjust.
Paul expresses the same principle in Romans 12:
“Repay no one evil for evil.”
And then:
“Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”
That language is striking.
Evil does not overcome us only when it hurts us.
Evil can overcome us when it teaches us to imitate it.
If another person’s hatred gives me permission to hate, evil has gained another servant.
If another person’s dishonesty gives me permission to deceive, evil has reproduced its pattern in my conduct.
If another person’s cruelty persuades me that cruelty is now justified, evil has overcome more than its original victim.
The Christian response to evil is therefore not to deny it.
It is to name evil truthfully, seek justice rightly, protect those who are vulnerable—and refuse to become evil in the process.
Being wronged does not make our response righteous.
This does not mean passivity
That distinction matters pastorally.
Christian non-retaliation is not the same thing as remaining passive before evil.
An abused spouse does not have to remain in immediate danger in order to demonstrate forgiveness.
A crime may be reported.
A threatened person may flee.
A church may exercise discipline.
A magistrate may punish wrongdoing.
The vulnerable should be protected.
Falsehood may be confronted with truth.
Peter himself is not saying that injustice does not matter. The entire argument depends upon the fact that God “judges justly.”
To relinquish personal vengeance is not to relinquish justice.
It is to recognize that justice and vengeance are not mine to redefine according to my anger.
The Christian is never permitted to become unrighteous in the name of opposing unrighteousness.
More than an example
But Peter does not stop with Christ as an example of righteous suffering.
“He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness.”
Isaiah 53 runs through the whole paragraph. The One whose footsteps believers follow is also the One who bears their sins. Peter does not separate Christ our pattern from Christ our sin-bearer.
That matters because the gospel is not simply, You have been wounded; now respond more nobly.
Christ does for sinners what we cannot do for ourselves.
He bears our sins.
And Peter immediately joins forgiveness to transformation: Christ bore our sins “that we might die to sin and live to righteousness.” Grace does not excuse retaliatory sin. It forgives the guilty and begins to make them different.
That brings the deepest problem into view.
Others may be genuinely innocent of particular wrongs done to them. Christ alone is the altogether sinless sufferer. He “committed no sin,” yet He bore the sins of people who have no righteousness of their own.
So every project of self-justification finally collapses.
My suffering cannot justify me.
My political identity cannot justify me.
My moral convictions cannot justify me.
My evangelical identity cannot justify me.
My victimhood cannot justify me.
Even being right about the sin committed against me cannot justify me before God.
The tax collector in Jesus’ parable does not go home justified because he has correctly identified someone else’s hypocrisy. He pleads:
“God, be merciful to me, a sinner!”
And Jesus says that this man went home justified.
We do not need to discover which tribe has finally earned the right to call itself righteous.
We need a righteousness that comes from outside ourselves.
We need Christ.
Return to the girl
And that brings us back to Gaza.
The girl does not need us to identify the morally pure geopolitical tribe before we care about her.
She bears God’s image.
Her suffering matters.
If her father has lost his home, livelihood, safety, or family members, his suffering matters too.
If poverty, displacement, fear, or social collapse helped create the conditions in which he contemplated forcing her into marriage, those conditions matter.
And if he forces her into marriage, his action still matters.
All of those things can be true at once.
That is what biblical anthropology allows us to say.
Human beings possess dignity.
Human beings inhabit circumstances they did not choose.
Human beings are shaped by those circumstances.
Human beings remain agents.
Human beings remain accountable.
And human beings endlessly search for ways to justify themselves.
The gospel gives us something better than choosing which group gets to claim innocence.
It gives us Christ.
So what do we do with all of this?
We still have to ask who is being oppressed. We still have to ask who is doing harm. Justice requires us to tell the truth about both.
But Scripture will not let us stop there.
Eventually the question becomes painfully personal:
What have I allowed someone else’s sin against me to justify in myself?
That question reaches Gaza.
It reaches American politics and our justice system.
It reaches evangelical Christianity.
It reaches our marriages, churches, families, and friendships.
And finally it reaches the place we are usually most reluctant to examine:
our own hearts.
Suffering matters.
Oppression matters.
Justice matters.
But suffering does not make us righteous.
Neither does being right about the people who wronged us.
God justifies sinners through Christ.