Tag Archives: order

JUSTICE

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I have done justice and righteousness; do not leave me to my oppressors.  Psalm 119:121  NASB

Justice and Righteousness – In a sense of Old Testament sovereignty, YHWH exhibited himself differently than the other “gods” the people of Israel were formerly aware of in Egypt. YHWH was concerned with a covenant partnership between Him and His chosen people that would be his ambassadors, and it was much established on the notion of two things – Justice and Righteousness. The Hebrew for righteousness is the word ṣedeq which typically takes a gloss of an ethical, moral standard based on the nature and will of God. In other words, the Lord is righteous.1 Justice is the word mišpāṭ. It is the divine governance of the created order. The way that God intended things to operate and called – TOV.

You may remember that the  priestly breastplate or breastpiece of judgment (Hebrew: חֹשֶׁן ḥōšen) was a sacred breastplate worn by the High Priest of the Israelites, according to the Book of Exodus. In the biblical account, the breastplate is termed the breastplate of judgment (Hebrew: חֹשֶׁן מִשְׁפָּט ḥōšen mišpāṭ – Exodus 28:15), because the Urim and Thummim (Hebrew: הָאוּרִים וְהַתֻּמִּים hāʾūrīm wəhattummīm) were placed upon it (Exodus 28:30). These elements of the breastplate are said in the Exodus verse to carry the judgment (Hebrew: מִשְׁפָּט mišpāṭ) of God concerning the Israelites at all times. According to the Talmud, the wearing of the Hoshen atoned for the sin of errors in judgment on the part of the Children of Israel. 2 So as you can see, justice was a theme tied carefully into the way that the priest represented God to the people and the people to God and “justice” played an important measure.

When you first think about justice, you might think about a court, perhaps even words like wrath, or anger, judgment, malice, retribution, avenging, some notion of getting what is deserved. But those thoughts are actually contrary to the grace notion and justice of God. That was exactly His point to Israel. YHWH was different and was going to redefine what justice meant and looked like to His people. Yet 3500 years later it seems many Christians are still holding to the kind of justice that God said was contrary to His very nature.

Mišpāṭ is to cooperate with God in bringing His order to the world.  It is to extend the Garden to the rest of creation, a task, by the way, that was given as the Prime Directive in the Genesis account.  “Let Us make mankind in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the livestock and over all the earth, and over every crawling thing that crawls on the earth.”  “Rule over” does not mean exploit.  It means to care for, to tend to, to cultivate, to nourish, to protect—it means precisely what God does and would do with His own creation.  Insofar as you bring God’s “rule” into your world, you do mišpāṭ.  Notice please that this is active involvement, not theoretical or passive contemplation of engagement.3

Exodus 34:6-7 is the key text that you are likely tired of me regurgitating. God is benevolent, compassionate, gracious, slow to anger, full of ḥesed (no English equivalent), truthful, preserving ḥesed for generations, forgiving, providing oversight; and in these features partners with us as his treasured possessions in covenant order. TOV has a good deal to play into this. In Genesis we see God using his “priests” to continue to cultivate God’s sense of order and do good. The Torah then becomes the handbook of life until Jesus comes. Living in justice and righteousness means living in devotion to the will of God committed to being a complete representative of the Creator as much as humanly possible.  The first century word for that is “agent,” and Yeshua is a full expression of what that means; He becomes the fulfillment of identity and purpose based on justice and righteousness.

There is also a sense of communal justice in the Bible, particularly for Israel.

Two Modes of Biblical Justice according to the Bible Project 4

  1. Retributive/Recompense
    This mode of justice is like the punishment/reward system in a court of law, ensuring there is recompense, repayment, or acquittal for just or unjust behavior. If you steal five dollars, you have to pay back five dollars. If you’re wrongly accused of stealing five dollars, you should not have to pay, and you should even be repaid for the trouble of being accused. Deuteronomy 25:1 – If there is a dispute between men and they go to court (lit. to the mishpat, place of justice), and the judges (Heb. shophetim) decide their case, and they declare the innocent to be in the right, and they will declare the guilty to be in the wrong.
  2. Restorative
    This mode of justice is about making sure that everyone in the community is treated fairly and given what they are due. It’s about granting people rights by changing unjust practices or laws. For example, in Deuteronomy 18:1-3, the Levites didn’t inherit land because they served all the tribes by working in the temple. And so, the other tribes were to give a tithe (one tenth) of their produce as offerings in the temple. This temple tax is called the Levites’ mishpat (“their right,” see also Deut. 21:17 “right of the firstborn”). In Israel, there was another group in their society who had unique mishpat: the quartet of the vulnerable, meaning the widow, orphan, immigrant, and the poor.

Deuteronomy 16:20: “That which is altogether just shalt thou follow, that thou mayest live, and inherit the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.”

The first words: “That which is altogether just” are just two words in the Hebrew “tsedeq tsedeq.”  The same word is repeated twice.  In Semitic languages when a word is repeated it usually indicates that the word is to be intensified or emphasized. 5

We don’t live under communal Israel and their laws though. So, what do we make of all this? I want to finish with a sense of deconstructing our modern views and what we want justice to be based on our desires of God for our life and world as compared to what the Bible presents it as. Christians demand justice so much today. People who have been offended, abused, victims of racism, etc.  They are all crying for justice. Certain politicians have been accused of sexual harassment and the victims are demanding justice.  What do they want? They want to see that person punished, resign from office, put in jail.  What is it that they saying?  The victim wants to see the perpetrator suffer as they suffered.  They want fairness, eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. Is that what God is talking about as a condition to inherit what God has given you? 6  

We know this wasn’t the way of Jesus. In Matthew 5:38-39 Jesus is clear not to repay evil for evil or as it says in Deuteronomy 16:20; “tsedeq tsedeq” which could be rendered as “just justice.” 7 There is indeed the need for justice, and we should pursue justice, but we must pursue a just justice, and that isn’t ours to address but God’s and God alone. In other words, justice isn’t for you… let it go and let the Lord heal. Perhaps occasionally we are part of the agents of that justice, but more often not.

Psalm 96:10-11a, 13 Say among the nations, “YHWH reigns; Indeed, the world is firmly established, it will not be moved. He will judge the peoples with equity.” Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice…  Be before YHWH for He is coming; He is coming to judge the earth. He will judge the world in righteousness and the people in His faithfulness.

Notice that God’s judgment is in the positive. It’s not brimstone and fire. He judges with equity; He judges in righteousness and in His faithfulness. He judges to SAVE the humble of the earth. Interesting that we often associate God’s judgement with God’s wrath. It is a common human desire to let God handle our enemies with vengeance. Sometimes life doesn’t seem fair when horrible people seem to have great success in life. We want God to judge the wicked in anger. Vengeance is a powerful human desire. But the answer to vengeance is vindication, not judgement. “Vengeance is mine, says the Lord… for YHWH will vindicate His people” (paraphrased from Deut. 32:35-36). To vindicate (God acting in judgement) is a completely different word in the Hebrew language: יָדִ֣ין (yadin).

Covenantal commitment is a flowing stream, this Biblical understanding of justice should inspire us to not only critique the world as it is, but to align ourselves with that which is Godly in the universe, working towards the day when all human beings are nurtured, respected, and be reclaimed to the identify that God has purposed them for.

Ironically, perhaps your need for retributive justice around you is exactly what is holding you back from the kind of relentless covenant partnership that God has destined you for. Perhaps today is the day you simply let God be the judge. Let God be the agent of restoration and use you as His hands and feet to physically manifest grace, love, compassion, and mercy which means healing.

  1. Stigers, H. G. (1999). 1879 צָדֵק. In R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament(electronic ed., p. 752). Moody Press. ↩︎
  2. Zevachim (Hebrew: זְבָחִים; lit. “Sacrifices”) is the first tractate of Seder Kodashim (“Holy Things”) of the Mishnah, the Talmud and the Tosefta. This tractate discusses the topics related to the sacrificial system of the Temple in Jerusalem, namely the laws for animal and bird offerings, and the conditions which make them acceptable or not, as specified in the Torah, primarily in the book of Leviticus (Lev 1:2 and on). The tractate has fourteen chapters divided into 101 mishnayot, or paragraphs. There is a Gemara – rabbinical commentary and analysis – for this tractate in the Babylonian Talmud, and no Gemara in the Jerusalem Talmud. ↩︎
  3. @Hebrewwordstudy ↩︎
  4. https://bibleproject.com/videos/justice/ ↩︎
  5. Owens, Jonathan (2013). The Oxford Handbook of Arabic Linguistics. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0199344093. ↩︎
  6. https://www.chaimbentorah.com/2021/09/hebrew-word-study-just-justice-tsedeq-tsedeq-%d7%a6%d7%93%d7%a7-%d7%a6%d7%93%d7%a7/ ↩︎
  7. https://hebrewwordlessons.com/2017/11/05/justicejudgement-its-not-about-vengeance-its-about-love/ ↩︎

NATURAL ORDER

Posted by expedition44 on

I want to talk about what is meant by God’s order, but before I do that, I want to guide you through a brief exegetical teaching through the text. When you hear the word order in relation to a biblical sense we have been conditioned to think about creation, law, hierarchy in the church and marriage, and perhaps even church discipline. Although it encompasses those things, I find it unfortunate that we start there, and therefore I feel we might need some deconstruction to get to good.

In the morning, O Lord, You will hear my voice; in the morning I will order my prayer to You and eagerly watch. Psalm 5:3 NASB

As I begin to read this in Hebrew the first thing that I notice in contrast to most English translations is the phrase “My prayer” is not found in the text. It isn’t a bad translation as I get the context leans that way but in Hebrew the verse better reads, “I will order toward you” which emphasizes a slightly different posture. Interesting the word prayer isn’t really there, perhaps a NT implication or even insertion. Prayer in the OT was a bit different than the way we understand it today. It was communal and far less personal (unless God appeared to you in a bush and orally spoke directly to you), after Jesus ascends to the throne and sends the Spirit to dwell in us and intercede, the biblical concept of prayer takes on a different form than what it had been considered over the last 2000 years or more. The way people thought of “prayer” in the OT may or may not be accurate. Are we just reading what they thought prayer was supposed to be perhaps based on what they knew of their former deities? Is this something that they got a bit off track with and Jesus sought to adjust or shed new light on? Perhaps, but perhaps not. Maybe our prayer should take a cue from the OT notions. When we read this verse in Hebrew form, we see that David isn’t talking about ritualistic prayer, or is he? He isn’t necessarily folding his hands and closing his eyes – but he is sort of. He is making a statement that if his life is in alignment with what is of God – TOV (creation order language), then he expects God to acknowledge and “DO THINGS” on his behalf. This may tie into the never-ending OT grappling over whether God was retributive or not, but it certainly had the trajectory of demonstrating the idea of devotion in connection to intimacy with the Lord. This connection over the years will then be attributed to the conjecture of relationship with the father in prayer. Some prayer is communal and some is personal.

Different people interact with God differently and perhaps in different seasons. Some say they don’t hear God and others act like God never stops screaming in their ear. How can the voice of God differ from person to person? Is it based on the posture of the heart, covenant faithfulness, gifting, seasons, understanding, choice, some sort of prejudice, or something completely different that is higher than our understanding? I believe that God is just that dynamic. I don’t know why He communicates differently to people and what it might be based on; I don’t always have the eyes of God. I believe Him to be Sovereign and know significantly more than we do in a much more complex grid. I am convinced that there are many things that influence this covenant relationship at a cosmic level. It is far bigger than simply me, and to think of my relationship with God (the creator of the universe) as doating on my every thought seems like a selfish notion. Does that view minimize a personal relationship or exemplify it?

God’s order is described in everything naturally defined by Yahweh and described generally as what is good (TOV). This is creation, the waters, the counting of the ark, the building of the temple, the pieces of firewood set in order for a sacrificial fire, showbread set out in two rows of six cakes on the gold table (Lev 24:8); seven altars set up by the pagan mantic Balaam (Num 23:4); stalks of flax arranged by Rahab for hiding the spies (Josh 2:6); a table prepared for dining (Ps 23:5; Isa 21:5); words produced for speaking (Job 32:14); a legal case developed for presentation (Job 13:18); etc. In II Sam 23:5 David exults in the covenant granted him by Yahweh, “for he has made with me an everlasting covenant, / ordered (ʿărûkâ) in all things and secure.[1] We see God’s order in many ways, but the common thread that binds seems to be that it is given as a framework for our devotion to Him. This intimate devotion that is often described as reading or memorizing scripture, devotional repetition, standards of practice and living, and so much more are all described as what it means to be defined as SET APART. That we are defined and claimed as part of God’s order not the chaos of the world.

What defines this? Covenant. Covenant is the secure, accessible, and recognizable attribute of everything good that God offers to us. It is the basis of all of our interaction with the LORD. Without covenant we are detached or separated from the creator and his ways. When David chooses every morning to be in order, he is making a statement about the balance of life and the posture of the heart. The Hebrew term בְּרִית bĕriyth for “covenant” is from a root with the sense of “cutting”, because pacts or covenants were made by passing between cut pieces of flesh of an animal sacrifice.[2] It meant something deep.

The New Covenant is a biblical interpretation originally derived from a phrase in the Book of Jeremiah and often thought of as an eschatological world to come related to the biblical concept of the Kingdom of God. Generally, Christians believe that the New Covenant was instituted at the Last Supper as part of the Eucharist, which in the Gospel of John includes the New Commandment.[3] A connection between the Blood of Christ and the New Covenant is portrayed with the saying: “this cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood”. Jesus is therefore the mediator of this New Covenant, and that his blood, shed is the required blood of the covenant. This is true looking back in both testaments and can be seen in all of the biblical covenants of the bible.

In the Christian context, this New Covenant is associated with the word ‘testament‘ in the sense of a ‘will left after the death of a person (Latin testamentum),[4] the original Greek word used in Scripture being diatheke (διαθήκη) which in the Greek context meant ‘will (left after death)’ but is also a word play having a dual meaning of ‘covenant, alliance’.[5] This notion implies a reinterpreted view of the Old Testament covenant as possessing characteristics of a ‘will left after death’ placing the old covenant, brit (בְּרִית) into a new application of understanding as revealed by the death, resurrection, ascension, and throning of CHRIST THE KING, JESUS. All things will forever connect at the covenants and be defined by the atoning accomplishments that transform into a covenant of eternity.

Order today might be better understood as a continually evolving algorithm based on the posture of your covenant faithfulness which, as I have described, is defined by many facets of devotion. Some may hear the audible voice of God more clearly while others simply see Him in every image. The revelation of God to us isn’t in a form of hierarchy. One form of transcendence doesn’t trump another. Who are we to judge anyway. But I do know that most of Christianity seems to be off course here. Rather than coming to the LORD as the cosmic wish granting genie in a bottle, let’s get back to biblical roots and think more covenantal and devotional based on the order that God modeled for us.

[1] Harris, R. L., Archer, G. L., Jr., & Waltke, B. K. (Eds.). (1999). Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 696). Chicago: Moody Press.

[2] Strong’s Concordance (1890).

[3] “Comparison of the two covenants mediated by Moses and the two covenants mediated by Jesus”. 25 September 2022. Archived from the original on 2022-09-28. Retrieved 2023-01-29.

[4]“testamentum: Latin Word Study Tool”. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu. Retrieved 2020-08-12.

[5] G1242 – diathēkē – Strong’s Greek Lexicon (KJV)”. Blue Letter Bible. Retrieved 2020-08-12.