Tim Lornie, our staff worker for JustLove Norwich, kicks off our Psalms of Justice series as we dig into what the ancient Hebrew songs of the Old Testament can tell us about worship and justice.
“Righteousness and justice are the foundations of your throne" - Psalm 89:14
The best Bible verses are the simplest ones - so much can be said about God, life and the world in just a few short words. Psalm 89:14 is one of those verses:
“Righteousness and justice are the foundations of your throne”.
These words are wildfire. We know that the main thing God is doing in the world is building his ‘Kingdom’ - his ‘throne’. Jesus talks about the Kingdom of God more than any other topic. This incredible verse tells us what that Kingdom is built on. It digs beneath the surface to the very foundations of what God is doing in the world. And what are those foundations?
Righteousness and justice. What does that mean?
Righteousness and Justice
First up: a bit of Hebrew.
’Righteousness and justice’ is one of the big word-pairings of the whole Bible - a bit like ‘salt and pepper’, only with more gravitas. These two words are translated from the Hebrew words ‘tsedeqah’ and ‘mishpat’, and they are bonded together literally dozens of times throughout the Old Testament. The two words refer to slightly different things, but together they form an incredibly powerful vision of the kind of life that God is calling us to lead in this world.
First, tsedeqah - “righteousness”. Tsedeqah is all about living in right relationships with others, especially in everyday life. It means things like speaking with honesty, treating people with respect and living with a posture of service. It is about having a basic level of integrity and kindness in our lives, making the choice to ‘prefer others’ over ourselves (Phil 2:3). However, tsedeqah also goes much deeper than that - all these things (honesty, kindness, integrity etc.) are pretty basic ideas of common decency - we all know that this is basically how we’re meant to live. But Biblical tsedeqah goes further - it is radical.
Biblical tsedeqah doesn’t just ask us how we do our relationships, but who we do them with. The Bible calls us out of our social circle, challenging us to burst our bubbles and to build real, meaningful relationships with people who are not like us, with folk we don’t ‘click with’ or even profoundly disagree with. In patrticular, God calls us to build friendships with those on the edge, with people on the margins of society: in Isaiah 58, God instructs his people to ‘spend yourselves on behalf of the hungry’, and to ‘satisfy the desires of the afflicted’ (v10). The language is so challenging. God’s version of ‘everyday righteousness’ looks like ‘spending ourselves’. It involves not only satisfying the ‘needs’ of the poor, but their ‘desires’ as well - that’s pretty radical! Jesus picks up the same thread: “When you host a party”, he says, “don’t just invite your friends, but invite those who can never repay you - the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame. Then your reward will be great in heaven” (Lk 14:13). Tsedeqah - this ‘righteousness’ that the throne of God is being built on - is pretty intense!
So that’s tsedeqah. But what about “mishpat”?
If tsedeqah is about everyday life, then mishpat is about the big picture: about politics, systems and structures - all of it matters to God. Mishpat is the word that we translate as ‘justice’.
In the Old Testament context, this word was most often used for things like legal justice - the courts upholding the rights of the poor or of foreigners, and not just taking bribes - and for economic fairness - fair pay for farm labourers, just conditions in the marketplace, a vast array of laws about land rights for the poor and dispossessed. Mishpat justice is about having a society that works for everyone, and in particular for the most vulnerable.
It’s not hard to see how desperately we need mishpat today. We live in a world where at least 36 million people are held in slavery, forced into everything from agricultural labour to sex work. Despite agricultural booms bigger than anything the human race has ever seen, 800 million people go without enough food to eat every day, while 1.2bn live on about a dollar a day. Women around the world are subjected on a systematic basis to violence, exclusion and economic injustice, while race and ethnicity continue to massively shape the life chances of people in every nation on earth. The global south receives millions of dollars in aid money from the richest nations, but every year loses over double that money straight back to multinational companies who line their pockets through tax dodging and avoidance, not to mention the massive amounts of debt interest being extracted from the poorest nations on earth by global banks and Western countries. The world is deeply unfair, and it’s the poor who bear the brunt.
If God cared about mishpat back then, He cares about it now. We need a revolution of ‘righteousness and justice’ in our time - a generation who commit to live like love in the small and the ordinary, and yet who also know how to ‘speak truth to power’ on the biggest issues of our day. As one Old Testament poet put it:
“Let justice roll on like a river, and righteousness like a never-failing stream” - Amos 5:14
The Worship Life
Overall, there are between 2000 and 3000 verses about social justice in the Bible, covering everything from rural food rights to the treatment of refugees, women’s justice to environmental stewardship. My friend once went through the Bible and cut out every verse that relates to social justice - it took him a while! By the end, he was left with a book in tatters. That’s because the Bible is absolutely packed with this stuff. Justice is dangerously close to the heart of God - dangerous enough to shake our whole lives.
The activist and writer Shane Claiborne says this:
“The more I get to know Jesus, the more trouble he seems to get me into”
That’s my experience, too. It was when I really began to take Jesus’ words seriously - including his incredibly radical words about generosity and love for the poor and the oppressed - that life began to get more complicated!
It’s because everything comes down to the kind of God we worship. As the theologian Jim Packer says, it’s actually really easy to build God in our own image - to construct an idol of God that suits our own preferences and perceptions, our own sense of what is most important in the world. But that’s not true worship - true worship is letting God shape us, letting God shape our vision of who he is, what he’s like, and what he really cares about. When that happens, we begin to encounter the radical love of a living God - and our idols seem pretty tame by comparison.
It turns out that one of the most important things God wants to tell us about himself is that he cares about righteousness and justice - the way we live in the world and our relationships with one another, in particular the poor. In fact, these things are literally the foundations of the Kingdom he is building!
When we begin to grasp this about God, it changes everything. Suddenly, worship is not just what we sing to God, but how we treat the planet. Praise is no longer just about our the cry of our hearts, important though that is, but about the work of our hands. “True religion is this”, says James; “to look after the vulnerable in their distress” (Jas 1:27).
It’s a verse from Jeremiah 21 that really gets me - God is speaking about a King, Josiah, who served him well. Unlike so many of the other Old Testament kings, Josiah had made a massive effort to do what was right, and to live in a way that reflected God’s law. Here’s what God says about him:
‘“Josiah? He did what was right and upheld the cause of the poor. Is that not what it means to know me?”, says the LORD’ - Jer 21:14
“Is that not what it means to know me?”, says God. Wow.
Foundations of the Throne
As part of the Just Love movement, we’re trying to live that out - a life of radical worship that encompasses every part of our lives - from the everyday tsedeqah to the big, systematic mishpat. We want to see the tide turned on the refugee crisis, and so the JL group in Cambridge helped organise the Cambridge Refugee Scholarship Campaign (CRSC), securing 10 places per year for refugees and asylum seekers to study at the University of Cambridge. We want to see an end to street homelessness in this nation, and so JL Durham set up a Winter Night Shelter - a student-run project providing hot meals and safe beds to rough sleepers on the coldest nights of winter. We believe that we can flip the narrative on climate change, seeing it not only as a crisis to be scared of but an opportunity to reframe our entire relationship with God’s creation. So, we’ve seen a wave of radical ethical living across the country - hundreds on hundreds of students make sacrificial lifestyle changes, trying “to live simply that others might simply live”, and trying to live more in tune with the natural limits of the world God has given us - but there’s more work to do.
As part of the JustLove movement, we want to see students living out justice on every level and in every sphere of Norwich - until we see the city transformed. What might the Lord do as we say yes to His call? How can you worship God by playing a part in seeing His kingdom of justice and righteousness come whilst at university? Keep an eye on our Facebook page for our upcoming event equipping students to help rough sleepers in our city and understand how we can see mishpat-justice transform the homeless situation in the long-term.
We won’t stop until we see this generation of Christianity become all we can be - a generation who lay down our lives for the sake of the poor and the marginalised, echoing the words of an ancient Hebrew poet who wrote these incredible words:
“Righteousness and justice are the foundations of your throne” - Ps 89:14
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