Justice, not wealth, is the only asset that lasts.

“You shall not pervert justice. You shall not show partiality, and you shall not accept a bribe, for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and subverts the cause of the righteous. Justice, and only justice, you shall follow, that you may live and inherit the land the LORD your God is giving you.” Deuteronomy 16.19, 20

As I mentioned earlier, and as is becoming increasingly clear amid our present economic crisis, material wealth can be a most unstable pillar on which to build one’s happiness. As retirement accounts erode, property values decline, jobs evaporate, the national debt mounts, and the value of the currency declines, many Americans are beginning to question whether our economics of materialism, as we have been pursuing it in recent generations, can produce the good life we envision. The cries to tax the wealthy more in order to fund the dependent and the entitled are little more than stop-gap thinking on the part of a people desperate to ensure material prosperity for the present.

The wellbeing of the future will be built, not on material wealth, but on justice. As long as the notion of justice in our society is treated as little more than a handmaiden to material wealth, the realization of true justice – love for God and neighbor – will continue to elude our society. While Christians do not deny the legitimacy of material wealth, the pursuit of prosperity is not to be the guiding factor in our lives or in the kinds of public policy we seek for our nation.

Christians believe that justice must be the defining norm of any economy. In a just economy neighbor love will be the guiding factor. Children will be educated in the primacy of neighbor-love. Culture will reflect the dignity of human life and promote justice rather than self-indulgence. Government will function not as an advocate for equality of wealth, but as a promoter of the general welfare by ensuring that justice is the defining code of all public policy.

An economics based on justice will go farther toward ensuring a secure future than an economics based on material wealth. If such an economics – such a divine economy – is to have a more significant role in determining the course of America’s future, it must begin in the lives of those who understand the nature and value of justice and who seek it through the Gospel of the Kingdom. The future wellbeing of this or any nation is not in the amount and distribution of its material wealth, but in the degree of its conviction and the extent of is practice of justice, as defined by the Law of God.

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