“For there will never cease to be poor in the land. Therefore I command you, ‘You shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor, in your land.’” Deuteronomy 15.11

Justice, being a reflection of the being and character of God, is a gem of many facets.

In essence, “justice” defines God’s plan for how human beings can live together in society on the basis of mutual love and respect. The Law of God outlines the demands of justice and represents justice as having obligatory, preventive, restorative, and retributive aspects. These different facets of “justice” work together in helping to maintain a society of order, respect, and human flourishing.

But how does a just society relate to those in its midst who are not flourishing, but rather, are barely able to contribute to the wellbeing of the community because of their being poor? What does justice for the poor entail, according to the Law of God?

The Bible does not teach a preference for the poor, as though merely being poor were some virtue in itself. Indeed, some may be poor because they are simply unwilling to work. The Apostle Paul explained that such people deserve the fruit of their lethargy and are not to be cared for by the community (2 Thess. 3.10). All who are able are expected to work, not just so that they can provide for themselves, but so that they may have wealth and possessions to share with those who are truly in need (Eph. 4.28). This is true of the poor as well, as we shall see in subsequent installments.

Thus we see in the New Testament, in the Kingdom of God, the continuation of the third facet of Biblical justice – a recognition of and concern for the poor.

This facet of the Biblical teaching on justice is what we may call distributive justice. It is the responsibility of a local community to distribute freely of its goods to those who are in need among them. Whether such people have become poor through some unforeseeable exigency, or whether they are immigrants or disabled, justice requires that they be provided for, according to their need, by the community in which they live.

The statutes requiring landowners not to harvest all their produce – to leave grain and dropped bundles of harvest, as well as grapes on the vine and olives in the tree – allowed the poor to have something to glean and thus, through honest labor, to provide for their needs. The land, after all, belonged to the Lord, as did all the harvest He regularly provided.

T. M. Moore

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