“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 mentioned in an earlier installment, 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 over recent generations, can continue to 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 – and political power – for the present.

But a capitalist economy cannot assure a safe and prosperous future. All who put their trust in wealth and things are destined to be disappointed, if not ruined. The wellbeing of the future will be built, not on material wealth, but on justice, on the basic tenets of the divine economy, as outlined in the Law and Word of God.

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. Justice, and only justice, can ensure the kind of future every American earnestly longs to know.

Christians believe that justice must be the defining norm of any economy, and justice is not defined by changeable social norms and the spiritus mundi, but by the unchanging Word of God and His Spirit, beginning in the Law of God.

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 norm 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 devotion to, and the extent of is practice of, justice, as defined by the Law of God and all His Word.

T. M. Moore
 

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