After Pentecost Devotional - Day 49

“If you forget to bring in a stack of harvested grain, don’t go back in the field to get it. Leave it for the poor, including foreigners, orphans, and widows, and the LORD will make you successful in everything you do.” Deuteronomy 24:19

Justice is not about retribution, punishment, and making people suffer. Justice is about making things right and doing what is right for others. It is about caring and living in real community with those around us. Instead of an individualistic focus on life that excludes the realities others face, justice calls us to pay more attention to the circumstances and needs of those around us. It calls us to trust God for the abundance necessary to be generous, loving, and kind.

Widows, orphans, poor, and foreigners are listed here in this passage as representation of all those who find themselves struggling against the establishment of society. These are those who do not hold the keys to wealth, abundance, and economic production. These are the ones the law makers and arbiters of justice would ignore as irrelevant in their political, economic, and social decisions. Perhaps those decisions are the result of a lack of understanding. Perhaps they are the result of a lack of caring. Perhaps they are the result of a failure to understand. Regardless, these are the people impacted by human power structures, and those with the least say in the process.

Our current economic models are most often structured around squeezing every last penny out of the process of growing wealth. If there is a strategy to increase a profit margin by 1/1000th of a percent, someone somewhere is employing that strategy for personal gain. By contrast, Deuteronomy tells us to operate according to very different norms. We are to leave behind what we did not see at first. We are to reap the major portion of the harvest without going back to be sure we did not miss something.

The point in that was that there are others around us who also have needs. There is a recognition here that the produce of the field, in the end, belonged to Yahweh who had provided sun and wind and rain, as well as the very land. The economic production was itself a gift for the people, not simply for one individual over another. As such, the people were to share the bounty of Yahweh's provision, especially so in the case of those with the least access to that bounty.

These laws were a reflection on the poverty of oppression under which they had lived and from which they had been redeemed by Yahweh. They had not been redeemed in order to shift that oppression onto others. They had been redeemed in order to learn a new way of life in which all people were counted as full recipients to share in Yahweh's bounty.

More than personal wealth, the people were to focus on the wealth and well-being of all. They were to share in the labor and in the results of that labor for economic production. The poor, widows, foreigners, and orphans alike were to find that the provision of Yahweh was sufficient for one and all. They were to be able to receive all they needed and more due to the bounty Yahweh would provide. Indeed, if the people did not live up to this definition of justice, Yahweh did not promise that there would be enough. Justice for all was to be the foundation of economic prosperity.

Determine how your own economic attitudes stack up to this measure of justice.


"Lord, make your justice flow through me that all might benefit from your provision."

—©Copyright 2016, Christopher B. Harbin
http://www.sermonsearch.com/contributors/104427/ 
My latest books can be found here on amazon

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