“You must not spread a false report. Do not join the wicked to be a malicious witness. You must not follow a crowd in wrongdoing. Do not testify in a lawsuit and go along with a crowd to pervert justice. Do not show favoritism to a poor person in his lawsuit.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Justice is hard to obtain. It’s so hard that when someone manages to achieve it, we tell those stories. They get splashed all over the newspapers. Well, that’s not really true anymore. They get splashed all over the Internet. They get made into movies. They become urban legends. Yet this isn’t how things should be. We serve a God who is just. How do we know? Well, because we keep running into passages like this one. God cares about justice and wants His people to care about it as well. Let’s talk through yet another example of this in a law He gave to Israel.

Think back with me several weeks ago to when we were working our way through the Ten Commandments. The second-to-last command is often translated as “Do not lie.” We typically take that translated idea and run with it as the reason we should not tell lies, namely, because God said so. That’s certainly not a bad idea to hold in the abstract. After all, Jesus told us that He is the truth. Reality is defined by the character of God. If we are going to live in relationship with Him, we have to live within the boundaries of reality. To deviate from that in word or in action is not a good thing.

There are some challenges to that understanding of the ninth command, though. For starters, as we have talked about before, the question of whether it is always without exception wrong to lie is more complicated than it appears. Second, and as we have also talked about it, Old Testament laws don’t apply to us directly like that as followers of Jesus such that any of the Ten Commandments by themselves are reason we should or shouldn’t do anything. Third and most importantly for this particular context, that’s not what the ninth command actually says. It says we should not “bear false witness.” As we talked about briefly in that particular post, the ninth command is about “making sure Israel’s legal system operated in a way that was just and fair, trustworthy and true.” To put that more simply, the ninth command was about not lying in court. It was about justice more so than it was about honesty, but not at the expense of it. Instead, God was helping the people see that the two are inextricably linked.

God really cared about making sure the system of justice in Israel operated justly. In this trio of verses we find five ways God sought to advance that effort. First, the people were not to spread false reports. As we might put it today, they were not to spread “fake news.” As the ninth command makes clear, getting justice right has everything to do with honesty. Justice is all about making sure the right thing happens. Saying dishonest things about another person will never lead to the right things happening.

In addition to not contributing to a false report, the people were not to join the wicked in being a malicious witness. This is pretty much covering the same ground as the first thing, but there are a couple of additional things to see. God defines efforts to thwart real justice as wicked. Injustice is something wicked people pursue. Injustice of any kind is a direct deviation from His character. One particular way the wicked sow injustice is by seeking to do harm to others through their words about them. A malicious witness is one who is actively seeking to harm the person about whom they are offering testimony. Don’t do that. We are to be committed to seeking the good of the people around us. As Jesus would later instruct us, we are to love one another as He loved us.

Not only are we to avoid seeking to do harm to others by our testimony, but we need to avoid wrongdoing altogether. But this third thing doesn’t just tell us to be good and do good. It tells us not to join the crowd in wrongdoing. So much of the injustice that flourishes in the context of a culture is not the result of one person doing wrong by another. It is the result of crowds of people operating by groupthink. It is much easier to go along with doing the wrong thing when everyone around you is doing the same. Just consider the wrongdoing that happened in the January 6th riots in 2020 or that is happening in the various protest camps on elite university campuses today. To put that another way, it is hard to do the right thing when no one around you is doing it. God’s people, though, were to be different. They were to be committed to advancing the cause of His righteousness both as a group but also as individuals such that even if the group made a sudden left turn, they were to keep on the path.

This commitment to doing the right thing even when the group is not wasn’t just to be pursued in general. It was to be pursued specifically in the context of justice. In Jesus’ show trial before His death, the chief priests managed to find a whole parade of witnesses who were suddenly available in the middle of the night to offer one testimony after another of things Jesus had done wrong. All of them were lying. None of them could keep their stories straight. All of them were violating this command. When a person has achieved villain status in a culture for some reason, it is frightfully easy for principles of justice to be thrown out in order to nail them. That can’t happen. Justice must indeed by blind. We must be committed to doing the right thing no matter who it involves. The right thing is the right thing and it will always be the right thing.

The last one here is interesting. It stands rather at odds with where our culture is today. God told the people “to not show favoritism to a poor person in his lawsuit.” There are other commands in other places that deal with the temptation to show favoritism to rich people in legal matters (or cultural matters as Jesus’ brother, James, talks about in the second chapter of his letter). To my knowledge, this is the only verse that says anything like this. Just because a person is disadvantaged in some way doesn’t mean the wheels of justice should turn any differently for him than they do for anybody else. The wheels of justice should turn the same way for everybody. This idea pretty much flies directly in the face of the whole concept of intersectionality today. Just because people tick one of any number of minority boxes does not mean they should receive any culture or legal or political advantages over anybody else. The same principle applies for people who tick any number of majority boxes either. Justice should operate the same for everybody without partiality, just like God does.

Now, no, these specific laws don’t apply to us as followers of Jesus anymore than any of the other laws that are part of the old covenant. But the principle of pursuing justice in all things as a function of our being created in the image of a God who is just is very much operative for believers today. We are still made in the image of that same God and so pursuing justice in all things is still absolutely our call. We should look for every opportunity we can to do the right thing for the people around us. And if we don’t see any in our immediate sphere of influence, number one, we’re probably not looking hard enough. But, number two, we should go looking for opportunities to do it. God is just and so must we be.