If there is anything we learn from the events unfolding in Exodus 18, it is this: Judgment is hard work.

As we noted in the previous post, to do justice, justice must first be discerned.  In Hebrew, the discernment of justice is Mishpat—judgment that culminates in a verdict. Tsedeq is the implementation of that justice—a process of prevention and remedy to ensure the successful ordering of human relations in a community. Like the relationship between the head and the hand, we must understand before we do.

All of this is extremely hard work, and it requires immense resources. This is evident not only from Jethro’s proposed hierarchy of judges, but also from the machinery we have constructed to pursue justice in modern society. Think for a moment of everything that has to exist before a society can even begin to administer justice: departments of justice; courts and judges; prosecutors and defence lawyers; police services and investigators; forensic laboratories; prisons and correctional services; probation and parole systems; legal-aid institutions; social workers and welfare agencies; child-protection services; human-rights commissions; ombudsmen; regulatory bodies; tribunals and mediation services.

And behind all of these institutions are millions of people whose daily work is devoted, directly or indirectly, to the discernment, administration, protection and implementation of justice.

Justice is hard work.

The short narrative from the Exodus to the giving of the Law at Sinai reveals this. But it also reveals an intriguing symmetry. Consider the pattern: bread from heaven, water from the rock, protection from an enemy, and the establishment of a justice system. Each portrays an earthly need met by heavenly provision.

The message is clear: to establish a community and become a kingdom, we need to eat, drink, protect ourselves, and do justice. These elements are non-negotiable, whether we are journeying to the land of our kingdom or live there. To the secular mind they represent the difficulty of life: work, sweat, pressure. To a spiritual people they represent the curse of living outside the garden of God—an opportunity to relearn that life was never intended to be our burden. Life is not a thing to be sought; it is the very nature and essence of God.

The grumbling of the people preceded God’s provision. They were untrained in the life of faith. The wilderness was God’s design to teach them that life comes from God and not from the meat pots of Egypt. The wilderness represented drought, famine, threats from enemies, and the inevitable social consequences of these pressures: disputes among the people.

Little did they understand that their suffering was a prerequisite for their spiritual formation:

And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.
(Deuteronomy 8:3)

There is something important to note here. These are words from above given by God. As such, the wilderness lesson was both a preparation for and reinforcement of what happened at Sinai. Also, these words are alive and have the capacity to fill and satisfy. This promise of life correlates with the Law’s testimony about itself: You shall therefore keep My statutes and My judgments (mishpat), which if a man does, he shall live by them: I am the Lord. (Lev.18:5 NKJV)

But this is not all. This profound lesson, of a word from God that is alive and comes down to people to give them life, was but a shadow of its own fulfilment. As we read in John’s gospel:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God... In him was life, and the life was the light of men... And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us… Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you... “Truly, truly, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world… I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst… Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink.“

Notice how this thread is interwoven into what is arguably the greatest teaching ever heard by human ears—one that introduces the New Testament and took place on a mountain:

Blesssed are those who hunger and thirst for justice (dikaiosynē—Greek equivalent of tsedeq), for they shall be satisfied… Do not think I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfil them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. Therefore whoever relaxes one of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your justice exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven… Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his justice, and all these things will be added to you.

John’s logos—the Word of Life in the flesh—appears on a mountain and speaks about the justice of the Law. But he does so with a difference. He speaks about the Law being fulfilled and accomplished in a way that will surpass the justice of Sinai’s most famous and obsessively devoted adherents—the scribes and Pharisees.

The prerequisite for receiving this justice is an appetite for it—a hungering and thirsting that will take precedence over the physical need to eat and drink. This redirection of the human “Gentile” appetite is framed in the mountain teaching as an exchange of earthly treasure for heavenly treasure, and earthly reward for heavenly reward.

To drive the point home, the teaching is preceded by a vivid illustration: Jesus enters the wilderness for 40 days, matching the years of Israel’s wandering. He willingly subjects himself to the hungering and thirsting that befell them, and faces the inevitable temptation that comes with the force of the human appetite. The serpent appears, as he did in Eden’s garden, and repeats the promise that life and fullness can be found in that which is dead. But unlike the first couple, Jesus refuses to subject the passion of his heart to the desires of his flesh. Instead, he quotes the words of Deuteronomy’s lesson:

Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.

The teaching that follows is an exposition of these words. Jesus leaves the wilderness, ascends the mountain, and speaks about the justice of the Law. Sinai is reenacted, but with a difference. The one who speaks is not Moses but Christ. The words are not dead but alive. The event does not signify the beginning of the Law but the consummation of the Law; not because justice will be abolished but fulfilled.

The fulfilment of justice will take place when the appetites of the heart are redirected to that for which the heart was created.

That is the message, and it prepares us for Paul’s towering declaration—a declaration that unlocks the mystery of the gospel::

Love fulfills the Law.

Those words are not a departure from Sinai. They are Sinai’s destination.

AI-generated illustration

In my previous post, I asked a simple question: Why justice? The answer is equally simple: Justice enables relationships. It is the principle of fairness that makes community possible. This is why we find justice (or perhaps we should say efforts at justice) wherever we find community.

In this post, I would like to ask another question: What does justice look like? What are its elements?

The elements of justice are remarkably consistent across communities. We can divide them into two main categories: preventative justice (sometimes called primary justice) and remedial justice (sometimes called rectifying justice).

Justice as prevention is like a STOP sign. Its aim is to deter any action that may bring harm to another: Do not steal, do not murder, do not tell lies about others, and so on.

Justice as remedy is like the clean-up operation after an accident. This happens when the STOP sign has been skipped: If you have stolen, this is how to fix it. If you have murdered… and so on.

Preventative justice aims to keep a relationship intact. Remedial justice aims to repair a broken relationship. Preventative justice says, “Do not steal your neighbour’s sheep.” Remedial justice says, “If you have stolen your neighbour’s sheep, you have to give them back.”

For remedial justice to work, it must restore what has been lost. Its compensation must be proportionate.  But there is a problem: If you steal a sheep from your neighbour, you take more than a sheep. You also take your neighbour’s peace of mind. He now goes to bed worried that more of his sheep may disappear in the middle of the night. He worries about feeding his family because his livelihood has suffered. His wife blames him for not securing the fences. He treats his farm workers with suspicion. By enriching yourself unjustly, you have brought misery to your neighbour and his family.

Proportionate compensation demands that the perpetrator repair all of this damage. He has to clean up the whole mess that he has caused. He has to return the sheep along with a compensation—a “penalty” that will compensate the distressed neighbour not only for his lost sheep but for all the trauma the theft has caused the family. Remedial justice-codes typically add a percentage on top of the compensation to ensure proportionality. Leviticus generally requires the return of stolen property together with an additional one-fifth (20 percent).

But what do you do if you no longer have the stolen goods—if, for instance, you have invited your friends over for a massive barbecue and the sheep is no more? According to Exodus, the penalty for slaughtered or sold sheep is four to one. This means you have to pay your neighbour an amount equal to the value of four sheep. The math is intended to restore your neighbour’s equilibrium to the same level it was before the break-in. Your penance must restore the neighbour’s peace, and the sign that this has been accomplished will ideally be his willingness to forgive you. (“Well, this turned out better than I expected. I am better off than before. I might as well forgive the miserable wretch who stole my stuff. He has demonstrated his remorse by his repentance and proven it by his restitution.”)

The problem is that sheep thieves are not exactly known for doing the above. They fail to discern justice, and so they do not stop or clean up. They hide. We will say more about the relationship between injustice and concealment later on. Let us note for now that a shortage of justice-discernment calls for another remedy altogether: someone to do the discernment on behalf of the one who cannot do it for themselves.

In justice-talk, the discernment of justice has a name: judgment. Judgment is the ability to perceive what justice requires, and it is a prerequisite for doing justice. Justice therefore consists of two inseparable movements: first discerning justice, and then doing what it demands. The one who judges well will be distinguished in a community from those who don’t, and called on to share their wisdom with those who lack judgment. More often than not, they end up in governing positions.

For instance, a dispute between people will reveal differing opinions on who is guilty of misconduct and who is not, calling for an arbiter who can judge the situation on their behalf. Situations of conflict typically stem from a difference in justice-discernment between two parties and end up in front of a judge—or, in some systems, a jury—who can do the discerning for them. We call that judgment a verdict, and it overrides the subjective sensibilities of the conflicting parties, the idea being that the judge or jury possesses powers of discernment that are superior to those of the conflicting parties. Thus, verdicts are binding on those who receive them.

Verdicts are not only issued as remedies to injustice. They can also be preventative. It makes sense that a judge may grow tired of constantly sentencing sheep thieves in a community to pay compensatory damage to their victims, and instead issue a law that forbids the stealing of sheep. Laws are codified judgments that pre-empt the necessity of perpetual clean-ups. They are the STOP signs in a community, and they are often informed by the messes that keep on occurring in that community.

Once we understand the above, the Old Testament makes a lot more sense. The book of Exodus tells the story of a community of people who had been liberated from a life in bondage to a foreign nation, and that included being subject to foreign laws. Once freed, they immediately acquired a new liberty: the right to start discerning justice for themselves instead of having it discerned for them by Pharaoh.

Three chapters after the crossing of the Red Sea, we find the people coming to Moses to be “judged” by him. (Remember our earlier point: community building starts with finding justice.) When Jethro asks Moses why he was sitting alone and all the people were standing around him from morning to evening, Moses answers: “Because the people come to me to inquire of God; when they have a dispute, they come to me and I decide between one person and another, and I make them know the statutes of God and his laws.” Jethro then advised Moses to appoint fellow judges to assist him—men who “fear God, are trustworthy and hate a bribe.”

The hatred of a bribe is an interesting but obvious qualification. It suggests that there is a peculiar temptation attached to the task of discerning justice on behalf of others, namely to siphon compensation away from the victim of injustice, appropriate it for oneself, and reward amnesty to the perpetrator in return. Isaiah would write much later, “Woe to those who acquit the guilty for a bribe and deprive the innocent of his right.” If there is anything that a judge should know, then it is that penalties are incurred for the sake of restitution—setting things right with the wronged—not for the benefit of the judge. More about this later.

Interestingly, in the next chapter (Exodus 19) Moses and the people find themselves in the wilderness of Sinai. God then called Moses up the mountain and began revealing his judgments to Israel, beginning with the Ten Commandments. The discernment of justice reaches new heights, with God himself taking over as the supreme judge. Exodus 20 presents God’s preventative judgments and Exodus 21 and 22 a string of remedial and restitutionary judgments.

In Exodus 21:1 these statutes are called ha-mishpatim—”the judgments”—plural of mishpat, a majestic word that means judgment or verdict and is coupled with the Hebrew word tsedeq (meaning justice) regularly throughout the Old Testament. The reason for the close relationship between these two words is obvious: To do justice you first need to discern it.

More about this in posts to come.