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.

Revien and I have just returned from a green Kansas City where we attended the Just Love conversations with my friend and co-author Wayne Jacobsen—a 4-day get-together of fellow travellers who had read the book and wanted to connect to others to discuss its ideas.

You can click here to listen to a podcast where Wayne and I discuss the meeting.

Just Love was released in early March, and it has been exciting to see how it is touching people’s lives. The past few months have provided an opportunity to assess the book’s impact and the varied responses to it, and to begin bringing that conversation into this space.

The main thesis of the book is simple: The word righteousness, as it is generally used and understood in the English-speaking world, does not appear in the original languages of the Bible. In the Greek world of the centuries before and after Christ, the word we translate as righteousness—dikaiosynē—meant justice.

The easiest way to see this is to look at English translations of classical Greek literature, such as Plato’s The Republic or Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. The same dik-stem words that run like a network of arteries throughout the Greek New Testament and Septuagint dominate much of the conversation in these works, yet many of them are translated into English without a single occurrence of the word righteousness. Overwhelmingly, it’s justice.

In the modern English mind, righteousness and justice do not mean the same thing, which is what Just Love is all about. This is not a casual observation, but a disturbing revelation that offers insight into why the lifestyle described in Matthew 5-7 (the Sermon on the Mount) and Luke 6:20-49 is oftentimes seen as an unattainable ideal reserved for the super-spiritual, or an interim ethic for the period between the Old Covenant and the Day of Pentecost.

I mean, seriously, who lives like that?

Righteousness or Justice?

Let’s pause for a moment and think about righteousness. What do you think when you hear this word?

Over the past decade, I have asked a lot of people this question. Their answers presented righteousness as a two-pronged fork: some hear it as moral rectitude or even religious piety; others as acquittal, forgiveness, or right standing before God. The relationship between these two ideas is understood in different ways. Some see the latter as God’s gracious answer to humanity’s inability to achieve the former. Others see it as the empowerment that enables believers to begin living the kind of life demanded by the former. Still others place obedience first, viewing it as the path that leads to God’s acceptance.

The word justice shifts the focus away from the above. Rather than a moral ideal or salvific status, justice suggests a relational reality. This is how the ancients understood it. As Aristotle argues in Book V of the Nicomachean Ethics, justice is the “complete virtue” because it is virtue exercised toward others. 

The implication is clear: For justice to be, you need an other. You can practice righteousness on a desert island, but not justice. Righteousness is associated with inward states and divine status; justice is concerned with the way you treat your neighbour.

This explains why justice is employed as a tool to order human relations. The relationship between justice and political order has been a central concern of human societies across time. In The Republic, Plato frames the question of the ideal state in terms of justice, treating it as the organising principle of both the individual and the polis. Justice, in this framework, is not an abstract ideal detached from lived reality but the condition that makes ordered communal life possible. 

This focus predates Plato by many centuries. One of the oldest legal codes known to humanity is a seven-and-a-half feet tall, charcoal-coloured, finger-shaped stone pillar (called a stele) unearthed in 1901 in Susa, Iran. Known to us as The Code of Hammurabi, it was penned by its name bearer in 1754 BC and is ancient Babylon’s version of The Republic. Hammurabi, the sixth Amorite king of the Old Babylonian Empire, claimed to have received his code and its 282 laws directly from Shamash, the Babylonian god of… you guessed it, justice. 

Hammurabi’s code was perceive to be grounded in divine authority. It reflects a worldview in which justice is not merely a human construct but a transcendent standard to be mediated through legal structures. Its provisions, which regulate matters ranging from property disputes to bodily harm, illustrate a consistent concern with proportionality, restitution, and social order—features that remain central to modern legal systems.

One of the reasons why Hammurabi’s code has attracted so much attention is that its content is remarkably similar to the laws of the Old Testament. (Law #196 reads, “If a man destroy the eye of another man, they shall destroy his eye.”) This has led some to suggest that the Israelites must have copied their laws from the Babylonians during the time of their exile, but that is to miss the point entirely. The similarity springs from a causality underlying both the Babylonian and Hebraic legal codes: the theme of justice—the very theme that dominates Plato’s Republic.

As Paul reminded the Romans, God has written his laws of justice on the hearts of the gentiles. The way they codify this universal inner consciousness is of lesser concern than the fact that their codes testify to a profound principle: Anyone who wishes to live peacefully with a neighbour must first bow to the call of justice in their hearts.

Across these traditions, a consistent pattern emerges: the establishment of a just society depends on the articulation and enforcement of just laws. Law, in this sense, functions as a formalised expression of justice, translating normative principles into enforceable rules.

Think about this. Societies do not create laws for the sake of righteousness; they do it for the sake of justice. A Department of Righteousness sounds like something one would encounter in an Orwellian novel. The connection between justice and law is obvious. To speak of governance is to speak of the institutionalisation of justice.

This structure is just as obvious in contemporary constitutional frameworks. Modern states typically distinguish between legislative, executive, and judicial functions, each of which plays a role in the realisation of justice. Legislative bodies formulate laws, executive authorities implement them, and judicial institutions interpret and apply them to concrete cases. While the terminology and institutional forms vary across jurisdictions, the underlying logic is consistent: law exists to secure justice, and the legitimacy of political authority is measured by its capacity to do so. It is no coincidence that 27 of the 45 US presidents were lawyers.

The relational character of justice is critical to the conversation I would like to have in these pages. Justice is not merely a personal attribute or moral disposition; it is a principle that structures interactions between people. It presupposes a community within which claims can be made, obligations recognised, and disputes resolved. For this reason, justice cannot be reduced to private virtue. It is intrinsically public, concerned with the ordering of relationships in a way that secures fairness, reciprocity, and social cohesion.

The historical record reinforces this understanding. From ancient Mesopotamia to classical Greece, from Roman law to modern constitutional democracies, the development of legal systems has been driven by the need to regulate human interactions in accordance with perceived standards of justice. These systems differ in their sources of authority—divine command, philosophical reasoning, popular sovereignty—but they converge on a shared premise: that a stable and flourishing society requires a framework within which justice can be articulated, administered, and enforced.

With this in mind, the towering presence of justice (tsedeq), judgment (mishpat), and Law (Torah) throughout the Old Testament makes perfect sense. Together they provide the framework for the establishment and ordering of God’s kingdom in ancient Israel.

Yet the Law and the Prophets, whose purpose was to establish justice and judgment in Israel, testify to a reality that is strikingly absent from the historic legal codes of the nations: the limitations of legal expressions of justice to bring about the relational reality God intended for his people.

Think about it. What ruler, if he were in his right mind, would issue a royal decree to order relationships throughout his kingdom, only to conclude by lamenting that the decree itself was incapable of producing the very thing it was designed to establish? That would be to undermine the entire project.

Yet this is precisely how the Old Testament is structured. Its message is unmistakable: legal systems can regulate what people do, but not what they desire. A person may conform to the requirements of the law while remaining inwardly disposed toward injustice. Legislation cannot reach the heart or redirect its loves.

Every civilisation recognised that justice requires law. Israel alone insisted that law is not enough. The Law and the Prophets therefore carry justice further than the nations ever imagined. They present their own legal code not as an end in itself, but as a shadow bearing witness to its own fulfilment.

We’ll explore that fulfilment in the posts to come.

In my previous post, I referred to a monumental theological paradigm shift that I had undergone some years ago. I also mentioned that I had never felt the unction to speak about it on this blog.

The main reason is that I have been working through the massive implications of it all.

Added to this, as one gets older, your desire to throw the cat amongst the pigeons diminishes. You lose the taste for the dramatic and sensational. Your appreciation for the greater gifts of God escalates—relationships, nature, prayer, contemplation, simplicity, solitude, books that focus on what God has done rather than what we should do, and so on.

The point is that I have little appetite for controversy and certainly no desire to stir it up. Schopenhauer is often credited with saying, “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” I do not mind ridicule. But violent opposition demands clarification—and clarification often hardens resistance, spiralling into verbal conflict that accomplishes nothing and ruins the hearers.

I read the other day that Keanu Reeves says he’s reached a stage in his life where he’s avoiding arguments, so “even if you say 1+1=5, you’re absolutely correct. Enjoy!”

“Yay,” I said, “I’m going to do exactly that.”

“No, you’re not,” a little voice whispered within.

I sighed and thanked the Lord. An aversion to theological quarrels does not mean compromising the truth; it means “speaking the truth in love”.

That’s the word I’ve been thinking about.

Love.

The more I thought about it, the more there was to think about. My shift turned out to be more of a continental drift than a hopscotch jump. Ultimately, it took me to a place where I could no longer use the exegetical and hermeneutical tools that I had been handed at seminary for unlocking the mysteries of God and his universe. The theological form I had inherited was inadequate for capturing or conveying what I was beginning to see.

During this period, two words began to play on my mind.

Parable.

Community.

The Power of Parable

I was reminded of Neil Postman’s analogy, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, of two Native Americans communicating via smoke signals, but finding it impossible to discuss deep philosophy this way. The form excludes the content, Postman said.

Postman was a disciple of Marshall McLuhan, the legendary Canadian philosopher who coined the adage, the medium is the message. According to McLuhan, the form of a medium of communication (television, technology, newspaper, pulpit) embeds itself in the content it carries and creates a structural influence that shapes perception more than the content itself.

Why is this relevant? Because it illustrates the futility of thinking and speaking about love outside the relational dynamic that is love. To do so is not to propagate love; it is to obscure it. Cognition alone is a poor wavelength for transmitting the language of love.

Parable makes it possible to circumvent those limitations. It makes dead words alive by subjecting them to stories of living people. Parable is incarnational. It can do more than speak about love; it can show it. And so, instead of writing about love, I wrote a story of a man who found love, a novel titled The Sinai Code.

In Community, for Community

But I did something else: I figured that if love must be embodied to be spoken truthfully, then it must also be explored and shared that way.

In community, for community.

And so, I reached out and shared my findings with a brother in the Lord, Wayne Jacobsen, whose writings had been resonating with my understanding of God’s love for a long time. Wayne is best known for his book He Loves Me!

This was his response:

One day, I received a fascinating email from South Africa. I had no idea who Tobie van der Westhuizen was or why he wanted to share with me a discovery he had been exploring for eight years. He wanted to know if his conclusions resonated with me. Did they ever! But it did take us some time to get there. His initial statement made me wonder if he was yet another kooky amateur theologian with some half-baked theological novelty. Tobie’s initial email cut right to the chase: “The word righteousness is not in the Bible.”

That email led to a friendship and, eventually, to our writing a book together, Just Love. These words, taken from the Dedication, say it all:

Whoever reads this book will soon realize it could not have been written by either of us alone. It is the shared witness of two lives that followed Christ on different continents for nearly a century between them. It reminds us that true community reaches beyond the limits of one mind or one lifetime. In these pages, two worlds merge—the world of reflection and the world of lived experience—and that meeting is no accident. Words are meant to become flesh.

If you are wondering about my kooky statement, “The word righteousness is not in the Bible”, you’ll have to buy the book 🙂 It will be available on Amazon.com within a few days. The official publication date is March 3.

A New Direction

The implications of the basic idea set forth in Just Love are far-reaching and call for further exploration and much reflection. For the past sixteen years, I have written on this blog about the Christian life and the organic nature of God’s church. I still intend to do so, but the focus will be different. In future, I will be exploring these and other issues in light of the discoveries that have changed my life beyond anything I could have imagined a decade ago—discoveries documented in Just Love.

As you may have noticed, the name of the blog has changed from naturalchurch to Justice of God. Stick around, and you will soon find out why.

Just love,

Tobie