All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable.

Christians and the Ceremonies

Before looking at some other passages that show how the Biblical concept of justice took form in the society of Israel, we must consider the thorny question: Are the laws of the Old Testament binding on Christians today?

Even though Christians believe that all of Scripture is authoritative, the coming of Christ fulfilled many of the Old Testament laws in such a way that they no longer bear on believers directly. One clear example of this is how the New Testament tells believers to regard the “ceremonial” laws of Moses. The numerous “clean laws” of Israel touching diet, dress, and other forms of ceremonial purity, as well as the entire sacrificial system and temple worship ordinances, are no longer considered binding on Christians, because Christ came and fulfilled them. In the New Testament book of Hebrews, we are told that Jesus is the final Sacrifice and the ultimate Priest, and so believers must no longer offer up animal sacrifices. Nor, as Jesus taught (Mark 7:17-23), do Christians have to obey the clean laws that determined if a worshipper was ceremonially clean and qualified for worship. Why not? It was because Christ’s atoning sacrifice brings us the reality to which the sacrifices pointed, and in Christ believers are permanently made “clean” and acceptable in God’s sight.

Nevertheless, as Biblical scholar Craig Blomberg points out, “Every command [from the Old Testament] reflects principles at some level that are binding on Christians (2 Timothy 3:16).”³² That is, even the parts of the Old Testament that are now fulfilled in Christ still have some abiding validity. For example, the principle of offering God sacrifices still remains in force, though changed by Christ’s work. We are now required to offer God our entire lives as sacrifices (Romans 12:1- 2), as well as the sacrifices of worship to God and the sharing of our resources with others (Hebrews 13:5).

And consider the book of Leviticus with all its clean laws and ceremonial regulations. These laws are not directly binding on Christians, but when Paul makes his case that Christians should lead holy lives, sharply distinct from those of the nonbelieving culture around them, he quotes Leviticus 26:12. (See 2 Corinthians 6:16-17.) So the coming of Christ changes the way in which Christians exhibit their holiness and offer their sacrifices, yet the basic principles remain valid.

Christians and the Civil Law of Moses

However, our concern here is not the ceremonial laws of Moses. What about the “civil” laws, the laws of social justice that have to do with the forgiving of debts, the freeing of slaves, and the redistribution of wealth? In the Old Testament believers comprised a single nation-state, with divinely appointed land apportionments and with a religious law code backed up by civil sanctions. Israel was characterized by theocratic rule in which both idolatry and adultery were offenses punished by the state. But in the New Testament this changed. Christians now do not constitute a theocratic kingdom-state, but exist as an international communion of local assemblies living in every nation and culture, under many different governments to whom they give great respect but never absolute allegiance. Jesus’s famous teaching to “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:21) signaled this change in the relationship between church and state to one of “non-establishment.”

Though believers are still a “covenant community,” a people who are bound together to obey God’s will, the church is not the state. So the apostle Paul, for example, calls for the rebuke of an adulterer in the Corinthian church. And if he does not repent, says Paul, expel him from membership in the community (1 Corinthians 5). Nevertheless, Paul does not demand his execution, as would have been the case in Israel. The church is not a government that rewards virtue and punishes evildoers with coercive force. But despite this massive change, do we have reason to believe that the civil laws of Moses, though not binding, still have some abiding validity? Yes.

Several factors should guide us. We should be wary of simply saying, “These things don’t apply anymore,” because the Mosaic laws of social justice are grounded in God’s character, and that never changes. God often tells the Israelites to lend to the poor without interest and to distribute goods to the needy and to defend the fatherless, because “the LORD your God . . . defends the cause [mishpat] of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the alien, giving him food and clothing” (Deuteronomy 10:17-18). If this is true of God, we who believe in him must always find some way of expressing it our own practices, even if believers now live in a new stage in the history of God’s redemption.

Also, in the next chapters we will see that New Testament writers do continue to look back to these social justice laws and base practices within the New Testament church upon them. For example, though the laws of gathering manna in the wilderness are obviously not applicable today, in 2 Corinthians 8:13-15 Paul can use them to require economic sharing and radical generosity among Christians. Just as Israel was a “community of justice,” so the church is to reflect these same concerns for the poor.

Christians and Society

But even if we can apply the social legislation of Old Testament Israel in some ways to the New Testament church, can we apply it to our society at large? Here we must be far more cautious. The laws of social justice in Israel were principles for relationships primarily between believers. Israel was a nation-state in which every citizen was bound to obey the whole law of God and also was required to give God wholehearted worship. This is not the situation in our society today.

Nevertheless, the Bible gives us an example of a believer calling a nonbelieving king to stop ruling unjustly (Daniel 4:27). In the book of Amos, we see God holding nonbelieving nations accountable for oppression, injustice, and violence (Amos 1:3-2:3). It is clearly God’s will that all societies reflect his concern for justice for the weak and vulnerable. So, like the ceremonial laws, the civil laws have some abiding validity that believers must carefully seek to reflect in their own lives and practices, not only as members of the church, but as citizens of their countries.

For example, many Biblical passages warn judges and rulers against taking bribes. “Do not pervert justice [mishpat] or show partiality. Do not accept a bribe, for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and twists the words of the righteous” (Deuteronomy 16:19). The poor person cannot afford to offer incentives to lawmakers and judges to decide matters for his benefit, but the rich and powerful can do this, and this is why bribery is so heinous to God. It marginalizes the poor from power. Bribery, of course, can take many modern forms. Poor people cannot make major contributions to a legislator’s campaign fund, for example. Do we want to say that these laws against bribery have no abiding validity? Should we insist that Christians should not try to see our own society’s laws reflect this particular kind of Biblical righteousness? Of course not.

With these caveats and cautions in mind, then, let’s look at the kind of society God called Israel to be, and see what we can learn from it.

A Community of Justice

One of the best places to see what God’s just society was supposed to look like is Deuteronomy 15. Here we read two verses that seem at first glance to be in tension with each other. In verse 11 it says, “There will always be poor people in the land, therefore I command you to be openhanded . . . toward the poor and needy in your land.” Yet just before, we read this:

There should be no poor among you, for in the land the LORD your God is giving you to possess as your inheritance, he will richly bless you, if only you fully obey the LORD your God and are careful to follow all these commands I am giving you today.

Deuteronomy 15:4-5

Despite the initial appearance, there is no contradiction. Surrounding verses 4 and 5 are a set of laws known as “shemitta” law, from the Hebrew word for “release.” At the beginning of the chapter we read:

At the end of every seven years you must cancel debts. [Literally make a “release,” shemitta.] This is how it is to be done: Every creditor shall cancel any loan he has made to his fellow Israelite.

Deuteronomy 15:1-2

This directed that any Israelite who fell into debt had to be forgiven those debts every seventh year. Not only could creditors no longer demand payment, but they had to release the pledges of collateral taken for the debt. Collateral was usually a portion of land from which produce could have been used to repay the loan.³³ This law of release was a powerful and specific public policy aimed at removing one of the key factors causing poverty—long-term, burdensome debt.

Later, in verses 7 through 11, using emphatic Hebrew constructions that can only be conveyed in English with lots of adverbs, such as “richly” (verse 4), “fully” (verse 5), “freely” (verse 8), and “generously” (verse 10), there was a powerful call to give to and help the poor until their need is eliminated.

If there is a poor man among your brothers in any of the towns of the land that the LORD your God is giving you, do not be hardhearted or tightfisted toward your poor brother. Rather be openhanded and freely lend him whatever he needs.

Deuteronomy 15:7-8

The poor man was not to be given merely a token “handout.” Rather, credit and help were to be extended until he was completely out of poverty. The generosity extended to the poor could not be cut off until the poor person’s need was gone and until he reached a level of self-sufficiency. Now we can understand how the passage could say, “There should be no poor among you.” God’s concern for the poor is so strong that he gave Israel a host of laws that, if practiced, would have virtually eliminated any permanent underclass.

Besides the laws of release, there were the laws of “gleaning.” Landowners could not gather all the grain their land could produce. They had to leave some of it for the poor to gather themselves (Leviticus 19:9- 10; 23:22). In other words, they were to voluntarily limit their profit-taking. Gleaning was not, however, what would ordinarily be called an act of charity. It enabled the poor to provide for themselves without relying on benevolence. On the other hand, Deuteronomy 23:24-25 protected the landowner from those who might try to overglean. The Bible is not a classist tract that sees the rich as always the villains and the poor as always virtuous.

In addition, there were the laws of tithing. All Israelites gave one-tenth of their annual income to the Levites and priests for the upkeep of the temple.³⁴ However, every third year the tithes were put in public storehouses so that the poor and “the aliens, the fatherless, and the widows” would receive them (Deuteronomy 14:29).³⁵

Lastly, there was the remarkable “year of Jubilee.”

Every seventh year was a “Sabbath” year in which debts and slaves were freed (Deuteronomy 15:1-18).³⁶ But every seventh Sabbath year (every forty-ninth year) was declared a “Jubilee.” In that year not only were debts to be forgiven, but the land was to go back to its original tribal and family allotments made when the Israelites returned to the land out of Egypt. Over a fifty-year period some families would economically do better and acquire more land while others would fare more poorly and have to sell some of their land—or lose it altogether and become workers and servants. But every fifty years the land was to go back to its original owners (Leviticus 25:8-55).

“Here, if ever,” writes Craig Blomberg, “is the ultimate relativization of private property. On average, each person or family had at least a once-in-a-lifetime chance to start afresh, no matter how irresponsibly they had handled their finances or how far into debt they had fallen.” ³⁷

If we combine the requirements of radical generosity with the regulations on profit-taking and property use, we are not surprised that God could say, “There should be no poor among you.” This does not mean that people would not continue to fall into poverty. But if Israel as an entire society had kept God’s laws perfectly with all their hearts, there would have been no permanent, long-term poverty.

Justice and Our Political Categories

We now need to face one of the main concerns of those who object to Christians talking so much of “social justice.” Kevin DeYoung states the problem in this way:

While the general principle—help the poor, don’t harm them—is abundantly and repeatedly clear in Scripture, the application of this principle is less so. For example, does a passage like Isaiah 58 support state-sponsored redistribution efforts? Christians can and do argue for this, but this text certainly doesn’t require this solution to poverty.

Deuteronomy 15 and the other Mosaic legislation that we have surveyed seem to answer DeYoung’s question with a “yes.” Israel did redistribute money, assets, and even land from the well-off to the poor, with the help of state-sponsored laws and institutions.

But as we’ve pointed out, Israel was a theocratic nation-state in covenant with God. We do not have anything like this today. We have been arguing that everything in the Old Testament has some abiding validity, though it must be applied with great care. Take the laws of gleaning, for example. I know of no one who believes that the Bible requires Christians to turn Old Testament gleaning into law in the United States. But what do the gleaning laws reveal to us about God’s will for our relationships? Why was it that landowners were not allowed to harvest out to the margins of their field? God did not want them to squeeze every cent of profit out of their land, and then think that by giving to charity they were doing all they could for general community welfare. The gleaning laws enabled the poor to be self-sufficient, not through getting a handout, but through their own work in the field.

How can business owners follow the same principles today? They should not squeeze every penny of profit out of their businesses for themselves by charging the highest possible fees and prices to customers and paying the lowest possible wages to workers. Instead, they should be willing to pay higher wages and charge lower prices that in effect share the corporate profits with employees and customers, with the community around them. This always creates a more vibrant, strong human community. How could a government follow the gleaning principle? It would do so by always favoring programs that encourage work and self-sufficiency rather than dependency.

For another example, see how Paul uses Exodus 16:18 in 2 Corinthians 8. In the desert God provided for the material needs of the people with manna that appeared in the mornings and that had to be gathered. Even though some were more able gatherers of manna than others, all manna was distributed equitably so that no one received too much or too little for their needs (Exodus 16:16-18). Any manna that was hoarded simply spoiled—it became rancid and full of maggots (verses 19-21). In 2 Corinthians 8:13-15 Paul interprets this as an abiding principle for how we are to deal with God’s material provision for us. He likens our money to manna. Paul teaches that the money we have is as much a gift of God as the manna was a gift to the Israelites in the desert. Though some are more able “gatherers”—that is, some are better at making money than others—the money you earn is a gift of God. Therefore, the money you make must be shared to build up community. So wealthier believers must share with poorer ones, not only within a congregation but also across congregations and borders. (See 2 Corinthians 8:15 and its context.) To extend the metaphor—money that is hoarded for oneself rots the soul.

We have seen a number of ways in which the social justice legislation of the Old Testament has abiding validity, yet we must recognize that everything I have just outlined is inferential. The Bible has many very direct and clear ethical prescriptions for human life. But when we come to the Old Testament social legislation, the application must be done with care and it will always be subject to debate. For example, while we have seen that the Bible demands that we share our resources with the needy, and that to fail to do so is unjust, taken as a whole the Bible does not say precisely how that redistribution should be carried out. Should it be the way political conservatives prescribe, almost exclusively through voluntary, private giving? Or should it be the way that political liberals desire, through progressive taxation and redistribution by the state? Thoughtful people have and will argue about which is the most effective way to help the poor. Both sides looking for support in the Bible can find some, and yet in the end what the Bible says about social justice cannot be tied to any one political system or economic policy. If it is possible, we need to take politics out of this equation as we look deeper into the Bible’s call for justice.

In Craig Blomberg’s survey of the Mosaic laws of gleaning, releasing, tithing, and the Jubilee, he concludes that the Biblical attitude toward wealth and possessions does not fit into any of the normal categories of democratic capitalism, or of traditional monarchial feudalism, or of state socialism. The rules for the use of land in the Biblical laws challenge all major contemporary economic models. They “suggest a sharp critique of 1) the statism that disregards the precious treasure of personal rootage, and 2) the untrammeled individualism which secures individuals at the expense of community.”³⁸

What Causes Poverty?

One of the main reasons we cannot fit the Bible’s approach into a liberal or conservative economic model is the Scripture’s highly nuanced understanding of the causes of poverty. Liberal theorists believe that the “root causes” of poverty are always social forces beyond the control of the poor, such as racial prejudice, economic deprivation, joblessness, and other inequities. Conservative theorists put the blame on the breakdown of the family, the loss of character qualities such as self-control and discipline, and other habits and practices of the poor themselves.

By contrast, the causes of poverty as put forth in the Bible are remarkably balanced. The Bible gives us a matrix of causes. One factor is oppression, which includes a judicial system weighted in favor of the powerful (Leviticus 19:15), or loans with excessive interest (Exodus 22:25-27), or unjustly low wages (Jeremiah 22:13; James 5:1-6). Ultimately, however, the prophets blame the rich when extremes of wealth and poverty in society appear (Amos 5:11-12; Ezekiel 22:29; Micah 2:2; Isaiah 5:8). As we have seen, a great deal of the Mosaic legislation was designed to keep the ordinary disparities between the wealthy and the poor from becoming aggravated and extreme. Therefore, whenever great disparities arose, the prophets assumed that to some degree it was the result of selfish individualism rather than concern with the common good.

If this were all that the Bible had to say about poverty, we might be tempted to assume that the liberals were right, that poverty comes from only unjust social conditions. But there are other factors. One is what we could call “natural disasters.” This refers to any natural circumstance that brings or keeps a person in poverty, such as famine (Genesis 47), disabling injury, floods, or fires. It may be fair to say, also, that some people lack the ability to make wise decisions. It is not a moral failing, they are simply unable to make good choices because they lack insight.³⁹

Another cause of poverty, according to the Bible, is what we could call “personal moral failures,” such as indolence (Proverbs 6:6-7), and other problems with self-discipline (Proverbs 23:21). The book of Proverbs is particularly forceful in its insistence that hard work can lead to economic prosperity (Proverbs 12:11; 14:23; 20:13), though there are exceptions (Proverbs 13:23).

Poverty, therefore, is seen in the Bible as a very complex phenomenon. Several factors are usually intertwined. ⁴⁰ Poverty cannot be eliminated simply by personal initiative or by merely changing the tax structure. Multiple factors are usually interactively present in the life of a poor family. For example: A person raised in a racial/economic ghetto (factor #1) is likely to have poor health (factor #2) and also learn many habits that do not fit with material/social advancement (factors #2 and 3). Any large-scale improvement in a society’s level of poverty will come through a comprehensive array of public and private, spiritual, personal, and corporate measures. There are many indications that scholars are coming to have a more balanced, complex view of poverty and are breaking through the older Right-Left deadlock.⁴¹

A Case Study

Mark Gornik, who I introduced in chapter 1 and who is a founder of New Song Church and ministries in Baltimore, makes a compelling case that “systematic exclusion” creates many poor inner-city neighborhoods. He uses the history of his former neighborhood, Sandtown, as an example. In the early and mid-twentieth century, the neighborhoods east of Sandtown, near the industrial jobs in the city’s center, were reserved for white immigrants, and the more prosperous neighborhoods to the west were also for whites only. Segregation saw to this. African-American newcomers from the South had to move into Sandtown, a place where the only jobs available were as low-wage domestic workers for wealthier families to the west. Many white-owned businesses would not hire African-Americans at all, or they did so for only menial work. Sandtown landlords shoehorned people into overcrowded and substandard housing. “This combination of circumstances led to a subsistence existence.”⁴²

By the 1970s, the industrial and manufacturing job base of the city of Baltimore was in sharp decline. New jobs were created in the suburbs and exurbs, places that were too expensive for many urban residents to live and inaccessible to them by transportation lines. The new jobs that were produced required advanced degrees, since the culture was shifting from a manufacturing to a service and knowledge economy. In just fifteen years, jobs in the city that required only a high school education (blue collar jobs) decreased by 45 percent, while jobs that required training past high school or college increased 56 percent.⁴³ Residents of inner-city neighborhoods, with their weak and failing schools, were completely unequipped to make the shift toward these jobs with the rest of society. Lower paying service-sector jobs were all that was left, without the retirement and health benefits and job security of the older manufacturing jobs, and those better-paying manufacturing jobs disappeared altogether for the residents of Sandtown.⁴⁴ Many people just gave up on finding formal work.

The resulting economic weakness in the neighborhood led to the kind of exploitative behavior toward the poor that the Bible condemns. Landlords did not live in the neighborhood. They provided abysmal services and maintenance, or abandoned their buildings altogether. Banks and lending institutions engaged in various forms of redlining, making it impossible for neighborhood residents to get home loans or insurance or credit cards.⁴⁵ Crime rose and the victims were usually members of the neighborhood. Businesses that were important for healthy communities moved out, and in their place came gun dealers, check-cashing centers, liquor stores, and porn shops, all of which encouraged the worst kinds of behavior in urban residents. ⁴⁶

During the middle and late twentieth century, government policy encouraged middle-class people to leave the city, further isolating communities like Sandtown. For example, intrusive freeways were built to enable people to live in the suburbs and commute by car to center city jobs, and many of these building programs bisected or devastated urban neighborhoods, as chronicled in Robert Caro’s classic The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.⁴⁷

Gornik’s research and narrative make a convincing case—the poverty of an inner-city neighborhood like Sandtown was not initially the product of individual irresponsible behavior or family breakdown. A complex range of structural factors led to the exclusion of the neighborhood’s residents from the resources they needed to thrive. And before that, the poverty of African-Americans emigrating into Baltimore from the South was due in great part to the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow laws. But the results of these factors were addiction, family breakdown, criminal activity, depression, the disintegration of community, and the erosion of personal character. This is why the problems of the poor are so much more complex than any one theory can accommodate. What it takes to rebuild a poor neighborhood goes well beyond public policy or social programs. It takes the rebuilding of families and communities and individual lives. This is why Gornik not only established programs of social service, but he also began a church that called people to spiritual conversion.⁴⁸

The three causes of poverty, according to the Bible, are oppression, calamity, and personal moral failure. Having surveyed the Bible on these texts numerous times, I have concluded that the emphasis is usually on the larger structural factors. In many countries of the world, corrupt governments, oppressive economic orders, and natural disasters keep hundreds of millions of people in poverty. In our own country, the weak educational system that society provides for inner city youth sets them up for failure. But when we add personal wrongdoing and crime to the larger forces of exclusion and oppression, we have a potent mixture that locks people into poverty. Taken in isolation no one factor—government programs, public policy, calls to personal responsibility, or private charity—is sufficient to address the problem.

“If He Cannot Afford . . .”

In an out-of-the-way part of the Hebrew Bible, in Leviticus 5, there are prescriptions for making confessions and offering sacrifices to God at the tabernacle in order to seek forgiveness for sins. There is an eye-glazing number of diverse rules and regulations for how to make atonement for various sins—what the penitents must do, what kind of animal sacrifices they had to bring, what the priests had to do, and so on. Then suddenly the text adds that if the worshipper “cannot afford” the standard offerings, “he is to bring as an offering a tenth of an ephah of fine flour for a sin offering. . . . In this way the priest will make atonement for him for any of these sins he has committed, and he will be forgiven” (Leviticus 5:11-13). One Bible commentary responds to this:

A person who knew he could come to God with nothing more than a cupful of flour and a confession of his sin and still receive forgiveness was learning something fundamental about the grace of God . . . even the most powerful in the land knew that God was not impressed by the most lavish sacrifices. . . .⁴⁹

Remember what Vinoth Ramachandra said. In the religions of the surrounding cultures, the gods identified particularly with the kings and others at the top of society. It made sense—the rich could build the gods magnificent temples and give sumptuous offerings. Why wouldn’t they be considered the favorites of the gods? But the Biblical God is not like that at all. He does not call everyone to bring sacrifices of the same kind and value, for that would have automatically make it easier for the rich to please God. Instead, God directs that each person should bring what they can, and if their heart is right, that will give them access to his grace.

For indeed, grace is the key to it all. It is not our lavish good deeds that procure salvation, but God’s lavish love and mercy. That is why the poor are as acceptable before God as the rich. It is the generosity of God, the freeness of his salvation, that lays the foundation for the society of justice for all. Even in the seemingly boring rules and regulations of tabernacle rituals, we see that God cares about the poor, that his laws make provision for the disadvantaged. God’s concern for justice permeated every part of Israel’s life. It should also permeate our lives.