THE PRINCIPLED THING:
Justice, Mercy, and Humility PART ONE
By Pastor Ricardo Graham
L
ike many of you, I have been reading and studying the Bible for a long, long time. During my reading and re-reading of both the Old and New Testaments, I have been inspired by many life-changing, life-challenging teachings. God speaks powerfully throughout His Word, and I continue to discover ways to listen and meditate better in order to be able to apply His inspired Word to my own life. Sometimes it appears that God has shared the same principles over and over in slightly different ways through the patriarchal history, the proclamations of His prophets, the precision of Jesus’ teachings, and the further elucidation on those themes by the New Testament writers. One of the themes that I find repeatedly presented in the Bible is the teaching on godly justice. We can find one prominent example in Micah 6:8: “He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” An electronic dictionary defines jus-
4
PA C I F I C U N I O N R E CO R D E R
tice as a noun meaning just behavior or treatment; a concern for justice, peace, and genuine respect for people; the quality of being fair and reasonable; the administration of the law or authority in maintaining justice. The Hebrew word for justice in Micah 6:8 is “mishpat from the root shaphat, ‘to judge’… To do mishpat is to order one’s life according to the ‘judgments’ of God.” In the Old Testament writings we find the idea of justice toward one’s fellow human beings emphasized repeatedly. In powerful pronouncements, the prophets who spoke for God castigated the people for their greed, cruelty, thievery, sexual sins, murder, and other evil deeds. If you read the entirety of chapter 6, the full context makes Micah’s more famous statement in verse 8 even more powerful. From reading the book of Micah, it is apparent that the people continued to do evil, even as they brought their sacrificial animals to the temple. The priests and judges—who were implicated by
