Before I begin my thoughts on the topic of biblical justice, I wanted to put a few things on the table. First, let me be quite clear about one thing - I am not a student of biblical languages. I have a passing familiarity with Greek, enough to find my way around a dictionary and figure out which words are the verbs and which are the nouns and so forth. With Hebrew, well, I know that it reads right to left and that there are no vowels, which is rather unhelpful for where I want to go. So here is the limitation that I want to be honest about at the outset - I am going to be reading as a reader of modern English, looking more for themes and movements than trying to convey deep linguistic insights from the original languages.

The second thought that I've had as I began to read through some things tonight is that justice is a loaded word that means different things to different people. To be honest, I'm really thinking of several different things that to my mind typically get lumped together into one category that represents (for my purposes) a Christian response to marginalized persons. By this, I mean in particular how do we treat those who have been discarded by society, who have been deemed disposable in our recycled world? This too is difficult to think through, not least in part because I am a young white male trying to understand in some sense a world that I have never personally experienced. I live in a sanitized world of suburban residences and shopping centers. To talk this way feels dishonest somehow, as though I were running for office. But I think that specifically because I have the modest suburban lifestyle that I have, I also have a responsibility to think honestly and biblically about what that means for me as a person of relative privilege in a broken world.

Thus far, two things seem to be unfolding as I read, two themes that come together into a God-shaped response to the issues that I mentioned. One is what I would typically think of as justice in a technical sense - we collectively have a responsibility to make sure that those with wealth, power, and position do not unfairly manipulate those who do not. The other is what I would term mercy - we also collectively have a responsibility to make sure that those who are in need have those needs addressed. It seems to me that as we watch these themes mingle and unfold in the biblical accounts that we learn something true and beautiful about God and about us - but I am getting ahead of myself.