Transcript:

Rethinking "Righteousness": What the Old Testament Prophets Really Meant

Hi everyone, it's Pastor Alicia. Today we're talking about the concept of righteousness. Now, I want you to get a picture in your mind of what I would be talking about when I say a righteous nation. What comes to mind? This is a kind of phrase that evokes a lot these days. We have the religious right; we have people who are advocating for a righteous nation, and generally, what they mean by that is a nation whose actions are in line with the law of God. Those would be the kinds of phrases people would say: a nation whose citizens obey God.

The Modern View of a "Righteous Nation"

And usually, those would be topics like emphasizing the nuclear family (a man and a woman married with children), and it would be people who are all gainfully employed and who are financially taking care of themselves and taking care of their families and probably their communities. That would probably be the picture that we would get when we would talk about a righteous nation today, and especially when we would think about what Christians are advocating for when they're advocating for a righteous nation because, at the end of the day, what they're talking about is individuals who are behaving in specific ways and probably legislating rules to prevent some behaviors outside of those things.

So, you're probably going to be surprised by some of the things that I share today about what the Old Testament prophets meant when they talked about a righteous nation.

A Starting Point: The Meaning of Righteousness and Justice

A starting point for this, something that I think is really helpful for this whole discussion, is what the biblical words for righteousness and justice even were. And today, we're going to be looking especially at the Old Testament, and the words that are used in the Old Testament to talk about righteousness and justice are two words: tsadeq (declined in some different ways, and the vowels change in Hebrew, but basically, it's tsadeq) and mishpat. Those are the two words in Hebrew that talk about righteousness, and interestingly enough, those words are just as likely translated "justice" as "righteousness."

Righteousness and justice in the Old Testament are not separate concepts.

They're not different ideas like we speak of them as dramatically different ideas now, but they weren't different ideas in the Old Testament. So, we're going to look at the subject of righteousness and justice, mishpat and tsadeq, and I want to get started by talking about what American evangelical churches are teaching today. And who better to ask that question than Bodie Baucom, who is often considered kind of a leading voice on what social justice should be for evangelicals and what he sees as major problems in the social justice movement. So, we're going to look at a quote from an article of his; we're going to look at that today, and you could see a reference in the description. So, let's look at it. He says, "From a biblical perspective, justice is a heart issue and a law of God issue. If the law of God says this, and you do that,1 it's unjust. If a law of God says this, and your heart goes towards that, it's unjust. Social justice, by definition, is not a heart issue; it's a state issue. It is about the redistribution of advantages and resources to disadvantaged groups. This is another critical distinction: social justice is not about individuals; it is about groups and achieving specific outcomes for groups."2

So, he's not alone in advocating for this and saying that Christians are not supposed to be concerned with group outcomes on the state level, that it really should be more about individual behavior, individual righteous behavior, and individual heart issues, and that might also include charity and giving to the poor and things like that, but it's an individual issue; it's not a state issue. Not uncommon at all.

What Does the Old Testament Say?

So, let's see what the Old Testament, and especially the prophets, and some other books as well, have to say about the meaning of righteousness and justice biblically, as Tony Baucom is advocating for. Deuteronomy 16:18-20: "You shall appoint judges and officials throughout your tribes in all your towns that the Lord your God is giving you, and they shall render just decisions,"3 which is mishpat tsadeq. So, it's both of those words together. You can see how closely linked they are in the Hebrew language. "You shall render just decisions for the people. You must not distort justice; you must not show partiality, and you must not accept a bribe, for a bribe blinds the4 eyes of the wise and subverts the cause of those who are in the right,"5 that tsadeq justice, and only justice-it's like an emphatic righteousness, right?-"you shall emphatically pursue righteousness so that you may live and occupy the land that the Lord your God has given you." So, he's speaking here very explicitly about the laws and the rules and that they be tsadeq and that they be mishpat, that they be just rules, and this is definitely speaking of the state.

Okay, so Proverbs 8:15-16, speaking of wisdom-this is wisdom personified as a woman who is speaking, and wisdom says-"By me kings reign, and rulers decree what is just," tsadeq. "By me princes rule, and nobles, all whom govern justly." So, speaking again about righteousness and justice and saying that it is God who inspires-when you see a king ruling with tsadeq, with mishpat-when a king is ruling with righteousness and justice, it is God who inspires that kind of behavior in a king. So, even the king's personal righteousness, if you even want to think about it that way, the inspiration of the king to be just and righteous is coming from God.

Okay, I have another verse that I want to share with you. The first one is from the law; the second was from the wisdom literature; now, this one is from the prophets. Isaiah, chapter 10, verses 1-2: "Ah, you who make iniquitous decrees, who write oppressive statutes, to turn aside the needy from justice," from mishpat, "and to rob the poor of my people of their right, that widows may be your spoil, and that you may make the orphans your prey."6

This is speaking very clearly about rules, about statutes. These are things enacted by the state that are there in a way that exploits the widows and the orphans.

Now, who were the widows and orphans in their society? Widows and orphans would have been those who were the most vulnerable financially, but in other ways too, because the culture and the laws were around land ownership, and land was owned by the patriarch, the land-owning man who was the head of the family, and every family was given an allotted share of land. No one was left out; everyone had land that they were able to work as a means of providing for themselves. No one was left out except for the Levites, who were given additional funds through the tithe. So, everyone was cared for except if you didn't have a connection to that patriarch, so that would be widows and orphans.

So, it's speaking about those who have the least opportunity to access financial resources and care for themselves, to access that land, which is the spring and the source of financial resources in their society. So, these are the most vulnerable, not just financially, but physically to violence as well. These would be people who were extremely vulnerable to all sorts of exploitations, and the laws need to be laws that help those people, that help give righteousness, which is justice, which is the same thing, to those people.

You'll also see later in Isaiah, chapters like 56, 57, 58, and surrounding chapters, that he speaks a lot also about people with disabilities, people who are blind, people who are lame, who need help in those ways as well. And in fact, also speaks about people with sexual difference, which is eunuchs, who don't really fit into the typical roles of male and female, and the way that people like that sometimes received a lot of shame and didn't belong in society because they weren't able to do the thing you were supposed to do, which is have children. So, there were ways in which these people were marginalized, estranged; they were shamed; they weren't given a place in society.

And the prophets, Isaiah and all of the prophets, are calling for mishpat and for tsadeq, which is righteousness and justice for those people.

It's supposed to happen through the state.

Like, literally, it is supposed to happen through the state. It doesn't mean it's only supposed to happen through the state, but that is a huge part of the concept of justice and righteousness in the prophets especially, but many parts of the Bible.

So, I want to look at just one more. There are so many we could look at, and I will put more in the description, but I just want to look at one more. Amos, chapter 5, verses 10-12: "They hate the one who reproves at the gates, and they abhor the one who speaks the truth. Therefore, because you trample on the poor and you take from them levies of grain, you have built houses of hewn stone, but you shall not live in them; you have planted pleasant vineyards, but you shall not drink their wine. For I know how many are your transgressions and how great are your sins-you who afflict the7 just," tsadeq-it's interesting; it's calling actually the poor and exploited the just, that tsadeq-"you who afflict the just, who take bribes and push aside the needy in the gate."

So, when it talks about the one who reproves in the gate, when it talks about pushing aside the needy in the gate, the gate to the city oftentimes in the Old Testament is spoken of almost the way that we would talk about the city square, kind of imagining an old town where it was like a gathering place where the leaders in the town might gather-the elders, the sages, the people in the town-but also people might come there to advocate for what they needed. And so, this is saying, like, these are people who, in public, in the place of public discourse in the town, are just, like, not willing to listen to those who reprove them and say that the way that they are treating the oppressed is not okay, and that the way that these people who are coming and asking for help and you're saying, "You can't have it," like, that's not acceptable.

These people who are not being righteous are those who, in the public discourse, are saying, "No, we're going to hold on to these oppressive behaviors towards the vulnerable."

What we are seeing today in the modern American evangelical church is an absolute denial of the core, central teaching of the prophets because this is actually the core, central teaching of the prophets.

I didn't cherry-pick some verses; you can find these verses all over the teachings of the prophets in the Old Testament, and it is in fact also core to the teachings about Israel and who they are as a nation. Modern American evangelicals are pretending as if righteousness is about getting all the country in line to their particular form of Christian boundary-making rules that they're making today, and they're saying that that's biblical. That is not biblical. Biblical righteousness is not about these boundary-marking behaviors of who's a good Christian, who's not; it is about social justice; it is about systemic issues.

Wage Theft: A Modern Injustice

I want to look at a very important issue that never gets conversation in public discourse about what righteousness does not look like in American law today. Have you heard of the concept of wage theft? Is it something that you're familiar with or something that you have heard about? Because it is unbelievably relevant to the message of the prophets. I looked at a lot of graphs and articles. I thought this one was nice and concise and simple, and it's actually from Wikipedia. These numbers are wildly conservative. I looked at several things that were, were saying that the number of wage theft must be much, much, much higher than this, but wage theft is essentially when an employer steals from an employee in terms of not paying them what they are owed.

It happens in a lot of different ways. There are a lot of people who should be working at minimum wage jobs, low-paid workers, who are actually getting paid less than minimum wage, some of them up to nearly a third less in some states as the average amount that people are being underpaid. That is systematically robbing from those people because it is illegal, but they're doing it anyways; they're not paying them what they're owed. But it happens in a lot of other ways as well. For example, you are supposed to be paid overtime if you work more than 40 hours a week, so maybe it's just not paying overtime, or maybe it's not paying someone for the full amount of time you're requiring them to be there, so having side work that people aren't paid for but they're expected to do. Say the doors close at 10, but if you can't get out till 10:15 because of the requirements you have for your job, you just have to donate that money, essentially, like that time is just for the company, and then you're not getting paid, or not giving people their federally mandated breaks, things like that that are just, like, systematically taking from the poorest in society, taking their money because you're not paying them for the time that you're having them there.

There are a lot of different ways to do it, but all those things are called wage theft, and wage theft is the most common type of theft.

If you look at these other property crimes-robbery, auto theft, burglary, larceny-it comes nowhere close to wage theft. The massive amount of money that corporations are stealing from the poorest in society, it's staggering. And here is where the law comes in, because obviously wage theft is not legal, but it is treated dramatically differently than other kinds of theft. If an employer were systematically taking money from someone who worked full time for them but was getting less than minimum wage, less than the mandated reimbursement that they are supposed to get, they could easily be stealing $10,000 from somebody who has almost nothing.

And if that very poor person wants to go try to get justice, try to get righteousness from the system, they have to sue in court; they have to take their employer to court and sue them. That person simply does not have the resources to do that. So, these things usually have to happen in class action suits that take years and years and years and years, so most of it goes absolutely unpursued; employers usually get away with it. And even if they don't get away with it, even somehow, if somehow this gets through, and there's a judgment against them, a huge amount of these are never collected because the business is just closed, and the person moves on because the only penalty they get is the civil court penalties of fines, of having to pay somebody back or something like that, and it's only against the business that could just close that business and go open another business, and they still have their clients, like, just close that LLC, open a new LLC, back to business. They just say, "Oh, it was an accident; I'm sorry."

This happens all the time. However, if that same employee who's, who's being ripped off thousands of dollars from their employer and is just trying to survive steal something worth a couple hundred bucks, that employer can call the police, and the police can be there and arrest them and put them in jail for up to a year immediately, and then they'll have a criminal record for the rest of their life because stealing a couple hundred bucks from that employer who's stealing thousands of dollars from a poor person is a criminal offense. Now, there's a couple states where this is recently changed, and they are starting to make wage theft a criminal offense so that people could actually spend time in prison, but this is just one of the ways that in our country our laws are not righteous; they're not just; they are not protecting the most vulnerable in society, but they're protecting the most powerful in society. And there are a lot of laws like this. White-collar crimes are a slap on the wrist, even if it affects huge amounts of people, even if it has unbelievably tremendous effects on thousands and thousands of people. A white-collar crime is a slap on the wrist. Prison time for white-collar crime is very uncommon, and if so, it's very short, and it would be a situation where someone has caused massive damages to a huge amount of people.

This is unrighteous.

We protect the wealthy in our country, and we exploit the poor in our country, and we give people criminal records for doing almost nothing when they have very few resources.

Sadly, the most popular forms of Christianity today that appeal the most to the masses are those who ignore this kind of biblical concept of righteousness. It blows my mind how they go on talking about "biblical, biblical, biblical," and it's like the main message of the prophets just, like, isn't on the radar. You don't hear messages about this. If a pastor of an evangelical American church gets up and says something like, "I'm going to preach a message today that's going to be very unpopular; people aren't going to appreciate it," it's probably-they're talking about homosexuality, like probably they're talking about gay people or trans people or something like that, like this is the unpopular biblical message that needs to be preached from the pulpit if you want to be faithful to biblical righteousness, but it's not something that you're going to hear.

Sadly, these popular evangelical megachurches are more focused on things that, at the end of the day, benefit them because it's created these cultural boundary markers that make people feel that they belong here in this church and that they need to stay part of this in order to not go to hell. And all of that focus on individual righteousness and focus on righteousness in the way of these boundary-making behaviors is an enormous benefit to these churches. I mean, it just is. We can call a spade a spade, right? Like, like we can be honest about that, can't we? That means that these churches want to stay focused on you and what you are doing wrong in your personal life so that you can either be, like, a good soldier for the church or you can be one of the people who's, like, a cautionary tale or somebody who just, like, needs so badly to be in their church and just always feels like not good enough and needs to rely on the church to help them. And all of these are a head-fake to keep our eyes off of the biblical messages of righteousness and the things that are happening in our society and the way that power structures of conservative Christian nationalism and the religious right are exploiting these systems for their own gain, to the detriment of the most vulnerable in society.

We are seeing this absolutely at scale right now, but at the end of the day, this dichotomy between righteousness for the state and righteousness for the individual-"and it's this one, not that one"-that is a false dichotomy.

Of course, like righteousness, tsadeq, righteousness, justice-that is something that is supposed to flow through every aspect of our being and everything we participate in, not just us as an individual and not as a citizen, not just the way that we work or our family, like our church life, and not the way that we vote, and not the way that these things play out for the most vulnerable in society, like it is supposed to be about that, at the end of the day, those who are left without economic resources. But I bet you haven't really heard righteousness talked about in economic terms in most evangelical churches today. I bet you haven't. Not because it's not biblical, but it's really not convenient for them.

I'm not going to say that I know this for sure, that this is why, but I can tell you that the year that the state of California decided to make wage theft a criminal offense is the same year that Tesla decided that they were going to leave the state of California, and they've been under investigation by the Labor Department that their CEO is trying to shut down. And all of this just makes me wonder, "Why are Christians not more concerned about biblical righteousness and biblical justice?" And it just makes me hurt so much to think about how many LGBT people like myself are suffering, thinking that we're not righteous enough, thinking that we're not good enough for God and for the church, when all along the churches had a vested economic interest in emphasizing this concept of personal righteousness and making that the whole thing and saying, "Our nation isn't righteous and just because we've allowed same-sex marriage and because transgender people," and "this is why our nation is not just; our nation is not righteous; God is going to judge us for our lack of righteousness," when we have these very clear, pointed messages of the Old Testament prophets saying that the way that the nations will be judged for not being righteous is because of economic exploitation.

It's a wildly inconvenient message-skandalon, almost-but the popular evangelical American churches of today just don't want to talk about it. At the same time, I don't think that this is a sinister calculation by every single person in these churches. There's so much absolute sincerity, like absolute sincerity, and there are so many people who can say, "Look, like I followed this path, and it's led to so many good things in my life, and if other people would do that, it would lead to good things in their lives too," and that they would say is legitimate as a solution. And so, I actually do want to talk about that in the next video: the sincerity of why people think about it that way and why people see it that way. I think it's important to look at it generously.

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