Dennis Tuuri

We’ll be looking at two different sermon texts today. We’re continuing our series, our topical series on doing justice. And we’ll look at what some have called the Old Testament Apostles Creed found in Deuteronomy 26. And then a summary statement of who we are and how we’re to live—sort of the path, the way of God’s people—as defined in the law of the covenant. So we’ll look at Deuteronomy 26:5-9, Exodus 22:21-24.

Please stand and I’ll read both these scriptures. Deuteronomy 26:5-9. And this is a declaration that was required every year by God’s people, his church in the Old Testament. “And you shall make response before the Lord your God. A wandering Aramean was my father. And he went down into Egypt and sojourned there, few in number. And there he became a nation, great, mighty, and prosperous. And the Egyptians treated us harshly and humiliated us and laid on us hard labor.

Then we cried to the Lord, the God of our fathers. And the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. And the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great deeds of terror, with signs and wonders. And he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.” And then Exodus 22:21-24. “You shall not wrong a sojourner or oppress him, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt. You shall not mistreat any widow or fatherless child. If you do mistreat them and they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry and my wrath will burn and I will kill you with the sword and your wives shall become widows and your children fatherless.”

Let’s pray. Almighty God, we thank you for your word. We thank you for your Holy Spirit who takes this word and transforms our lives. Write it upon our hearts, Lord God. Transform us. Make us a people who do justice in its fullest sense, following our Savior as we leave this place into the world in Jesus’s name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated. Apparently President Garfield—who I think was our 20th president or so, most well-known because he served, I think, one of the shortest terms in office, six months or so. He was assassinated, died after three months of having a bullet in his back. They couldn’t get it out—just a horrific death. But the other thing he is known for among some trivia people is he was ambidextrous. And he was more than ambidextrous. You could ask him a question in English and he could write the answer in Greek with one hand and Latin with the other hand at the same time. So, you know, pretty amazing stuff.

You know, it’s kind of like—and I’m sure his eyes didn’t exactly do this. I don’t know how his eyes worked when he did this feat, but it’s sort of like lizards. You know how lizards can look here and they look over there? Well, that’s kind of like us. In what way, Dennis?

Well, let me give a brief quote from a guy named E. Jacob in a book called Theology of the Old Testament. He said, “If man’s nature can be defined by the theme of the Image of God, and of course it can, his function can be qualified as an imitation of God.” And we saw that in Advent season that this is who we are—imitators of God, so to speak.

This involves a double obligation for man. We might say a doubled outlook. One eye turned towards God and the other toward the world. So we look at who God is and our other obligations to look at the world that he has placed us in to do what he does in the world. So we got to know who God is and what he does in the world. And then we have to look at our world and figure out how we go about being his image bearer—redeemed in Jesus, of course, to accomplish that feat. So we’re those who follow Jesus. And to do that, we got to have this double-eyed perspective.

What I want to do today is look at some texts dealing with oppression, the opposite of justice. So if we look at justice in the Bible and its comprehensiveness, and we recognize that Jesus—this season, and I’ll talk about that in a minute as well—but this season we’re meditating on his resurrection leading up to a consideration of his ascension in Pentecost. That he came specifically to bring justice to victory. Okay? And so we’re trying to look at how this works in the context of our world.

Well, justice is usually talked about by a single Greek word, but in the Old Testament, there’s all kinds of different words and we’ve looked at some of those. And we’ve looked at the relationship of justice and righteousness and there’s different kinds of justice. So a multiplicity of Hebrew terms that give us the dimensions, right? The jewel—or think of it as a prism. We’ve got justice, who is what God is, and it’s prismed out for us. And we’re seeing the component elements as we look at different Old Testament texts, or you know, facets on a diamond, whatever illustration you want to use. The same thing’s true of injustice or oppression. The opposite of justice has a multiplicity of terms in the Old Testament. And what I want to do today is look at several of them.

I’ve given you a chart or a graph of 10. You know, we won’t go through all of them in any kind of detail, but we’ll look at the first few of them more specifically. Now, this chart—I give you a source for it at the top. I didn’t create it, I had to build the chart myself, but the basic information came from an online paper written by a guy who favors Marxist liberation theology. And it’s very interesting to me that the liberation theology guys have done a ton of work—lexical work in the Hebrew and looking at texts in the Old Testament—and ignored all the relationship of righteousness or justice to God’s justice in his law.

It’s geared more toward, you know, a feeling of injustice, right? And they kind of ignore the personal aspect of relationship with God. The social gospel is over here to these guys, but they’re doing a ton of work in the Bible. And over here, you know, on the conservative side, we stress right relationship to God through salvation in Christ, grace by faith alone, righteousness by faith—all well and good. But it seems to me that we haven’t necessarily always stressed, or maybe it’s not been as evident that we’ve stressed, doing justice in the world as these guys have. And so they’ve done a lot of the plowing of the ground. They’ve done a lot of the research. They’ve produced articles that we can look at these specific Hebrew words. They interpret them with what Judge Bahnsen used to call—my old mentor—a “portside list,” right? That’s how they look at the verses. But we don’t have to do that. We like the study and so we can look at them the way we think is correct and biblical.

Justice is a big deal. As most of you know, I’m involved in a case still in the CREC, hearing an appeal of an appeal of a presbyter’s decision from a man who appealed the decision of a church. So we’re at the top level now and I’m on a group of five guys making a decision. And we have to make—you know, we—this series is real important to me as I think about that: do justice only, justice. We may feel this way or that about things that happened, but what we have to really look at is what the law is, what the covenants that were entered into are. And that’s where justice will be found. God says justice isn’t found by our feelings. It’s found by a submission to God’s word. And we want to look at that word today.

The Reformation itself was birthed by a guy doing justice. Martin Luther—there’s a book, I think I mentioned it on your outline, by Froude, a man named Froude, on the Council of Trent. And he demonstrates very convincingly, according to my close friend Jack Phelps (and I knew this part of it before), that Martin Luther’s concerns were pastoral. He hated the moral immorality of the papacy and much of the Roman Catholic Church and the results that it had, the injustice that it had, the oppressive nature of the Roman Catholic theology and its actions on his parishioners. He was driven to do justice. And interestingly, Froude’s analysis of the Council of Trent is that they wanted to make it a doctrinal controversy because they didn’t want to have to deal with the immorality of the Roman Catholic Church and her bishops and the Pope. They are the ones who spun it—as a good Jesuit could—into a deal that’s all about arcane elements of theology. And I know they’re not arcane to us. We hold to them dearly and we grab onto them. We love them, of course. But never forget that Martin Luther’s concern, the thing that birthed the Reformation, was a pastoral concern to relieve the oppression of his own parishioners through the immorality and the injustice and oppression of the Roman Catholic Church.

The people that had been influential in our development—the reconstructionists again—R.J. Rushdoony came to prominence early on, primarily combating what was known in the middle of the ’50s and ’60s as the social gospel. A gospel completely devoid of the saving grace of Jesus Christ, just given to doing justice. But even that doing of justice, of course, that the liberation theology people want to talk about, isn’t justice defined by God’s law. It’s justice defined by what we think people need. So our own roots as a church, both in the Reformation and in the reconstructionists, come from men who are articulating a desire to do justice in the context of our world.

We’re at, you know, we have primary elections this week here in Oregon and we have these voters guides downstairs to help you do justice and elect elected representatives, particularly here in Clackamas County, by the way, where our church is located. Big thing going on. Don’t have time to get into it, but we want to do justice by making sure we have county commissioners who won’t be statist oppressive with taxation levels and overdue regulations, etc. So lots of practical application.

Doing justice involves acts of mercy, of course, right? And so you know you’ll see downstairs in your agape—at the agape table at the tables that are set up—a flyer for tin cans and guitar strings. It’s a benefit for Love Inc., an aspect of doing justice, helping people, helping the poor. And so we can very practically, immediately, a week from this Friday, participate in acts of doing justice.

All right, let’s turn to our text now. And first, this Old Testament—what some have called the Apostles Creed. And so this text, you know, we sometimes have put this text, referred to it in our tithing receipts because at the end of the year the guy says, “Well, I handled your money correctly, Lord.” Actually, it’s at the end of the three-year cycle. And but this is what they had to do. This is what it meant to be a conservative Christian—the way we recite the Apostles Creed. They’re reciting this thing. This is a declaration they have to make. And this declaration is all based upon or focuses upon God’s deliverance of them from oppression, right? We don’t like to think of it that way, but that’s what it is.

Verse six of the text says, “The Egyptians treated us harshly. They humiliated us. Laid on us hard labor.” Three of the Hebrew roots on your table are different ways of oppression and injustice. God’s people were treated unjustly by the Egyptians. The response to injustice, our response, one of the most important responses is to cry to God. And they say in verse 7, that’s what we did. Now, they didn’t do it right. These are people hundreds of years later, but they’re declaring, as Doug was talking about, we’re grafted into that single body. And so this is our declaration as well. We were in Egypt in terms of a historical continuity of God’s people in the Old Testament and New. God brings us out.

We cried out to the Lord, the God of our fathers, and the Lord heard our voice, saw our affliction, our toil, our oppression. He saw injustice. And God does justice then. “And the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great deeds of terror, with signs and wonders. And he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.”

Now, this Exodus narrative is one of God relieving his people. And more than that, doing justice in the world. Okay? He rolls back the injustice of Egypt and he creates more justice in the world. That’s who he is. If our one eye is looking at God, God declares himself to be a God who delivers people from injustice. He does justice. And the Exodus was the big deal in Old Testament history. And they had to recite that all the time. Their entire calendar, right? Exodus was year one. Their calendar, right? And their whole cycle, their whole yearly cycle was tied to remembrances of the Exodus and the results of the Exodus, moving through into the feast of booths at the end of that cycle. Time and even their space, right? Three times a year they had to go up. These times were times of remembrance of the doing of justice by God by bringing his people out of Egypt.

God molded their time and their space to give them a continuing appreciation, a continuing remembrance, a calling to mind that the God we serve is a God that does justice and he did it for us. And therefore, with our other eye, that’s who God is. We’re looking at the rest of the world now and we’re trying to do justice because that’s what God does. He comes to empower us. The Holy Spirit doesn’t come to give us a Disneyland experience. He comes to empower us for ministry. And Christ’s ministry is about bringing justice to victory. Okay.

So their time and their space, their history, their liturgical actions all were wrapped around Exodus. Now, it’s interesting because the liberation theologians will tell you, “Well, see, the big deal in the Old Testament isn’t creation the way those fundamentalists say. It’s Exodus.” But of course, here we’ve done the study and we know that the Exodus is referred to in several ways, very distinctive and obvious ways, once you look, as a new creation. We’ve talked about this. God created Israel and he’s talking in Isaiah in the prophets about bringing them out of Egypt. It’s a new creation. The Spirit hovers over them in their wilderness wanderings the same way the Spirit, you know, hovered over the creation at the original. It’s a new creation. Now, it wasn’t really, was it? But what it pointed to was the definitive new creation, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The Exodus—remember at the mount of transfiguration, Jesus said he had an “exodus” not to be subjected to, but to accomplish at Jerusalem. Jesus said he was going to die and be raised up. And everything that calendar and the space and all that stuff pointed to for thousands of years, all were prefigurements of the great exodus that would come when Jesus dies for the sins of the world, dies for our sins, brings his people to life in his resurrection, and causes us to reign. At his ascension, he reigns through his people—the acts of the apostles, or the acts of Jesus through the church. So that’s why, without getting into a big deal and discussion, but that’s why some CREC churches, as an example, have a church calendar—New Testament church calendar based upon Advent and Easter and all that stuff—because they’re doing what God, the church, did for thousands of years in the Old Testament. Their whole cycle of life—the seasons, the weeks that go by, their liturgical formulations—are reminders of the Exodus, not from Egypt, but the great Exodus that Jesus accomplished in the world, the new creation that happened there.

And so this Apostles Creed, the Old Testament, informs what we believe that Jesus accomplished in his Exodus. And Jesus said that he came at his Advent, quoting from Isaiah and several passages, that he came to bring justice. He came to bring justice to victory. He came to roll back the effects of the curse. And what are the effects of the curse? Right out of the shoot, brother kills brother. Lamech is a polygamist and a murderer. Oppression and injustice are the results of the fall. Jesus is rolling back, rolling that back, through saving us, sanctifying us, and then causing us, with an eye upon knowing who he is, to know what we’re supposed to do in the context of the world.

So Deuteronomy 26 informs us. It helps us to see who we are based upon what the Old Testament church confessed. And that confession has to do with deliverance certainly from sin, but also the doing of justice by Yahweh.

Then the path itself—and this is one text among various ones—but the law of the covenant is found in Exodus 22, right? And that law of the covenant, the other text that we just read, says this: “You shall not wrong,” and that’s one of these words on this chart as well. “You shall not wrong a sojourner or oppress him severely, squeezed by him. For you are sojourners in the land of Egypt. You shall not oppress,” a different word, “any widow or orphan. If you oppress them and they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry and my wrath will burn and I will kill you with the sword.”

Now, very significant, this wrath of God thing. You know, there are in the law of the covenant—Exodus 20 through 23 or 22. You know, in the law of the covenant, there’s lots of, you know, stuff, and there’s some death penalty stuff and other things going on. But I think this is the only kind of crime where the punishment will be the wrath of God in hellfire burning against his people. Okay? That kind of punishment is not attached to most of the other laws. The only law it is, is a law having to do with not oppressing, not doing injustice to people.

And you say, “Well, you know, we don’t really have a position of justice or injustice.” Yeah. Every one of you is in some social structures where there are inferiors and superiors. There’s guys, people, delegated authorities under you, over you. All in those kind of relationships all the time. And in the context of those sort of relationships, these categories that are mentioned here are people that are prone to have no one step up for them, no one defend them. They’re easily taken. At least in the context of the not so easily today, but in the context of the writing of this law, widows, fatherless, immigrants, they were defenseless. And God warns us severely: who he is—he’s delivered us—and don’t you go oppressing other people.

Why did they go into exile? Well, there’s several reasons listed, but one of the most significant reasons listed for exile is because they enslaved their brothers. Remember, they broke off, and when God—Jeremiah tells them stop doing that—they stop for a while, then they pick it right back up again. Oppression, injustice is what creates the exile. And God, so wrath, God’s wrath—the way our way is supposed to be sensitive to the context of people that we may, even inadvertently or not even think about it, oppress, humiliate, put the squeeze on, all these various Hebrew terms.

So our basic creedal formulations remind us that we serve a God who is a God that does justice in the world. That’s who Jesus is. Jesus is accomplishing justice through his church. We’re called to do that and we’re called to look at the relationships that we have to make sure we do no injustice. So these are things that inform us and give us a significant identity as to who we are in the world. This is who we are.

You know, when we—so let’s look at a few of these texts now with more specific words that are used. We’ll just look at the first couple. So now, evidences of injustice. So how do you know if you’re oppressing somebody? Where’s the oppression going on? Where’s the injustice going on? And one last thing before I move on—and we could talk about this a lot—but I think Doug mentioned it: illegal immigration, right? So what is the verse we just read? How does that inform us about who we are as Christians on that issue?

If God is a God of justice, what does it mean in terms of our relationship to the illegal immigrant? Well, and see, be careful here. You know, it’s easy to get wrong in different directions here. And I put this before you: remember, justice is defined. What we just looked at was a law. Justice is defined. It’s God’s character, but God’s character is reflected in the Ten Commandments. And it’s reflected in all those laws that tell us how to apply the Ten Commandments at a particular place in time.

Don’t go thinking that justice means having a soft heart for people who break the law. That’s not justice. That may be something else, and maybe it’s not a bad thing in particular cases, but that’s not what justice is. Justice says people shouldn’t enter the country illegally here. Shouldn’t be done. And there should be some penalty attached to them for that illegal action. Okay? If there’s no penalty, there’s no law. Okay? So there should be. But the other side of it is—and particularly with those that are here illegal—they’re very subject to extortion, intimidation, blackmail, right? I mean, they were more subject to that with our last president, but under the current administration, that there isn’t as much worry to them. Maybe not so much. But traditionally in cultures, people that are here illegally as immigrants are prone to injustice, and that’s not right either. It’s not right just because somebody has entered the country illegally to treat them unjustly.

Our desire is to bring justice to them. Right? We’re liberators. That’s who we are in Jesus. Jesus is the great liberator. And how we liberate people is knocking, you know, knocking back their oppressors. Some guy that’s trying to extort money from them by charging them some incredible amount. I heard that it used to be in Woodburn. You’d have 20 farm workers in a house being charged 100 bucks a piece. They’d have to go to the bathroom out in the backyard. They’re all sleeping together in one room. I mean, it’s just really unjust. And it was illegal, which is the definition of justice. So partly what we do, we’re liberators, is to make sure that we don’t oppress people, extort people, you know, try to give them less than what a job is worth just because we know that they can’t say anything about it. That’s injustice.

On the other hand, we want to liberate them from their own position of vulnerability because of their violation of the law. And so we want to encourage them to get legal, to go about whatever they got to do—whether it’s going back to whatever country they came from or whatever. So that’s, I think, the way it works: seeing ourselves as liberators. And then the way what we’re supposed to do is we watch the world around us and typically, you know, we don’t see a lot of articulation of Christian solutions to the problem. We see right and left, conservative and liberal. They’re just, you know, you know, I’ve always said this: Micah 6:8 says, “Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with God.” Conservatives tend to want to do justice. Liberals tend to want to love mercy. And neither are humble before God frequently. And as a result, they don’t really do justice and they’re not really being merciful to people.

All right, let’s look at a couple of these other words here. And this first one—so it’s under evidences of injustice. Now, the chart has 10 items that are related to that—go down the list here. And the first term is ashaq, which means to oppress. It can mean discouragement. It can mean, basically, it’s just a word meaning oppression, impoverishment, to do ruthless violence against someone. Injustice is frequently how it’s translated. So it’s probably one of the most significant terms that relates to injustice. This first one, this first term, and it’s used several times in Ecclesiastes. We read this again:

“I saw all the oppressions that are practiced under the sun. And behold, the tears of the oppressed. And they had no one to comfort them. On the side of the oppressors, there was power and there was no one to comfort them.”

So this is a pretty, you know, kind of, this is the way it is under the sun in the fallen state. A summation of what life is like is oppression of the weaker by the more powerful. And if that’s the only verse we looked at, it helps us to understand the term—this great oppressiveness of powerful people over weak people. But it’s pretty discouraging. But in Psalm 103, the same word is used. We read this:

“The Lord works justice and just judgments in favor of all who are oppressed. He made known his ways to Moses, his acts to the people of Israel.”

Okay, so it’s the same thing, isn’t it? God says that his character—this is, now, who he is, what are his ways that we’re going to base our ways upon? He made known his ways to Moses by doing what? By relieving the injustice of the situation they were at, had in Egypt, where they were oppressed by a pharaoh that knew not Joseph. They were put to forced slavery, right? They were beaten. They were doing all kinds of things to, and God says that his ways that he revealed is he doesn’t put up with that.

The message of Jesus’s coming is that’s all getting rolled back. We’re getting rid of that stuff. Jesus says that’s no good. I’m rolling back the effects of the curse. And those people that are oppressed, we read God is bringing justice to. Interestingly, because it says that he has these just judgments in favor of all who are oppressed. Well, that’s a challenge to us. All who are oppressed. God’s scope of doing justice is global. It’s global.

Now, it doesn’t mean that he’s bringing justice to people. In fact, we see in various places that in the exile, for instance, the injustice that’s done to God’s people—ultimately in lament that we spent during Lent, the Lenten season, right? Some of the worst depression imaginable, I’m sure the darkest description of horrors of the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70 we can imagine. And many of these Hebrew terms that are given to you on your outline here today are in that text. And there was unjust. The Babylonians were unjust in doing what they did. But remember that in Lamentations we have one of the strongest assertions of the sovereignty of God.

Who brings forth good and evil, if not God? The writer says God uses sin sinlessly. God uses injustice justly. The people of God deserve their punishments. They had sinned. And God brings rash, or these other terms, ashaq, these other terms. He brings those things upon our head. Okay? And he frequently will do it through people that aren’t particularly good. But the end result of what he’s doing is our redemption. So the exile leads back to the Exodus and coming back into the land.

So this text tells us that God is doing justice. He’s relieving the oppression of all because through time and history, through the church, he is rolling back injustice. And Jesus is bringing justice to victory through the proclamation of the gospel and through you and me going about our work tomorrow, going about our family structures, being good community people here, voting in the election, going to benefit concerts for benevolent groups like Love Inc., through all that stuff—what Jesus is doing is he’s rolling back the oppression of the world. Okay? He’s bringing justice to victory. This is his way.

And this first Hebrew term says, “Yeah, in the fallen world, oppression reigns, but not so with God. He is in the business of rolling back oppression.” So this is the kind of God that we serve. Our eye looks at him. His kingdom rules over all, we’re told. And we also then look to the world around us and say, “Well, there’s some work that he wants us to do. There’s some work that he wants us to do.”

Let’s look at Psalm 72. We read this:

“Give the king thy just judgments, O God, thy justice to the royal son. May he judge thy people with justice, thy poor with just judgments. Let the mountains bear prosperity for the people and the hills in justice. May he defend the cause of the poor of the people, giving deliverance to the needy and crush the oppressor.”

The oppressor here is that word ashaq that we’re dealing with in number one in our chart. So Psalm 72, the great psalm that concludes the second book of the psalter, that we all know is messianic—that we see here, the eyes looking at Jesus, what he’s going about doing. And what Jesus is going about doing is delivering the needy by crushing oppressors. Okay.

So now, when it says “oppressor” singular, I think what this means is—and remember the context of the Psalms, in the context of the prophets, is oppression usually by foreign nations, Philistines or the Assyrians or whoever it is. God will crush them. Now I think that, I think that what we can say here is that there are governmental and societal structures that are part of the mechanism of oppression. I mean, we know it in the case of invading nations. Assyria has a structure to it that goes about oppressing other people. And the same with the enemies that David combated. And so one of the things that this teaches us is we got these personal duties of justice.

But this says that the king is going to deal with other kings, other rulers, other authorities as oppressors, and he’s going to deal with them. That means we’re supposed to deal with them. That means that when we got a nation that results in a guy trying to support a family, feeling squeezed—which is another term for oppression—feeling crushed, humiliated because he can’t make enough money, he’s got to work what is it, 45% of the time, something like that, in America now, to pay taxes to a system of government that says he only gets to keep 55% of what he earns, and then sets up structures of governance that restrict business practices that do more and more wealth redistribution from people that have worked hard and made money that they’re going to use to help other people with. But the government takes that money. And what does it do? Frequently, what it’s done since the Great Society on in this country is to set up systems of oppression. And I don’t know if they’re intended or not intended. I have no idea. But I know that Walter Williams, the black man who subs in sometimes—great economist, great guy—for Rush Limbaugh sometimes, says when he was growing up in, you know, poor neighborhood of Philadelphia as a kid, you can sleep outside in the summer, no problem. You can’t do that now because dads were encouraged by the great—by the War on Poverty, the Great Society. They would pay moms with kids, but if the dad was present, so dads left those homes in the ghettos. And the ghetto became hell on earth, and that’s what it is now. Okay. Why is that? Is that because people who live in the ghetto are inferior people? It is not. Except that the kind of schools they’re given that they have to send their kids to does in the short term produce a lack of intelligence. Not because there’s problems with the people, but because there’s problems with the public school system, the government.

So I think that there’s a lot to be said that Psalm 72 says that we’re supposed to address societal systems of oppression. I agree with the liberation theology people about that. What we disagree about is how it’s handled.

Let me close with talking about Paul Ryan a little bit. Paul Ryan, congressman from Congress, US congressman, who wrote this budget plan up. I don’t know if you know about it or not. And he wants to try to balance the budget and cut programs and take care of things from a more of a conservative perspective. Paul Ryan is Catholic and Paul Ryan caught all kinds of grief from the bishops, the Roman Catholic bishops, for wanting to cut poverty programs. Paul Ryan spoke at Georgetown University, I think a week, maybe two weeks ago, and he got grief there too.

What he said was his Catholic beliefs are what create in him the kind of urges to do what he’s doing in terms of trying to reduce tax levels, reduce indebtedness, and reduce government programs that produce oppression to poor people. Okay? So you got the bishops over here: Fund more money, more Head Start, more schools, more cradle to grave stuff going on. Take as much money as you can from people that are productive to do that. And they’re saying that’s social justice. And then you got Paul Ryan over here saying, “Hey, I’m a Catholic. I’m tired of you guys being the only ones that speak for the Roman Catholic Church. I think the Bible says Jesus is a liberator, and he liberates people by helping them to move toward a path of self-sufficiency, independence, work—all that stuff—not government dependence.”

And I think that Paul Ryan is much closer to what these verses we’ve looked at are all about because he’s tying it not to kind of an empty-headed, full-hearted “we just want to help people.” He’s saying if we want to help people biblically, we don’t want them oppressed anymore. We don’t want them squeezed. We don’t want them dependent upon the government check every month. We don’t want them dependent upon the public school that’s so poorly serving them. We want to be willing to pick their own schools and pick better teachers for their kids. Now, I think that’s a direct relationship of what the Bible says about doing justice and oppression.

It tells us individually that, as I said earlier, when we go to our businesses, our families, our communities tomorrow, we want to be real careful not to do any injustice and we want to be just in our dealing with each other. But I believe that Psalm 72 and a lot of other scriptures tell us that our obligations are far broader than that. We have an obligation to do whatever we can—and admittedly it’s not much, okay, usually—but whatever we can to articulate that, “Hey, these people who talk about liberation theology, they don’t know what they’re talking about from the scriptures. Yeah, God’s a liberator, but he does it through rolling back oppression, through bringing business, bringing work, getting people to become self-sufficient, not making them dependent.”

Because that’s one of those Hebrew root words for oppression is enslavement, where somebody else is telling you what to do with all your life. So, you know, I think that’s our obligation: to roll back oppression by not just personally being aware of what’s happening in our cities, in our communities, but also saying that there are these massive structures in our culture today, at least in America, that have to be relieved. We get relief from—how do we do it? Well, what did they do in Egypt? Did they form a political action committee or a community organizing or those things? All of those are fine. I’m involved in PACs. But what did they do? They cried out to God. They said, “God, we are so oppressed.” And they cried out for each other, too. By the way, we’re supposed to lift up our cries for those who are oppressed. And as we see what’s going on in the inner cities of America, can’t our prayers cry out to God for relief from that kind of oppression, that God would do justice through his church in those cities?

I hope so. And maybe we can identify a neighborhood or two here in Oregon City, those of us that live here, and see—we want to try to bring justice by getting those people away from lives of dependency so that they can enjoy the liberation that Jesus Christ brings.

May God bless us in those efforts. Let’s pray.

Father, Father, we thank you that you have revealed yourself to be a God of justice who does justice. In fact, the very nature of our worship and the worship of the Old Testament church reminded us of that and reminds us of that every Lord’s day. Thank you that you have brought us into right relationship with you through the shed blood of Jesus our Savior. And now help us, Lord God, also that on the basis of that relationship and the power of your Spirit to help others be right related to you but also right related to each other by having just systems of work and vocation, schooling and government in our land. Thank you, Lord God, for your scriptures. Help us to continue to understand them, not so that we can be intellectually fed, but so that our hands can be put to work this week.

In Jesus’s name we ask it. Amen.