Tzedeq and Mishpat: Righteousness
and Saving Justice
By Rand
York+
God
is righteous, and in his saving justice he rescues his people. God’s salvation
is not just to be taken out of danger. It is to be rescued from something to something, out of one place and into another place. For a rescue is no
rescue at all if the victim is not brought into a state better than that which
went before. This is
true, whether God is rescuing Job out of a life of despair and
destitution and into a full and joyful life, or rescuing Israel out
of Pharoah's rule of slavery and into God's rule of freedom (as
evidenced in the Decalogue), or rescuing believers out of slavery to sin and
into freedom in Christ.
References
to God’s “righteousness” or “saving justice” occur far more often in Psalms and
Isaiah than in all the rest of the Old Testament and Inter-testamental books
combined, with some 42 passages in Psalms, 29 in Isaiah, and only 17 times in
the other books, and the meaning(s) of these is a matter for study. Clearly the
best place to begin is in the Psalms, where connotations of judgment and of victory
and deliverance are the most numerous. Interestingly, these two general
categories seem to share equal time with the psalmist in his usages, sometimes
even in the same passage. Psalm 48:10-11 reads this way in the NJB:
Psalm
48:10-11 (NJB) – Both your name and your praise, God, are over the whole wide
world. Your right hand is full of saving
justice, Mount
Zion Judah
Here
is how the NRSV translates the same passage:
Psalm
48:10-11 (NRSV) – Your name, O God, like your praise, reaches to the ends of
the earth. Your right hand is filled with victory
(tzedeq). Let Mount Zion Judah
Tzedeq is a root word for the name Melchizedek, and is also the Hebrew
name for the king of the planets, Jupiter. There is victory, overcoming, and
deliverance implied here. It is the root of tzedaqa,
or “charity.” In this passage, God’s right hand is filled with this victorious
beneficence to deliver his people.
Mishpat ivri has to do with Hebrew law
or jurisprudence, especially as it relates to secular settings. Hence, it would
certainly be a cause for the towns (political and community entities) of Judah
They
are different words with different meanings, but the NJB translates them both
“saving justice.” Why? Can there be a connection between God’s deliverance and
his judgments?
In
both of these cases, there is a “righting” going on, whether through
deliverance from injustice, or through governance over daily affairs. Indeed,
there is a beautifully poetic sense of rescuing and establishing as two sides
of the same coin, two parts of the whole of God’s saving justice.
A
unifying crossover concept word in English that has one foot in the deliverance
camp and the other in the judgment camp is that of vindication, which appears in passages such as Psalm 24:5 and
35:24. Here, there is the sense of deliverance from enemies (and particularly
from the scorn of such enemies) through the judgment of God. Psalm 31:1 carries
this same flavor.
This
is something God does, and from which his people benefit. NJB carries this idea
in some passages where NRSV misses it. Compare the two translations in Job
33:26 –
NJB
– “He will pray to God who has restored him to favour, and will come into his
presence with joy. He will tell others how he
has received saving justice.”
NRSV
– “Then he prays to God, and is accepted by him, he comes into his presence
with joy, and God repays him for his
righteousness.”
In
both of these God is the main actor, but there is a difference in emphasis. NJB
emphasizes the blessing as a gift received, while NRSV emphasizes it as a
payment that is earned.
Let’s
also look at Psalm 51:4 –
NJB
– “Against you, you alone, I have sinned, I have done what you see to be wrong,
that you may show your saving justice
when you pass sentence, and your victory may appear when you give
judgement.”
NRSV
– “Against you, you alone, have I sinned, and done what is evil in your sight,
so that you are justified in your
sentence and blameless when you pass judgment.”
Here,
the NJB emphasizes the opportunity presented for God to save, while the NRSV expresses
it in a way that seems to lean much more toward God’s condemnation.
There
are so many passages where deliverance is the focus of saving justice that the traditional Protestant notion of God’s
righteousness being a foundation for the punishment of sinners is not a
satisfactory conclusion. Deliverance is clearly the intent of the term saving justice in Psalms 22:31; 31:1;
40:9; 40:10; 48:10; 51:14; 65:5; 71:2; 118:19; 143:11. There are, of course,
many other passages that point to God’s judgment, but with so much deliverance
going on, judgment cannot be seen as punitive. It must be, rather, the
establishment of God’s people into their right place, the place for which they
are made.
In
the New Testament, Paul refers to the Law as a kind of tutor or schoolmaster to
guide us until Christ should come (Galatians 3:24 ). Now if the Law and the cult are indeed reflective
of Christ, then Christ’s sacrifice cannot be one of substitutionary atonement
without the cult sacrifice having been understood in the same way. However,
God’s own saving righteousness was never dependent on the cult. “Abraham
believed, and it was credited to him as righteousness” (Romans 4:3 NASB ). This is salvation by faith, and it is in
this sense that faith is a conduit through which God bestows his righteousness,
his saving justice. ”For in it the righteousness of God is
revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, ‘But the righteous man shall
live by faith’” (Romans 1:17
NASB ).
We need to go
back to a proper understanding of the cult sacrifice itself. Animals were never
sacrificed in propitiation as if they could somehow be punished in our place.
Rather, the blood from their sacrifice was a life-force to counteract the
death-force of sin. In this way, the sacrifices and subsequent purging by blood
brought spiritual cleansing, healing, and life where there had only been dirt,
disease, and death. The cult was never about paying something to God, but rather about receiving
something from God. It was here at
the place of sacrifice that God met his people. It was a type and a precursor
of the one true sacrifice in Jesus Christ.
If the penal
substitutionary theory of the atonement looks to the mercy seat of Romans 3:25 for its justification, it will
find little support there, for penal substitution was not the point of the
cult. Penal substitution is, however, very different from penal atonement,
which has been going on since the Great Fall. “For the wages of sin is death”
(Romans 6:23 NASB ) says Paul, and so it is and has always been.
Death can certainly be viewed as penal atonement for sin, but not in the sense
that it mollifies or satisfies God. Rather, it is in the sense that cessation
of being removes the gap, for there can be no gap between something and
nothing. Any chasm requires the existence of two somethings to make the nothing
meaningful, or even definable.
Of course,
death can be viewed also as a gift given by God at the Great Fall, to save us
from perfecting our evil. We were made to live forever in communion with our
maker. Our sin breaks that communion. Our death is considered a victory by the
enemy, but actually makes possible two things: 1) The end of a sinful life, and
2) The inauguration of a holy eternal life. And the best part is that we do not
have to wait for death for that new life to begin.
For Paul to
refer to Christ as the hilasterion
(“mercy seat”) in Romans 3:25
is especially problematic for advocates of penal substitution because the mercy
seat cannot be punished. Schreiner’s assertion that, “He set forth Jesus as a
sacrifice to demonstrate his judging righteousness” accepts and engages the
theory of penal substitution, while in fact we die and rise with Christ. We die
to death and rise to life. There is no math going on here. There is no law
going on here. There is, perhaps, a kind of spiritual physics going on here. To
run with Schreiner’s suggestion is to miss the point. God does not judge or
condemn through the mercy seat; God saves
through the mercy seat.
Because God
is righteous, he has power to save us. “For I am not
ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who
believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek” (Romans 1:16 NASB ).
Because this is something God
does, not we ourselves, the term “saving justice” can be a problematic translation
in some instances. For example, in Romans 6:16 , Paul speaks of “obedience which leads to saving
justice” (NJB). But this suggests that our obedience, our works, have the power
to save. Obedience does indeed lead to righteousness, or being righted, but
only in as much as it molds our posture to become one of openness to and
reception of God’s saving justice. And so, NRSV says it better as it reads:
“…obedience which leads to righteousness.”
Christ's
righteousness covers us, but not in a representative way (in the sense that
when God looks at us, he only sees Christ). Rather, his righteousness covers us
in a way that actually changes us, making us into the people God intended us to
be in the first place. When God looks at us, he sees not just Christ, but us as
we are becoming and were made to be. This becomes possible because of our own
participation in the death, resurrection, and life of Christ. While it is true
that we are intended to become like him, and that we will be like him when we
see him as he is (I John 3:2), this in no sense implies that we are meant to be
clones. It is rather to say that the more like him we become, the more like our
own individual selves we become. The implication here is that God's own
righteousness is more than merely imputed; it is imparted. God's image is part
of our make-up (Genesis 1:26 ),
and is therefore inherent to each of us, imparted by God. We have been broken
in the Fall, and our restoration is provided in Christ, but it is a restoration
of who we are. If the quality of God's image is foreign to us, it is because we
have made it so, not because God has made us so. His restoration is truly our
deliverance from darkness and separation from God. As David said, "He
restores my soul" (Psalm 23.3).
Holiness as Judgment
But
to what does he restore it? If God restores it to himself, so that the soul is
no longer separated from God, then the connotation of God’s holiness contained within the word righteousness begins to come into play. In
describing righteousness from a biblical perspective, A.H. Leitch has this to
say: “There is no law above God, but there is a law in God. Holiness is of His
essence, and righteousness is a mode of this holiness” (Zondervan Encyclopedia V, 105).
God
is holy, and he is the origin of all that is. He cannot be otherwise, or he
would cease to be God. And so, anything that is not of his very nature cannot
survive in his presence. God is the fountainhead of love, and anything that is
not that is destroyed, consumed in the very atmosphere that emanates from him.
It is a light so brilliant that shadows flee and are no more, leaving only that
which is, that which exists in him.
Father Alexander Schmemann speaks of all that truly exists (the Real) as that
which has a place in God’s memory, and that to fall out of his memory is to
cease to be. And so, if God restores a lost soul to himself, that soul becomes
purged of all unrighteousness, as in the cleansing of the Mercy Seat with the
blood of a consecrated bull on the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur). This is the
judgment that does justice to God’s image inherent in the human soul, restoring
it to its true self.
Restoring us to our true selves.
Restoring us to our true selves.
©2013 Rand
York
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