A Just Weight – ChurchEdge

There are several places in Scripture that speak of God’s abhorrence of “dishonest scales.” Having recently read an editorial that sought to expose what the writer deemed “the unfair scales” of our justice system, the phrase catches my attention. There is something within us that cries out at the sight of injustice; we long to find the place where life is fair. But do we seek to measure our own lives with an honest scale?

As the Israelites emerged from their slavery in Egypt and the perils of the desert through mighty acts of deliverance, they were asked to remember the almighty hand of God. The great plagues that came upon Egypt, the triumphant parting of the Red Sea, the manna from heaven — all were arguably unforgettable — and yet God specifically asked them to REMEMBER. Remember the great movement of God among you; remember the God who saw your misery and acted out in justice. Indeed, REMEMBER. For how easy it is to forget. How easy it is to forget that God not only sees the injustice of our situation, our yearning for help and crying for deliverance, but also the injustice we impose on others, our unwillingness to forgive, and our eagerness to tip the scales in our favor.

Through the prophet Micah, the LORD inquired of Israel, “Am I still to forget, O wicked house, your ill-gotten treasures and the short ephah, which is accursed? Shall I acquit a man with dishonest scales, with a bag of false weights?” (6:10-11).

Used in ancient Israel, the ephah was a large vessel with which merchants measured out goods for a buyer. Likewise, the shekel was used to weigh out the silver with which the buyer paid for it. By shortening the ephah and increasing the weight of the shekel, the merchant found a way to sell less than he promised for more than he agreed. The practice of utilizing measures to get ahead in business was prevalent amongst merchants in the ancient world — perhaps as prevalent as it is today. In a poem titled “Song of the Devil” W.H. Auden voices a chorus familiar to the ages: “Values are relative / Dough is dough.”

Yet as God declared through Micah and again through Hosea and Amos, our dishonest dealings make a mockery of the one who blesses and provides. The cry of the prophet for economic justice is the cry of the God who is JUST. And He who is just demands a careful commitment to truth: “You shall not have in your bag differing weights, a large and a small. You shall not have in your house differing measures, a large and a small. You shall have a full and just weight; you shall have a full and just measure, that your days may be prolonged in the land which the LORD your God gives you” (Deuteronomy 25:13-15).

Moreover, He who is just not only requires justice in our dealings with others, but in our dealings with Him. Powerfully we are reminded often in Scripture that we have been weighed on the scales and found wanting. Within a world marked by its allegiance to tolerance, this is a difficult truth to accept. We are told that Christ died for us and that his death has washed away our debt. On one hand it seems ridiculous. If God was prepared to forgive us from sin, why didn’t he just do so? Why did an innocent man have to die? The first thing we must do is see our sin as it is before God: When we look at sin as a debt, it is reasonable that someone who is able to make the payment must pay. Someone had to balance the scales. We cannot.

I have heard it said that God is like the judge who passed the sentence for the guilty defendant and then got up from the judges bench, stood alongside the convicted, and paid the fine for him. The apostle Peter proclaims similarly, “Christ died for sins once for all, the just for the unjust, so that he might bring us to God, having been put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit” (1 Peter 3:18). In Christ the scales of sin and death have been balanced! He is our full and just weight.

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