Praise and Worship Music (2)

“The Rock!  His work is perfect, for all His ways are just; A God of faithfulness and without injustice, righteous and upright is He.”  Deuteronomy 32:4  NASB

Just – Why are God’s accomplishments blameless?  Why are the results of His performance perfect examples of virtue and sacrifice? ki kol-d’ra-kav mishpat (“because all His paths justice”).  Moshe answers with another equivalence.  Every path, every step on the journey, every part of God’s walk is equal to mishpat, justice, what is legally proper, righteous, without the smallest hint of any impropriety.  Everything God does is just!

Are you nodding your head in agreement?  Does your theological sensibility concur?  Great!  Now let’s put it to the test.

Did God allow His people to fall into the hands of Pharaoh?  Did He allow them to be tortured, killed and abused?  Is that just?

Did God permit the Jewish pogroms, the Holocaust, the anti-Semitism of history?  Was that just?

And what about your life?  What about your trials and travails, your illnesses, your heartaches?  Does God stand in the background of your existence?  Is that just?

Now tell me, are all of God’s ways just?  Can you still sing, “ki kol-d’ra-kav mishpat”?

Because our perspective is so influenced by Greek ethical concepts, we often stumble over moral outrage and evil acts when it comes to proclaiming God’s goodness.  We can’t seem to find ways to reconcile our own sense of justice with a God who would allow the innocent to be slaughtered, tortured and abused.  How could Moshe declare that all of God’s ways are upright when Moshe knew the hideousness of ancient Egypt, just as surely as we know the enormity of evil in our world today?  Part of our stumbling comes from a difference in paradigm.  We think of ethics as a set of universally applicable principles that undergird goodness – and we think that a good God should exemplify these principles.  This concept is based in the Greek ideals, the rationally constructed standards of highest intellect.  This puts the principles in first position.  Moshe, and the whole near-Eastern world, thinks differently.

In the ancient near-East, what God does is what justice means!  If God allows, or even commands, the extinction of an entire people, this is not evidence that God is arbitrary, tyrannical or evil.  This is simply a case of another way in which God is just.  The fact that you and I cannot understand it does not mean we may hold court over God’s action.  He is the only Judge, even of His own acts.  When Moshe sings, ki kol-d’ra-kav mishpat, he literally means, “Everything God does is what it means to be just, no matter what it is that He actually does.”  In ancient near-Eastern thinking, there are no first principles of ethical behavior.  There are only the case-by-case examples of what God actually does.

The rabbis also struggled with the view.  One school taught that justice was essentially eschatological.  We will never know how it all works while we are here in this world.  We won’t see the fit of the pieces until the olam ha-ba.  What does not make sense now is not a problem of ethics.  It is a problem of epistemology.  Now we know in part.  That must satisfy for now.

This verse from Moshe’s song is very deep.  Men have struggled with its implications for five millennia.  When a songwriter can pen lines like this, he deserves to be called a master of the trade for these words confront every one of us.  Moshe also speaks to himself.  He will not enter the Land – but, all God’s ways are just.

Are all God’s ways with you just?  Are you willing to live on the basis that they are and not enter the Land?  Can you wait for the answers you don’t have today?

Topical Index:  just, mishpat, evil, path, derek, Deuteronomy 32:4