Pay It Forward

With my lips I have told of all the ordinances of Your mouth.  Psalm 119:13  NASB

I have told – Oral transmission.  How often we forget that Israel’s ancient cultural was oral.  Yes, of course, the fundamentals were written on those stone tablets, but the transmission of the message, the training in righteousness, the legacy and history was by and large oral.  Knowing what God demanded of you depended on someone else teaching you, someone who was taught by another person from the previous generation.  Moses gives clear instructions about this process.  Training up a child was not sending him to school to learn to read and write.  It was personal, parental instruction of the history of God’s interaction with the people.  In this verse the poet doesn’t tell us something unusual about his faithfulness.  He recounts the typical.  He proclaims that he has not failed to make God’s ordinances public.  He’s done his part to keep the tradition alive, the instruction current, and the commitment obvious.  Can we say the same?

What is it that he’s proclaimed?  The mišpāṭ of God.  And what is that?

The primary sense of šāpaṭ is to exercise the processes of government. Since, however, the ancients did not always divide the functions of government, as most modern governments do, between legislative, executive, and judicial functions (and departments) the common translation, “to judge,” misleads us. For, the word, judge, as šāpaṭ is usually translated, in modern English, means to exercise only the judicial function of government.^[1]

(mišpāṭ). Justice, ordinance, custom, manner. Represents what is doubtless the most important idea for correct understanding of government—whether of man by man or of the whole creation by God. Though rendered “judgment” in most of the four hundred or so appearances of mišpāṭ in the Hebrew Bible, this rendering is often defective for us moderns by reason of our novel way of distinctly separating legislative, executive, and judicial functions and functionaries in government.^[2]

The poet isn’t speaking just about the typical religious rituals and commandments.  He’s declaring the government of God on earth.  You might say that he’s partially fulfilling the plea in Yeshua’s prayer, “Your kingdom come on earth.”  We often hear that the Lord’s Prayer is a completely unique development using Hebraic ideas in a “Christian” context, but now that we recognize the psalmist’s declaration of God’s mišpāṭ (a term used hundreds of times), we realize that Yeshua is expanding, and commenting, on the coming Kingdom.   We’ll have to look carefully at his words with this poet’s perspective in mind.  But for the moment, we realize that it’s not enough to practice internal righteousness.  God’s intention is social reformation.  In today’s religious world, the Church has become an extension of current societal values; values that have abandoned biblical righteousness long ago.  God’s mišpāṭ are alien to this culture, and following them makes us aliens in this world.  “There is only one duty, only one safe course, and that is to try to be right and not to fear to do or say what you believe to be right.”[3]

Topical Index:  mišpāṭ, ordinance, government, alien, Lord’s Prayer, Psalm 119:13

^[1] Culver, R. D. (1999). 2443 שָׁפַט. In R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament(electronic ed., p. 947). Moody Press.

^[2] Ibid.

[3] Winston Churchill