| Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet; righteousness and peace [shalom] will kiss each other. — Psalm 85:10  Open and Unafraid: Justice by W. David O. Taylor, from Open and Unafraid 
 Give justice to the weak and the orphan; maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute. — Psalm 82:3
"Cursed be anyone who deprives the alien, the orphan, and the widow of justice." All the people shall say, "Amen!" — Deuteronomy 27:19
Injustices in the World
On October 2, 2006, a dairy-truck driver entered a one-room schoolhouse in the Old Order Amish community of Nickel Mines in Pennsylvania. The driver, Charles C. Roberts IV, first demanded that all the boys leave the room; he then ordered the eleven girls to line up facing the chalkboard.
The girls had a clear sense of the danger they faced, seeing all the instruments of violence before them: the stun gun, the nails, the bolts, the wrenches, the rope, the plastic ties to bind their feet, and the chains and clamps for restraint.
Shortly before Roberts opened fire, two sisters requested they be shot first so that the others might be spared. He ignored their request. Instead he killed five girls and wounded seven before killing himself. One of the sisters was wounded; the other was killed.
The names of the girls who were killed were Naomi Rose Ebersole, seven; Marian Fisher, thirteen (one of the sisters who did not survive); sisters Mary Liz Miller, eight, and Lina Miller, seven; and Anna Mae Stoltzfus, twelve.
Janice Ballenger, the deputy coroner in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, shaken up by the event, said afterward, "There was not one desk, not one chair, in the whole schoolroom that was not splattered with either blood or glass."1
On June 7, 1998, three known white supremacists murdered a forty-nine-year-old father of three in Jasper, Texas. The father, a black man, had accepted an early morning ride home with the three men. After attacking him, they dragged him to his death behind their truck, later dumping the man's mutilated remains in the town's segregated African American cemetery. Afterward they went to a barbecue. The name of the man who was killed was James Byrd Jr.2
To date, more than 250,000 people have been displaced from northeast Nigeria on account of the violence caused by the Islamist extremist group Boko Haram.3
In early January 2019, two men and nine teenage boys were rescued from bonded-labor slavery at an urban factory near Chennai, India.4
On January 31, 2019, the Roman Catholic Church in Texas released the names of almost three hundred priests who it said had been credibly accused of child sex abuse over nearly eight decades.5
During the late 2018 trial of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Mexican drug kingpin known as El Chapo, nearly every level of Mexican government was implicated in bribes, including the presidency.6
In 2017, the CDC found the first genetic link from Legionnaires' disease to the lead-contaminated water supply in Flint, Michigan; such lead exposure in children included the possibility of impaired cognition, behavioral disorders, hearing problems, and delayed puberty.7
By the time Hurricane Harvey left the Gulf of Mexico in August 2017, an estimated thirty thousand people had been displaced from their homes. Nearly a trillion gallons of water had fallen over the city of Houston, and the poor were hit the hardest.8
No True Faith Without Justice
The fact that injustices occur every day is obvious to anyone who reads the daily news. Injustices happen to individuals, people groups, and entire countries; they mar systems and institutions. Injustices take place in our own homes and in nature as a whole. The book of Psalms understands this. The psalmist says this about the wicked in Psalm 10:
In arrogance the wicked persecute the poor... they lurk that they may seize the poor; They think in their heart, "God has forgotten, He has hidden His face, He will never see it. — Psalm 10: 2-3, Psalm 10:9, Psalm 10:11
The psalmists pray repeatedly for justice because they understand that a world full of broken people, dark forces, and harsh conditions generates injustice everywhere and always. Where there is enemy talk in the psalms, there is also justice talk. Where there is injustice talk, there is also a plea for a Just Judge to make things right or, as philosophers might put it, to give people what they are due.9
Many Christians, unfortunately, do not see this as clearly as the psalmists see it. The psalmists see structural injustice within society, where Christians, perhaps especially evangelicals in the West, may see only personal guilt. The psalmists see wickedness that pervades institutions and cultures, while Christians may see only the need for the forgiveness of individual sins.
The psalmists see powerless people who are oppressed by the powerful, and so they pray for justice (Psalm 37; Psalm 82; Psalm 113); Christians see only Psalm 51 with its plea for mercy.10 Writes C. S. Lewis, "Christians cry to God for mercy instead of justice; they [the psalmists] cried to God for justice instead of injustice"11 (emphasis original).
It isn't that mercy and justice are opposed in the Psalter; they belong together intimately, integrally. But while many Christians give justice half the attention they give to mercy, the Psalter devotes twice as much space to justice as it does to mercy. This is not because mercy matters less than justice but because a world that violates justice violates God's fundamental purposes for that world.12
In the psalms there is no true worship without justice, no faithful prayer that leaves out justice, and no genuine faith that takes justice less seriously than God takes it. There is no account of God that makes justice secondary to his nature or an afterthought to his redemptive, restorative work in the world. There is likewise no account of human beings in the psalms that allows justice to remain a concern only of other people, rather than of all humanity.
The Psalms of Justice
In the psalms there is no generic idea of justice; there is only God's idea of justice.13 Psalm 89:14 says this:
Righteousness and justice are the foundation of Your throne; steadfast love and faithfulness go before You. Psalm 111:7–8 adds,
The works of His hands are faithful and just; all His precepts are trustworthy. They are established forever and ever, to be performed with faithfulness and uprightness. But for the psalmist, it is not simply that God cares about the abstract idea of distributive and retributive justice; it is that God loves justice. Psalm 37:28 declares,
For the Lord loves justice; He will not forsake His faithful ones.
Psalm 99:4 proclaims,
Mighty King, lover of justice, You have established equity; You have executed justice and righteousness in Jacob.
In the psalms the Lord is king. As king, the Lord stands sovereign over all of Creation, sovereign throughout all eternity, sovereign over the nations and over the people of Israel. There is nowhere that God's justice should remain absent (Psalm 33:5–9; Psalm 96:11–13). It should be manifest at every level of reality — locally, globally, and cosmically (Psalm 97:6). Psalm 85:10–11 articulates this comprehensive vision of justice:
Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet; Faithfulness will spring up from the ground,
God wants justice for human beings precisely because He loves human beings. Writes Nicholas Wolterstorff, "God desires that each and every human being shall flourish, that each and every shall experience what the Old Testament writers call shalom"14 (emphasis original). Shalom, or a deep sense of well-being, is God's original gift to the cosmos and its final goal. It is what God has promised to creation and what Je will fulfill in the new creation.
As the book of Psalms sees it, God isn't the only One who's in the business of making justice happen; human beings are entrusted with this work too.
1. Tamara Jones and Joshua Partlow, "Pa. Killer Had Prepared for 'Long Siege,'" Washington Post, October 4, 2006, http://www.washingtonpost .com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/04/AR2006100400331.html. 2. Rick Lyman, "Man Guilty of Murder in Texas Dragging Death," New York Times, February 24, 1999, https://www.nytimes.com/1999 /02/24/us/man-guilty-of-murder-in-texas-dragging-death.html. 3. Bukola Adebayo and Sara Mazloumsaki, "30,000 Nigerians Flee Boko Haram Violence in Two Days, UN Says," CNN, January 29, 2019 *see blog for full list Excerpted with permission from Open and Unafraid by W. David O. Taylor, copyright W. David O. Taylor. Watch video from W. David O. Taylor 
Your Turn
Justice may not seem to matter much these days in the world around us but it matters greatly to God! He cares about justice! He cares about justice for every single person He created and He is sovereign over everything. ~ Devotionals Daily Share this devotion with someone who needs it today. Psalms as a Guide to Life
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How can we find a more transparent, resilient, and fearless life of faith?  Softcover, Regular: $18.99 eBook price: $12.99 + free U.S. shipping* on orders $30 or more From professor, pastor, and producer of the documentary Bono and Eugene Peterson: The Psalms, a devotional examination of the life of faith as presented in the Psalter--one lived in joy, sorrow, anger, doubt, fear, mortality, community, isolation, and above all in the presence of God--in order to deepen discipleship and worship.
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How can we find a more transparent, resilient, and fearless life of faith?
The book of Psalms has been central to God's people for millennia, across all walks of life and cultural contexts. In reading it, we discover that we are never alone in our joys, sorrows, angers, doubts, praises, or thanksgivings. In it, we learn about prayer and poetry, honesty and community, justice and enemies, life and death, nations and creation. Open and Unafraid shows us how to read the psalms in a fresh, life-giving way, and so access the bottomless resources for life that they provide.
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