If the only thing in your life guided by your Christianity is two or three hours on the weekend then you have missed the boat. The Christian is called to walk worthy of the God (Ephesians 4:1, Philippians 1:27, Colossians 1:10, 1 Thessalonians 2:12, etc.) and I don’t think that is just supposed to play itself out in the Church. If the Gospel doesn’t impact all spheres of life then it impacts nothing.
Christians should be standing on the foundation of the word of God and calling for something to change! I cringe when I look at the political and economic movements that are happening around us. Life is snuffed out before first light, the needy are cast aside as threats to security and prosperity. If we look our two-party system through the eyes of the famous words of Micah we can see a little bit of what is happening. Micah 6:8 says:
He has told you, O man, what is good;
and what does the LORD require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?
It is as if one side heard “Do Justice” and ran with it as their banner, and the other side heard “Love Kindness” and seeks to make that their mantra. The problem is that neither side is Walking Humbly with God, but continues to trumpet their own causes and tear down the other side. These three commands work in harmony or they do not work at all.
I’m afraid this is what happens when there is no objective standard of morality. At the end of the book of Judges, the author closes the book (Judges 21:25) by saying, “In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” There are some in our society that would applaud that as a great achievement or a goal with which to attain. However, those people vastly underestimate the depravity of man. This statement is meant to make the people tremble and leave them in a very dark and confusing place.
The point that the author of Judges is trying to make is that the vast majority of people did not consider God to be their king. They had lost their objective moral authority and so they turned to subjective standards of morality which always promote extremes that flow from our sinful, prideful hearts.
If we roll back the tape on history, we can see the roots of the problems that we face today. I’ll leave that for another post. I don’t believe that any existing system of economics or societal organization is perfect. They are all flawed systems because they are designed and run by sinful people. We will never see true justice, mercy, and humility until we see Jesus face to face. The economy of heaven is going to be an amazing sight! But let’s look at our free-market economy and see where things went wrong and what would need to be done to make a course correction back to the one true and living God.
First off, we need to define some terms. A free-market economy is a system of voluntary economic trades established on the ideas of voluntary exchange of goods and services based on the principle of private property. I think there are inherently some problems with that core idea of private property since we own nothing and we are just called to be stewards of God’s creation. However, that is a topic for another day.
In a free market economy, if I own an apple farm which produces apples, I can offer those apples up for sale or trade and people are free to come and buy them if they so desire. There is no compulsion, either by the government or any other outside forces, to take away my apples or to force people to buy my apples. Also, the prices and values of those apples are set by this free system because if I own the property I get to establish its value. However, if another apple farmer wants to sell his apples for less than I sell mine then that is his right as well and it is the right of the people to be free to choose which farmer they want to buy apples from.
This is the idea of supply and demand. In our rudimentary example, we have a farmer who has a supply of apples and the people have a demand for apples. If the demand for apples decreases then the farmer is going to have excess supply and the desire to sell his supply, so to increase demand, he might decrease his price. But if there is a great demand for apples then the farmer will naturally raise the price of the apples to maximize his profits. The raising of the prices should be kept in check by the forces of competition. You can’t go much higher in cost than the farmer across the road or else the demand for your apples will decrease and customers will go elsewhere.
It sounds like a pretty clean system, and if we still lived in agrarian societies with limited travel and information, it would be. If everyone lived by God’s requirements from Micah then things would run smoothly. This is one of the main principles that America was founded upon. Once the colonies saw that they had in their possession everything that they needed, they rebelled against the rule of the King and they claimed the country as their personal property. Then they said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
However, the need for a government shows up in the need to protect those rights from corruption and sin. Out of this need, springs law and justice. For example, someone who says, “I want apples, but I don’t want to pay anything,” can steal them, but the law says that this is a crime and is punishable. On the other hand, if the farmer has no competition and is greedy and decides to extort the people then a law may be established which seeks to protect the people.
In other words, the government is established to “Do Justice” and “Love Mercy” with the assumption that people will Walk Humbly with God. I think that a humble walk with God is what the writers intended when they said “the pursuit of happiness.” The problem comes when people are allowed to define what is meant by happiness instead of seeing the foundation of happiness in a walk with God. The happiest people on the planet are those who spend their lives ordering their appetites and desires to the truth of who God is and who they are. When we see God’s glory and holiness as the high standard and seek to live our lives out of that truth then the pursuit of happiness becomes a pursuit of virtue and effects all areas of life.
C.H. Spurgeon spoke to this idea in a sermon on Psalm 119:133 entitled “A Well Ordered Life.” He said:
Many men seem to play at living, but he doeth best who lives earnestly and thoughtfully each single instant, and lifts up his heart to God, that every one of his separate thoughts, words, and deeds, may bear the scales of the last judgment, and may be found in conformity with the righteousness of God. The first order, then, of a holy life, is the order of conformity to the Lord’s will.
Let us see our responsibility, not only to the Lord but also to our society, to walk humbly with our God. This guiding principle is the missing piece in a balancing act between justice and mercy. God is calling both those who seek to do justice and those who want to love mercy to act out of a heart of humility with their steps well ordered by our Holy and Benevolent God.