God Avenges the Poor

Introduction

I would like to share a meme with you all that I saw on Facebook recently. It says: “Justice is a dish best served cold. If it were served warm, it would be just water.” It’s a dumb dad joke, I know. I like cheesy jokes like this. It may be dumb, but it does introduce the topic of interest today: justice, or rather, the lack of justice.

I. Exposition of the text:

There was a big problem of injustice in the ancient world. Many times, the court systems favored the rich at the expense of the poor. If you were a poor farmer in the ancient world trying to scrape out a meager living, you would have been worried about a scenario like this:

A wealthy person who wants to falsely accuse you as a pretense for stealing your money or your property brings false charges in court against you. You get summoned to appear before the elders at the city gates to give your defense. You listen as your rich accuser opens with a false accusation that you committed some petty crime against him. Maybe he says that you stole a sheep. Then he calls forward two witnesses who falsely testify that they saw you take it. You try to say that this isn't true, but it is clear that the elders believe the false witnesses. They confer with each other and make a ruling: you are guilty. You will have to compensate your accuser for the loss of his sheep. Since you have no money to pay him, you will simply have to give him one of your own sheep. If you don't own any sheep, then your land must be sold to pay him or you must become his slave until you pay off the debt. After the trial, you discover that your accuser paid off the elders and the two false witnesses. This is not fair! How can he get away with this? Why are you the one that has to pay for his crimes? You were already poor to begin with; what did you do to deserve this?

The ancient world was full of scenarios like this that really happened. That is why God stressed over and over again in the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings that the poor were to be treated fairly and protected. They were not to be exploited.

I would like to invite your attention to a passage in the book of Proverbs that addresses this issue. Proverbs is classified as Wisdom literature which was a common literary genre in the ancient world. There is scholarly debate over who wrote it and when just as there is with every book of the Bible. But for simplicity's sake, I will just say that the traditional author has been King Solomon, the king of ancient Israel who built the temple and was renowned for his wisdom. That means the origins of this book probably go back to ancient Israel during the monarchy in the tenth century BC.

With that in mind, let's look at our text. Please go with me in your Bibles or on your devices to Proverbs 22:22-23. The text reads:

22 Do not rob the poor because he is poor,

Or crush the afflicted at the gate;

23 For the LORD will plead their case

And take the life of those who rob them.

Now at first glance, it appears that this text is about not robbing the poor. And that is true, but it is more specific than that.

The thought in verse 22 is completed by the thought in verse 23. Verse 22 prohibits a certain behavior: robbing the poor; and verse 23 gives the reason why this behavior should be avoided: because God will rob those who rob them. So the thought unit in verse 22 is completed by the thought unit in verse 23.

But that's not all. Temper Longman III in The Baker Commentary on the Old Testament says that there is also a chiastic structure present in this text. A chiastic structure is a special type of parallelism, an ancient literary device. In a chiastic structure, the first line and the last line of text are parallel to each other. Then the second line and the second to last line of the text are parallel to each other. This pattern continues all the way to the center of the chiasm. Longman says that this passage has an a-b-b’-a’ format as follows:

a Do not rob the poor because he is poor,

b Or crush the afflicted at the gate;

b’ For the LORD will plead their case

a’ And take the life of those who rob them.

According to this structure, the first line of verse 22 is parallel to the last line of verse 23. They are both talking about robbing. The first line says not to rob the poor and the last line says that God will rob those who rob them. That leaves the inner two lines also being parallel to each other. To see the parallel thought of these inner two lines, it is necessary to know one detail about ancient culture.

Randall Merrill says in The Lexham Bible Dictionary that in the ancient Near East, the gates of cities were the centers of public life. Everyone going in and out of the city had to go through the gate. Most of the time, city gates opened into an open courtyard which was full of merchants selling all kinds of goods. Because of the central role that the gates played in a city's public life, the gates essentially became its courthouse where its judicial cases were decided. The elders or judges of the city would have seats inside the gate before which, accusers would bring their charges.

So now back to the text. We see that the reference to the gate is really a reference to the judicial system. The command not to crush the afflicted at the gate is really another way of saying not to exploit the poor in the courts. So the inner two lines of the chiasm are parallel to each other in the sense that they are both referring to judicial cases. The last line of verse 22 says not to exploit the poor in court. The first line of verse 23 says that God will take up their case in his own divine court.

An exegesis textbook will tell us that in a chiastic structure, the focal point or the emphasis is on what comes at the center. Ancient writers would use a chiastic structure as a way of emphasizing what they put at the center of it. So in this passage, the emphasis is on judicial exploitation. It's not just saying not to rob the poor, but it's speaking against a specific kind of robbery. And it's saying that those who use the courts to rob the poor will be subject to a lawsuit in God's divine court. God's going to come after the robbers with retributive justice.

II. What do we do about it now?

Now that we know about the judicial exploitation that was happening, and we know what God said about it through the writer of Proverbs, what can we do about it now?

Advocate for just, fair, and impartial judicial systems and processes.

First, we must advocate for just, fair, and impartial judicial systems and processes. This means contacting our elected officials whether it is the city councilmen, the mayor, state legislators or governors, or the national officials like the president or our senators and representatives in congress. Any time they have to vote on an unjust law that will result in exploitation, call their office or email them and say that you don’t support that bill and why. All of them usually have a website you can find their contact information on. Just Google their name and their website will be near the top of the results.

This also means voting for public officials who are competent and have the right values and character. I encourage you to google your local election commission, print up a sample ballot, and look up all of the people on it and find out who they are, what their qualifications are, their values, and what policies they want to implement. We have to vote as best we can for people who will implement righteous policies that will not result in exploitation. It takes a little practice, but after you get the hang of it, you can do your research a couple days before an election and spend a few hours looking up all the people. This includes judges in some elections. So look them up and find out what their track record is.

For example, there has been a lot of research that has shown that children generally do better when their parents are married. The family is more stable and they are usually able to make more money. And growing up in a family with both parents in the home does immeasurable good for the child's well-being. But many welfare programs and government benefits have rules in place that reduce the amount of benefits people get when they get married. If you have a poor couple and each of them are making $15-20000 a year, they each qualify for food stamps and all kinds of other government benefits alone. But if they get married and their spouse's income is factored in, they will suddenly lose most of their benefits. So many of the rules for welfare penalize getting married. These penalties make it harder for the poor to get married and start families. So many young couples who are poor that are depending on government benefits opt not to get married and to stay separate. This makes it more likely for them to stay poor and it has disastrous consequences on their children. This means that we need to vote for candidates who want to repeal these types of marriage penalties. Any time there is a bill being debated in the government that would affect these marriage penalties, we need to contact our government officials to show our support or our opposition depending on what the bill does to the marriage penalties.

This also means spending money with businesses that are not using exploitative practices. If you find out a company is doing something unethical that exploits the poor, don’t buy their products or services. Vote with your dollars and support businesses with upright practices.

About 6 years ago, my parents' water heater developed a slow leak. They had a master protection agreement with Sears where they got it, so they called up and had a technician come to their house to look at it. The tech said that the way the water heaters were made these days, it was impossible to fix the leak. Their water heater needed to be replaced. Luckily, the water heater was under warranty. So the tech called up a customer service number in order to use the warranty to get the water heater replaced. As part of the procedure, the customer service representative told the tech to check the water pressure in the water lines. It turned out that the water pressure in the water lines was high. This violated the terms of the warranty and caused the warranty to be voided. The customer service representative said that Sears would not pay for the water heater to be replaced. The tech responded “But they have a master protection agreement. That's supposed to cover everything.” To this, the customer service agent responded that Sears no longer replaces water heaters. Even though the tech's phone was not on speakerphone, all of us standing in the room with him distinctly heard the customer service agent end by telling the tech: “tell them to sue us.” It became clear to us that Sears was trying to get out of fulfilling its obligations to replace water heaters that were covered under warranty or under protection agreements. They just used the water pressure as a technicality to get out of it. We later found out from my uncle that the pressure had been high in all of the water lines for the whole city of Peoria for decades (50 years). This meant that Sears in Peoria sold my parents a water heater with a warranty that had it written into the fine print that high water pressure voided the warranty knowing that the whole city of Peoria had high water pressure. My dad talked to a couple of attorneys about it and both of them told him that Sears would essentially try to string the case out for 2 or 3 years. They said that if he stuck with it long enough, he would eventually win the case and they would be forced to replace his water heater and compensate him for the trouble. But he would have to deal with attorney fees and no water heater until then. So this huge company quit replacing people's water heaters knowing that it had the money and the means to string these court cases out so that most poor people like my dad couldn't afford to take it to court and go the distance until the court made them pay for it. They were using corrupt exploitative business practices. Since then, the Sears in Peoria closed and I believe Sears as a company has largely gone out of business. Exploitive practices like this do not really pay even though it saves them a little money in the short run. People quit doing business with them once they saw that Sears was not upright. This is what we need to do. We can in essence vote with our dollars by spending money on products and services from businesses that don't exploit the poor.

But even more than that, why are these large companies able to do this? Why are they able to use money and lawyers to string out court cases so that poor people cannot afford to pay the attorney’s fees to keep pursuing the case until they get a court date and win the case? It’s because our laws are set up to allow it. I don’t know exactly which judicial laws say what details, but I can see that it must be legal for these companies to string it out and keep having the court date postponed. We need to advocate for laws that do not allow companies to exploit the poor by breaking their agreements like this and get out of it by prolonging the judicial process until the poor can’t afford to pay their lawyers to work through it to the end.

And lastly, if you know someone who is competent who has the necessary skills who is Christlike and has been transformed, encourage them to go into appropriate areas of public service. We need godly judges and lawmakers, defense attorneys, prosecutors, and leaders of companies who will do what is right and help fix the problem. If God’s people just stay out of these areas, then the problems will continue with ungodly people writing the laws, making the decisions, and perpetuating corrupt practices.

It’s not about trying to take over society and enforcing Christianity from the top down. It is about being a positive example and influencing all of these areas for good from the bottom up. The more godly people go into these areas, the more our society will be uplifted and the less exploitation will occur.

But if you do not have these skills and you don’t know anyone who would make a good judge or lawyer, that’s OK. You can still let God transform you, and advocate for righteous systems in the other ways we have discussed. All you have to do is do your part.

The world will never be perfect until Jesus Christ returns. Jesus himself said that the poor would always be among us. But we have the opportunity to diminish the evil that occurs. If everyone does what they can, God’s people will multiply, society will be uplifted, and the exploitation and effects of human corruption will be minimized.

It may look bad now. It may look like exploitation is out of control. But a day is ultimately coming when God will directly intervene. There is coming a final judgment when Jesus Christ will return and God will judge the nations and the peoples of the world and ultimately set things straight. When that day comes, the righteous will be saved and rewarded and the wicked including those who exploited the poor will be punished according to their deeds. God will put a stop to the corruption and exploitation and these things will no longer be allowed to continue! No one will ever be robbed or exploited again! The world will be at peace and God will cause everything to work harmoniously as he intended it from the beginning. So as we look forward to that day in hope, let's do what we can today to make a difference and trust that God will use it to accomplish his purposes and make the world a better place for everyone! God is good, he loves us, he cares for the poor, and he wants to use us to give them relief. So let’s do it and watch the vindication God reveals.