Key Verse:
Deuteronomy 16:18 NKJV
18 “You shall appoint judges and officers in all your [a]gates, which the Lord your God gives you, according to your tribes, and they shall judge the people with just judgment.
They weren’t at Mount Sinai this time. That generation perished in the wilderness. It was required of the present generation to appoint just public servants. We can look to the past for how our forefathers chose leadership, but the responsibility for the choice of responsible leadership today falls to us. We must choose wisely.
What you need to know
Deuteronomy 10:12-14 NKJV
12 “And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you, but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all His ways and to love Him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, 13 and to keep the commandments of the Lord and His statutes which I command you today for your [f]good? 14 Indeed heaven and the highest heavens belong to the Lord your God, also the earth with all that is in it.
The Book of Deuteronomy was a reiteration of God’s law to the generation born in the wilderness. Except for Joshua and Caleb, they had not suffered the bonds of slavery, but rather, the ravages of the desert: a dog-eat-dog place full of savagery and violence. And yet, God kept them and honed them into a people after His own heart. Now they stood at the gate of the land promised to their progenitor, Abraham. God desired that they put Him first in all of their endeavors so that they would prosper in the land He had given them.
God’s instruction to them is relevant to each new generation of believers, as it advances the responsibility of successful governance to each successive generation. While the framework, the Word of God remains the standard upon which all law is built, it is up to those in each generation to renew the commitment to follow that standard individually and to maintain a system of government based on God’s intent for all people.
The Lesson
Deuteronomy 16:18 NKJV
18 “You shall appoint judges and officers in all your [a]gates, which the Lord your God gives you, according to your tribes, and they shall judge the people with just judgment.
The Israelites were to appoint judges and officers in every community. They were to always judge fairly within their realm of influence. That would require that they be Godly men and women who reverently feared the Lord. The same is required of us in today’s society. Each generation is given the charge to appoint leaders locally, state-wide, and nationally who will govern conscientiously and humbly as servants, not masters of God’s people.
Deuteronomy 16:19 NKJV
19 You shall not pervert justice; you shall not [b]show partiality, nor take a bribe, for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and [c]twists the words of the righteous.
Those public servants should never be selected with the thought that they will be anything but impartial servants. Those who would serve their own interest in any way might pervert justice in ways that make it wholly unrecognizable to people of good conscience. True justice originates in Heaven, at the throne of Grace. It must not be perverted, lest it present God in a manner that is beneath His righteousness and majesty.
Deuteronomy 16:20 NKJV
20 You shall follow what is altogether just, that you may live and inherit the land which the Lord your God is giving you.
In fact, every effort should be made toward justice in every facet of society, so that the people of the land will prosper under God’s abundant grace. We must take to heart that we each have a responsibility in the effort for a just and fair society.
Deuteronomy 17:8 NKJV
8 “If a matter arises which is too hard for you to judge, between degrees of guilt for bloodshed, between one judgment or another, or between one punishment or another, matters of controversy within your gates, then you shall arise and go up to the place which the Lord your God chooses.
Beloved, God does not dwell in temples made with our hands, rather He dwells in our hearts. Every decision, great or small, must be considered from hearts attuned to the will of the Lord.
Deuteronomy 17:9 NKJV
9 And you shall come to the priests, the Levites, and to the judge there in those days, and inquire of them; they shall pronounce upon you the sentence of judgment.
God directed His people to rely on the spiritual and secular leadership of their day to provide the wise judgment and counsel required to maneuver the legal and spiritual challenges that they would face. The same is required of us today. We should be able to look to our appointed spiritual and secular leaders for sound guidance and judgment. That requires that we select these leaders based on their character and integrity, taking care to remember that God sees all that we do and will act on our behalf when we stand for … justice.
Deuteronomy 17:10-11 NKJV
10 You shall do according to the sentence which they pronounce upon you in that place which the Lord chooses. And you shall be careful to do according to all that they order you. 11 According to the sentence of the law in which they instruct you, according to the judgment which they tell you, you shall do; you shall not turn aside to the right hand or to the left from the sentence which they pronounce upon you.
And so it becomes painfully evident as to why just leadership is so vitally important to the well-being of a community. The consequences of unjust leadership can have a disruptive effect on society. Laws must be followed or chaos will ensue. God is not the author of confusion. Satan is. It is imperative that just, conscientious leaders be elected for the sake of a peaceable, ordered existence.
Deuteronomy 17:12-13 NKJV
12 Now the man who acts presumptuously and will not heed the priest who stands to minister there before the Lord your God, or the judge, that man shall die. So you shall put away the evil from Israel. 13 And all the people shall hear and fear, and no longer act presumptuously.
Allow me to close with a few thoughts that may seem contrary to the verses above. The verses above, at first glance, appear to press the believer into a state of ‘blind’ obedience to those who lead our communities for fear of the penalty of death, thus giving way to corrupt authoritarian influences that seek power and money to the detriment of the communities they ‘serve’. This can especially be true in the Church, where the presbytery often leans into authoritarianism in order to keep a congregation in line. Please notice in verse 12 that those ministers to whom we are to offer obeisance must be those who are wholly committed as servants of the Lord, God Almighty. Jesus insisted that those who would lead be servants. When that is not the case, we all suffer. God’s corrective mechanism in the case of unjust leadership was the ministry of the prophet. The prophet was called to point out and drive out corrupt leadership. Those men had a unique aura about them that was immediately recognizable. We call it, ‘the anointing’. It was the Spirit of God working in them and through them to call out the social, economic, ecological, and spiritual injustice that arose from corrupt leadership, both within and without the spiritual community.
Such was is the case today. God has called prophets, such as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to address the societal ills that besiege society to corrupt leadership. In his letter to white, moderate religious leaders in the south during the civil rights era, he asked the question, “Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world?” In this query, he challenged his brothers in Christ to simply care about people who did not look like them. In our day, those same challenges have again resurfaced to a painful and contentious point, especially on the political stage and within the evangelical community. And the reasons are remarkably similar. Many just want moderation. They just want the status quo to be maintained.
While it is true that we must pray for those in authority, we must also pray that God will raise up from His own, people who will speak truth to power, no matter the consequence. Through prayer and adherence to the principles of justice, we can affect leadership to the end that we continue toward the goal of a just society. Dr. King offered the following as justification for his fight against injustice: “I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all." Thus, as believers, we have a moral responsibility to bend the arc of history toward justice.
Selah,
wb
Psalm 24:1 NLT
1 The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it.
The world and all its people belong to him.
Thus we have a responsibility to live humbly and do justly before the Lord, our God.
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