For Many Christians, the concepts of justice and love sum up the major thrusts of the Old Testament and New Testament respectively. But this view misses a great deal of truth in both parts of the Bible.
Starting with simple word counts (using the NIV as a basis), the word “justice” occurs 115 times in the Old Testament and only 15 times in the New. But there are far more books in the Old Testament than the New, of course, and when we look at the average occurrences in the individual books, we find the frequency of the word justice is actually about the same in both Testaments.
When we look at the word love, we find the same thing. The Old Testament mentions love a surprising 425 times, and the New Testament mentions the same concept 261 times. But once again, when we check the averages, we find they are essentially the same – the word love occurs with about the same frequency in the books of the Old Testament and New Testament.
But there is more to this. Looking at simple word counts only gives us part of the picture. First, there are OT verses that clearly show the equivalent importance of both justice and love. David, for example, wrote “I will sing of your love and justice” (Psalm 101:1), and Hosea urges us to “maintain love and justice” (Hosea 12:6).
We may be familiar with such verses, but when we read the Old Testament carefully, we find something surprising. In many places in the Pentateuch, laws regarding justice are clearly alternated with laws regarding love. We find this, for example, in Exodus 23:1-9 as we see below – where the laws regarding justice are in normal type and those regarding love are in italic type:
“Do not spread false reports. Do not help a guilty person by being a malicious witness. “Do not follow the crowd in doing wrong. When you give testimony in a lawsuit, do not pervert justice by siding with the crowd, and do not show favoritism to a poor person in a lawsuit.
“If you come across your enemy’s ox or donkey wandering off, be sure to return it. If you see the donkey of someone who hates you fallen down under its load, do not leave it there; be sure you help them with it.
“Do not deny justice to your poor people in their lawsuits. Have nothing to do with a false charge and do not put an innocent or honest person to death, for I will not acquit the guilty. “Do not accept a bribe, for a bribe blinds those who see and twists the words of the innocent.
“Do not oppress a foreigner; you yourselves know how it feels to be foreigners, because you were foreigners in Egypt.“
When we consider the numerical frequency of the words justice and love that we looked at in the beginning of this article, and we add the frequent alternation of laws of justice with laws of love in the Old Testament, we realize that to characterize the Old Testament as the testament of “justice,” as opposed to the New Testament of “love” is a complete misunderstanding. Both the Old and New Testaments stress the important of justice and love.
Both the Old and New Testaments show that God is a God of justice and love. For example, in the Old Testament we read “Righteousness and justice are the foundation of your throne; steadfast love and faithfulness go before you.” (Psalm 89:14), and in the New Testament we read both that “God is love” (1 John 4:8; 4:16) and “Lord God Almighty, true and just are your judgments” (Revelation 16:7; 19:2). Verses such as these show that the two cannot be separated – true justice involves love and true love involves justice.
The application of this fact for us as Christians is to look at our own lives and to consider if they reflect the godly qualities of both justice and love.
