There’s no such thing as personal devotion
A quote from a Bible Project video…
“Jesus spent most of his time with the poor and insignificant people of his day, and he claimed that God‘s rescue of the world was beginning through him and in them. What was God rescuing the world from? Well, it’s a rescue from the kind of world we’ve created by our selfishness and our contempt for others, that leads to violence. And it’s a rescue into communities of wholehearted love and respect. Jesus describes this way of life by using an ancient biblical word righteousness. A righteous person is someone who consistently does right by God and right by others.“
The word in the bible
The word is tzadeqah, and it refers to a life of right relationships. A righteous person is “righteous” because they are “right with God and therefore committed to putting right all other relationships in life. This means, then, that Biblical righteousness is inevitably “social,” because it is about relationships.
When most modern people see the word “righteousness” in the Bible…
…they tend to think of it in terms of private morality, such as holding yourself back sexually or diligence in prayer and Bible study. But in the Bible tzadeqah refers to day-to-day living in which a person conducts all relationships in family and society with fairness, generosity, and equity. It is not surprising, then, to discover that tzadeqah and the word for justice (Mishpat) are brought together often times in the Bible.
Why are these words always mentioned together?
These two words roughly correspond to what some have called “primary” and “rectifying justice.”Rectifying justice is mishpat. It means punishing wrongdoers and caring for the victims of unjust treatment. Primary justice, or tzadeqah, is behaviour that, if it was prevalent in the world, would render rectifying justice unnecessary, because everyone would be living in right relationship to everyone else. Therefore, though tzadeqah is primarily about being in a right relationship with God, the righteous life that results is profoundly social. A passage in the book of Job illustrates what this kind of righteous or just-living person looks like:
I rescued the poor who cried for help, and the fatherless who had none to assist him. The man who was dying blessed me; I made the widow’s heart sing. I put on righteousness [tzadeqah] as my clot ing; justice [mishpat] was my robe and my turban. I was eyes to the blind and feet to the lame. I was a father to the needy; I took up the case of the immigrant. I broke the fangs of the wicked and snatched the victims from their teeth.
Job 29:12-17
Francis I. Anderson points out in his commentary on Job that this is one of the most important texts in the Scripture for the study of Israelite ethics. It is a complete picture of how a righteous Israelite was supposed to live, “and to Job, right conduct is almost entirely social. . . . In Job’s conscience . . . to omit to do good to any fellow human being, of whatever rank or class, would be a grievous offence to God.
What does this practically look like?
Job gives us many examples of what we could call primary justice or righteous living. He says that he is “eyes to the blind and feet to the lame,” and “a father to the needy.” To be a “father” meant that he cared for the needs of the poor as a parent would meet the needs of his children. In our world, this means taking the time personally to meet the needs of the handicapped, the elderly, or the hungry in our neighbourhoods. Or it could mean building a business to serve the interests of these classes of persons. Or it could also mean a group of families from the more wealthier side of town working with the public school in a poor community and making generous donations of money and work in order to improve the quality of the education. Job goes on to say…
If I have denied justice [mishpat] to my menservants and maidservants when they had a grievance against me, what will I do when God confronts me? . . . If I have denied the desires of the poor or let the eyes of the widow grow weary, if I have kept my bread to myself, not sharing it with the fatherless—but from my youth I reared him as would a father, and from my birth I guided the widow—if I have seen anyone perishing for lack of clothing, or a needy man without a garment, and his heart did not bless me for warming him with the fleece from my sheep, if I have raised my hand against the fatherless,knowing that I had influence in court, then let my arm fall from the shoulder, let it be broken off at the joint. . . . these also would be sins to be judged, for I would have been unfaithful to God on high.
Job 31:13-28
In chapter 31 Job gives us more details about a righteous or just life. He fulfils “the desires of the poor” (verse 16). The word “desire” does not mean just meeting basic needs for food and shelter. It means that he turns the poor man’s life into a delight. Then he says that if he had not shared his bread or “the fleece from my sheep” with the poor, it would have been a terrible sin and offence to God (verses 23 and 28).This certainly goes beyond what today we would call “charity.”
Job is not just giving handouts, but rather has become deeply involved in the life of the poor, the orphaned, and the handicapped.
His goal for the poor is a life of delight, and his goal for the widow is that her eyes would “no longer be weary.” He is not at all satisfied with halfway measures for the needy people in his community. He is not content to give them small, perfunctory gifts in the assumption that their misery and weakness are a permanent condition.
So there is no such thing as personal devotion, Job understood this.
And this is ultimately the kind of life Jesus embodied and announced. The Kingdom of God was not simply about saving isolated souls for heaven, but about forming a new humanity marked by wholehearted love, justice, mercy, and reconciliation. To follow Christ, then, is not merely to cultivate a private spiritual life, but to participate in God’s restoration of the world.
There is no such thing as merely personal devotion, because love for God inevitably expresses itself as love for people.
