God’s Justice bears little resemblance to the moral assumptions of most Westerners.
Western justice is a hodgepodge of Roman, Greek and Tribal German morals. There is a semblance of tempering it with cold logic. However, the fundamental world outlook — the basic assumptions about reality — are mostly German Tribal mythology. The emphasis changes a bit from country to country; here in the US it’s mostly Anglo-Saxon traditional justice with a lot progressive gobbledygook and psychobabble thrown in the mix.
All the unspoken assumptions of what it means to be moral or just come from a known history and culture that excluded the God of the Bible until very late in the game. It was simply assumed without question it all had His stamp of approval.
It does not.
The very most basic Western assumptions about what is, what can be, and therefore what ought to be, are completely foreign to the Bible. Those of the Bible are so foreign to that of the US that most Americans can’t even recognize it. There is some visceral revulsion to what God said is His idea of justice.
I’m going to pick out one single issue: human life. This will be more comparative than simply descriptive.
In the Bible, life isn’t sacred in the sense that we claim it is for us. We act instinctively as if this life and this universe is all there is, and our sense of what is just depends on that notion. In the Bible, life is sacred only in the sense God is supremely sovereign in how it is used and ended. It belongs to God; no human owns his own life. God alone has a claim to it.
This alone is why the language of human rights is so blasphemous; it’s a direct attack on God’s Person and authority. You do not have a right to your life.
Further, God has delegated a measure of authority over human lives to a certain class of people He said He appointed to represent Him in certain contexts. It is generally role-based. From conception up through weaning, the life of the child is under the mother’s sole authority. Her role assumes a protective authority in the father of the child, but she is the final executive. She is directly accountable to God for executing His justice in regards to the life of that child within the social context. There is an assumption the father of the child will be involved; from there it includes some limited authority in the immediate kin whose blood runs in the veins of that child. Still, the ultimate decision is the mother’s. (Youth is not worshiped in the Bible — shock!)
You’ll notice right away it is complex and personal; it is blasphemous to attempt depersonalizing or objectifying this whole thing. It is all about persons and roles. God discusses how others can take a limited proxy for certain roles, but it’s all about people and we are moving on here.
During childhood, the rest of the immediate blood kin take a greater authority in the child’s life. No outside agency is permitted in any way to hold them accountable until that child is roughly nine years old, the age of concrete logic. It is the age at which symbolic learning (literacy) becomes genuinely possible, and there is a reasonable expectation that logic and intelligence has been developed functionally. Yes, most kids enter that stage at age eight, but need to use it awhile first. That is, they need to be able read and discuss what they read — presumably the simpler narratives of the Bible. This calls for them to begin forming the fundamental mythology of the culture. We use the term “mythology” here as the collective basic assumptions about reality, what is good and bad, etc.
After age nine, the child becomes a ward of the wider community in the sense they can participate in social life. The sexes are increasingly separated socially. At around age twelve, boys become apprentices of adulthood as symbolized in the Bar Mitzvah ceremony. Girls become apprentices of adulthood in preparation for marriage and domestic arts. The girls are generally kept away from all non-family males after age twelve or so. The emphasis is on removing temptation from the girls.
In adulthood, everyone is responsible to someone. There will always be someone who holds power over your life, someone delegated to the role by God’s revealed Laws. That someone must inevitably be kin by blood or marriage. Outsiders would seek to notify the perpetrator’s family if there is some crime. The family household is sacred to God. Your life becomes forfeit in quite a few ways, but someone in your family must have tried to teach you before age twelve, and certain reinforce it after that.
Certain kinds of major injustices you commit can forfeit your life to other families, clans, tribes, nations, etc. Lesser punishments are always possible, but there can be no precise and objective rules for this. It has to be fuzzy and flexible because people and contexts vary too much. Every family unit at every level is obliged to have at least one elder capable of judging most things. Taking the life of another will always follow prescribed reasoning under His Justice, and it is variable.
If you happen to include a spiritual awareness in this context, you begin to see life as a prison. It is something you hope to work through and depart at God’s earliest convenience. He remains the ultimate authority. Your human life is not a gift, but a burden. There are blessings from God in that life; a consciousness of calling defines your life and is the whole of whatever value it could have. There are some really fine moments, mostly consisting of insights into God’s character. This is how you see everything: a challenge for you to make sense of in light of what God has revealed to you. By no means do you regard your own life as precious and worthy of significant effort to preserve for its own sake. Rather, you hold it as a trust from God, to use for His glory in accordance with His instructions. You maintain it, or don’t, in the measure God reveals to you in your individual spiritual awareness. You don’t aim for a long life, but a just life, allowing God to decide a wide range of things typically referred to as “fate” in English. The idea is to seek insight into what that fate is coming from God’s hand today.
In God’s Justice, the value of a human life is whatever He says it is, and that definition fluctuates wildly by context over any given period of life. You presume blasphemously when you attempt to formalize it beyond what God revealed.
