“The Lord executeth righteousness and judgment for all that are oppressed.”

Psalm 103:6

Soren Kierkegaard told a parable about a traveling circus in Denmark. Shortly after the circus had arrived on the outskirts of a Danish town, a fire broke out in one of the heavy circus vans. The circus manager turned to the performers for help. Some of them were already beginning to dress for their acts. He hurriedly dispatched a clown to rush to the nearby village and call the townspeople to help put out the fire.

The clown in his ridiculous costume with his face smeared with grease paint, hurried to the town square and began to plead eloquently to the people to come to the circus grounds and help put out the fire. The villagers laughed and applauded this novel way of tricking them into coming to the big top. But the clown insisted that this was not an act he was putting on. The fire was real, and there was danger that the flames would race across the dry fields and burn up their homes and stores if they did not heed him and come quickly. But the more he pleaded and even wept in passionate entreaty, the more the villagers howled; until, the fire leaped across the fields and spread to the town. Before the villagers were aware of what was really happening, their homes had been destroyed.

The prophets and priests and preachers of religion have insisted through the centuries that God, the Supreme and Eternal Ruler of the universe, is a God of impartial and perfect righteousness and justice. They have declared that He will execute righteousness and justice on the earth. But the people have listened to these “word merchants,” these clowns and medicine men and quaint antiquarians, and they have hooped and hollered. They have counted it just an act, another mumbo-jumbo of religious ritual and nothing more. A crazy clown screaming: “Fire, Fire,” when there is no fire! Like the people in the days of the prophet, Zephaniah, they continue to say: “The Lord will not do good, neither will He do evil.” In short, the Lord will do nothing.

The prophet Micah painted a beautiful word picture of the last days when the universal rule of the Lord would be established in Zion, when the law of the Lord would go forth through all the world and the universal obedience to His just rule would result in universal peace and prosperity to all people. Then the nations would put away war and turn the destructive instruments of battle and bloodshed into the productive tools of commerce and service. Then the heavy burdens of armament building, impoverishing the nations, would be lifted in a universal disarmament program that would go farther than all the nuclear ban treaties. But the generations of people have hooted at Micah’s airy, unsubstantial vision of the peaceable kingdom. They have counted it nothing more than the wild ranting of a clown.

Jesus described the consummation of this world’s history in the imagery of one seated on a judgment throne, meting out justice, dividing all the nations of the world as a shepherd divides his sheep from his goats entirely on the basis of whether or not each person has seen in other people the very image of God and dealt compassionately with each one. But people have reacted as if Jesus were putting on an act, as if this declaration of the nature of ultimate judgment never had, and never would, have any basis in fact.

We shall be celebrating this week another Fourth of July, the traditionally observed birthday of the United States of America. We trace the origin of our Republic, the freedoms we enjoy, the American way of life, back to the signing of a historic document in Philadelphia, Pa., on July 4, 1776, by some wise and courageous men. We call this document “Our Declaration of Independence” which sets forth certain humanitarian principles secured under the rule of a just and righteous God.

Now what should be the nature of our celebration of this another glorious Fourth of July in relation to the smoldering hot spots that now threaten world wide conflagration: in Bosnia, Korea, China, and the ever dangerous tinder box of the Middle East, where Israel and her Arab neighbors have moved again to the edge of the abyss?

The terrorist bombing in Saudi Arabia last week jerks our startled attention to that geographical area where a wild fire could be ignited at any moment. Alvin Toffler in commenting on some of the explosive situations in the Middle East has asked: “What is likely to happen, not only in the U.S.A., but in the rest of the world, if the present rulers in Saudi Arabia are kicked off the throne? Is it likely that this tiny clique of ruling families, who control 25% of the world’s oil reserves, can cling to power indefinitely … while religious and political uprisings are sweeping over the Middle East? … What’s likely to happen if frogmen (from Iran or Iraq) would sink a ship in the Straits of Hormuz or mine its waters, thereby blocking half the oil shipments on which the world depends for survival.” (A. Toffler — The Third Wave — p. 414)

So long as such explosive spots exist, how may holocaust be averted? By believing the word of the prophets that on the throne of the universe, at the controls of history, presides a righteous judge who wills justice in all human affairs?

Are we, and the Israelis, the Iraqis, the Iranians, the Saudi Arabians, and all the other nations of the earth changing our methods of dealing with each other to conform to the demands of eternal justice as delivered by the prophets of God? Or are we still acting as if the words spoken are those of a clown, just putting on an act?

When the framers of our Presbyterian Westminster Standards got around to putting in words their concept of God, they included as one of the big, descriptive facets of God’s character His Justice. Listen again to our Catechism’s definition of God: “God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, unchangeable in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.”

Deep and far sweeping is the Hebrew-Christian tradition that the Lord God Almighty is a just God, executing righteousness and justice among all people, without partiality or prejudice and especially championing the cause of the weak and the oppressed, smashing tyrannical, unjust, and inhumane crimes and customs of mortal men and women.

From the earliest times the Hebrew people looked upon their law as an expression of the character or nature of their God. All their laws proceeded from the Covenant that the Lord had made with His people at Sinai. He, the Lord, had showed compassion on an oppressed and persecuted slave people. He had righted the injustices they suffered under their Egyptian bondage. He had freed them to become His obedient people through whom He would bless all the nations of the earth. The terms of their obedience were the keeping of His laws of just and fair dealings with their fellows.

What should be our response to the proclamation of the prophets and law-givers and apostles of the Judaeo-Christian faith that there is a just God ruling from His throne over the whole universe? If we really believe that their message is something more than a clown putting on an act, what will we do?

In his day, the prophet Micah grappled with this serious question. “What doth the Lord require of Thee?” he asks. “Will the just ruler of the universe be satisfied with the gift of a sacrificial system of religion which acknowledges God’s providence and gratefully expresses man’s dependence by bringing gifts of the first-fruits of the orchard and field, the firstlings of the flock, even the first born child of a marriage? Infant human sacrifices in the Middle East of ancient times sprang from such a religious instinct. Did not the fruits of a marriage belong also to God? asked primitive peoples. “Archeologists find ashes and remaining bones of sacrificial children deposited in urns in the corners of houses — the origin of laying a cornerstone (for a home)” — (Interpreter’s Bible — Commentary on Micah)

But Micah affirms there is for the earthly children of God a better religious response to the Lord of the Universe who has revealed Himself in His covenant dealings with men and women as a just God. So Micah made his brave declaration: “God hath shown thee, O man, what is good. And what doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.”

Being open to and obedient to the directives of eternal and perfect justice constitute all people’s worthy response to such a God of Justice.

Archibald MacLeigh in an address once pictured Abraham Lincoln in those dark days when he was on his way to Washington to be inaugurated President of the Republic which was falling to pieces. He recalled that Lincoln went by Philadelphia and into Independence Hall — “that small brick building where those hopes began. Abraham Lincoln said he had often wondered what had held those states so long together in the past. Certainly it was not the war of independence with the mother country. There was something in the Declaration which had been drafted 85 years before within those rooms, something which promised liberty — ‘not alone to the people of this country, but also to the world … something that promised … that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men.’” What had always held this country together Lincoln concluded: “was an idea, a dream, large and abstract, of the sort that realistic and sophisticated people might reject, but human kind can hold to.”

We know from the history of our nation that across the years a steady stream of refugees, fleeing the tyranny, oppression and injustice they suffered in the lands of their birth have sought refuge in that American dream of the Founding Fathers’ Declaration. Starving Irish, persecuted Jews, Vietnamese, Cambodians, citizens fleeing Soviet and Chinese tyranny and oppression have fled to these shores of ours and been welcomed. For the hospitable spirit of America has ever been as Emma Lazarus’ poem proclaims it on the base of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor:

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me! I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

And the proclamation of the Hebrew-Christian message is that the source and inspiration of that American dream of lifting the weights off the shoulders of all the peoples of the world, is the solid spiritual reality of a God who is a just God and who executes righteousness and justice for all.