Liberating Planet Earth

The Liberation of the State 101
and tainted with sin. As this passage amply demonstrates, the
Bible is hostile to the humanists’ quest for perfect justice on earth.
There will eventually be perfect justice administered by God on
judgment day.
Under Moses’ direct rule, God’s revelation was instantly avail- ~
able in any given case. Yet there was insufficient time available for
Moses to hear every case of legal dispute in the land. Perfect justice
was limited by time and space. Men had to come to Moses’
tent and stand in (presumably) long lines (Exodus 18:14). The
quest for perfect earthly justice from God through His servant
Moses was eating up countless man-hours. Not only was Moses’
time limited, but so was the time of those who stood in lines.
When people are waiting for justice, their lives tend to come to
a halt. They become unproductive. They are afraid to commit
scarce economic resources to their tasks. They hold back, hoping
to get an area of uncertainty in their lives resolved by civil justice.
Jethro recognized the limitations of even a system of perfect
justice, where God’s word came directly to the people. Such a system
could not work. It was too great a burden. Better to have an
appeals court system judged by men with less than perfect insight,
so long as justice was speedy. Better to have speedy justice and to
get back to living normal routines than to have perfect justice several
years down the road of life.
Who was fit to be a judge? The standards are similar (though
not so rigorous) to the standards given for elders and deacons in
the church (1 Timothy 3): “. . . able men, such as fear God, men
of truth, hating covetousness.” Character counts for more than
technical knowledge of the law.
Consider the available judges. They had grown up as slaves.
The whole generation, except for Joshua and Caleb, possessed
slave mentalities. Nevertheless, their rule was preferable in most
cases to a system which offered perfect justice in individual cases,
but which had to ration the number of cases. Conclusion: regular
and predictable justice provided by responsible amateurs is better than
perfect justice provided on a sporadic or “first in line” basis. The
burden of dispensing justice had to be shared (v. 22). This was re-