Wise Men and the Link Between Justice and Truth

The Epiphany of the Lord commemorates the visit of the three wise men who traveled from the East to search out the infant Jesus and pay him homage.  These three men, referred to as Magi, were apparently wise enough to avoid King Herod on their return, demonstrating good judgment in the process.  Herod, on the other hand, lied to the Magi, and only wanted to find the Christ child so that he could kill him.  In his obsessive desire to retain power, he called for the murder of hundreds of infant children, in hopes of destroying the newborn king of the Jews.   

A couple things struck me about the scripture readings for this solemnity, the first being Psalm 72 which repeatedly uses the word justice to describe the way God leads His people through His kingship and the kingship of His Son:

“O God, with your judgment endow the king, and with your justice, the king’s son;
He shall govern your people with justice and your afflicted ones with judgment.
Justice shall flower in his days, and profound peace, till the moon be no more.”                                                                                                                     (Psalm 72:1-2,7)

Justice is a term often misunderstood and misused.  The practical application of Justice requires good judgment, and also demands an acute awareness of what is true and what is not.  “Everyone talks about justice, but there can be no justice where there is no truth, and there are times when truth is seldom recognized and often despised.”  This quote is from a Dean Koontz novel I’m reading at the moment (Innocence).  It captures the essence of the problem our country faces because the leaders of our nation refuse to acknowledge the truth of natural law, and in many respects, seem to despise the truths revealed by God through nature, scripture, and His Son, Jesus.   Like Herod, our president has lied repeatedly, about religious freedom, about conscience rights, and about abortion funding, to name but a few.  In the name of social justice, our government ignores the truth of the dignity of human life, while millions of babies are murdered in the womb.  At the same time, religious liberty which is protected in our constitution, is being violated by our Department of Justice , who last week filed a lawsuit against the Little Sisters of the Poor to require them to accept the so-called “religious accommodation” in which their employees would receive abortion-inducing drugs (Plan B and ella), contraception, and sterilization services, paid for by their health administrators. The Sisters operate a national chain of hospices and nursing homes, and face millions of dollars in fines under the Obamacare HHS mandate.  Their health plan is self-funded, so whatever their health plan administrator does, is being done with the Sisters’ money.  

The second thing that caught my ear in Sunday’s scripture was Isaiah’s use of the phrase, “the wealth of nations,” in describing the homage paid to God by those who believe in Him.  This is also the title of Adam Smith’s monumental work, considered to be the beginning of modern economic thought.  In it, Smith described the benefits of free markets, the value of labor, and the means by which supply and demand influence prices.   Smith was very critical of government interference in markets, demonstrating that it causes inefficiency and higher prices.  He published The Wealth of Nations in 1776 and it heavily influenced our founding fathers as they wrote our constitution with the intent of limiting government interference in commerce and State’s rights.  These “wise men” argued for years about how to limit the powers of the federal government and, in the first decade of our fledgling country, passed the bill of rights and laws such as The Northwest Ordinance, which contained the beautiful sentence, “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary for good government and the happiness of mankind, the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”  The Northwest Ordinance, passed in 1779, gave 1/36^th of the land in the Northwest Territories to State, local, and township governments for the purpose of establishing schools, to be managed at the local level.  In contrast, we now have a huge federal bureaucracy that ignores the truth that our country is rapidly going bankrupt, spending trillions of dollars we don’t have, on programs that suppress economic vitality. 

Whereas the Constitution contained a mere 4400 words, the Affordable Care Act contains 363,086 words and has resulted in more than 30,000 pages of new administrative rules and regulations, with about 10,000 new pages to be added each of the next several years.  Add to this the 14,000 pages (15 million words) of new regs from the Dodd-Frank bill, and you can understand why the wealth of our nation is in decline.

The truth about our national debt is that it represents a huge injustice toward our children and grandchildren who will inherit a bankrupt nation.  Our government insists on spending money we don’t have, in order to artificially prop up an economy that is being continually damaged and restrained by mountains of bureaucracy.  As if the vast bureaucracy now associated with banking, healthcare, and the environment weren’t enough, our government now has its sights on reforming education with the stated goal of better preparing young people for the workforce.  The common core, which I’ve written about previously, treats students as cogs in the wheel of our economy, eliminating educational elements that would teach students lessons from classical literature, and replacing it with efficiency in reading technical manuals.  Apparently the educational illuminati think it’s better to teach students to follow orders than to think creatively or understand something about the meaning of life.  I guess they think we need a proletariat rather than people who are creative, ambitious, and well-rounded thinkers.   Don’t they realize that we have moved beyond the industrial age, and that we live in a knowledge-based economy in which creativity and entrepreneurship will determine our success in the global economy?

You would think that the lessons of history would better inform our political thinking.  For example, during the great depression, FDR thought he could turn around the economy by increasing the profit made by big companies.  Consequently, he passed the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) which authorized him to regulate industries in an effort to raise prices.  What he did was empower large corporations to establish oligopolies, driving out smaller corporations and reducing competition.  This is well-known to have slowed the recovery, rather than sped it up.  Not until Ronald Reagan deregulated the phone, energy, and transportation industries, 50 years later, did we see a resurgence of competition, lower prices, and unprecedented job growth for more than a decade.

As we begin a new year, lets pray for leaders with the wisdom to recognize truth, so that “Justice will flower and… profound peace, till the moon be no more.”  (Ps 72:7)