​Ephesians 4: 14 – 32
 
The Apostle Paul wrote the Ephesian Epistle from his prison in Rome around A.D. 60, to strengthen the believers’ faith by teaching them the significance of their heavenly citizenship, and its requirement to live as God’s testimonials. From its prologue, the Ephesian narrative described an unusual realm that we can only tag as ‘heaven-on-earth,’ where the church is earth-bound but with a heavenly milieu: it’s neither completely one nor the other. However, we are clear on one point – the radical power to live an earthly transformed lifestyle can only be derived from God. The Kingdom of Heaven is here with us, albeit in an incomplete sense, as we “grow up in all aspects into Him… until we attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ” (Eph 4:15,13). How that is achieved is then partially exposited by Paul in the rest of his Letter. We will only focus on a limited segment.
 
The reminder by Paul that we are no longer children is an apt analogy (Eph 4:14), for youngsters soon develop a will of their own and would resist any reasonable parental demands despite the latter’s’ best advice, and would even at times, by craftiness and deceit, get their own way; if we allow them to get away with it. In this context, the believers are encouraged to not be misled by the trickery and cunning of others into theological unorthodoxies, but to consider themselves as one covenant community in Christ, committed to practicing the truth in love (Eph 4:15a; the Greek form does not indicate a verb for “speaking,” but is a participle, a verbal adjective, literally translated as “truthing in love”; cf., Eph 4:25). The writer’s thought is about engagement – by living the truth before each other. Biblical ‘truth-living’ is demanding and is a reason for our routine nominalized faith in practice, as it involves taking responsibility for how we interpret the world around us in the light of others and the Scriptural standards. Undertaking responsibility requires responsiveness, which is not a mere subjective state, but a way of responding to what is before us with the resources that are available to us as social beings in Christ. That is how Jesus responded to our needs; even in His silence, He speaks.
 
Further, Paul spelt it all out explicitly how this community was going to transform itself (Eph 4:25-32). He began by informing the Ephesians that they are not to revert to the meaningless condition of their pagan past (Eph 4:17), which resulted in hardened hearts and ignorant minds (Eph 4:18). The outcome of such a combination was a pervasive self-centeredness and an uncaring and materialistic attitude (Eph 4:19). It is an excellent practice to remind ourselves where we would be today, if not for God’s salvific action in our lives. Paul’s motive was for the Ephesian community to embody corporately Jesus’ way of life. They must renew their minds and think from their new position in Christ, being righteous and holy in recognizing and eradicating destructive community routines which subvert others’ integrity (Eph 4:20-24). Understandably, he is only able to list a salient few which are particularly toxic among any group of people (Eph 4: 25-32). 
 
It is appropriate to remind ourselves that Paul was writing to believers about an unmistakable darkness of double mindedness that still plaques us all, often contradicting the Christian values inherent in our heavenly citizenship. The crux of his letter was to foster a Spirit-empowered community mindset and behaviors, characterizing the heavenly nature of an earthly church.

​Psalm 146
 
The Psalmist first reminded us by his perceptive appreciation of God’s absolute trustworthiness and almighty creative power by comparing these eternal attributes with man’s innate follies (Ps 146:6). This portrayal of our Creator, as the be-all-and-end-all of man’s ultimate hope is future-oriented, and it possesses colossal ramification concerning who we ultimately and consistently trust in this world. He then turned his attention to a motley group of people who hardly would have been the focus of any consideration - society’s non-descripts! It is not that He is indifferent to the political shenanigans in our broken world, but despite His commitment to care for everyone, He possesses a distinct predilection in His love and concern for the world’s underdogs (c.f., Deut 10:16-21; Is 61: 1-2; James 2:14-17), in providing for their welfare and seeking justice for their causes. It is within this context that the psalmist also exhorts us to continue to worship and keep faith with the One who saves and Who is faithful to the end (Ps 146:1-6). 
 
There are over 400 occasions in Scripture, where the Hebrew noun 'mishpat' generally translated as justice, judgments, just, or ordinances, is used to remind us about God’s laws, His principles of justice, and the need for His people to practice His form of justice to all (cf., Micah 6:8). He then lists who He meant by the oppressed: the poor, the unjustly imprisoned, the alien, the orphans, and the widows (Ps 146:7-9; c.f., Prov 31:8-9). Justice as defined within the context of divine law is meant to be applied equally among the Israelites, as well as strangers, or non-Israelites in their midst (Lev 24:22). It is significant that what God was looking for is certainly not a casual intermittent assistance towards the afflicted and burdened, but a perennial way of life of seeking to intentionally alleviate their distresses - a lifestyle of living justly and aiding those who have been unjustly treated.
 
Job’s own description in his defense before Yahweh, of his righteous ministry towards society’s underdogs in his days, is exemplary where justice, as he portrays it, was like a robe and a turban – meaning, akin to an everyday responsibility (Job 29:12-17). Today’s societal partialities are no different from the Old Testament era, where many are still being enslaved, incarcerated, persecuted, and murdered by powerful interests in different countries and communities, whether differentiated by politics or religion, race or otherwise. As God’s people, we cannot turn a blind eye towards these evil misdemeanors. Job understood that for him to notice these injustices and not do anything about it, was likened to have God punish him by ‘dislocating his shoulder and breaking his arm’ – not only is it a sin against the Almighty but a personal blight (Job 31:13-23; Prov 14:31).   
 
A self-righteous individual is incapable of contemplating mercy towards another, and therefore to expect him to initiate justice for the oppressed is improbable. Additionally, the peril of a black-and-white mode of impatient justice, often without due consideration for compassion becomes a form of cognitive distortion, where justice for justice’s sake is applied irrespective of mercy. God, on the other hand, would always be gracious and magnanimous in forgiving and encouraging change for the better, and when He does judge, the guilty, invariably, would have consciously ignored many prior opportunities to reform (cf., Ps 103:6-14).