TEN YEARS GONE: Equity, Justice, and Righteousness (Revised)

When Your Opponent Is Protecting Something Valuable

First published Thursday, February 4, 2016. Revised Saturday, June 20, 2026

O mighty King, lover of justice, you have established equity; you have executed justice and righteousness in Jacob.

— Psalm 99

I was struck recently by the fact that this single verse contains three words that have become deeply charged in modern political life: equity, justice, and righteousness.

Mention any one of them today and people immediately begin making assumptions about where you stand politically.

The word equity tends to be associated with the political left. Righteousness often sounds like the language of the political right. And justice is claimed by nearly everyone, though people frequently mean very different things when they use it.

What fascinates me is that Scripture seems entirely unconcerned with our categories.

The Psalm simply presents all three as virtues of God.

Not one.

All three.

Perhaps that should make us pause.

One of the habits that seems to dominate modern public life is the tendency to identify the value we care about most and then treat every competing value as a threat. We become defenders of justice while growing suspicious of righteousness. Or defenders of righteousness while dismissing concerns about equity. We convince ourselves that the value we champion is the only one that truly matters.

But reality is usually more complicated than that.

Often our opponents are not entirely wrong. Often they are protecting something important that we have overlooked.

The person talking about equity may be responding to real human suffering. The person talking about righteousness may be trying to preserve moral truths that should not be abandoned. The person talking about justice may be seeking accountability where accountability is genuinely needed.

The challenge is that none of these values function well in isolation.

Justice without mercy can become harsh.

Righteousness without humility can become self-righteousness.

Equity without wisdom can lose sight of human complexity.

The Psalm presents a more demanding vision. God is not forced to choose between these things. His character is large enough to hold them together.

That may be one of the reasons political solutions so often disappoint us. Human beings tend to grab hold of one truth and use it as a weapon against every other truth.

God does not.

For believers, then, the goal is not simply to win arguments or defend a tribe. The goal is to become people who love all three virtues: justice, equity, and righteousness. We should pursue them in our churches, in our communities, in our relationships, and yes, even in our public life.

Because if they all belong to God, then perhaps none of them belongs exclusively to a political party.

And perhaps wisdom begins when we stop asking which one matters most and start asking how God intended them to work together.