Old Testament
Leviticus 19:35-36
35 “‘You shall do no unrighteousness in judgement, in measures of length, of weight, or of quantity.
36 You shall have just balances, just weights, a just ephah, and a just hin. I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt.
New Testament
James 5:4-5
4 Behold, the wages of the labourers who mowed your fields, which you have kept back by fraud, cry out; and the cries of those who reaped have entered into the ears of the Lord of Armies.
5 You have lived in luxury on the earth, and taken your pleasure. You have nourished your hearts as in a day of slaughter.
Leviticus comes close to the ground: weights, measures, honest volumes. Holiness is not only sung; it is weighed out. God’s people were commanded not to do ‘injustice’ in the ordinary instruments by which daily life is ordered.
James speaks with prophetic sharpness to those who live in plenty while others are deprived: wages withheld, workers unheard, the innocent condemned. The point is not that money is evil, but that wealth can become a veil behind which we stop seeing, and comfort can make a person forget how to tremble.
Trade policy sounds abstract until you remember what it touches: food, medicine, rent, schooling, work. In that sense, policy is a public set of measures. It can guard against cheating, limit predation, and restrain the strong; or it can make the strong stronger and the weak more exposed.
Lord, make us a people who can pray both in the sanctuary and in the marketplace without changing our standards. When we speak about ‘rules’ and ‘regulation’, keep us mindful of faces and names, and of the families who cannot absorb another shock. Teach us to desire a common life where the poor are not priced out of dignity. Help us to pray for fair measures in places we will never see.