...make yourself clean...

“16 Wash and make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight;     stop doing wrong. 

17 Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow. 

18 “Come now, let us settle the matter,”says the Lord. “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool”

Isaiah 1:16-18.

“Plead the cause” is a phrase found in the background of these verses. There’s also another backstory going on here because Isaiah is admonishing his audience to get clean. We must acknowledge our own condition before we seek to plead the cause to others. We must be right with Christ before we can plead with others to do so. Indeed, this is one of the challenges, or calls, of Advent!

In the context of the time the texts of Isaiah were written, “justice” refers to the “judicial process of settling disputes” and “arriving at something that is right and full of integrity.” Read Exodus 23, for example. Justice actively seeks an end goal that is oriented toward the complete “rightness” of a holy God. It seeks results that reflect His redemption in the midst of a broken world.

Righteousness and justice involve action, but this does not warrant dependence on either personal righteousness and social justice. We as a community need to be righteous and just. Only then is it an effort full of integrity that honors the Lord and holds fast to His commands. This integrity demanded by God is more practical than we might expect. After all, restoring fractured relationships is doing justice and practicing righteousness.

We can practically pursue what is right through the act of prayer, which is one of the fruits of daily’s prayer. Prayer is much more than just a passive response to the brokenness of the world, but in prayer we serve a God who tells us that “whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours” (Mark 11:24). He knows the tears and He desires to wipe them away. He knows the injustices that seem unconquerable and promises to make them right.

However, prayer is not just an individual endeavor. Something what we can do day by day is to pray with other people for other people, interceding at various levels for parents, families, leaders, and officials in the judicial system. By interceding in prayer we are able to effectively plead the cause of our neighbors in need.

The pursuit of justice laid out in Isaiah chapter 1, we ought to remember Micah 6:8: “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” Can you see that this verse calls us to do justice, but we often neglect the other two equally important exhortations. Our doing must be centered on more than ourselves. Acting justly is not mutually exclusive from loving mercy and devoting ourselves to the unfailingly unconditional covenant love of God. Justice does not reach its complete integrity if it is not rooted in the mercy extended by God to His people. However, the only way to simultaneously do justice and love mercy is to continually walk with God. Walking with God is the most important part of the process, and this calls us to truly plead the cause: by never separating a love for mercy and a passion for doing justice from walking humbly with God.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me a sinner.

From the Bible:

“Do not spread false reports. Do not help a guilty person by being a malicious witness.

2 “Do not follow the crowd in doing wrong. When you give testimony in a lawsuit, do not pervert justice by siding with the crowd, 3 and do not show favoritism to a poor person in a lawsuit.

4 “If you come across your enemy’s ox or donkey wandering off, be sure to return it. 5 If you see the donkey of someone who hates you fallen down under its load, do not leave it there; be sure you help them with it.

6 “Do not deny justice to your poor people in their lawsuits. 7 Have nothing to do with a false charge and do not put an innocent or honest person to death, for I will not acquit the guilty.

8 “Do not accept a bribe, for a bribe blinds those who see and twists the words of the innocent.

9 “Do not oppress a foreigner; you yourselves know how it feels to be foreigners, because you were foreigners in Egypt” Exodus 23:1-9.

“He is the Rock, his works are perfect,    and all his ways are just.A faithful God who does no wrong,    upright and just is he” Deuteronomy 32:4.

“Do not hastily bring into court, for what will you do in the end, when your neighbor puts you to shame” Proverbs 25:8?