Weights and Measures

“A just balance and scales are the Lord’s; all the weights in the bag are his work.”

Sometimes a proverb you’ve read dozens of times just hits you a different way. Perhaps Solomon is saying something like this: Every transaction fairly concluded has its governing principles derived from the character of God. If you got what you were looking for, it’s not because you were lucky, clever or deserving. It’s because the Lord sets and enforces the standards by which the world treats us and by which we are to treat others.

This is true whether we are talking about selling beef, meting out justice in the courts, or paying a day’s wage for a day’s work.

If You Missed NIST …

I recently enjoyed the ministry of a Christian who works for something called the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST … just one more American government organization I had never heard of. If you missed NIST, you’re not alone.

From their website, here’s the logic behind their existence:

“Everything you use in your everyday life works because of measurements. Without precise measurements, your car wouldn’t run, your phone wouldn’t work, and hospitals couldn’t function. We maintain the measurements that make industry and society work.”

I suppose Canada and every other reasonably civilized country must have something similar. Words like “inch”, “pound”, “liter”, “minute” or “megahertz” must all mean something consistent across any society that purports to function properly, and ideally, well beyond that. Trade, commerce and functionality depend on it. A pound of flour in Bug Tussle, Texas must equal a pound of flour in Poughkeepsie, and (ideally) in Toronto, Macau and Bangalore too. When an engineer in China builds a widget for a computer for sale by a company based in Tallahassee, Florida, he needs to know that it will fit in the housing the company purchased from their supplier in Venezuela. A doctor in Tuscaloosa who prescribes a milligram of substance ‘X’ manufactured in Chennai needs to know that’s exactly what his patient is getting. Less may not help him; more may kill him.

Unless we want to live the way people allegedly subsisted in the alleged Stone Age, we need consistent standards. Such designations must reflect a kind of small-‘t’ truth.

Taking Consistency for Granted

The NIST concept grabbed my attention because setting consistent standards across a huge nation is such a screamingly obvious requirement for a civilized, functioning society while simultaneously being the sort of necessity one never thinks about once its standards are there working away in the background for you and being quietly enforced. We take such things for granted.

Coming back to our proverb, balances and scales are tools calibrated to something beyond them. They were that way centuries before Christ and they remain that way today. Everybody from the wife baking a cake to the man inflating his tires makes use of such calibrations in almost every moment. They required a consistent standard long before anybody thought of creating an organization like NIST.

Likewise, the metaphorical weights and balances of the law must operate consistently, or massive injustices result. “You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great,” says the Law of Moses. Humanity needs the moral equivalent of NIST, and the Christian faith provides us with that reassurance.

Enforcing the Standard

The Golden Rule (“Do unto others”) only operates consistently and predictably under the assumption that Someone with the power to do so will eventually enforce compliance from all the balances, scales and weights in our world. Divine justice. Otherwise, there is chaos. The knowledge that there is moral analog for NIST is not only a brake on wickedness but also a great reassurance to the powerless. After all, an amiable atheist with a full stomach and wallet may treat me fairly when it pleases him to do so, but when his back is against the wall and I have something he desperately needs right now, there is nothing in his worldview to restrain him from taking it if he has the power to do so.

That’s not to say an atheist must misbehave, or that people with a knowledge of God always operate in ways that reflect his character. But the man who knows the balances and scales belong to God thinks twice before letting self-interest govern his actions. The man convinced that weights and measures — literal or moral — are mere social constructs may do absolutely anything he pleases when circumstances appear to require it.

I love the truth that God does not change. His standards are objective and eternal. Abraham noted that the judge of all the earth will do justice. He must. He cannot do otherwise because his values and measures derive from his character. All the weights in the bag are his work. Not one originated with you or me.