Honest Scales, Honest Gospel Text: Leviticus 19:35-37
Introduction: The Spirituality of a Gallon of Gas
We live in a time that loves to spiritualize everything and consequently makes nothing spiritual. We are told that faith is a private matter, a quiet affair of the heart, something that has to do with your personal feelings about Jesus on a Sunday morning. But when it comes to the marketplace on Monday, when it comes to the gritty details of commerce, contracts, and currency, we are told that this is a neutral zone. Here, we are to be practical, secular, and pragmatic. God, we are assured, does not care about the price of wheat or the accuracy of a scale.
This is a lie from the pit of Hell. It is a Gnostic lie that seeks to carve up reality into two domains, the spiritual and the material, and it hands the material world, the world of stuff, right over to the devil. The Bible knows nothing of this distinction. The God of Scripture is the God of everything or He is the God of nothing. He is the Lord of the sanctuary and He is the Lord of the stock market. He cares about your prayers, and He cares about your weights and measures.
The book of Leviticus is often treated by modern Christians like a dusty attic full of strange and irrelevant furniture. We might peek in out of curiosity, but we have no intention of living there. But this is the very Word of God, and it lays the foundation for a total worldview. It shows us what it means to be a holy people, set apart for a holy God. And what does that holiness look like? It looks like right worship, certainly. But right here, in the middle of the Holiness Code, tucked in with laws about idolatry and sexual purity, we find a demand for honest scales, just weights, and true measures. This is not an interruption of the spiritual instruction; it is the very application of it. God's holiness must extend to the checkout counter. Piety that does not result in honest business is no piety at all; it is a clanging gong.
Our text today is a direct assault on the modern lie that economics is a secular science. God ties our economic activity directly to our redemption from Egypt and anchors it in His own unchanging character. To cheat in the marketplace is not just bad business; it is a theological statement. It is a denial of the God who saved you and a rejection of the Lord who defines you.
The Text
‘You shall do no wrong in judgment, in measurement of weight, or in volume. You shall have just balances, just weights, a just ephah, and a just hin; I am Yahweh your God, who brought you out from the land of Egypt. You shall thus keep all My statutes and all My judgments and do them; I am Yahweh.’
(Leviticus 19:35-37 LSB)
The Foundation of All Justice (v. 35)
The command begins with a broad principle that is then applied with increasing specificity.
"‘You shall do no wrong in judgment, in measurement of weight, or in volume.’" (Leviticus 19:35)
The prohibition starts with "judgment." This is not just about a judge in a courtroom. The Hebrew word, mishpat, refers to justice in the broadest sense. It is about making right decisions, rendering true verdicts, and living in a way that reflects God's created order. All of life requires judgment. When a baker sells a loaf of bread, he is making a judgment about its weight and value. When a customer pays, he is making a judgment about the fairness of the price. There is no escape from this. Every transaction is a moral and judicial act.
Our secularists want to pretend that the marketplace is an amoral space governed by impersonal forces, like the law of supply and demand. But God says otherwise. He says that every economic exchange is an exercise in judgment, and therefore it must be righteous. To do "no wrong in judgment" means that all our dealings must be shot through with biblical righteousness. There is no neutrality.
From this high principle of justice, God immediately brings it down to the dirt. He applies it to "measurement of weight, or in volume." This is where the rubber of righteousness meets the road of reality. It is not enough to have lofty ideals about justice. Your philosophy of justice must be able to tell you what a pound is, and it must be the same pound today as it was yesterday. It must define a gallon and stick to it. Why? Because God is a God of truth, and truth requires objective, unchanging standards. When a society's weights and measures become unreliable, it is a sign that its concept of truth has become fluid. And a society with a fluid concept of truth is a society that is coming apart at the seams.
The Tools of Righteousness (v. 36)
Verse 36 gets even more specific, naming the actual instruments of commerce and tying them directly to God's redemptive character.
"You shall have just balances, just weights, a just ephah, and a just hin; I am Yahweh your God, who brought you out from the land of Egypt." (Leviticus 19:36 LSB)
Balances, weights, an ephah for dry goods, a hin for liquids. These were the everyday tools of the Israelite economy. And God demands that they be "just." The Hebrew word is tzedek, which is the word for righteousness. We are to have righteous scales, righteous stones, a righteous basket, and a righteous jug. This is radical. It means that righteousness is not an abstract feeling in your heart. Righteousness is a thing. It is a physical standard. It is a weight that is what it claims to be. A dishonest scale is an abomination to the Lord (Proverbs 11:1) because it is a physical lie. It is an assault on the nature of God, who is truth.
And then comes the thunderclap. Why must they do this? Because "I am Yahweh your God, who brought you out from the land of Egypt." This is the foundation of all covenant ethics. God does not say, "Be honest because it is good for business," though it is. He does not say, "Be honest because it builds a stable society," though it does. He anchors this command in two bedrock realities: His identity and His redemptive act.
First, "I am Yahweh." This is His covenant name. This is the God who is, the self-existent, unchanging foundation of all reality. Because He is eternally consistent, His people must be consistent. Our standards must be fixed because His character is fixed. To tamper with the weights is to create a different god in your own image, a shifty, unreliable god who changes with circumstances. It is practical atheism.
Second, He is the God "who brought you out from the land of Egypt." What does redemption from slavery have to do with honest weights? Everything. In Egypt, Israel was enslaved by a system of arbitrary power and economic exploitation. Pharaoh was a tyrant who changed the rules to suit himself. He demanded bricks without straw. His economic system was one of theft and oppression. God's deliverance was not just a spiritual rescue; it was an economic and political one. He rescued them from a crooked kingdom to bring them into a righteous one. Therefore, for an Israelite to then turn around and use a crooked scale on his brother is to spit on the grace of the Exodus. It is to take the freedom God gave him and use it to build a little Egypt in his own shop. It is a profound act of covenantal ingratitude.
The Sum of the Matter (v. 37)
The final verse broadens the scope again, reminding the people that this specific command is part of a whole-life response to God's authority.
"You shall thus keep all My statutes and all My judgments and do them; I am Yahweh." (Leviticus 19:37 LSB)
This is not a pick-and-choose religion. You cannot be fastidious about the temple sacrifices while cheating your customers. You cannot claim to love God, whom you have not seen, while defrauding your neighbor, whom you have seen. All of God's statutes and judgments form a seamless whole. They are a reflection of His character. To "keep" them and "do" them is the essence of the covenant life. It is not about earning salvation, but about living out the salvation you have already received.
And the command is sealed with that ultimate, unshakeable declaration: "I am Yahweh." This is the final word. There is no higher court of appeal. God's authority is not based on our consent or our understanding. His authority is based on His identity. He is the Lord. That is the beginning and the end of the matter. All ethical reasoning, all economic theory, all political philosophy must begin and end here. Yahweh is Lord, and therefore our scales must be true.
The Gospel in the Marketplace
Now, how does this apply to us? We are not under the Mosaic civil code in the same way Israel was. But the moral principle here is eternal, because the God who gave it is eternal. We have been brought out of a greater Egypt. We have been redeemed from our slavery to sin and death, not by the blood of a lamb on a doorpost, but by the precious blood of the Lamb of God, Jesus Christ.
Our slavery was to a system of ultimate fraud. Satan is a liar and the father of lies (John 8:44). Sin promises freedom and pays in the currency of death and bondage. The wages of sin is death. That is the ultimate crooked deal. We were promised life and fulfillment, and we received condemnation and emptiness.
But Christ, our true standard, our perfect weight, entered into this crooked system. He lived a life of perfect righteousness, of perfect tzedek. He fulfilled all the demands of God's just law. On the cross, He took upon Himself the unjust condemnation we deserved. The scales of divine justice were balanced, not by our works, but by His. God "made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God" (2 Corinthians 5:21).
Therefore, for a Christian to engage in dishonest business practices is an even greater blasphemy than it was for an Israelite. It is to deny the very nature of the gospel we claim to believe. How can we, who have been saved from the ultimate cosmic fraud, engage in petty fraud ourselves? How can we, whose debts were paid by the incalculable price of the blood of God's Son, quibble over a few cents by shaving the measurements?
This is why all attempts to create a sound economy apart from a return to the Christian faith are doomed to fail. Our modern economic chaos, with its fiat currency printed out of thin air, its spiraling debt, and its inflation which is a hidden tax and a form of systemic theft, is the direct result of abandoning the God of the Bible. We have rejected the true standard, so our standards have become a lie. We have rejected Yahweh, so our ephah and our hin are dishonest. We are trying to build a kingdom on the shifting sands of human autonomy, and the whole thing is sinking into the mire.
The call for us is clear. First, we must repent of the Gnostic lie that separates our faith from our finances. We must bring every economic thought and every transaction captive to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Second, as a practical matter, Christians ought to be the most honest, reliable, and trustworthy people in business. Our word should be our bond, and our work should be of the highest quality. Our scales, literal and metaphorical, must be just. This is our witness. This is how we show a watching world that our redemption is real. It is not just a ticket to heaven; it is a transformation that touches everything, right down to the last penny. For we serve the God who brought us out of Egypt, the God who is truth itself. We serve Yahweh.