Value Expressed By Means of Trade: Explored through a Paradigm of Adult Children and Their Parents

Lady Justice stands blindfolded with scales in her outstretched right hand and a sword in her left.  She was introduced by the Roman emperor Augustus, but the concepts communicated in allegory through her imagery reflect teachings of scripture.  The blindfold portrays impartiality (Leviticus 19:15), the sword the judgment of evil doing (Romans 13:4), and the scales represent justice itself (Proverbs 11:1).

Scales are for weighing and Lady Justice holds an old style balance scale.  It's a beam with a fulcrum in the center and identical pans on each end to hold the weight.  Justice meant the punishment fit the crime, the Latin lex talionis, equal retribution, which in the Old Testament was an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth (Exodus 21:24).  Justice is represented by equal weights on each side of the fulcrum, what Solomon called a "just weight and balance" (Proverbs 16:11).  A common way to rip someone off was to tip the scale on one side, what became known as "putting your thumb on the scale."  God asks His people (Micah 6:11):  "Shall I count them pure with the wicked balances, and with the bag of deceitful weights?"

Weight still represents value.  Packaging and labeling includes weight.  The more pounds and ounces, the greater the value.  The Latin word, gravitas, means, "weight or heavy."  The English "gravity" comes from it.  The Romans used the word to connote value and seriousness.  We still say we "weigh" the sides of an important decision.  Commodities still trade by weight:  corn, beans, oats, wheat, cotton, sugar, copper, lead, gold, silver, and platinum.

The two sides on the scale constitute a trade.  You give me this and I give you that.  Apples to apples.  Oranges to oranges.  All this thinking we got from God.  It comes from Him and it is in scripture.  It is foundational to everything right from the start.  Eat the tree, one side.  Death, the other side.  Before eating the tree, think about the punishment of death.  It is a trade.

Right now we have the coronavirus.  Quarantine to stop the disease is on one side and the destruction of the economy is on the other.  It is a trade.  It isn't as important as this one spoken by Jesus in Mark 8:36, "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"

In making that trade, Jesus brings other consistent language, such as 'counting the cost' (Luke 14:28).  When Jesus explains the gospel in His sermon in Matthew 5, He says, you are poor, but you inherit the earth.  You mourn, but you are comforted.  You hunger and thirst, but you are filled.  You are persecuted, reviled, and have all manner of evil said against you falsely, but yours is the kingdom of heaven.  In other teaching in Matthew 13, Jesus says, you give up everything to buy a field, because you know there is a treasure buried in it.  And you sell everything you have to buy one pearl.  The treasure and the pearl are salvation.

In many various ways, Jesus preached to trade this life for an eternal one.  If you hang on to this life, he said you will lose everything in the end.  It would be better to give up your sight in one eye than to end up with both eyes but in eternal hell fire, Jesus says someplace else.  Rather than offend one of these little ones, which is to cause one of them to never be eternally saved, it would be better to tie a giant millstone around your neck and throw yourself into deep water.

In describing the trade, the Apostle Paul said that he had to count as dung the best of everything he did, that he might win Christ (Philippians 3:8).  He had been putting his thumb on the scale of this life and giving himself a deceitful weight.  This trade was real.  It wasn't Paul fooling himself into thinking his life before was dung.  It was right to count it as dung, especially for what he calls "the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus" (Philippians 3:14).

The Apostle Paul writes one of the greatest expressions of trade for all time and eternity in 2 Corinthians 5:21:

For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.

We know sin and Jesus knows no sin.  The Lord Jesus is made sin so that we might be made righteousness.  We trade sin for righteousness by faith.  Without Jesus' righteousness, we trade sin for death now and hell in the end.

All the Christian life is a trade.  Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15:58 that your labor is not in vain in Christ.  Why?  "Vain" is empty.  Labor in Christ on the other hand is not vain.

Paul commanded the church at Ephesus, "Walk circumspectly. . . redeeming the time" (Ephesians 5:15-16).  Redeeming means making a better trade.  Stop trading something valuable for something worthless.  Every aspect of life is trading and the following will explore adult children and their parents as a paradigm.

My parents live with me.  I am an adult child.  How much value do my parents bring to me?  In my father's present state, I would estimate that he asks at least twenty times a day where my mom is.  That's just one very small example.  There are many more of those, but when he does ask, every time I tell him one of the only two places she could be, her room or the bathroom.  It's not his fault.  It's a disease.  What's the trade here?  What do I get?  I value my parents.  God values my honoring my parents.

God commands, obey and honor your parents.  If I love God, I keep His commandments.  That is some of that labor that is not in vain in Him.  That is redeeming the time.  My parents themselves are more valuable to me than the alternative.

Maybe for some of you reading here, or you know someone who might read this, you would give up your parents for your rock/pop music.  You can't give up the latter.  You can't.  You won't.  That's how little you value them, care about or for them.  They want you to stop certain behavior, but you would rather keep those activities, none of which are needed to please God, rather than keep your parents.  You can't give them up, but you are very willing to toss your parents.

Anything that you value more than God is an idol.  You can't have the world and the Lord Jesus Christ.  That's a trade.  Those are mutually exclusive.  But what about some temporal thing that you value more than your parents?   Paul said that he had to count his former life as dung.  He couldn't keep both lives.  One of them he had to give up.  What you value is expressed by means of a trade.  What you keep or get in that trade is what you really value.