The Law is good and correct and valuable because God is good, true, and worthy. Law is the revelation of the order of the universe and that order is founded on the character of God. The Law expresses not simply His instructions for living but also the essential character of the God Who is. From the biblical perspective, God is the Law. First, the Hebrew view of the Law stands behind all apostolic occurrences of dike. To answer these questions, we must know a bit about the ideas behind dike (justice). Is there any difference between these two ideas? And if there is a difference, how can we communicate this difference when the language has only one word for both? So, Spanish translates all the occurrences of dikaiosyne as justicia, allowing no difference between the concepts that are expressed in English as justice and righteousness. From dike, Greek derives dikaiosyne (justification and righteousness). This is a result of the fact that the Greek root behind both of these words is dike (justice). There is only the word which means both justice and righteousness. In fact, there appears to be no separate word for righteousness. Looking up verses like Genesis 30:33, Deuteronomy 9:4, Psalm 5:8, Psalm 23:3, Matthew 5:6, John 16:8 and Romans 3:25 (along with dozens of others) in the Spanish translation of the Bible consistently produces the word justicia. A contemporary example is the problem of taking a single biblical concept like righteousness and expressing it in a Spanish-speaking culture where the word is universally translated justicia– justice. You might think that all of this is a result of moving from an ancient near-eastern culture to a contemporary one, but that is not the case. The trick is to help one side see the other. Every time I try to elucidate the meaning behind a Greek or Hebrew word from the Bible, I find myself standing between two very different views of reality.

It’s the way the language fits into the patterns of living when the worldview changes.

It’s not just the translation of the words that matters. Righteousness– Let’s have a conversation about the process of converting language from one culture to another. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.” Matthew 5:6 NASB

The hebrew word for right