Have you ever seen a victim say the following: "I have forgiven, but the legal process must continue. Most people are amazed by his generosity, but some others respond with cynicism. They were highly suspicious of whether the forgiveness was truly born out of love, or just a normative gesture uttered for the sake of public image. We are often molded by the notion that loving means being gentle, giving in, and away from assertiveness. Whereas love can also come from firmness and courage, which gives birth to justice and siding with victims of injustice.

This kind of suspicion is understandable, given that forgiveness is often misunderstood as a quick way to reduce conflict, rather than an honest and restorative inner process. In social relations, harmony is often built by avoiding tension. So love is reduced to a tool to maintain calm, not the courage to face the truth. As a result, love is easily perceived as soft and indecisive.

Psalm 149 challenges that perspective. The psalm opens with joy: new songs, dances, and praises to God who delights in His people and crowns the humble with salvation (v. 4). The joy is rooted in hesed, God's faithful love that accepts and restores. Thus, the people rejoice because they are loved, not because the world has become just.

But the praise did not stop at a purely spiritual experience. Amidst the singing and cheering comes the image of a two-edged sword in the hands of the people (v. 6). Textually, the sword here is not a symbol of violence, but rather a symbol of the ethical call to carry out the “judgment as it is written” (v. 9). God's steadfast love does not produce a passive people, but a people who take part in God's work of restoration of the world. In fact, love becomes the power to carry out His justice indiscriminately.

Friends of the Bible, Psalm 149 reminds us that love and justice are not two values that negate each other, but rather one faith calling that must be lived out together. In the midst of fractured relationships, legal processes that often disappoint, social media spaces that are easily filled with hate speech, even in church life that often denies conflict instead of resolving it, love is often misunderstood as silence and defeat. Whereas true love frees the heart from resentment, it does not desensitize it to injustice. It is precisely because it is faithful that love dares to be firm. Being loved by God means being called to be both a recipient and a doer of hesed, bringing the joy of mature faith through the courage to stand on the side of truth and justice.