The Scales of Justice

Proverbs 21:15 New American Standard Bible (NASB)

15 The exercise of justice is joy for the righteous,

But is terror to the workers of iniquity.

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The Lady of Justice is a depiction of our legal system.  Ideally, she represents fairness.  She is blindfolded because the law is supposed to be free of bias or corruption.  She's holding scales to show that she's weighing the evidence.  She's holding a sword to show that sometimes justice can be swift and final.  Let's be frank with one another and go ahead and say that, for the most part, there is no justice on earth, and we won't see it until Heaven.

I was thinking about scales after weighing in the Meat Birds last night using our kitchen scale.  I always have to adjust a little knob to zero it out so that I get an accurate reading.  It is important for the scale to be right.

Our kitchen scale borrowed from my Lady of Justice

We were eating a delicious bowl of Shrimp and Okra Gumbo tonight.  Tricia was digging in the deep freeze and pulled out the last quart bag of shrimp and decided to make a gumbo on maybe the last cool night in many months.  We began discussing the shrimp and it brought to mind a great story I'll tell you.

Several years ago we were outside working in the garden and a pickup truck came down the drive.  Often, people will drop in to purchase eggs or visit.  This person wanted neither.  She was selling fresh Gulf of Mexico shrimp.  She opened her ice chest to show us what she had.  They were beautiful, big, fat shrimp.  I forgot how much she was asking for her shrimp, but it wasn't unreasonable and we bought some.

As the lady selling shrimp was weighing them out, I don't know what prompted this, but my wife walked in the house and came back out with an unopened 5 lb. bag of flour.  She put that in the lady's scale and what do you know?  The scale was showing that the 5 lb bag of flour weighed 5 1/2 pounds.  We were getting cheated due to unjust scales.  I don't know if the lady was trying to cheat us intentionally or if it was just a mistake.

When caught, the lady apologized made our shrimp purchase amounts whole.  She repeatedly told us she felt so bad about everyone she had sold shrimp to earlier and shorted.  We got a good laugh while eating those same shrimp tonight, remembering that story.  My wife is a shrewd businesswoman!  I don't know how she thought of the bag of flour calibration method.  I would have never thought of that.

There is a moral to the story:  Don't try to cheat Tricia out of shrimp.  Her eyes aren't blindfolded.  They are wide open. She's watching your scale and she's carrying a sword!