Lamentations 3:64. "Thou wilt requite them, O Lord, according to the work of their hands." In this chapter, Jeremiah is lamenting not only the destruction of Jerusalem and the suffering of God's people, but also his own treatment at his people's hands. "They flung me alive into the pit and cast stones on me," he says (Lamentations 3:53), but he called out to God from the depths of the pit and God answered him. "Thou didst come near me when I called on thee; thou didst say, 'Do not fear!'" (Lamentations 3:57). Here, now Jeremiah is acknowledging that God will requite the people who treated him this way "according to the work of their hands."

How else would an all just God requite us, except by the work of our hands? That is true justice! God doesn't have to punish us, really, we do it to ourselves, He just allows us to experience the effects of what we have done. We are made in God's image and to be with Him; all that we are is, deep down, yearning for that. But we are also fallen, so the broken parts of us often rebel, pridefully doing, saying, and thinking things that are contrary, sometimes very contrary, to what we know, in our hearts, we were created to be and do. There is part of us, especially when we sin, that wants to deny the truth, but we can't run from it forever, we will eventually feel the effects of our denial.

When we sin, we are, essentially, creating our own false reality by countering God, who is reality, or truth, itself. That false reality becomes the "work of our hands." Depending on how willing we are to repent, we may go deeper and deeper into sin in order to protect our narrative and our egos, and to try to hide from God and the things we have done (like Adam and Eve tried to do). This can lead us to doing very evil things, like trying to kill God's messengers; or even just more banal, but still sinful, hurtful things, such as ignoring or even attacking people who are speaking truth to us, thus challenging our false narrative. Just like we get the relationships that we foster, and lose the ones we don't, we get the "reality" we foster, and lose true reality if we refuse to accept it. We can pretend for a while, sometimes a long while, that all is well; we can push the obvious bad effects of what we have done out of our field of vision, but the key to sanity is accepting reality, so this will effect our mental and emotional health. Since denial of God through unrepented sin is a denial of reality, it will, over time, warp us psychologically, and we will become some combination of unhappy, anxious, depressed, argumentative, and sometimes even despairing or violent. Our lives will become more and more miserable, as will the lives of those around us. All of this is not God devising some horrible punishment for us - it is us experiencing the fruits of what we have done and are doing. (By the way, if you are thinking that this may be, in large part, what is behind a lot of the turmoil and unrest we are seeing right now, I think you are right! I think much of it is the result of people lying to themselves I think much of it is the result of people lying to themselves or being lied to on a massive scale!)

As long as we are alive, though, there is always time to repent and allow ourselves to be brought into the truth. And if we are trying to lead good lives, striving for holiness, and repenting when we sin, we will also experience the works of our hands. Goodness and holiness bring us into the "real" reality, God's reality, Truth; and the truth is that we were created to be in Heaven with God. Living in holiness, we become more and more in harmony with God, and we experience the fruits of Heaven even while here in this fallen world. One of the psalm-prayers in the Liturgy of the Hours contains the line "Make us love and obey you, so that the works of our hands may always display what your hands have done". That is exactly right - our good works reflect God’s goodness, and help build His kingdom!

In the end, then, for good or for evil, we are requited according to the works of our hands. We get what we give, we experience what we have created. That is true justice.