Mt. Rose OPC

Our Old Testament reading is Exodus chapter 23, verses 10 through 19. Exodus 23, 10 through 19, and this is the holy word of our Lord.

For six years you shall sow your land and gather in its yield, but the seventh year you shall let it rest and lie fallow, that the poor of your people may eat, and what they leave the beasts of the field may eat. You shall do likewise with your vineyard and with your olive orchard. Six days you shall do your work, but on the seventh day you shall rest, that your ox and your donkey may have rest, and the son of your servant woman and the alien may be refreshed. Pay attention to all that I’ve said to you and make no mention of the names of other gods, nor let it be heard on your lips.

Three times in the year you shall keep a feast to me. You shall keep the feast of unleavened bread. As I commanded you, you shall eat unleavened bread for seven days at the appointed time in the month of Abib. For in it you came out of Egypt. None shall appear before me empty-handed. You shall keep the feast of harvest, or the firstfruits, or of the firstfruits of your labor, of what you sow in the field. You shall keep the feast of ingathering at the end of the year, when you gather in from the field the fruit of your labor. Three times in the year shall all your males appear before the Lord God.

You shall not offer the blood of my sacrifice with anything leaven or let the fat of my feast remain until the morning. The best of the first fruits of your ground you shall bring into the house of the Lord your God. You shall not boil a young goat in its mother’s milk.

Let’s turn now to Romans chapter 12 for our New Testament reading. Romans 12 verses one and two. Romans 12, one and two.

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.

If you watched any of the Winter Olympics that were on a few weeks ago, I’m sure that you couldn’t help but being impressed by the talents and the skills of the athletes that were competing in their various events. Those athletes, they are truly the best of the best. But maybe the most impressive thing about those athletes is what we don’t see, what isn’t broadcast, and that is the hours and hours and hours of training each day that they put in for years and years on end.

If you’re going to be an Olympic athlete, if you’re going to be an athlete at that elite level, you must be extremely devoted to the training, the preparation that it takes to reach that level of success in any given sport. And that kind of devotion on the part of athletes to their sport is a picture in some ways of the sort of devotion that God calls you as a Christian to give or to devote yourself to God.

You are to devote yourself to Him in service, in worship, in obedience, not just a few hours each day, not just a few days each week, but every day, all the time, you are to give yourself, to consecrate yourself to serving the Lord, to worshiping Him, seeking Him, loving Him. And so Christ calls you not just to devote part of your life to Him, but you are to consecrate the entirety of your life to your Savior and Lord.

This has always been the standard that God has set for his people. He has always demanded their wholehearted obedience, devotion, worship, their complete and unreserved consecration to Him. God wants all of us, not just part of us.

In these verses that we read from Exodus chapter 23, they give us a picture of the way in which the Lord called His Old Testament people, the people of Israel, to commit their lives to Him as their God and Savior. Again, as we are going through this section of Exodus, we are dealing with all kinds of various laws that the Lord gave to his people after he gave them the Ten Commandments. So we have seen various civil laws, judicial laws. These laws here mainly have to do with ceremonial duties on the part of the Israelites.

And as we look at these laws, one theme at least that we can use to tie these laws together—one common denominator that they have in common in our passage—is that they all, in one way or the other, they all call for the consecration of the people of God to the Lord. They call for their complete devotion to God. And so as we look at this passage this morning, we’ll see how the Lord called his people to be devoted to him in these different ways. And then we’ll see how Christ still speaks to us as Christians today through these laws and calling us to be completely devoted to him as our Lord and savior.

And so let’s just go through these laws and we’ll consider them somewhat briefly. In verses 10 and 11, the Lord commanded his people to give their land a rest every seventh year. And so they were to farm their lands for six years, but on the seventh year, they were to let their fields lie fallow. And they were to do the same with their vineyards and their olive orchards. And so this was a Sabbath for the land. This was a Sabbath rest for the land.

Just as the people of Israel were to rest one day each week, so the land also was to have a rest one year every seven years. And there could be, and no doubt there is, good agricultural reasons for doing this. If the fields lie fallow once every seven years, it gives them time to regain their fertility. But notice that in this passage, that’s not the reason why the Lord gave the Israelites that they were to give their land rest every seven years. But it was so that through this lack of cultivating the land once every seven years that the poor may have something to eat. And not only the poor, but that even the beasts of the field may have something to eat.

And so this is one way in which God would provide for his people, particularly the poor among his people. And so if the Israelites, if they trusted in God’s provision, if they trusted that the Lord would provide, even though they wouldn’t go out and work their fields that year, they would give their land a Sabbath rest, and they would see how the Lord would provide for them, especially for the poor among them.

And in the same way, the Lord called on his people to trust him for his provision when he commanded them to rest one day of the week, one day in seven. And so in verse 12, we have what is essentially a restatement of the fourth commandment, which we considered several weeks ago. The people were not to work on the Sabbath day, and that was so not only they could rest from their labors, but also that their servants could rest from their work, their animals could rest from their labors as well, that they could be refreshed and strengthened.

As the Israelites were faithful to keep this Sabbath commandment, they also in this way testified to their faith, their trust that the Lord would provide for them, that he would give them all that they need. They did not need to devote themselves entirely all seven days of the week to secure what they needed to survive, but they trusted that God would provide for them even by taking a day off one day in seven during the week. And so the Lord called on his people in these ways to dedicate themselves to him. They were to dedicate their land to him. He commanded them to devote their time to him. And as they did so, the Israelites would bear witness to the truth that God was faithful to provide. He was their great provider.

The Lord also called for the devotion of his people in observing the annual feasts that he had appointed for them. And that’s what we read about in verses 14 through 17. Every year, the people of Israel were to travel to Jerusalem three times in the year and to celebrate these annual feasts that are described for us.

And the first feast was the feast of unleavened bread. For seven days after the day of Passover, the Israelites were to eat unleavened bread. And this was a celebration, a commemoration of that great salvation that the Lord worked for his people in bringing them out of Egypt, bringing them out from under their bondage to Pharaoh. Verse 15 says, you shall keep the feast of unleavened bread. As I commanded you, you shall eat unleavened bread for seven days at the appointed time in the month of Abib, for in it you came out of Egypt. And they ate only unleavened bread in order to commemorate the fact that when the Lord brought them out of Egypt, they left in such a hurry that their bread did not have time to rise. And so they would eat unleavened bread to remember how the Lord rescued them from Egypt. And so it was an annual reminder for them, this feast of the salvation that the Lord gave them.

And this was another reason why the Israelites were to devote themselves to the Lord. He was not only their provider, but he was their savior. And therefore, he deserved the worship of the people of Israel, of all the people of Israel. He says in verse 15, none shall appear before me empty handed.

The second feast was the Feast of Harvest. Elsewhere in the New Testament or the Old Testament rather, the Feast of Harvest is called the Feast of Weeks. It took place about two months after the Feast of Unleavened Bread. And the occasion of the Feast of Harvest was to celebrate the beginning at least of the harvest of grain that they were beginning to reap from their fields. And so this was a celebration again of God’s provision. They brought the first fruits of their crops to the Lord as a way of offering.

Finally, the third feast was the Feast of Ingathering. This also has different names in the Old Testament. It’s called the Feast of Tabernacles or the Feast of Booths. And this took place several months after the Feast of Harvest. This took place in the fall. And the occasion for the Feast of Ingathering was to celebrate the ingathering of all the different crops in Israel before the onset of winter. And so grain, olives and grapes, they had all been brought in from the fields. And so as they celebrated this feast at the end of all the harvests, they were giving praise to God for his provision again.

But this was also a feast to remember their salvation from Egypt. In Leviticus, we read that the Israelites during the feast of ingathering, that they were to live in tents or in booths for seven days. And this was to remind them of their salvation from Egypt because when they were delivered from the land of Egypt and in the wilderness, they lived in tabernacles or in booths.

And so the Lord commanded then his people to observe these three yearly times of feasting and worshiping. When you look at verse 17, it seems to suggest that only the male Israelites would participate in these festivals. But when we compare other verses from the Old Testament that we won’t look at, it’s apparent that it was normal, perhaps even expected, that whole families would join in as well in celebrating these festivals. And so these festivals were for the people of Israel in general; for them as a nation, as a people, they were to observe these times of feasting and worshiping. And in this way, they would dedicate themselves to their God, to the Lord, who was both the one who provided for them, who cared for them, but he was also their redeemer, their savior.

When we look at the rest of these laws in this passage, again, the common theme running through them is the Israelites’ devotion to the Lord. And it goes on to speak of their worship. In verse 18, we read that the Israelites were not to mix the blood of their sacrifice with anything leavened, and they were not to let the fat of the Lord’s feast remain until the morning. The fat was the best part of the meat, and it was considered the best part of the meat in those days. I don’t know if that’s what you think the best part of the meat is, but it was to be given to the Lord. All the fat was to be burned up on the altar. So if the Israelites waited until the morning to burn up the fat on the altar, they were sinfully withholding from the Lord what belonged to Him. And so it was not to be put off until the morning.

Verse 19 says that the best of the first fruits of your ground, you shall bring it to the house of the Lord, your God. And so whenever the Israelites were to bring the first fruits of their crops to the Lord, they were to bring the very best of their crops, the very best of their first fruits, because it was God whom they were worshiping and he was deserving of their best.

When you go to the grocery store to buy fruits or vegetables, you look over what they have, and you pick over what’s there, and you choose the best looking oranges or apples, and then you let the rest of the customers take whatever rejects that you left behind. Well, the Israelites, they were supposed to do something like that, only they were to pick out the very best of their produce, not for themselves, but for God. And so in that way, they were to devote what they had to the Lord.

Finally, there is in the second half of verse 19, a rather strange verse. You shall not boil a young goat in its mother’s milk. This is one of those verses sometimes you read in the Old Testament, especially in these law sections that seem to come out of nowhere. There’s no explanation attached to it. Just be sure you don’t let your pastor see you boiling a goat in its mother’s milk. There will be trouble.

But most likely, this verse is an expression of God’s concern, even for animals. Again, people don’t really know why this law is here. There’s some guesses, and this is as good as a guess as any, but it would be a very cruel thing, a very perverse thing to take the milk of a mother, the mother of a young goat, the milk that is supposed to nourish and sustain the life of her offspring, to use that very milk to boil the flesh of her young. And so evidently this was a practice that needed to be forbidden, prohibited. And so the Lord prohibited the Israelites from doing this.

In the middle of all these laws in verse 13, which comes in the middle of these laws, is kind of a summary of what the Lord is communicating to his people. And that is this: they were to be wholly consecrated to the Lord. They were not to pay attention to any other God or idol. Verse 13 says, pay attention to all that I have said to you. So the Israelites were commanded to obey everything that God had spoken to them. Make no mention of the names of other gods, nor let it be heard on your lips.

And so when you consider these laws, especially when you consider them in addition to all of the other laws that we’ve already considered in the last few weeks, it’s obvious that the law that God gave to his people, these various commandments, that they would impact every aspect of their lives. And so it was a reminder to them that they were not their own. They belong to the Lord.

And so their land—their land didn’t belong to them to be used however they saw fit. It wasn’t simply for them to make a profit, but they had to manage it according to the law of God. The Israelites were not free to schedule their time any way they wished, but they had to attend these annual feasts. They had to keep the Sabbath day, one day a week, holy for rest and worship. They certainly were not free in religious matters. They had to give themselves and worship in service to the Lord and only to the Lord. They could not mix the worship of the Lord with other gods, other idols, but they were to worship him according to his word as he commanded.

And so everything in the life of the Israelite—his time, his land, his wealth—it was all to be wholly consecrated to God. And they were to be wholly devoted to the Lord because of who he was, because he was the God who loved them, who cared for them, who provided for them, and who rescued them, who saved them from Egypt and from their bondage to Egypt and Pharaoh.

In fact, when we read these laws in the light of the New Testament, we see it’s evidence that the Lord was revealing to his people, the Israelites, that he was their savior, not just from their bondage to Pharaoh and Egypt. He was the one who provided for them, not just with what they needed for life in this world, but he revealed to them through these laws that the Lord was their savior from their bondage to a far greater enemy, that is their bondage to sin. And he was the one who had provided for them, not just what they needed for temporal life in this world, but the Lord was the one who provided what they needed for eternal life, for spiritual life.

And so the greatest blessings that God gave to his people in the old covenant, as well as the new, were not earthly blessings, temporal blessings, but they were spiritual, eternal. And so the land that the Lord would give the Israelites, that they were to farm a certain way, the land of Canaan, the land of promise, this land was just a shadow of the greater heavenly country that the Lord was preparing for his faithful people.

The Sabbath day, of course, it pointed back to their salvation from Egypt, but at the same time, it pointed ahead to the eternal Sabbath rest that God was preparing for his people. And insofar as these three annual feasts reminded the Israelites of their redemption from their bondage to Pharaoh, they also pointed the Israelites ahead to that greater salvation that the Lord was preparing for them, that he would accomplish for them through the Messiah, through the Christ, that is freedom from slavery to sin.

Insofar as these feasts were times to praise God for the provision of their daily bread, they would also be reminders to Israel that it was the Lord who not only provided their daily bread, their grain and wine and so on, but he also provided them spiritual bread. He provided them the spiritual sustenance of his word and promises. And so in Deuteronomy 8:3, the Lord declared to Israel that it was his will that they would know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.

And we can go on. The blood of the sacrifices of the Israelites, that they were not to mix with leaven. This was the blood that pointed them to the blood of that one perfect sacrifice that was to come that would take away their sin forever. And it is as we stand where we are after the coming of Christ, we can look back and we can see it was Jesus Christ. It was the Messiah who fulfilled all of these promises that were implied in these laws and in these feasts.

He is the true spiritual bread. Jesus said, I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me shall not hunger. Whoever believes in me shall never thirst. And just as the Passover lamb pointed to Christ, who is the lamb of God, who takes away the guilt of sin, so the leaven of the feast of unleavened bread pointed to the presence of sin in us, that we are to purge that sin, that we are to purge by the grace of God as the redeemed people of God. Paul says in 1 Corinthians, cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our Passover lamb has been sacrificed. Let us therefore celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

And again, we can go on and see how Christ fulfilled these laws and the promises implied in them. The Feast of Harvest was a day or the day that the New Testament calls Pentecost. And it was the day of Pentecost that the exalted Lord Jesus, that he poured out his spirit upon the church. And it was a celebration there, not just of the harvest from the fields, but it was the beginning of a far greater harvest, the harvest of redeemed people, redeemed by Christ, converted by the Spirit, brought into the kingdom—a great harvest of souls began on that day.

Also, just as the firstfruits of the Feast of Harvest were a sign of a greater harvest to come, so the Lord Jesus in His resurrection is called in 1 Corinthians the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. And so Jesus, as the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep, that points again ahead to a great spiritual harvest, the harvest of countless resurrected souls, resurrected saints who will come to new life at the return of Christ.

Verse 18 speaks of the blood of my sacrifice. All the blood of the sacrifices that the Israelites offered to the Lord pointed to the shed blood of Christ that cleanses us from sin and frees us from all guilt and condemnation. And so in one way or another, these laws and these feasts, they reveal to the Israelites the greater salvation that was to come with the coming of Christ, the greater provision of spiritual blessings, eternal blessings that God had in store for his people.

And the salvation from bondage to sin and death, the gift of eternal life—these realities that these laws and these commandments pointed to and these festivals pointed to—these are now yours in fullness by faith in Jesus Christ, the Son of God. As you come to Him by faith, as you hold fast to the Lord Jesus Christ by faith, these promises are yours; your sins are forgiven. You have been freed from the bondage of sin. You have been freed from the bondage to sin and guilt and death forever. You have Jesus, the bread of life, who gives you eternal life, who sustains you in that life.

And so Jesus Christ is your great savior. He is your great provider. And for that reason, just as the Lord called the Israelites then to devote themselves, to give themselves in obedience and service and worship to the Lord who was their savior, so you are called to that same kind of complete, unreserved, wholehearted devotion and consecration to Jesus Christ because of the work of salvation that he has accomplished for you.

And that’s what we read in the New Testament reading in Romans chapter 12. If you remember when we went through the book of Romans, the first 11 chapters of Romans, in Romans, Paul unpacks the gospel and all of its different aspects of that grace that God has given to us in Jesus Christ. And then beginning with chapter 12, verse one, Paul says this: he says, I appeal to you brothers by the mercies of God to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.

As Christians, we are called to consecrate ourselves, our bodies, to the Lord in worship as a sacrifice. And your bodies here means all that you are. Body and soul, you are to offer to God as a sacrifice. And so unlike the Israelites, you don’t bring to the Lord sacrifices of grain or of animals, but you bring to the Lord your body, your heart, your mind, your will, all that you have, all that you are, you bring to the Lord as a living sacrifice. That is the worship, the life to which God calls you as one whom he has redeemed from sin and death.

At our men’s fellowship meetings, we are working through a book by John Calvin, and John Calvin had a motto, and his motto was this—his personal motto: “My heart I offer to you, Lord, promptly and sincerely.” And this should be the motto of every believer. My heart I offer to you, Lord, promptly and sincerely.

If someone saw your life, if someone examines the course of your life and was even able to examine your thoughts and your hearts, if he saw the priorities that you make, if he saw how you spend your time, how you use your money, if he saw how you relate to others, how you think of others, if he saw the things that you think about, the things that you delight in and treasure—if he saw your life, would he be able to say, here’s a life, here is the life of a person who is devoted to Christ, his savior. Here is the life of a person who has consecrated herself to her Lord, Jesus Christ.

The truth is none of us are as devoted to Jesus as wholly, as unreservedly as we should be. But we have the promise of God that by his spirit at work in us, by the word that he has given us, he will work in us to conform us more and more to the image of Jesus. He will make us more like that one man who gave himself, the one and only man who ever gave himself in complete, total, unreserved devotion to his God.

But the Spirit of God, as a believer, you have the Spirit of God abiding in you, living in you, working in you, to grow you to be more like Christ. None of us are there yet. But as God gives you the grace to trust in Him, as God gives you the grace to walk by faith, to serve and worship Him, He will make you more and more an instrument set apart and devoted to Him.

You may be familiar with the story of the famous Japanese dog named Hachiko. Hachiko was a dog in Japan, an Akita, if you’re familiar with that breed. He lived in the 20s and 30s, the 1920s and 30s. His owner was a professor at the University of Tokyo. And every afternoon when Hachiko’s owner got off at the train station on his way home from work, his dog Hachiko would be there waiting for him on the train platform. One day his owner didn’t get off the train and that’s because his owner died at work. He had a heart attack and died. And so Hachiko that day went home alone.

He showed up again the next day at the train station at the time that his master should have been getting off the train. But his master was not there to meet him. And so he went home again. And then he showed up the next day at the right time waiting for his master and he showed up for the next nine and a half years, every single day, waiting for his beloved master to get off the train. And he did that until the day he died.

It’s a wonderful story of loyalty and devotion to a master. And it’s an illustration in part of the kind of loyalty and devotion and steadfastness that Christ calls you and me to give to him. We are to wait day by day for him. We are to look to him as our master and savior, even though we do not yet see him.

The good news is that unlike Hachiko’s master, your master, the Lord Jesus Christ, he is coming back one day. He is not dead; he lives, and he has promised that he will return. And so you serve, you wait upon, you look to a living Savior and Lord who has promised that He is coming again to take you home to be with Him forever.

Until He comes, He sees your faithfulness to Him, and He promises that your labor for His sake is never in vain. And when He does return, He will say to those who have been faithful to wait for Him, to serve Him in His absence, He will say, “Well done, good and faithful servant, You have been faithful over a little. I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.”

Let’s pray.

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The Old Testament reading is Exodus chapter 22, verse 16, through chapter 23, verse nine. So let’s give our attention to God’s word. This is God’s inerrant, infallible, and holy word.

If a man seduces a virgin who is not betrothed and lies with her, he shall give the bride price for her and make her his wife. If her father utterly refuses to give her to him, he shall pay money equal to the bride price for virgins. You shall not permit a sorceress to live. Whoever lies with an animal shall be put to death. Whoever sacrifices to any God other than the Lord alone shall be devoted to destruction.

You shall not wrong a sojourner or oppress him for you are sojourners in the land of Egypt. You shall not mistreat any widow or fatherless child. If you do mistreat them and they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry and my wrath will burn and I will kill you with the sword and your wives shall become widows and your children fatherless.

If you lend money to any of my people with you who is poor, you shall not be like a money lender to him and you shall not exact interest from him. If ever you take your neighbor’s cloak and pledge, you shall return it to him before the sun goes down, for that is his only covering, and it is his cloak for his body, and what else shall he sleep? And if he cries to me, I will hear, for I am compassionate.

You shall not revile God nor curse a ruler of your people. You shall not delay to offer from the fullness of your harvest and from the outflow of your presses. The firstborn of your sons you shall give to me. You shall do the same with your oxen and with your sheep. Seven days it shall be with its mother. On the eighth day, you shall give it to me. You shall be consecrated to me. Therefore, you shall not eat any flesh that is torn by beasts in the field. You shall throw it to the dogs.

You shall not spread a false report. You shall not join hands with a wicked man to be a malicious witness. You shall not fall in with the many to do evil, nor shall you bear witness in a lawsuit siding with the many so as to pervert justice, nor shall you be partial to a poor man in his lawsuit. If you meet your enemy’s ox or his donkey going astray, you shall bring it back to him. If you see the donkey of one who hates you lying down under its burden, you shall refrain from leaving him with it. You shall rescue it with him.

You shall not pervert the justice due to your poor in his lawsuit. Keep far from a false charge and do not kill the innocent and righteous, for I will not acquit the wicked. And you shall take no bribe, for a bribe blinds the clear-sighted and subverts the cause of those who are in the right. You shall not oppress a sojourner. You know the heart of a sojourner, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.

Our New Testament reading is 1 Peter, Chapter 1, 13 through 16, 1 Peter 1, 13 through 16. Therefore, preparing your minds for action, be sober-minded, set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct. Since it is written, you shall be holy for I am holy. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.

There is no kind of pressure like peer pressure. We all experience it and we’ve all succumbed to it. There’s something within us that really wants to be like everybody else, something within us that wants to do what everybody else is doing. We don’t want to stand out as odd or different or not with it. And when it comes to spiritual and moral concerns, this desire that we have within us to conform, to be like everyone else, to be like the world around us, this can lead us into all kinds of trouble.

The Lord knew that the people of Israel were going to struggle with this temptation to want to conform to the world. He knew that after he brought his people into the promised land, after they settled there, that they would naturally see the nations around them and that they would want to be like those nations around them. And so one of the purposes of the many laws that God gave to Israel was to teach them that because they belonged to the Lord, they were not to be like the nations around them. They were not to be conformed to the world, but they were to be holy. They were to be a people who were distinct from the rest of the world in their life and in their worship.

And this call that the Lord gave to his people to be a holy people, a people belonging to a holy God, this is, really the unifying theme in all of these laws that we just read. We’ve been going through the various civil laws that the Lord gave to the people of Israel from Mount Sinai. He gave them to Moses. Moses gave them to the people. Our passage this morning reads kind of like a laundry list, like miscellaneous laws. There are various statutes and rules here that cover a large variety of subjects, but one thing that we can say that they all have in common is this, that in these laws, the Lord was calling his people to be a holy people, a people different from the world, a people set apart from the world to belong to God and to reflect that holiness, separateness in the way in which they lived and worshiped. They were not to be like the pagans, the unbelievers that would surround them.

And so we’ll look at these laws today with that in mind. And as we look at these laws, we’ll proceed in the same way. Hopefully it’s become familiar to us by now. First, we’ll consider how these laws, what their significance was for the people of Israel when Moses gave them to them. And then we’ll consider what lesson can we learn from these laws for us as believers in Christ today.

So first, what these laws meant for Israel. So we’ll just go through these laws and draw some lessons from them and consider what they meant for the people of Israel. Also, we’ll draw some lessons, what they mean for us today as well.

Verses 16 and 17 are laws that gave, or the Lord gave to the people of Israel to preserve the sanctity of marriage by forbidding men and women to have sexual relations with one another outside the bonds of marriage. And we won’t get into all the nitty-gritty details, but the gist of these laws is that there would be serious consequences for an unmarried man if he seduced an unmarried woman and slept with her. The man in that case, he would be guilty of stealing her virginity. And thus, not only would he bring dishonor upon her and her family, but in that social context, he would have rendered her virtually unmarriageable. And so he’d have to compensate the family. He would have to pay the family what is called a bride price or an engagement present.

And if her father consented to the marriage, he would have to marry this young woman whom he slept with. If her father did not consent to the marriage, he would still have to pay that same amount as a bride price as a way of compensating her and her family for the harm that he had done to them by seducing this young woman. And so this law, along with the seventh commandment that forbids adultery, and along with all of the other laws that we read in the Old Testament that condemn various kinds of sexual immorality, these laws together, they taught the Israelites that one thing that holiness means is sexual purity. As we saw when we consider the seventh commandments, any kind of sexual activity outside the covenant bond of marriage that was sinful, that was forbidden by the Lord for his people.

And from what we know of the pagan nations that would surround the people of Israel, the Israelites, if in fact they did live according to these laws, if in fact they were sexually pure, they would have been very, very different from the nations that surrounded them. The pagan nations, the pagan peoples in those days were very much engaged in all kinds of sexually immoral practices. Now today, this exact law doesn’t apply to the Church. We don’t transfer this law and apply it word for word to the Church today. However, it is still very much the will of God today for His people, for us, that sexual relations take place only within marriage, only within a biblical marriage, one man and one woman. Anything other than that is sin.

And just like the Israelites would be very different from the people around them if they kept these commandments, so we too, as the people of God, insofar as we are faithful to honor God in keeping the seventh commandment, keeping the marriage bed undefiled, protecting the marriage bond as the one place in which sexual activity takes place, insofar as we are faithful to do this, we are going to be very, very different from the world around us as well. And this is one way, by the grace of God, that we will demonstrate that we are a holy people, that we belong to a holy God.

Verses 18 through 20 list three separate offenses for which the guilty party was subject to capital punishment. He would have to be killed. Sorcery, bestiality, and idolatry. And all three of these practices were characteristic of the nations that existed at this time that would surround the people of Israel. And so this would be one area in which the Israelites would feel that peer pressure. Everyone else is doing it. We should as well. But these were sins against God that were so heinous. They were practices so dangerous that the spiritual or they were so dangerous to the spiritual health of the people of God as a whole that the penalty for them was death. The death penalty for those who committed these sins.

Now today, of course, God does not will the church to put anybody to death for anything. Israel, as the church then was a political entity, a nation, a geographical, a national kingdom, but the Church of Jesus Christ is a spiritual kingdom. Therefore, we do not put anybody to death. However, when a person in the church is guilty of a serious sin and that person refuses to repent of their sin, then the church, after pursuing formal church discipline, must declare that that person is no longer a member of the church. They are no longer able to take part in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. And this action on the part of the church today, this is called excommunication. They are no longer able to commune with the people of God in the Lord’s Supper because the church declares them to be no longer part of God’s people.

And this is the spiritual equivalent of what was then the death penalty. However, thankfully today, with excommunication, unlike with the death penalty, there was always the hope of restoration, that the offender, although he or she is guilty of grievous sins and has been excommunicated, nevertheless, that God will bring them back to repentance and faith. And so we pray, of course, that the Lord would bring back one who has been excommunicated back into full communion with the Lord Jesus, back into full communion with the church. But the concern both for the people of Israel then, the concern for the church today behind these laws and behind this penalty of excommunication, the concern is the holiness, the purity of the people of God. Those who have been redeemed by the Lord Jesus Christ, those who have been called out of darkness to belong to Him, we cannot, we must not engage in the sinful, the evil practices of the unbelieving world. There must be a distinction. And therefore the church at times must carry out this kind of discipline to declare this person excommunicated from the church until they repent and come back to faith.

And so holiness is involved in all of that, but there is more to holiness than just avoiding these kind of flagrant, blatant sins, like sorcery and idolatry, but holiness is also a matter of showing love and compassion to those who are weak and vulnerable. And that is the concern of the laws in verses 21 through 24, and in chapter 23, verse 9. The Israelites were not to oppress or to exploit or take advantage of the sojourner, the widow, and the fatherless. These were all classes of people in the ancient world who were liable to be trampled upon by others. They were weak. They were defenseless. The Israelites knew themselves all too well from their recent history what it meant, what it was like to be oppressed, to be taken advantage of, to be trampled upon. They suffered at the hands of Pharaoh, the taskmasters. They were sojourners in Egypt, but they were to be different when they were the ones who were in a position of more power or authority. They were the people belonging to the Lord and the God who saved them was a God who had special concern for the weak and the vulnerable. Therefore, the Israelites were not to mistreat the strangers and the widows and the orphans in their midst.

Now, we need to take a little bit of time, a minute or two, to look at verse 21 especially, in our current political situation. I think it’s important for us to hear what this verse is saying and what it’s not saying. So I’ll read verse 21. You shall not wrong a sojourner or oppress him, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt. Now, in the immigration debates that are kind of raging right now in our current context, this verse is often appealed to. However, this verse does not say a thing about how the United States government should go about pursuing an immigration policy that is just and wise, a policy that is in the best interest of the nation as a whole. This verse does not prescribe any specific kind of immigration laws or immigration policies for any nation today. So it’s not saying that.

However, what it is saying is that Christians, the people of God, we must treat those from other nations, those who are in our midst, who have come here from other places, we must treat them with fairness, with justice, and even compassion. So often immigrants, no matter how they came here, they are vulnerable. They are vulnerable to mistreatment, to oppression, because they are strangers living in a foreign land. But having said that, as Christians, we can certainly support immigration laws, we can support immigration restrictions, we can support the enforcement of those laws. We can do so without wrongdoing, without wronging or oppressing the foreigners who live in our country, or even those who want to live in our country. And so verse 21 does not mandate what our nation’s immigration policy is supposed to look like, but it does tell us as Christians what our basic attitude should be toward the stranger who is in our midst.

Our basic attitude should be to carry out what Jesus taught us, what we call the golden rule, that we are to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. And we can apply that same rule to all sorts of people in our society, not only those who are from other nations living in our midst, but also those who are more vulnerable to oppression or exploitation. Think of the forgotten, the lonely elderly among us. Think of children who have no families, have no homes. Think of the unborn children who are at risk of abortion. If we were in their shoes, how would we want to be treated by others? That is how we should think of and how we should treat those who are in positions of weakness.

And God is the same God today who gave these laws to the Israelites back then. God still has a special concern for those who are weak and vulnerable in society. And he declared just how strong his concern was when he told the Israelites that if they did wrong and mistreat the vulnerable in their midst, that he would carry out a very severe judgment against them. Look at verses 23 and 24. The Lord says, if you do mistreat them and they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry and my wrath will burn and I will kill you with the sword and your wives shall become widows and your children fatherless. And so we as the people of God, we too should have the same concern, the same care, the same mindset of compassion to those in our midst who are weak and vulnerable and know that God has that concern for them and that he watches over them in a special way.

Moving on in our laws here, verses 25 through 27 are also concerned with the fair treatment of the weak. But this time the concern is with the poor. The Israelites were not to act like loan sharks towards their brothers when they needed a loan, they needed money. They were to lend their money to the poor and not charge interest to them. And they were not to take away some vital piece of property of theirs as collateral. For example, the cloak that they used to sleep at night, they were not to withhold that from them. What else were they going to sleep in at night, the Lord says. So they were to show mercy towards their poor brothers in loaning money to them.

And then in verses 28 to 31, the subject of the law changes to the proper respect and worship that is due to God. The Israelites were not to revile God. They were not to revile any God-given ruler that was set over them. And they were to faithfully bring to the Lord their offerings from their wealth. And they were to consecrate to the Lord their firstborn sons, both human and animal. For their firstborn sons, and for certain kinds of animals, they would consecrate to the Lord by redeeming them with money. But for other kinds of animals, they were to be sacrificed to the Lord. The Israelites were not to eat the flesh of animals killed by other animals. We might call this the roadkill law. They were not to eat any dead animal that they saw on the side of the road that may have been killed by another animal. And insofar as the Israelites obeyed these laws, they demonstrated that they were set apart to the Lord as a holy people, a special people.

In chapter 23, verses one through three and six through eight, the concern there is with upholding justice, upholding justice both in their general dealings with one another and also in a court of law. There are so many ways that we can pervert justice. We can spread lies about other people. We can bear false witness in a courtroom. We can go along with popular opinion just because it’s popular and we don’t want to swim against the tide. We can show favoritism towards the poor just because they are poor. We can show favoritism towards the rich just because they are rich. And all of these ways of injustice are either explicitly or implicitly forbidden in these laws to the Israelites. If the judges of Israel accepted a false charge or condemned the innocent to death or accepted a bribe, they would be perverting justice.

And so part of the holiness of Israel was that in all of their dealings with one another, whether it was just in the general life situations that emerge or whether it was in a more formal court of law, the Israelites were to be very concerned that they dealt with one another in terms of justice, fairness, equity, what was right, what was true, and to the degree that the Israelites upheld justice, they, again, would have been distinct from their pagan neighbors. In that way, they would have reflected the holiness of God. We know all too well, just from our own observations of the world, that the default condition of societies in this fallen world is that the justice systems in our nations are very far from perfect. They are very flawed. There is no perfect justice in this world. And yet the Israelites were to be different. They were to uphold what is true, what is just, what is fair in all of their dealings with one another.

And then finally, in verses four and five of chapter 23, the Lord commanded the holiness of his people in the most demanding way, and that is his people were to show concern even to those who were their enemies. If an Israelite saw his enemy’s ox or donkey wandering away from his home, he was to lead that animal back to the home of his enemy. Or if he saw his enemy’s donkey collapse under the weight of his load, and his enemy was trying to help his donkey up, but he wasn’t able to get him back up on his feet, the Israelite was to go out and to help his neighbor, even if he was at odds with him.

Now, obviously, this is the exact opposite of what anybody would naturally do in that situation. It’s not hard to imagine an Israelite looking out of his window one day and smiling with perverse pleasure as he sees that neighbor whom he can’t stand trying to get his donkey up back on his feet. And he’s just watching, enjoying the spectacle, but that’s not what he was supposed to do. He was supposed to go out and to help his enemy get his donkey back up again. And of course, Jesus taught the same teaching. He says, you have heard that it was said, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy, but I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. And insofar as the Israelites kept that commandment, to do good to their enemies, to love those even that they were at odds with, that they showed themselves to be holy, that they were people who belong to the Lord.

So the general theme of all these laws is this: I am the Lord who is holy, you are my people, therefore you are to be holy. You are not to be like everyone else in the world, but you are set apart, you belong to me, and this is what that holiness will look like in your day-to-day life as my people.

So let’s consider now what the significance of these laws are for us as believers today. I’ve said this before, I’ll say it again, it’s worth repeating. We do not take these laws from the Old Testament that were given to the people of God under the old covenants. We don’t take these and apply them word for word for the church today. We don’t take them and say, these are the laws that the nations of the world today should have as their laws. Again, Israel as a nation was a political kingdom. It needed these laws, but the church today is a spiritual kingdom. We have laws to be sure. Christ is our lawgiver, but it is not these specific laws. So they do not apply to us in the same way that they did to them.

However, having said that, insofar as these various civil laws are faithful applications of the 10 commandments of the moral law, then they do show us how we are to conduct ourselves as the people of God. And these laws will help us, even as Christians today, to see that God’s will for us today is that we are a people who are holy, a holy people.

So listen again to what God says to us in 1 Peter. This is the passage that I read from 1 Peter earlier. As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, but as he who called you as holy, you also shall be holy in all your conduct. Since it is written, you shall be holy for I am holy. So Peter was writing to Christians who were Gentiles. And before they came to faith in Christ, they were the pagans who were living lives that were far from holy. They lived according to the passions of their former ignorance. They were unbelievers. They lived according to their sinful desires and passions. And they weren’t all that different than the pagans who surrounded the people of Israel under the old covenant. But once they came to know Christ, they were called to live holy lives. And as they were faithful to do so, these Christians in the first century that Peter was writing to, they would have also set themselves apart as a holy people. They would have been distinct from their neighbors, from the world in which they lived.

And what was true for the Israelites in the Old Testament, what was true for the Christians in the New Testament, the early Christians, is also just as much true for us today. We are living, we live in a world that by and large does not acknowledge God, does not worship God, is not seeking truth and holiness and righteousness. We are living in a society whose values and beliefs and practices are far more pagan than they are Christian. And so we find ourselves in the very similar situation as the people of God have always found themselves in. There are so many ways in which our culture denies fundamental biblical truths. The truth that God is the creator. We are the creature. The truth that God rules over this creation by his sovereign power and wisdom and goodness. The truth that there is an absolute right and wrong that is given to us by a transcendent Lord. The truth of the reality of sin. The truth of the reality of the coming judgment of heaven, of hell, of salvation in Jesus Christ.

These are all truths that our society, that our culture denies or suppresses. They seem like quaint religious ideas from a distant past. And as a result of that, we find ourselves living in a world in which we are enshrouded in great spiritual darkness, in which we are immersed in great moral confusion. But you, as the people of God, as those who belong to Jesus Christ, are called to holiness. You are called to worship the true and the living God and to live according to his word. And if there is any silver lining to the sad reality that we are living in a society that is increasingly pagan in nature, it is this, that to the degree that we as Christians, by the grace of God, reflect the holiness of God in our lives and worship, to that degree, the truth of Christ will shine all the more brightly in that moral and spiritual darkness that surrounds us.

We can put it this way: that God causes the light of his own holy character to shine in the world through his people whose lives he is making to conform more and more to his own image, to reflect his holiness. And so God’s own light, his own holiness is reflected in his people as we are faithful by the grace of God to serve and to worship him. And so Jesus said to his disciples, you are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. We are the light of the world because we belong to God and we reflect his holiness. And insofar as we do that, we are reflecting nothing other than the truth of God’s character, which is light, which is holiness and righteousness.

And one thing that that means is that these laws that God gave to Israel back then, the laws that he gives us today, the Ten Commandments, the moral law, that these are really an expression of his own holiness and righteousness. You know, we read these laws and sometimes we get the impression, or sometimes we ask, why in the world did God give this law to his people? Sometimes we might even think this seems like such an arbitrary law. What’s the purpose? What’s the point of it? But these are not arbitrary laws. God did not give these laws to his people just because he could, because he is God. But these laws made up a pattern of holiness and righteousness that would be an expression of the righteousness, the character of God himself.

And so because God is pure, because God is a God who is infinite in purity, in righteousness, in goodness, we are to be pure in sexual matters. Because God is the one true and living God, because there is no God beside him, his people then reflect that insofar as we give worship and service and obedience to God alone. Because God has a special concern for the weak and the vulnerable, we manifest the character of God as we show special concern and compassion towards the weak and the vulnerable. And because God is perfect in justice, we are to be just in all our dealings. And because God loves his enemies, because God so loved us when we were his enemies, he so loved us that he gave us his son, Jesus Christ, to die for our sins, so we too are to love our enemy. We are even to go out of our way to help our enemy when he is in need.

And so one thing that these laws mean for you as a Christian is this: they reveal to you the holy character of God, that you might better reflect in this world his holiness, that God might be glorified through you in this world, in this world of darkness and confusion. As you continue to serve and to worship God, you show forth the truth, the light, the righteousness of God, who He is.

But the issue is really deeper than that. God wants us to be holy, not just so that His truth may shine more brightly through us, which is true, but it’s also true, and this is even perhaps an even deeper truth, and that is, it is only in holiness that you can enjoy true communion with God. Only as you are pursuing the holiness of God can you enjoy that communion, that fellowship with God that he created you to enjoy forever. This is why Jesus Christ came into the world. He came into the world to make us holy so that we might have communion with God.

And Jesus Christ makes us holy in two ways. First of all, he makes us holy by giving us his perfect righteousness. We are sinners by nature. We have broken God’s commandments. In us, in our hearts, there is no inherent holiness, righteousness, purity, but the opposite, there is corruption, immorality, there is sin. But God came into the world in the person of his son, Jesus Christ, in order to live a perfectly righteous life for us, in order to bear our sin and guilt for us upon the cross, so that by coming to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, you receive as a gift His perfect righteousness, His holiness, and that is yours now and forevermore. As a believer in Jesus Christ, you are already holy, you are already sanctified, you are already righteous because God looks at the righteousness of Christ and He counts it as your very own. And so Jesus makes us holy in that way.

But the second way that Jesus came to make us holy is to give us His Holy Spirit so that He might work within us, that we might grow in personal righteousness, personal holiness, so that we might become more and more what we already are in the sight of God. And this is your sanctification. This is growing in holiness, growing in righteousness, and only to the degree that you grow in this holiness by God’s grace, only to that degree will you enjoy the fullness of joy and peace in spiritual life.

We could put it this way: happiness follows holiness. Happiness follows holiness. And that is why if you are a Christian, and I trust we are all believers here, that is why as a Christian, you will not find joy in Christ as long as you are engaged in sexually immoral conduct. You will not have joy in Christ if you devote yourself to any other person or thing as an idol. You will not find joy in Christ if you only live for yourself, if you show no concern for helping others or serving others in need. You will not find joy in Christ if you are not living for him a life of self-sacrifice, self-giving. You will not find joy in Christ if you are not dealing with others justly and fairly. You will not find joy in Christ if you do not love your enemy, forgive your enemy. If you harbor bitterness and resentment in your heart, you will not enjoy the fullness of that life and peace that Christ came to give us.

And so God calls you to holiness in all of these ways expressed in these laws so that you might enjoy that fullness of life, that fellowship, that communion with the Lord. That is why God created us. That is why God saved us, that we might know Him and know life, eternal life, and be filled with that joy and peace in knowing Him. But we only enjoy that to the fullest as we are pursuing the holiness to which He calls us. And so holiness, at the end of the day, doesn’t mean being holier than thou, but it means growing in Christlikeness so that the life of Christ may abound in you.

And I’ll end with these words from our Lord Jesus. He says, if you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love just as I’ve kept my father’s commandments and abide in his love. These things I’ve spoken to you that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be full. Let’s pray.

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The Old Testament reading is Exodus chapter 22, verses one through 15. Exodus 22, one through 15. This is God’s word, his inspired, his infallible, his inerrant word. So let’s give our attention to the reading of the word of God.

Exodus 22, one through 15. If a man steals an ox or a sheep and kills it or sells it, he shall repay five oxen for an ox and four sheep for a sheep. If a thief is found breaking in and is struck so that he dies, there shall be no blood guilt for him. But if the sun has risen on him, there shall be blood guilt for him. He shall surely pay. If he has nothing, then he shall be sold for his theft. If the stolen beast is found alive in his possession, whether it is an ox or a donkey or a sheep, he shall pay double.

If a man causes a field or vineyard to be grazed over or lets his beast loose and it feeds in another man’s field, he shall make restitution from the best in his own field and in his own vineyard. If fire breaks out and catches in thorns so that the stacked grain or the standing grain or the field is consumed, he who started the fire shall make full restitution.

If a man gives to his neighbor money or goods to keep safe, and it is stolen from the man’s house, then if the thief is found, he shall pay double. If the thief is not found, the owner of the house shall come near to God to show whether or not he has put his hand to his neighbor’s property. For every breach of trust, whether it is for an ox, for a donkey, for a sheep, for a cloak, or for any kind of lost thing of which one says, this is it, the case of both parties shall come before God. The one whom God condemns shall pay double to his neighbor.

If a man gives to his neighbor a donkey or an ox or a sheep or any beast to keep safe and it dies or is injured or is driven away without anyone seeing it, an oath by the Lord shall be between them both to see whether or not he has put his hand to his neighbor’s property. The owner shall accept the oath and he shall not make restitution. But if it is stolen from him, he shall make restitution to its owner. If it is torn by beasts, let him bring it as evidence. He shall not make restitution for what has been torn.

If a man borrows anything of his neighbor and it is injured or dies, the owner not being with it, he shall make full restitution. If the owner was with it, he shall not make restitution. If it was hired, it came for its hiring fee.

That is our passage this morning, but we will also hear from the New Testament. So you can keep your place there in Exodus and turn to Luke chapter 19, a very familiar passage from the Gospels of Zacchaeus, the wee little man who came to faith in Jesus. Luke 19, verses 1 through 10. Luke 19, verses 1 through 10.

He entered Jericho and was passing through. And behold, there was a man named Zacchaeus. He was a chief tax collector and was rich. And he was seeking to see who Jesus was. But on account of the crowd, he could not because he was small in stature. So he ran on ahead and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see him, for he was about to pass that way. And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today.

So he hurried and came down and received him joyfully. And when they saw it, they all grumbled. He has gone in to be the guest of a man who was a sinner. And Zacchaeus stood and said to the Lord, behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor. And if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold. And Jesus said to him, today salvation has come to this house since he also is a son of Abraham. For the son of man came to seek and to save the lost. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.

We all have things in our past that we are not too proud of. And as I was thinking of our passage that we’re looking at today, one thing from my past came to mind that I’m not too proud of, but I share it with you today because it illustrates, at least indirectly, it illustrates the wisdom and the goodness of these laws that the Lord gave to his people Israel.

When I was in college, my fraternity decided to build this huge tree house in front of our fraternity house. We were planning to have a party and we wanted to have a tree house for our party. And of course, to build a big treehouse, you need wood. You need a lot of wood. And since I had a pickup truck, I was asked, along with a couple of other friends, to acquire the wood that we would need for the treehouse.

And our idea for obtaining the wood was not to go to the lumberyard or Lowe’s and actually purchase a bunch of lumber. Rather, we decided we’d visit a home construction site late at night and help ourselves to the piles of lumber that were stacked up in front of the homes that were being built. And so my two friends and I drove out to this neighborhood where houses were under construction and in the darkness of night, the cover of darkness, we loaded up the back of the truck with as much lumber as we possibly could.

And then we started our drive back to campus. And when we were just a few blocks away from campus, I saw the red and blue lights in my rear view mirror. I was not really excited to see that. So we got pulled over by a police officer. Somehow the sight of three young guys driving in the middle of the night with a truck full of lumber looked suspicious to him. Rightfully so.

And so he pulled us over and before he came to my car window, my friends and I concocted a story that we would tell him to explain what we were doing. I told the policeman that we were students at the college, which was true enough. And then I told him that we were just getting back from Nashville, which was a few hours away, and we had bought the lumber there and we were driving all day and we were just coming home, which was definitely not true.

The policeman looked at my license, and he looked at the three of us and he was not at all happy. And he said in words that I will not repeat now that my story was not believable at all. But for some reason he gave me my license back and he let us go on our way. And the result of all that was that my two friends and I were the heroes of our fraternity. We had stolen the lumber for our tree house. The party was a great success. We lied to a policeman. And I got to tell the story over and over to my admiring friends.

I wasn’t a Christian at that time, just so you know. And I look back at that now, and I’m very ashamed of what I did. It was a terrible thing to do. But I learned all the wrong lessons from it. I got away with stealing and lying. And in the process, strangely enough, I gained the respect of my friends. And so, in a small way, at least for me at that one time, crime did pay.

But as I think about it, particularly in the light of God’s word in this passage, how much better for me it would have been if I and my friends had been arrested by the policemen, and if we had been forced not only to return all the lumber that we had stolen from the construction company, but also if we had been forced to pay back double to the company of what we had taken in order to compensate for the time and trouble that no doubt we had caused them. In that case, I would have learned all the right lessons from that whole episode.

I would have learned that stealing is wrong, that it’s disgraceful, that it hurts other people, and the penalty of paying double for what we had stolen would have not only driven those lessons home in a painful but good way, but it also would have compensated the company from whom we stole that lumber for the trouble that we had put them through. And in that case, if that had been the outcome of that, in that case there would have been a true restitution for our crime. That is, the wrongs that we did to our victims would have been righted. What they lost, the trouble that they suffered, would have been compensated by us who caused all the trouble for them.

And that is God’s concern behind the various laws that we have heard this morning from this passage in Exodus. God’s justice demands that there be restitution for the victim, a restitution that must be paid by the one who is guilty of the crime. And as we’ve done in the last couple of weeks, as we’ve been looking at this section in Exodus with these various civil laws, we’ll first consider what the laws meant for the people of Israel at that time. And then next we’ll consider the significance of these laws in the light of the gospel of Jesus Christ. What do these laws mean for us or what can we learn from them as Christians today?

But before we look at the laws in more detail, I want to make a couple of comments concerning these laws that all have to do with property, or the theft of property, or the destruction of property. One thing to note about these laws is that they were to be applied to all people in the same way. There is no special conditions carved out here for the rich, the powerful, the influential. This was not the case in other law codes of the ancient Near East. Often people of high social standing had a privileged status in the eyes of the law. But people of a high social standing do not have a privileged status in the eyes of God. God is no respecter of persons. And that truth is enshrined in the laws that he gave to the people of Israel. All people were to be treated equally in the sight of the law.

And of course that ought to apply to our laws today. Any just and fair legal system today will not show favor to the rich, the powerful, the influential, but a just law with just penalties will apply equally to all people, just as God’s moral commandments, just as his moral law applies equally to all people, regardless of social standing or power in the society.

A second thing to note is that the punishments are proportionate to the crime. Other ancient law codes that existed around this time often had penalties that were draconian and totally disproportionate to the offense. For example, the Hammurabi Code made theft a capital punishment. And so if you stole something, you were put to death. In some parts of the world today, if you are guilty of theft, especially in Islamic, at least some Islamic places, if you are guilty of theft, you get your hand chopped off.

But here in God’s laws, you see the principle of equity. That is the principle that we looked at last Sunday. Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, the penalty must be proportionate to the crime, not more extreme than the crime, not less in severity than the crime. And so this law then, these laws that we have seen show God’s concern that the penalty match the crime. It also shows God’s concern or his priority of human life over property. Even the thief who steals something does not deserve to have his life taken away for that crime. And so God values human life even over human property.

And so with all that in mind then, let’s look at these laws to understand what they meant to the people of Israel, to whom they were given. The first four verses deal with two different situations. Verses one and four are concerned with the theft of an animal, an ox or a sheep or a donkey. And as you can imagine in that society, that was a primary, if not the primary, source of wealth for people. Animals were very valuable because they were so vital to that economy, the livelihood of people then.

And so if a man steals another person’s animal and then he goes to kill it or to sell it, his penalty was that he would have to give back to the victim not only one animal to replace the one that he stole, but that he would have to give back four or five additional animals depending on the kind of animal that he stole. In verse 4, however, if the thief was caught with the animal alive, he had not killed it, he had not sold it, he’d only have to pay back the owner double for what he stole. So he would have to give the owner back his original animal, and then he would have to provide one more just like it to the owner.

And that was a way in which the law treats this crime of or the previous crime of killing the stolen animal or selling the stolen animal, that was a much more severe, that was a much more serious crime. And so he had to pay back fourfold or fivefold. But if the thief could return the original animal, he had to pay back double. And of course, this could have given the thief some pause to consider after he had stolen the animal, before he killed it, before he sold it. Perhaps he would think that it would be better not to do that because if I’m caught, then I will probably, I will have to pay back fourfold. And so perhaps this law was something of a deterrent.

In fact, when we compare these laws to those in Leviticus, it appears, when we look at the Levitical laws, that if a thief did repent of his crime, if he did confess his crime, the penalty was that he would have to restore that animal and then add a fifth to it. So he would add a fifth of the value of the animal that he stole. That was quite a bit less than repaying double. And so the law recognized, and again, God, the law giver, was acknowledging that the penalty ought to be less severe for the thief who confesses it, who willingly surrenders the animal, who repents of his sin.

Verses two and three address what we would call a home invasion. If a thief breaks into someone’s house and it is at night and the homeowner kills the thief, the homeowner was not guilty of murder. And that’s because it was dark. The homeowner, he couldn’t tell if the invader was armed. He couldn’t tell if his life was a threat. And so he could use deadly force in that situation. It was justified. However, if a thief broke into someone’s house during the day, the homeowner could not kill the thief. If he did kill the thief, he would be guilty of that man’s blood. He would be guilty of murder.

And the reason for this law was to prevent unnecessary, needless killing. If a thief broke in during the day, and presumably if it was clear that the thief did not present a threat to the homeowner, his life was not a threat, the homeowner did not have the right to kill the thief just because he had broken into his home. And again, you see God’s concern for a fair penalty. Even a thief, though a criminal, in this case, did not deserve to die for his crime.

Verses five and six address cases where one person is careless and negligent and causes damage to another person’s property. This can happen by allowing his animals to graze in his neighbor’s field or garden, or he sets a fire, he’s careless, it gets out of control, it starts to burn up his neighbor’s stacked grain. And the penalty in these cases was that the wrongdoer must make full restitution to his neighbor. He must make full restitution from the best of his own field and vineyard.

And note that in these situations, the person who did the wrong, he is not required to pay back double. He is only required to replace what was destroyed or damaged by his animal, by his carelessness. And so the law was more lenient towards those who did not have the intent to steal something, but those who were simply irresponsible or careless and destroyed their neighbor’s property by their negligence. But it was still fair. The law was fair. The guilty party still had to make restitution. The victim had to be repaid.

Verses seven through 13 deal with situations in which one person gives to another person his money or possessions or animals for safekeeping while he was away. And if you think about it, this makes sense. This would have been a common practice in those days. They didn’t have banks like we have today or modern locks or security systems and so on. And so when you went away on a trip, you might give your valuables to your neighbor for protection. But what happens if your neighbor, while he’s keeping them, steals them from you? Or what happens if he just says that they were stolen, but really he is the one who stole them?

Well, these laws address these cases, and again, the guiding principle is restitution. If a thief is found with your goods, then the thief must pay double. But in the case that no thief is found, there are instructions in verses eight and nine to follow a procedure to determine the guilt or innocence of the person to whom you entrusted your goods. Unfortunately, the instructions aren’t super clear. The Hebrew is difficult to interpret. Scholars don’t know exactly what verses eight and nine are saying, but in some way, it seems, probably involving the authorities with some kind of appeal to God, there is a judgment that determines whether the person you entrusted your possessions to, whether he had stolen them himself or whether they had been stolen from him. And if it turns out that he had stolen them, then he has to pay you back double. And so that’s that principle of restitution, even more so because it was theft.

In verses 10 through 12, you give to your neighbor an animal for safekeeping. And if while your animal is in your neighbor’s care, it dies or it’s injured or it’s driven away, your neighbor must swear an oath that he has not stolen it. And that settles the matter. By swearing an oath, that would have deterred at least some people, because an oath is a very serious thing, swearing something to be true in the name of the Lord would have deterred some people, at least, from not lying about what happened to his neighbor’s property.

Interestingly, in verse 12, if your animal is in your neighbor’s care and it is stolen from him while it is in your neighbor’s care, the neighbor himself must make restitution to you. And the idea here seems to be that if you entrust your animal to your neighbor, that he should be extra careful with that animal to make sure that it is not stolen from him while it is in his safekeeping. But according to verse 13, if your neighbor can prove that your animal was torn apart by wild beasts, he can produce the carcass, then he doesn’t have to make restitution.

Finally, in verses 14 and 15, these deal with borrowing or renting things, animals from others. If you, for example, if you borrowed my ax and it broke, you would owe me a new ax. However, if you borrowed my ax and I was with you while you were using it, then I would have to replace the broken ax myself. I’m out of luck. But if you paid me to use my ax, that is, if you rented my ax from me, and then in that case it was understood that the rental agreement that we had, that under that agreement I would be responsible for any damages to the ax while you borrowed it. And so these are the laws then that dealt with, in Exodus, theft and the accidental destruction of others’ property.

So having considered these laws, let’s ask the question, what can we as Christians learn from these laws in the lights of the gospel? Well, there are two lessons we can learn from them. First of all, these laws could only limit sinful behavior. They could not cure a sinful heart. These laws could only minimize limits, contain sinful actions on the part of other different people, but they could not address the heart. They could not cure a sinful heart. There is not a word in these laws about the heart of the one who committed theft or the one who damaged his neighbor’s property. The sole concern here is what he must do to make things right with his victim.

And of course, that’s because these laws were establishing justice and equity, fairness in in the nation of Israel among the Israelites and their dealings with one another. There had to be some laws to govern their relationships with one another. And so that was important, that was vital. However, that was not God’s primary concern for his people when it came to their wealth and possessions. Rather, God’s primary concern was for the heart of his people. God’s primary concern was what would be my people’s heart or their attitude, their orientation towards the wealth, towards the possessions that they would acquire.

Would the Israelites see their wealth and possessions as gifts from God to be used in serving and glorifying Him? Or would the Israelites look to their money or their possessions or their wealth for security, for life, for happiness? That was the chief concern that God had for His people when it came to their wealth or possessions. When we turn to the New Testament, we know what the answer to those questions was, at least for some of the people of Israel, maybe even most of the people of Israel, and that is they had a completely wrong view of their money and goods.

And where the Israelites went wrong in their thinking was this. They thought that as long as they kept these laws, as long as they avoided stealing from their neighbors, as long as they were not guilty of any of the sins described in these laws, then that was all that really mattered to God when it came to their possessions and their wealth. But Jesus, when he came into the world, he revealed what truly matters to God concerning wealth.

In Luke chapter 12, we read of a man who is near Jesus in a crowd and he yells out to Jesus. He says, teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me. Now, we might think that this man had the right idea, that he was perfectly justified in looking to Jesus, this teacher, this rabbi, to help him arbitrate this dispute that he had with his brother over their father’s inheritance. In fact, if you think about it, there’s no better person in the world to whom this question could be brought to than Jesus himself. After all, this is Jesus. This is God incarnate, this is the same Lord who gave the law to the people of Israel, the great law giver. He is the one who spoke these laws, delivered them to Moses. And so who else but Jesus could deliver a right verdict in this case? He would be the most impartial, the wisest, the fairest judge of all to decide who was in the right, who was in the wrong.

However, Jesus was not at all interested in arbitrating this dispute between these two brothers. He was not at all interested in being the Judge Judy to figure out which brother was in the wrong. He told the man in verse 14, this is again the gospel of Luke, man, who made me a judge or an arbitrator over you? And so Jesus’ first concern was not to make sure that this man got his fair share of the inheritance. Rather, Jesus was interested in uncovering the sin that was in the heart of this man. That is his sin of greed, his sin of covetousness, idolatry. And we know that was Jesus’s concern because he goes on to say in verse 15, take care and be on your guard against all covetousness for once life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.

So again, let’s consider this man who came to Jesus with this question, this dispute over their father’s inheritance. He could have been in the right. His brother could have been a complete scoundrel. His brother could have been cheating him out of his lawful share of the wealth that they gained from their father. But the man, when he appealed to Jesus, he heard, hopefully he realized that he had a far, far greater problem than simply losing out on some worldly wealth. And that was he had a heart problem. He was driven by greed, by covetousness. And for Jesus, that was the real issue. It wasn’t who had the rightful claim to his father’s inheritance.

Now, if we can take that man’s attitude towards his wealth as typical of the Israelites in Jesus’s day towards their own wealth and possessions, then we can say that as a people, the heart of the Israelites was in the wrong place. Their heart was not set on heavenly treasure. Their heart was set on their own earthly treasure. It’s not just the Israelites who went astray in this way, but that’s true for all of us. We all do the same thing. When we consider our wealth or our possessions, we think that the most important issues are simply a question of who rightfully owns what, what belongs to whom.

And so our natural way of thinking is all that really matters to God is that I don’t steal from others, that I don’t defraud others. As long as I avoid those sins, then God must be satisfied with me regarding my wealth and possessions and my attitude towards them. And when we read laws such as these in Exodus chapter 22, when we read the eighth commandment, thou shall not steal, we hear these laws, we feel good about ourselves, we haven’t stolen anything from anybody, or maybe we haven’t stolen anything in a long time from anybody, and in our sinful thinking we tell ourselves, because I’m not a thief, I might, I must be right before God. My heart must be right before God when it comes to my wealth and possessions.

This is what the rich young ruler thought who came to Jesus asking him how to inherit eternal life. He told Jesus that he had successfully kept all of God’s laws from his youth, including the eighth commandment, thou shall not steal. But Jesus said to the rich young ruler, he said, one thing you still lack, sell all that you have and distribute to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven and come follow me. And of course, that was the one thing that the rich young ruler could not do. He could not sell his possessions. He could not part with his wealth. And so instead he parted from Jesus. He walked away from the one who alone could give him that eternal life that he desired and asked for. And he did so because he loved his wealth more than he loved Christ, more than he loved the son of God.

The rich young ruler, he was upstanding. He was moral. He was upright. According to these laws of Exodus, he had kept every one of them to the T. He had kept the 10 commandments, at least in his external behavior. All that he owned, that great wealth that he had, it was all rightfully and properly his. He didn’t defraud anyone. He didn’t cheat anyone. But his heart wasn’t right. He couldn’t sell his goods. He couldn’t part with his goods. He couldn’t follow Jesus because his money, his possessions were his God.

And apart from the grace of God, you and I would do exactly the same thing as a rich young ruler. It’s not enough to tell ourselves, well, we haven’t stolen the property of anybody, but we need to recognize that by nature, our hearts make an idol out of our wealth, out of our possessions, out of whatever property that God is pleased to give us.

We read of another man in Luke’s gospel who was guilty of this as well. Only unlike the just or unlike the rich young ruler, this man, he could make no claim that he was an upright and moral law-keeping Israelite. This man was a thief and he knew he was a thief. And of course, that is Zacchaeus, the passage that we read from Luke’s gospel. He was a tax collector. And as a tax collector, he became very wealthy. And he became very wealthy by defrauding those whom he taxed. But when Jesus encountered Zacchaeus and saw him up in the tree, he called him by name. He told him to come down. He told him that he was going to be his house guest that day.

Zacchaeus, he responded to his encounter with Jesus in a completely different way from the rich young ruler. Zacchaeus said in Luke chapter 19, verse eight, behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor. And if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold. Probably Zacchaeus was thinking of this passage. He was ready to restore fourfold what he had stolen. And Jesus said this about Zacchaeus. Jesus said what he could not say about the rich young ruler. Jesus said of this tax collector, this thief, he said, today salvation has come to this house since he also is a son of Abraham.

And the difference between Zacchaeus and the rich young ruler was that by the grace of God, Zacchaeus came to have a radically new attitude towards his wealth and possessions. He was not only ready to make restitution to those whom he had cheated, but he was ready to part with his wealth, to give half of it to the poor out of his love for his savior. So what Zacchaeus had was a new heart. He was no longer devoted to his money, his possessions, but he was now devoted wholly to Christ.

And the lesson is this, is that when it comes to your wealth and property, you may be the most honest person in the world. You may be upright in all of your dealings with others. You may have cheated and defrauded no one. But if you have made wealth your trust, if you have looked to your property, your wealth, your money, as the way to secure comfort, security, hope for you, then in terms of your standing with God, what you need is a radically new orientation. You need a new heart towards your wealth and your property. And that is only a gift of God’s grace.

Only by the grace of God can we come to let go of worldly wealth as a means of our comforts, our hope, our security in this world. Only when you treasure the Lord Jesus Christ more than you treasure your money and your possessions will your heart be right with God. Only when you are ready by the grace of God to part with everything that you have in this world for the sake of following Jesus and knowing Him and finding in Him true treasure. Only then is your heart right and your heart is where God wants it to be. And that is a gift of God’s grace by faith in Jesus Christ.

The second lesson is this. We need a savior to make restitution for us to God. So all of these laws are addressing the sin of stealing, of mishandling the property, the possessions that people might entrust to us. But when we consider the sin of theft, when we consider the sin of stealing from another person in the light of the truth of who God is, the fact that God is the sovereign creator of heaven and earth, the fact that God is the sovereign Lord that all that he has made, Almighty God is the one who is the rightful owner and possessor of all things.

When we consider the sin of stealing in the light of who God is, we see stealing very differently. We see that when we steal from somebody, we are not just taking something that belongs to them, but ultimately we are taking something that belongs to God. We are robbing God, we are stealing from Him because He is the true Lord and proprietor of all things. And so in the truest sense of the word, you and I don’t really own anything. We are only stewards and trusted by God with whatever wealth and possessions he gives to us in this world. Ultimately, all things are his and his alone. The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and all those who dwell therein. Psalm 24:1.

And so to steal anything is really to steal from God. And not only that, but when we consider that not just our material possessions, but all that we have, all that we are, our gifts, our talents, our time, our lives, our hearts, that all of this belong to God, then we can see that every time we fail to devote all that we have and all that we are to the service and worship of Christ, we are stealing from God. When we sin against God in any way, when we fail to devote everything we have to Him and His worship and service, we are robbing God of the glory, the honor, the praise that is rightfully His that we are to be giving to Him continually.

And so sin is robbing God. And with that in view then, since that is what sin is, stealing from God, His glory, in the light of these laws in Exodus, that raises the question, well, how do we make restitution to God? How do we compensate to Him? How do we repay Him from what we have taken? And the answer is, we cannot. We cannot possibly restore what we have stolen from God by our sin. And that’s because God is infinite. He is infinite in holiness and righteousness. And therefore to steal from him in any way, which is to say to sin against him in any way is to be guilty of a crime of infinite proportions. It is to have an infinite amount of guilt.

And so you and I cannot make restitution to God. We cannot repay him for the sin that we have sinned against him. We cannot compensate for our guilt against him or before him. The justice of God demands a restitution of infinite value, infinite worth, and even an eternity under the wrath of God is not sufficient restitution to God for the sin that we have committed against him. Only a restitution of infinite value can satisfy God’s justice. And that is exactly what Jesus Christ came to do.

That is exactly why Christ came into the world for sinners like you and me, so that by his suffering, what he suffered upon the cross, the judgment of God, the wrath of God, by his death upon the cross on our behalf, he has repaid the debt that you and I could never repay to God. Jesus Christ is our Savior. He has made a full, a perfect, a final restitution to God through our sins against him. He has paid the debt that you and I owe to him.

And so, as a believer in Jesus Christ, as one who belongs to him by faith, if your trust, your hope is in Jesus, as your savior from sin and death, you have the promise that that debt is paid, restitution has been made, God’s justice is satisfied, so that you can come into his presence now with that joy and freedom of knowing that there is no more guilt. There is no more sin. There is no more justice that needs to be dealt with before God, but that you are right with him, both now and forevermore. And so in the Lord Jesus Christ, your debt to the Lord is paid, your sins are forgiven, and you have received the gift of eternal life. Let’s pray.

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Our Old Testament reading is Exodus chapter 21, verses 12 through 36. So Exodus 21, verses 12 to 36. And this is the infallible, the inspired, the inerrant word of God.

Whoever strikes a man so that he dies shall be put to death. But if he did not lie in wait for him, but God let him fall into his hand, then I will appoint for you a place to which he may flee. But if a man willfully attacks another to kill him by cunning, you shall take him from my altar that he may die. Whoever strikes his father or his mother shall be put to death. Whoever steals a man and sells him and anyone found in possession of him shall be put to death. Whoever curses his father or his mother shall be put to death.

When men quarrel and one strikes the other with a stone or with his fist and the man does not die but takes to his bed, then if the man rises again and walks outdoors with his staff, he who struck him shall be clear. Only he shall pay for the loss of his time and shall have him thoroughly healed. When a man strikes a slave, male or female, with a rod, and the slave dies under his hand, he shall be avenged. But if the slave survives a day or two, he is not to be avenged, for the slave is his money.

When men strive together and hit a pregnant woman so that her children come out, but there is no harm, the one who hit her shall surely be fined, as the woman’s husband shall impose on him, and he shall pay as the judges determine. But if there is harm, then you shall pay life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.

When a man strikes the eye of his slave, male or female, and destroys it, he shall let the slave go free because of his eye. If he knocks out the tooth of his slave, male or female, he shall let the slave go free because of his tooth.

When an ox gores a man or a woman to death, the ox shall be stoned and its flesh shall not be eaten, but the owner of the ox shall not be liable. But if the ox has been accustomed to gore in the past and its owner has been warned but has not kept it in, and it kills a man or a woman, the ox shall be stoned, and its owner also shall be put to death. If a ransom is imposed on him, then he shall give for the redemption of his life whatever is imposed on him. If it gores a man’s son or daughter, he shall be dealt with according to this same rule. If the ox gores a slave, male or female, the owner shall give to their master 30 shekels of silver, and the ox shall be stoned.

When a man opens a pit, or when a man digs a pit and does not cover it, and an ox or a donkey falls into it, the owner of the pit shall make restoration. He shall give money to its owner, and the dead beast shall be his. When one man’s ox butts another’s so that it dies, then they shall sell the live ox and share its price, and the dead beast also they shall share. Or if it is known that the ox has been accustomed to gore in the past and its owner has not kept it in, he shall repay ox for ox, and the dead beast shall be his.

You can keep your place there. That will be our sermon text this morning. Our New Testament reading is Matthew chapter five, verses 38 through 42. Matthew 5, 38 through 42. You have heard that it was said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But I say to you, do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who begs from you and do not refuse the one who would borrow from you. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.

We are working our way through the book of Exodus, and last week we began a section in Exodus in which the Lord gave to Moses various laws that would govern the life as the Israelites, as they were being formed at this time to live as a nation, as the covenant people of God. They needed laws to direct and to govern the various circumstances, situations that would come up.

And we began looking at some of these laws last week, and it’s easy to get bogged down in all of the details of these various laws that God has given to the people of Israel. So before we get into the passage, let’s just remind ourselves, first of all, of the function of these laws, how they operated, or what was their role in the life of God’s people under the old covenants, in the nation of Israel.

These laws are part of what theology has called the civil or the judicial law of God. These were not meant to be permanent, but they were given to the people of Israel as long as they were a nation, that is, up until the coming of Christ. These laws were to direct the life of the nation of Israel. And I mentioned last week that we should not read these laws as if this is God’s blueprint for a perfect society. That is not the intent of these laws. Of course, the laws are just, they are righteous and so on.

But as we saw last week, with some of these laws, at least, God was not establishing what an ideal society would look like, but he was giving laws that would regulate practices that he knew would take place, but he did not necessarily sanction or approve. But he gave laws that would at least moderate or regulate practices that could be easily abused or perhaps even somewhat evil in themselves, for example, divorce. We might even include the practice of slavery in that category as well. And so that’s something to keep in mind when we consider these laws.

And part of the purpose of these civil laws was to illustrate or to demonstrate how the Ten Commandments applied to the life of the Israelites in their day-to-day dealings with one another. As I said last week, these civil laws are not meant to be the basis of the laws of any nation or state today. We are not to take these civil laws and make them word for word the law of the United States or any other country.

However, there is much value in considering these laws and studying them because they demonstrate ways in which the Ten Commandments, the moral law, ought to govern and inform the lives of all people today. For example, some of these laws have to do with a situation in which an animal is owned by someone and that animal kills another person. And the principle that we can take from that and a principle that ought to be enshrined in the just laws of any nation is that we are not only responsible ourselves to protect the lives of others, but that responsibility also extends to the things or the animals that are under our control.

And so if I have a vicious dog and I carefully or carelessly, I should say, if I irresponsibly, carelessly let my dog roam the neighborhood and he bites a neighbor, I am guilty of breaking the sixth commandment because I have not restrained my dog from hurting others. And so there’s these laws and we can see how the 10 commandments would apply to the everyday life situations that may come up among the people of Israel.

Another purpose of these laws that make them useful to us, as well as they were useful to the people of Israel then, was that they reveal to us, they show to us what God values, what he deems important, what he considers worthy, worthy of protection among the people of God. And so, for example, we’ll see in these laws that God is very concerned about those in society who are weak, who are vulnerable, who are easy to be exploited or oppressed by others. And so many of these laws are protection against the unrighteous oppression or exploitation of those who are weak and vulnerable.

And so we’ll see that as we go along. So having said that then, we’ll proceed as we consider this passage this morning in the same way that we did last week. We’ll consider first what these laws meant to the people of Israel back then, the original recipients of these laws. What did they mean? How were they to be carried out? And then we’ll look at these laws in light of the coming of Christ. And we’ll consider the significance that they hold for us as Christians today.

As we look at this passage, kind of reads like almost a random assortment of different laws, but there is some structure here. We can break this passage up into three different sections. There are three laws that pretty much break down into three different categories. Verses 12 through 17 deal with crimes that demand the death penalty. And so verses 12 through 17 are crimes that require, or they are capital offenses. They require a capital punishment. Verses 18 through 27 deal with crimes involving personal injury. And then verses 28 through 36 are laws that cover what we would call today criminal negligence.

So let’s look first at the first group of laws in verses 12 through 17. These laws call for the death penalty for those who break these commandments. And verses 12 through 14 deal with the crime of murder. And these laws in verses 12 through 14 distinguish between someone who kills someone intentionally, that is, he murders someone, versus someone who accidentally kills someone. It was purely an accident. He wasn’t meaning to kill him. He had no malice against him and so on.

And so if the killer acted with premeditation, if he intentionally set out to kill somebody, even if it was in the heat of the moment, he was guilty of the crime of murder. And in the Old Testament, the penalty for murder is always the death penalty, capital punishment. The one who committed murder, he may try to find safety by fleeing to the altar of God and taking hold of the altar. But if he purposely killed someone, even the altar of God would not provide sanctuary for him. He was to be taken away from the altar and his life was to be taken away from him. He was to be put to death.

But if a person killed somebody by accident, for example, if two friends are out in the woods chopping down firewood and one of the ax handles flies off or the ax head flies off the handle and hits the other guy in the head and he dies, that’s an accident. Accidentally killed his friend is not considered guilty of murder. And so that’s what verse 13 refers to when it says, but if he did not lie in wait for him, but God let him fall into his hand.

And so in the mysterious providence of God, these tragedies take place. These awful things can happen. A person can accidentally kill another person. But according to God’s perfect justice, the person who killed him is innocent, he ought not to be punished even though somebody died. But unless it was an accident, according to these laws, according to God’s justice for the Israelites, if someone killed another person purposely, he is a murderer and he must forfeit his own life. He must be subject to capital punishments.

And this raises the question. If capital punishment, as we read it here in these laws, if it was part of these civil laws that God gave to the people of Israel, these laws that have expired along with the state or the nation of Israel, does that not mean, therefore, because the civil laws no longer directly apply to our laws today, does that not mean, therefore, that there is no biblical warrant or justification for the death penalty today?

And the answer to that is, no, there is. There is biblical warrant, biblical justification for the death penalty today, but it’s not found in these laws per se. Rather, the biblical mandate for the death penalty is found in Genesis chapter nine, verse six, where the Lord says this, whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image. You remember that these words were spoken by the Lord to Noah.

And the Lord spoke these words to Noah before the creation of the people of Israel. So this was not a law that had to do only with the people of Israel, but the Lord spoke these words to Noah when he made his covenant with him, a covenant that included, that embraced all of humanity. And so this verse in Genesis 9:6 is something that was meant to apply to all societies at all times. It is the biblical warrant for the death penalty.

Now, of course, when we talk about our own judicial system and the actual carrying out of the death penalty or sentencing a criminal to death, we ought to be extremely careful and sober and serious about that. There should be no question of guilt. And there may be circumstances, even when someone is murdered, extenuating circumstances that may call for something less than the capital punishment.

However, we must affirm that biblically speaking, according to the perfect justice of God, when someone commits murder, the just penalty is that that person’s life must be forfeited. He must give up his own life because he took the life of another unlawfully. But it’s important to see the positive truth that is contained here in God’s provision for the death penalty. And that is God has given every human being worth and value and inestimable worth and value because every human being is created in the image of God who is infinitely worthy, infinitely valuable.

It is such a heinous sin against God to unlawfully destroy the life of His image bearers that His justice demands the life of the one who is guilty of murder. That’s the measure, that’s the extent to which God places value and worth in His human creatures, those who bear His image. And so we too ought to value human life as much as God does.

When we go on in this passage in verses 15 and 17, they tell us of two other crimes that required the death penalty. I’ll just read those two passages, first verses 15 and then verse 17. So verse 15, whoever strikes his father or his mother shall be put to death. Verse 17, whoever curses his father or his mother shall be put to death.

Now these laws, I think it’s reasonable to assume that these laws are not dealing with the ways in which young children, small children will act out against their parents, maybe even in a fit of rage, even strike their parents, hit their parents. But these laws have in view adult children, adult children whose contempt and hatred for their parents is so intense that they physically attack them, or one of them, or they call down God’s curses upon their parents. And when that happened, according to these laws, the guilty son, the guilty daughter had to be put to death.

Now, these laws, they sound, some of these laws, they sound very harsh to us. We certainly don’t have a law like this in our laws in our society today. But again, it’s important to see the positive reason. What was God seeking to protect? What value was he assigning here with this law? And what the Lord was seeking to protect was the dignity of human authority, particularly parental authority. God takes the fifth commandment. The fifth commandment says, honor your father and mother. God takes that very, very seriously.

So we can see just how important it is to God and how important it should be to us to give all due respect and honor to our parents and not only to our parents, but to all lawful authority that God has set over us. No society could flourish or survive for long which did not have a basic value and respect, not only for parental authority, but for all forms of lawful authority. And so although, unlike in the case of murder, we don’t apply the death penalty today for breaking the Fifth Commandment, nevertheless, these laws should impress upon us just how much value God places upon having an authority structure that is respected among any kind of society.

Another crime that call for the death penalty is in verse 16. So look at verse 16 and I’ll read that as well. Whoever steals a man and sells him and anyone found in possession of him shall be put to death. So kidnapping a person, stealing a person, and keeping him as a slave or selling him to someone else to be their slave, this was such an egregious assault against that person that the Lord called for, commanded the death penalty for the one who was guilty of that crime.

And again, what we see here is God’s basic concern for those who bear his image. He is concerned for the dignity, the liberty of human beings. And so for those who do not treat other human beings with that respect that they deserve simply by being made in the image of God, they treated them not like people, but like animals, like a slave trade does, then they were to be put to death.

And as I said last week, since this verse describes the basis upon which the institution of slavery was founded upon in our own nation, whatever else we may say about the Bible’s teaching on slavery, we can confidently say that the Bible clearly condemns the kind of slavery, the institution of slavery, as it existed in our own country in the South a few hundred years ago.

The second group of laws, so that’s the first group of laws, verses 12 through 17. The second group of laws are in verses 18 through 27, and these have to do with personal injury, causing physical harm to someone. The law in verses 18 and 19 deals with the situation in which two men fight and one is injured but not killed. And so the penalty in that case was a just restitution. The man who injured the other person, he not only has to pay for that injured person’s loss of time at work, but he also has to pay for his medical care so that he is thoroughly healed.

It’s not hard to imagine that perhaps if the Israelites kept these laws in their minds that they might have thought twice before settling their differences with their fists, knowing that it could become quite expensive if they hurt someone in a fight. Verses 20 and 21 deal with the treatment of slaves or servants. I will read verses 20 and 21. When a man strikes his slave, male or female, with a rod and the slave dies under his hand, he shall be avenged. But if the slave survives a day or two, he is not to be avenged, for the slave is his money.

Now, we need to remember that what was culturally acceptable in these days, in those days, is not what we might find culturally acceptable today. So it’s hard for us to hear some of these laws, but these laws assume that a master of a slave or a servant had the right, he was within his bounds, to use physical punishment against his servant. However, the use of corporal punishment could not be extreme, it could not be vicious or cruel.

Verse 20 says that if a master beat his servant so severely that he died, that the servant shall be avenged. And so what that means is that the law against murder and the penalty of capital punishment that this applied just as equally in the case of a master with his slave. A master was not free to simply murder his slave or to beat him to death. If he did, he would be subject to the same penalty for anyone who murdered another person.

The slave shall be avenged. The master would have to give up his own life if he murdered his slave. Again, you see how God is protecting those not only who bear his image, but those who were in particularly vulnerable situations and a slave would have been. Verse 21 deals with the case where a servant is beaten but he survives a day or two before he dies. And verse 21 says that in that case, he is not to be avenged. That means the master is not to be held guilty for murder, for the slave is his money.

Now, again, this is hard for us to hear, kind of hard for us to accept, but what this law is saying is that the master is not guilty of murder in this case, because the slave survived a day or two. In other words, the master was not trying to kill him. He was not trying to put him to death. And so he’s not subject to capital punishment. What the verse is saying is that the master has inflicted his own punishment upon himself. The slave is his money. He no longer has the labor, the services of that slave that he would otherwise have.

It sounds harsh to us, this law, but let’s hear that law in the light of these other laws that the Lord gave to his people. In verses 26 and 27, listen to this. It says, when a man strikes the eye of his slave, male or female, and destroys it, he shall let the slave go free because of his eye. If he knocks out the tooth of his slave, male or female, he shall let the slave go free because of his tooth. And so there was a, a narrow limit put to how much a master would hurt his slave. If he did any kind of permanent damage, any kind of permanent injury, if he knocked out his eye or his tooth, the slave would go free. And so when you look at these laws, the overall design for them was to protect those who were servants or slaves from the abuse that they might have been subjected to by their masters.

Now verses 22 through 24, these are the most difficult verses in this passage, partly because, or perhaps mainly because, the Hebrew is very difficult to interpret. It’s not easy to translate, but the general sense seems to be this, that two men are fighting near a pregnant woman, probably not a good idea, but they’re fighting near a pregnant woman, and one of them accidentally hits the woman, and she’s injured. And if there was, and not only that, but the baby that she carries is born prematurely.

If there was no permanent harm done to her or her newborn infant, the man who unintentionally struck her would still have to pay a fine. It was a terrible thing to do. So even if there was no damage done to the woman or to her baby, he would still have to pay a fine. But if there was some harm done to either the mother or to her unborn child, the guilty man would suffer a penalty.

And what was that penalty? Well, look at verses 24 or 23, 24 and 25. Verse 23 says, but if there is harm, then you shall pay life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe. Now, let’s leave the pregnant woman to the side for a minute and just look at these verses and consider them because these are so famous. People who have never read the Bible in their lives, they’ll be familiar with this phrase, eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.

They’re not only very famous, but they’re also very misunderstood. So what do you think of when you hear the expression, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth? Well, what you think of probably is personal revenge. He insulted me. He offended me. I will get even with him. Just like the Bible says, eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. I have it coming to him. But the truth is, eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, this is not a mandate for personal vengeance.

Rather, God gave this law to the Israelites as a principle to guide the judges or the elders, the lawful authorities to determine the appropriateness of a penalty. And the penalty had to be consistent or had to match in severity the harm that was done. And so the punishment must correspond to the crime, not more, not less. That’s what this verse means or these verses mean. The Latin name for this principle, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, the Latin name for this is Lex Talionis. It means the law of retaliation.

But again, it’s not referring to personal vengeance or retaliation, but it refers to the proper penalty that should be given to the one who inflicts harm on someone. It cannot be more severe than the harm done. It cannot be less severe than the harm done. It must be proportionate to the degree of the injury. God knows the human hearts. He knows our hearts. He knows that when we are offended or hurt by someone, we not only want that person to suffer in some proportional way as he has caused us to suffer, but we want him to suffer more, a lot more.

And so when that obnoxious driver tailgates you, you don’t say to yourself, oh, I hope that someone tailgates you just so you can know how it feels. But what you think to yourself is something more like, I hope you get hit by a train. That’s what you deserve for how you’ve been so rude to me. And so we have no sense of proportion when we feel like we have been slighted or sinned against. And so this law was meant to ensure that that kind of mentality of seeking revenge would not prevail in a court of law.

But on the other hand, the law also protected the victim of a crime from penalties that were too light, too easy, so that there would not be this sense on the part of the victim and the part of society that justice wasn’t really served. So one question that we have when we think about this principle, eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, does this mean that God meant that this law to be carried out in a literal fashion? And so that if you make me mad and I knock out your tooth, that the only just penalty is for someone to knock out my tooth?

Well, probably not, at least, when it comes to anything less than murder. When it comes to murder, it was to be literally life for life. But anything less than that, this law was not so much to be applied literally as it was to be a rule, to be followed. If you look at verses 26 and 27, and a rule to be followed in the sense that the penalty, whatever it was, should be proportionate to the crime, but not that it should be literally an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.

So look at verses 26 and 27 again. The penalty for the master who damaged his servant’s eye, the penalty for the master who knocked out his servant’s tooth was not that he should have his eye gouged out or his tooth knocked out, but he had to set his servant free. So there’s good reason to think that this law was never meant to be interpreted literally or applied literally, but rather metaphorically, if we can use that expression. So if you injure me, you must suffer in some way, a penalty that’s equivalent to the hurt that I’ve received from you.

So having dealt with that, then let’s go back to the poor pregnant woman who was injured when this fight broke out between two men. Again, these are difficult verses to interpret. Even conservative scholars disagree on exactly what they’re saying, but they seem to be saying this, that God considers the harm done to the child of the mother as significant as any harm that is done to the mother herself. In other words, God is just as concerned for the unborn child that she carries as he is for the pregnant mom.

And so if the mother miscarries or if her child sustained some injury that becomes evident after birth, then the men who were fighting or the guilty one who had hit the woman, he is just as liable for the harm done to that baby as he is for the harm done to the mother. And so what that means then is that God assigns the same value and worth to the unborn child in the mother’s womb as he does to the mother herself. Because the baby in the womb, and we know this from other scripture, it’s consistent with what the Bible teaches generally, but the baby in the womb is also an image bearer of God.

And again, we are not to think that these Old Testament civil laws are to be made the laws of our country in a kind of direct word for word fashion. Nevertheless, any society, any society like our own, that does not protect the life of the unborn child in the womb, that is necessarily a society that is fundamentally unjust. It is fundamentally unjust because it does not protect those whom God cares about, those who are the weakest, the most vulnerable in society, and who is weaker and more vulnerable than the baby in her mother’s womb. And so we can see in this law, God’s care, his concern, not just for the mother, but also for the baby that she carries.

The third group of laws are in verses 18 through 26, and these have to do with criminal negligence, that is hurting someone else by careless or irresponsible behavior. And in these laws, the same principle of a just penalty for harming another person, these are extended not only to someone who may harm another, but to their animals that they owned. And you can imagine in an agricultural society like the people of Israel were then, that these kinds of situations described in these laws would probably be not infrequent.

And so there is just a sampling of what might happen in these laws. An ox gores somebody. An animal is injured or killed when it falls into a pit that the owner has not covered up. An ox may attack another man’s ox and so on. We won’t look at all of these laws in detail. But the important thing to take from them is that the Lord laid responsibility on the owners of the animals for the actions of those animals.

So if you own a bull that had attacked or gored other animals or people in the past and you did not keep it locked up and safe from others, you would be responsible and guilty for whatever the bull did just as though you yourself had gored another person or attacked or killed another person. You would be subject to the same penalties. And so the general principle for these last set of laws is that you and I are responsible for the consequences of our foolishness or our carelessness. And this is one way in which we see how the sixth commandment applies in our lives, that I may not purposely go out to hurt somebody, but if I do something foolish or careless and it results in someone’s injury, then it’s as though I did try to hurt them. And so I’m subject to the penalty in that case.

And so these are the laws then that we are considering today, and as we look at these laws in the light of the coming of Christ, one thing, or the first thing I want you to notice is the nature of these laws. That they are exacting, they are uncompromising, there is no flexibility with these laws. But they demand, they demand nothing less than a fair and equitable retribution against the person who has broken them. That is exactly what is expressed in that principle, life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, burn for burn, and so on.

That the laws requirement for justice must be met. And so when a law of God is broken, satisfaction must be made in the form of a punishment. Satisfaction that is equal to the transgression. Justice must be upheld. And this is because of the one who has given these laws, God, the great law giver, he is perfect and infinite in justice and righteousness. And his justice must be upheld. He cannot deny his very character. It would be contrary to the integrity of who God is as a righteous God, a holy God, a just God, if he did not uphold his own standards of justice, if he did not mete out the penalty that is due to those who break his commandments.

In this way, these civil laws that God gave to Israel illustrate what is true of the moral law that God has given to all people at all times. And when I speak of the moral law, what I mean is that law that is given to us in the 10 commandments, that law that applies to every human being, the law that God has written upon our hearts. And when it comes to that moral law as well, God cannot compromise his justice. There is no flexibility. There is no compromising with the law of God. His law must be satisfied. Justice must be dealt.

And here’s the bad news. We are law breakers. We are guilty of breaking God’s commandments. We are just as guilty of breaking the 10 commandments. One way or the other, we’ve broken all 10 commandments, but we are just as guilty of breaking God’s moral law as those people in these verses that are described here, as they were guilty of breaking these particular commandments. And so we are lawbreakers. We are subject to God’s justice.

And here’s more bad news. When Christ comes again, he is going to judge every single human being on the basis of his perfect justice. And that judgment will be fair, it will be just. And apart from the grace of God, we are all condemned as lawbreakers. Apart from the grace of God, we are guilty. We are all subject to the perfect justice of God for breaking his law. And God says in his word that that justice that must be satisfied against sinners, against you and me for breaking God’s law is nothing less than eternal condemnation. Nothing less than an eternity suffering under the wrath of God, the anguish and torment of that suffering forever and ever because we have broken the law of God.

Again, this passage helps us to see just how unbending God’s justice and His law really is. And our plight would be terrible were it not for the grace of God, were it not for the good news. But there is mercy and grace in the gospel of Jesus Christ. There is salvation for all who believe in Jesus Christ as their Savior. But that raises the question, how can that be? If God is perfectly just, if his law and the demands of his law and the penalties that the law demands must be met, how can he save anyone? How can he show mercy and grace to anyone?

Well, the answer is found at the cross. The book of Romans says that the death of Jesus on the cross, it shows the righteousness of God in Romans 3:26, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. What a marvelous thing. When you look at the cross of Jesus Christ, what you see there is the display, the manifestation of the perfect justice of God. Every sin will be dealt with. Every transgression will receive justice.

But at the cross, you also see the mercy, the love of God, because it is Jesus who takes that penalty. It is Jesus who takes that judgment for you and me, if your hope and faith are in Jesus Christ. And so the cross reveals both the uncompromising, the unbending justice of God, but also the mercy of God, so that he is both just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus Christ. The law says life for life, but the gospel says Jesus laid down his life for your life. And he has met the demands of the law so that you can enjoy the fullness of that eternal life, which he gives to you as a gift of his grace.

Another way to put all this is to say this, that God does not deal with us on the basis of justice. The law of God, these laws that he gave to the people of Israel, the 10 commandments. This is not the basis on which God deals with you and me as those who belong to Jesus Christ. Psalm 103:10 says, he does not deal with us according to our sins nor repay us according to our iniquities. Your relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ, your communion with God is not on a legal basis.

It is not because you have kept the law that God loved you. It is not because you continue to keep the law that he loves you, but he has loved you out of his mercy and grace in his son, Jesus Christ, despite the fact that you have broken the law and you still do not keep it perfectly. And so what this means is that our relationship to Christ, our communion with God, is on a grace basis. It’s because of grace that we are saved.

And this is the way in which we are to deal with one another as well. Not on a legal basis, tit for tat. I’ll repay you for what you have done to me, but on a grace basis. And that’s what Jesus taught in Matthew chapter five in that passage that we read. You have heard that it was said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But I say to you, do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who begs from you and do not refuse the one who would borrow from you.

And what Jesus is saying here is this, is that, as one who belongs to Jesus Christ by faith, that seeking retribution, seeking to demand your requirements for justice in your dealings with one another, that has no place in how you deal with other people. But on the contrary, as followers of Christ, we must be willing even to suffer wrong for the sake of bearing witness to Christ. And so as you, by the grace of God, as you overlook minor offenses, as you are ready to forgive those who sin against you, as you love your enemy and pray for him, then you are dealing with others in the very same way that God has dealt with you, not on the basis of justice and law, but on the basis of mercy and grace, that mercy and grace that was so marvelously exhibited when he gave us his son, Jesus Christ, to be our savior. Let’s pray.

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The Old Testament reading is Exodus chapter 21, verses 1 through 11, Exodus 21, one through eleven. And this is the inspired, the inerrant and infallible word of God. Let’s hear God’s word. 

Now, these are the rules that you shall set before them. When you buy a Hebrew slave, he shall serve six years and in the seventh, he shall go out free for nothing. If he comes in single, he shall go out single. If he comes in married, then his wife shall go out with him. If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall be her masters and he shall go out alone. But if the slave plainly says, I love my master, my wife and my children, I will not go out free, then his master shall bring him to God and he shall bring him to the door or the doorpost and his master shall bore his ear through with an awl and he shall be his slave forever.

When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she shall not go out as the male slaves do. If she does not please her master who has designated her for himself, then he shall let her be redeemed. He shall have no right to sell her to a foreign people since he has broken faith with her. If he designates her for his son, he shall deal with her as with a daughter. If he takes another wife to himself, he shall not diminish her food, her clothing, or her marital rights. And if he does not do these three things for her, she shall go out for nothing without payment of money.

And now turn to Mark’s gospel, Mark chapter 10, verses 42 through 45 for the New Testament reading. Mark 10, 42 through 45. 

And Jesus called them to him and said to them, you know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lorded over them and their great ones exercise authority over them, but it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant. And whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For even the son of man came not to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.

You may turn back to Exodus chapter 21 for our Sermon Text this morning. Today, we are beginning to look at what you might call the fine print, the fine print of God’s covenant with his people Israel. The major aspects or parts of that covenant have been made very clear. The Lord has promised to his people, Israel, that he will be their God. And by his loving them, by his hearing their cries, by redeeming them from their bondage in Egypt, God has made them his people.

And the Lord has made his commandments very clear to the people of Israel. In fact, he has made them terrifyingly clear. With his own voice that thundered from the top of Mount Sinai, with his own finger by which he inscribed the words of the Decalogue upon the tablets of stone, the Lord has given to the people of Israel his 10 commandments. And he has told the Israelites what they must do to be faithful to this covenant that he has brought them into. They must keep his commandments, keep his law.

But now the Lord has called Moses back up to Mount Sinai. And with our passage this morning, he begins to give to Moses all kinds of laws and instructions dealing with the day-to-day lives of the Israelites as they were going to live together as a nation, as a society. So he says in verse one of chapter 21, now, these are the rules that you shall set before them. And these rules begin here in chapter 21, verse one, they go all the way to the end of chapter 23. And these are the rules that I’m calling the fine print of the covenant that God made with Israel.

And that’s because these rules are very detailed. And if I may say so, with all due reverence to the word of God, when we come to these various laws and rules, we find them to be a bit tedious to read. I imagine it’s about here in Exodus that a lot of people start to flame out on their Bible reading plan through one year because they get bogged down in these arcane, seemingly irrelevant rules and laws. We’re tempted to just pass over the section, kind of like when we have to download an app or software of pages and pages of terms and conditions that we’re supposed to promise that we have read. We just scroll down through that and we never read it. We’re tempted to kind of just skim past this section of the Bible as well.

But these chapters are all part of the word of God. And as we consider these detailed laws that God has given to his people of Israel, we’ll see that there are important lessons for us, for Christians today that we can take from these various laws. Our passage this morning, as you have heard, has to do with the laws that governed the practice of slavery among the people of Israel. And so first we’ll consider how these laws applied to the people of Israel, and then we’ll consider how or what these laws have to say to us as Christians today, as the new covenant people of God, as the church today.

But before we look more closely at our passage this morning, before we begin to unpack these laws and all of their details, I want to make some general comments about our passage, but also about how we are to understand all of the laws that God gave to the people of Israel, all of these laws that govern the life of the people of Israel.

So first of all, my first observation or first comment is this, that when it comes to slavery, that’s what our passage is about today, but when it comes to slavery, the Bible condemns the kind of slavery that once existed in our nation. When we read the word slave in the Bible, when we see that word anywhere really, but when we read in the Bible our minds naturally envision the institution of slavery that we are most familiar with from our nation’s history and that is that race-based chattel slavery that existed in the American South for so many years and of course we think of all of the horrors, the evils that were wrapped up in that institution. And we wonder how can the Bible, how can God permit such a wicked thing as slavery to exist even among his own people?

But we need to understand that the slavery that existed in the American South was an entire institution that was based on a practice that the Bible explicitly condemns, and that is the practice of stealing people in order to sell them or to make them slaves. 

In 1 Timothy 1, Paul gives a list of various sins that are typical of the unrighteous, the ungodly, those whom he calls the lawless, the disobedient, the ungodly and sinners, the unholy and profane. And among other things that characterize the acts of these unrighteous, ungodly people, he says that they are enslavers, enslavers. And the word in Greek refers specifically to those who take people captive, kidnap people, steal people in order to make them slaves or to sell them into slavery. The King James Version uses the word men-stealers for enslavers in First Timothy.

And of course, that’s exactly how slaves were obtained by the slave traders. They got their victims from Africa. Then they would go on to sell them on the other side of the Atlantic. And by and large, they were people who had been kidnapped and then sold as stolen property. And in the chapter that we’re looking at now, in Exodus chapter 21 and verse 16, it says this, it affirms what we read in the New Testament. Verse 16, chapter 21 says, whoever steals a man and sells him and anyone found in possession of him, he shall be put to death. And so both the Old Testament and the New Testament clearly explicitly condemn the exact practice that was the basis for the institution of slavery in the American South. And so we can’t transfer what we think of that institution into the Bible and read that into the Bible when the Bible speaks of slavery. As we’ll see in our passage this morning, the slavery that is described in the Bible is much different from that. We need to keep that in mind as we read these verses so that we can get a better grasp of what these verses actually meant to the people of Israel then and to hopefully disengage from our minds these preconceptions of what slavery is like in all times and all places.

A second general comment is this – hese laws in the Old Testament are not God’s prescription for an ideal society. So on the one hand, these are laws even to the very details of all these laws, they were given by God, they were given to Moses by the Lord who is infinite in wisdom and justice and goodness and truth. And so all of these laws are inherently good and just. But on the other hand, in giving his laws to the people of Israel, we know that God accommodated, he made room for the weakness, even the sinfulness of his people. In other words, God gave these laws not to create an ideal society, but to govern and to regulate a society of sinners, of fallen people, flawed people, who inevitably would try to hurt and take advantage of one another.

And we know that this is true of the Old Testament laws from the teaching of Jesus. You remember when the Pharisees asked Jesus about why Moses commanded them to give their wives a certificate of divorce in certain circumstances? Jesus corrected the Pharisees. He says in Matthew 19, 8, because of your hardness of heart, Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning, it was not so. In other words, what Jesus told the Pharisees is, what you call a commandment, that rule that you find in the scriptures, was actually a concession. It was a concession to the hardness of your hearts.

God gave you that law to regulate an evil practice because God’s will for marriage is that once a man and a woman are joined together in holy matrimony, they are to remain married until death do them part. But because the Lord knew that the people of Israel were fallen, they were sinful, that they would seek to divorce, he gave laws to regulate, to minimize, or to regulate that practice, to minimize the hurt and the evil that might result from it. And so sometimes God gave laws to his people to constrain them in their sinful ways, to ensure that an evil practice would not do more harm than it otherwise would. And these laws then, they don’t represent God’s blueprint for a perfect ideal society on earth.

You see that in verse 10 of our passage. If you look at verse 10, it says, if he takes another wife to himself, well, this doesn’t mean that God condoned or sanctioned or approved the practice of polygamy. We know that God does not approve of polygamy for the same reason why Jesus told that God does not approve of the practice of divorce, because from the beginning, it was not so. From the beginning, it was not so. God created Adam and Eve. Their marriage was normative for all marriages to follow. One man, one woman, and a lifelong union between the two. And so when you read of laws such as these, these laws this morning that regulate a system of slavery or indentured servanthood, that doesn’t mean that the institution itself was part of God’s design or blueprint for a perfect society for his people. So that’s another thing to keep in mind as we read this passage and other passages that follow from it.

A third general comment related to that is this. These laws are not meant to be directly applied to societies and nations today. And why is that? It’s because unlike the nation of Israel, the church of Jesus Christ is a spiritual entity. The church is not a political body. It’s not a geographical nation with borders and lands and an army and all of that. Jesus said, my kingdom is not of this world. And so when Jesus Christ came into the world, the people of God from that point on were no longer constituted as a nation state with, again, borders and land and various laws governing the civil, the judicial life of the nation.

And so with the end of the nation of Israel as the covenant people of God came the end of these civil and judicial laws that governed their people as a nation. They no longer apply to the church, not directly. They no longer apply to nations today. Now, there are principles enshrined in these laws that should inform the laws of any nation, but the laws themselves, there’s not an immediate transference of the laws from the Old Testament to what should be the laws of nations today.

Our confession of faith puts it this way, when it speaks of the judicial, the civil laws that God gave to the people of Israel, it says that these laws have expired together with the state of that people, not obligating or not obliging any other now further than the general equity thereof may require. And so what that means is, for example, the government of the United States is under no divine obligation to take these laws that God gave to the people of Israel when they were a nation state and to make them the laws of our nation. Now, in a more perfect world, our government would always seek to make laws that are moral, that are just, that are good according to the general teaching of the word of God. But these Old Testament laws are not meant to be a divine law code that nations today must adopt as their own. And so that’s another thing to keep in mind as we read these laws from the Old Testament.

But having said all that, these laws are still a part of the inspired word of God. In 2 Timothy, when Paul says that all scripture is God-breathed and profitable for us in different ways, he says earlier that the scriptures are able to make us wise for salvation. That includes all of scripture. That includes the passage that we’re looking at today, these laws that God gave to the people of Israel. And so they are worthy of our time. And so we’ll consider how these laws apply to the people of Israel, and then we’ll draw some lessons for us as the church today.

So, first, let’s just walk through these verses and try to understand what these laws are saying. Look at verse 2. So this is verse 2, chapter 21. When you buy a Hebrew slave, he shall serve six years, and in the seventh, he shall go out free for nothing. Again, we hear that language and our minds immediately think of those horrendous drawings that we have seen of slave auctions, of people being sold as if they were livestock or something like that, but that’s not what’s happening here. When you buy a Hebrew slave, that means something like when you purchase the right to a man’s labor with his full consent. And when that was the case, when one person purchased the rights to a man’s labor with his consent, the one who had the right to that man’s labor, the master, he had the right to that labor, not for a whole lifetime, but for six years, only for six years. In verse two, he shall serve six years, and in the seventh, he shall go out free for nothing.

And so if a servant or the slave, if he worked hard and learned a skill, after six years of this kind of indentured servanthood, he would be in a position in which he was able to make a living, to provide for himself, to provide for a family. This was an arrangement that could especially benefit a young man who was desperately poor, or perhaps he was deep in debt, or maybe he had simply lived unwisely, irresponsibly, or all of the above. But this was an arrangement by which he could get his feet back on the ground, he could learn a skill, and after six years, he could make a living, become a productive member of society. So this was a way that, actually, this would be a help to some people in the society then.

And in verse 3, the Lord ensured that this arrangement would not break up families. In verse three, we read this. If he comes in single, he shall go out single. If he comes in married, then his wife shall go out with him. But then verse four addresses a different situation. Look at verse four. If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall be her masters and he shall go out alone. Now what’s assumed here in verse four is that the woman that the slave marries, that she herself is also a servant belonging to the same master. And the reason for this law was to protect the interests of the master. The master had rights to her service, whether she was committed to him to be his servant for a period of years or whether for life, it wouldn’t have been just if she was taken from him without fulfilling that commitment.

But this law in verse four doesn’t mean that the husband just abandoned his family. Presumably, this freed slave, he would find some other way to continue to be the husband and father to his family. Perhaps he had the option to purchase the freedom of his wife and family. We just don’t honestly know enough about how all of this worked to say for sure. But we can safely say that verse four, the intent of it was not to break up families. We know that is the case because that would contradict what the Lord said in verse 3, and it would also contradict everything that God has revealed of the scripture concerning marriages and families.

And there was one option open to this slave who would be freed, who had married in the meantime, that given the right circumstances may have been very attractive to him, and that is he could decide to remain a servant of his master for the rest of his life. So look at verses 5 and 6. But if the slave plainly says, I love my master, my wife and my children, I will not go out free, then his master shall bring him to God and he shall bring him to the door or the doorpost. And his master shall bore his ear through with an awl and he shall be his slave forever.

This is, it strikes us as a kind of strange thing, this ceremony that the Lord gave to the people of Israel to make this person the permanent servant of his master. There’s at least a couple of reasons for this ritual of ear piercing. First, it would have kept the servant from making a rash commitment. You would have to be pretty committed to this course of action to be willing to undergo this ceremony, which your ear would be pierced with an awl against the doorpost. But also because it was a lifelong commitment, the ritual, the pierced ear, would serve as an enduring public testimony of that commitment. And so from that point on, neither the master nor the servant could ever say, I never made that promise. I never made that arrangement to be a servant here in your house forever. The master could not say, I don’t want you in my house anymore. You have to leave. No, they could both, either one could point to the pierced ear and say, no, this is a reminder to us that, yes, we both entered into this commitment, this arrangement.

Now, things were a little different with the female servants. Look at verse 7. Again, we’ve got to understand that this verse is not saying what it sounds like it may be saying to us. It’s not picturing some terrible situation in which a father heartlessly sells his daughter into slavery because he’s more interested in the money he can get for her than being a father to his daughter. What this verse is actually describing is something more like an arranged marriage. The daughter would be given to this other family, presumably a family with more means, a wealthier family, with the idea that she would likely end up marrying one of the master’s sons or perhaps one of his servants.

It’s important to remember that in this society, it was not like today where a single woman could go out and make a living, have a career and so on. That just really wasn’t an option for young women living in Israel in these days. And so this arrangement was really meant for the good of the daughter. It wasn’t for the profit of the father, but that she might be married and find security, stability in that. And we see how the Lord ensured that this daughter who was given to the master had certain rights, rights that could not be violated.

So look at verse eight. If she does not please her master who has designated her for himself, then he shall let her be redeemed. He shall have no right to sell her to a foreign people since he has broken faith with her. So if for some reason her service did not please the master, he couldn’t just willy-nilly sell her to pagan slave traders. That would have been contrary to God’s will. Rather, he had to let her be redeemed. That is, her family had to have the opportunity to purchase her freedom so that she could return back to her biological family. And if this was the case, for some reason, this was an indication that the master had failed. If this whole arrangement fell apart and she was redeemed by her family, it says in verse eight that the master has broken faith with her.

This female servant continued to have rights if she did marry one of the master’s sons. So look at verse nine. If he designates her for his son, he shall deal with her as a daughter. In other words, if she marries a son, she shall be like a daughter to the master. She would be fully adopted. She would no longer be considered just a servant, but a daughter in the family. And then if the son took another wife, which, again, would be contrary to the will of God in terms of his creation design for us, but again, he gave this law to regulate the practice of polygamy, if the son took another wife and failed to fulfill his obligations to his first wife as her husband, she was free to leave.

So look at verses 10 and 11. If he takes another wife, that is, if the husband that she married, a son of the master, if he takes another wife to himself, he shall not diminish her food, her clothing, or her marital rights. And if he does not do these three things for her, she shall go out for nothing without payment of money. And so these then are some of the fine print, the laws that God attached to his covenant with Israel. One way to think about these laws is to see them as specific applications of the Ten Commandments. One way or the other, the Lord is saying, this is how you keep these moral laws, these Ten Commandments in the specific situations that you will encounter in your life together as a nation. But you can see that God’s concern was that the vulnerable, the poor, would not be exploited by the rich, by the powerful, with some kind of ruthless practice of slavery, but that there would be guardrails, regulations, ways to ensure that that practice would be kept from becoming something very exploitative and hurtful to others.

Now, if we step back a minute and think about the bigger context in which we find this passage, if we think about the situation in which the Israelites found themselves when God gave them these laws, a striking picture emerges from that. First of all, we need to remember that the Israelites, as a people, they were a free people. It was not so long ago that the Lord had redeemed them from Egypt by His mighty power, by an outstretched arm, with signs and wonders, and all of the things that we saw in the Exodus, the Lord brought his people out of Egypt. He made them his own. He gave them freedom. He liberated them. They were no longer slaves to Pharaoh. They were no longer slaves to his ruthless taskmasters, but they were truly now at the foot of Mount Sinai, a free people, a free people having been freed to serve and to worship the Lord.

But even in their freedom, some of the Israelites at least, some of them would be servants, even slaves of others. And so for some of the Israelites, they would be at the very same time both free, free in the Lord, but also servants of others. The words that the Apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthians really described the situation of some of these Israelites. He says, for he who was called in the Lord as a bondservant is a freedman of the Lord. And so it was possible to be both free and a slave at the same time.

And this describes you and me as believers in Jesus Christ. As a believer in Christ, as one who belongs to Christ, you are both free and you are a slave. Martin Luther, in one of his tracts, one of his little booklets, he put it this way. He said, a Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. But he also said, a Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all. Sounds paradoxical. How can these two things be true at the same time? But they are true. As a Christian, you are the free lord of all. And you are free, you are the lord of all, even because you have the promise from God that God in His almighty power, His sovereign rule over all things, that He is working out all things for your ultimate blessedness, salvation, for your good.

And so what that means is that all things are your servants. All things work together for your good. God makes all things, he puts everything into the service of your salvation and your eternal bliss and glory one day. And so you are the free lord of all, subject to none, but you are at the same time the servant of all, because as a Christian, you are called to love your neighbor in the very same way that Christ loved you, as a servant, freely, willingly, gladly. Paul applies this to himself, this status of being both free and lord of all, and at the same time, a slave and subject to all. He says in 1 Corinthians 9, verse 19, for though I am free from all, I have made myself a servant to all.

And in this passage, the Holy Spirit gives us a beautiful picture of what true Christian servanthood looks like. In verse five, we have a servant who truly wants to stay with his master. He wants to serve his master. And not just because it’s a good place to make a living, it’s comfortable, it’s okay, but because he loves his master. He says in verse five, I love my master, my wife, and my children. I will not go out free. And in a sense, this describes the way that we should see ourselves as those who are servants of Christ. It is out of love to Him, out of love for our Master, that we ought to serve Him. The people of God are our family. It is out of love for them that we ought to serve them, because Christ loved them and made them His own. We, too, ought to love those whom Christ has loved.

The servant in verse five in our passage, he’s fulfilling what the Apostle Paul would say in Galatians 5:13, through love, serve one another. And so the slave had been set free, but he, in his freedom, chooses to be a slave, to be a servant, to serve his master whom he loves, to serve the family whom he loves. He gave up his personal freedom because he knew a greater freedom, the freedom to serve out of love for his master and for his family. Is that the way that you view yourself as a Christian serving Christ? I hope that you do not see Christ as a hard taskmaster. I hope that you do not see Jesus as one who places upon you these burdens that are too heavy to bear. To serve the Lord is burdensome, it is difficult, it is joyless. That’s not how we ought to be as believers in Christ. We ought to serve Christ because we love Him. We serve Him because we love Him for what He has done for us, because He has first loved us.

The Bible says His commandments are not burdensome. His yoke is easy. And when we truly love Christ for all that He has done for us, for who He is as our Savior, then serving Him is something we want to do, we love to do, because He has made us His own. And what’s more, this servant in chapter five is also a shadow of the greatest servant who ever lived, that is Jesus. Just as the servant presented himself in this passage to his master whom he loved, he presented himself to him. He devoted himself to him, to his service forever. So in his coming into the world as man, Jesus presented himself to his heavenly father, to his master, to do the will of his father forever and ever, to be his servant.

And out of love both for his father and for us, Jesus made himself our servant. And that service came to its greatest expression when Jesus willingly went to the cross out of obedience to his father, but out of love for his father, out of love for his people whom he would redeem. He went to the cross and there bore the pain, the shame, the curse of God, that terrible agony of soul and body that we cannot even begin to fathom. He bore that judgment that we deserved for you and me, that our sins might be forgiven, that we might receive the gift of eternal life.

And so if your trust is in the Lord Jesus Christ, He is your Savior. He came not to be served, but to serve for your salvation. But He is also your Lord. Yes, he came to serve, but he is also one who is to be served by you, those whom he has redeemed. And for that same reason, we ought to be servants of others for the sake of Jesus. Jesus set for us an example of service. He washed the feet of his disciples. He even laid down his life for us. And this is how we ought to serve others, by making ourselves the servant of others, by taking the lower place.

Listen to how Martin Luther describes in the same booklet that I quoted from earlier. Listen to how he describes what should be the attitude of every believer in Christ. He says, he ought to think, although I am an unworthy and condemned man, my God has given me in Christ all the riches of righteousness and salvation without any merit on my part, out of pure free mercy, so that from now on, I need nothing except faith, which believes that this is true. Why should I not therefore freely, joyfully, with all my heart and with an eager will, do all things which I know are pleasing and acceptable to such a father who has overwhelmed me with his inestimable riches? I will therefore give myself as a Christ to my neighbor, just as Christ offered himself to me. I will do nothing in this life except what I see as necessary, profitable, and salutary to my neighbor, since through faith I have an abundance of all good things in Christ.

This should describe our service as those who belong to Christ, our service to our master, our service to others for the sake of Christ. Jesus said, the son of man came not to be served, but to serve, to give his life as a ransom for many. There is nothing more like Christ than to voluntarily serve your neighbor for his good. And nothing pleases God more than when you do this out of love for Christ, because we love him from the heart for all that he has done for you. Let’s pray.

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The Old Testament reading is Exodus chapter 20, verses 18 to 26. And this is the inerrant and infallible word of God. Now, when all the people saw the thunder and the flashes of lightning and the sound of the trumpet and the mountains smoking, the people were afraid and trembled. And they stood far off and said to Moses, “You speak to us and we will listen, but do not let God speak to us lest we die.”

Moses said to the people, “Do not fear for God has come to test you that the fear of him may be before you that you may not sin.” The people stood far off while Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was. And the Lord said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the people of Israel, ‘You have seen for yourselves that I have talked with you from heaven. You shall not make gods of silver to be with me, nor shall you make for yourselves gods of gold. An altar of earth you shall make for me and sacrifice on it your burnt offerings and your peace offerings, your sheep and your oxen. In every place where I cause my name to be remembered, I will come to you and bless you. If you make me an altar of stone, you shall not build it of hewn stones, for if you wield your tool on it, you profane it. And you shall not go up by steps to my altar, that your nakedness be not exposed on it.'”

Our New Testament reading is Hebrews chapter 12, Hebrews 12 verses 18 through 24. Hebrews 12, 18 through 24. For you have not come to what may be touched, a blazing fire, and darkness, and gloom, and a tempest, and the sound of a trumpet, and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that no further messages be spoken to them. For they could not endure the order that was given. If even a beast touches the mountain, it shall be stoned. Indeed, so terrifying was the sight that Moses said, “I tremble with fear.”

But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem and to innumerable angels and festal gathering and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven and to God, the judge of all and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.

I’ll begin this morning by asking you a question. Do you fear God or do you walk in the fear of God? As Christians today, we don’t usually speak of our faith in this way. We talk about knowing God or loving God, worshiping God, but not so often about fearing God. In fact, to fear the Lord, that phrase may even sound a little old-fashioned to us, kind of like the way they talked at your grandparents’ fundamentalist Baptist church. We prefer to talk about the joy and peace of knowing God, being in communion with Him, but not so much about fearing God or fearing the Lord.

But the scriptures often speak in this way. In Psalm 130 verse four, we read, “But with you there is forgiveness that you may be feared.” First Peter 2, 17: “Honor everyone, love the brotherhood, fear God, honor the emperor.” And in the Bible, almost in every situation, when God reveals himself to someone or some people in a way that is very extraordinary, very personal, that person or those people always come away from their encounter with God with an overwhelming sense of fear and dread. In the scriptures, when someone meets God, it is always a fearful thing.

For example, in the book of Judges, when the angel of the Lord appears to Manoah and his wife, those would become the parents of Samson. After the angel of the Lord appeared to Manoah, he said, “We shall surely die for we have seen God.” And you know the response of Isaiah the prophet when he was in the temple and the Lord appeared to Isaiah in the fullness of his glory and majesty. The Lord said, “Woe is me for I am lost for I’m a man of unclean lips. And I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips. For my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.”

And this is not just an Old Testament phenomenon. We see the same thing in the New Testament. You remember when Peter was fishing and Jesus was with him, Jesus caused Peter’s net to miraculously fill with fish, and this filled the heart of Peter with fear. He said to Jesus, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.” And why did all these people come away from their encounter with the Lord filled with a sense of dread or fear? It was because of the holiness of God. When God reveals himself in the majesty of his splendor, his divine purity and holiness, it inspires, it has to inspire us with fear. It fills our hearts with the sense of dread.

Maybe the reason we don’t speak of fearing God so much is because we’ve lost that sense of awe and dread before a God who is holy, a God who, according to the scripture, alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see. Well, the Israelites certainly did not lack this sense of awe and dread before the Lord, especially when they met with the Lord at Mount Sinai.

In our passage this morning, Moses tells us what happened right after the Lord spoke to the people of Israel and gave them the 10 commandments. And the picture that Moses draws for us here is a scene that is one of, you could almost call it abject terror, paralyzing fear of the people of Israel who have just heard and come into the presence of their Lord, a majestic and holy God. And as the hearts and the minds of the people of Israel were filled with this fear of the Lord, the Lord, through Moses, he taught the Israelites two lessons that would have made a deep impression upon the people, particularly at this time when they were so overcome by this sense of awe and dread in the presence of God.

Those two lessons were this. First of all, they needed a mediator to come into the presence of God. Secondly, they needed sacrifices to come into the presence of God. And we’ll consider those two lessons this morning and what they mean for us as Christians today.

First of all, the Israelites were taught that they needed a mediator. The people of Israel, they just heard from the Lord. They were just in the presence of God as he descended upon Mount Sinai and those terrible scenes of fire and smoke and thunder and lightning and all of that. He declared to them the 10 commandments. And the reaction on the people of Israel was not something like, “That all sounds good, thank you for these rules, we’ll try to keep them in mind.” But Moses tells us that the people were left petrified. They were fearful.

Let me read verse 18. “Now, when all the people saw the thunder and the flashes of lightning and the sound of the trumpet and the mountain smoking, the people were afraid and trembled and they stood far off.” Imagine, if you will, being there among the people of Israel at the foot of Mount Sinai. With each peal of thunder, the earth beneath your feet rocks. Bullets of lightning light up the dark sky for an instant, and then the darkness again envelops you. You hear the ear-piercing blast of a trumpet. The mountain above you, so imposing, it’s enveloped in fire and smoke, and above all else, worst of all, you hear the dreadful voice of the Lord thunders down from the mountain. This was definitely not the still small voice that the prophet Elijah heard.

And we too, if we had been there with the people of Israel, we would have responded in the very same way. We too would have been filled with a sense of dread and awe of being in the presence of God. We too would have been overcome by the fearful majesty, the holiness of God as he made himself known to the people. And when you couple that with all the words that the Israelites had just heard, the words that had thundered from the top of the mountain, these 10 commandments, they would have been filled as well with the dread of the judgment of God, that breaking those commandments would surely bring upon them.

It was out of that fear of God that the Israelites said to Moses in verse 19, “You speak to us and we will listen, but do not let God speak to us lest we die.” Oh, the voice of the Lord was too terrible for them to hear. It was too frightful. It was so majestic, so glorious. We sometimes think, “Oh, if God would only speak to me.” I’m not so sure we want that when we consider how it affected the Israelite people. And so the people wanted Moses to be a mediator. They wanted Moses to represent them, to go before them to the Lord and to the presence of God, to hear the voice of the Lord, to relay to them the words that God had spoken to Moses. They themselves did not want to go anywhere near the Lord. They were too afraid.

So verse 21 says, “The people stood far off while Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was.” Now, if the Israelites had not already understood it, at this time, they knew this lesson was blazing upon their hearts. They needed someone to go before them into the presence of God. They needed a mediator. And they looked to Moses, the same Moses whom they had rejected in the wilderness, whose leadership they tried to throw off. Now they are begging him, “Moses, go, please, in our place to be with God. You go, you hear the voice of God. We cannot bear to hear it anymore.” And so they learned that they needed a mediator.

And God also used the occasion to teach the Israelites that they needed to approach him with sacrifices. And so when the Lord, or when Moses went up to speak with the Lord or to hear the Lord on Mount Sinai, God gave him instructions concerning how he was to be worshiped with sacrifices. And this was not an entirely new lesson for Moses and the Israelites. They already knew that God needed to be approached and worshiped through animal sacrifices. They knew that the blood of those animal sacrifices in some way atoned for their sins so that they could come into the presence of God.

But what was new here were the instructions concerning the altar upon which those sacrifices were to be offered. Before the Israelites would go on in the book of Exodus, which we’ll see, to build a tabernacle at which they would offer sacrifices to the Lord—before that, they were to offer sacrifices on a very simple, a very primitive altar. The Lord says to Moses in verse 24, “An altar of earth you shall make for me.” And according to verse 25, if the Israelites did use stones to construct an altar, they were not to be hewn, they were not to be touched by human tools, but they were to be just as they were found. They were not to be cut in any way.

And so this plain and unadorned altar—this was meant to reinforce in the minds of the Israelites the truth of God’s holiness. In verse 25, the Lord says that if they did use tools to cut the stones for the altar, they would be profaning the altar. They would be desecrating the altar of the Lord. And the idea is that the more that this altar was a product of man’s handiwork and design, sinful man’s handiwork and design, the more that the altar was manmade in that sense, the more it would detract from the purity, the righteousness, the holiness of God.

It was for that same reason that the Lord prohibited in verse 26 that the priest or the worshiper, that he was not to go up by steps to the altar because he would expose himself on the altar and so profane it. And so the two lessons that the Lord impressed upon the hearts of the Israelites just after giving them the 10 commandments were these: that they needed a mediator, one who could go between them and the Lord, and they needed to approach the Lord with right sacrifices, sacrifices offered on an altar that was kept sacred and pure.

Now, the Lord in all of this, He is being gracious. He is being merciful to the people of Israel. Remember the Lord graciously entered into this covenant with his people. He saw their misery. He saw their enslavement in Egypt. He heard their cries for deliverance. He brought them out of Egypt. He rescued them from their bondage to Pharaoh and to the slavery there. And so he showed them his love, but at the same time, He was still God. He is still God. Almighty, majestic, glorious, holy. And if the Israelites were learning anything, it was that they could not come to the Lord on their own terms in any way that they thought appropriate.

All of this, including the law, would have reminded the Israelites that they were sinners. They needed a mediator and they needed to come to God with sacrifices. And the same is true for you and me. Yes, God is a God of love. He is merciful. He is kind. He is compassionate. He is good. And yet we cannot come to him. We cannot come into his presence on our own terms in any way that we devise or think of. And the reason why we cannot do that is for the same reason the Israelites could not come to the Lord on their own terms. It’s because we are sinners. God is holy.

If we were to come into the presence of a holy God without a mediator and without a sacrifice to atone for our sins, we would be destroyed in an instance by the infinite purity, the majestic holiness of God. We could not stand in his presence for a second. This is a fundamental truth that the scriptures reveal to us about God. But this is a truth that has by and large been lost on us in this unbelieving secular age in which we live.

We have forgotten, we have lost the sense of God’s greatness, his glory. His perfect holiness, His uncompromising righteousness, His infinite weightiness. And at the same time, and this goes hand in hand, we have lost the sense of our own unrighteousness, our unworthiness, that we cannot just waltz into the presence of God and expect to be received by a holy God apart from a mediator, apart from sacrifices. That’s why the language of fearing God sounds a little strange to our ears. We’re not 100% comfortable with talking a lot about fearing God or the fear of God. But if you and I had been with the Israelites that day at the foot of Mount Sinai, that would have been the most natural way in the world for us to speak.

Now the Israelites had Moses, they had animal sacrifices, they had an altar of stone and earth, but we have something much better than all of that. We have the son of God, Jesus Christ. And he is everything that this passage is pointing towards. He is a mediator, he is the perfect mediator. He is himself the perfect sacrifice. He is the one through whom we can with confidence come into the presence of God.

God has given us, he has given humanity one and only one mediator, only one through whom we can come to God, and that is his son, Jesus Christ. 1 Timothy 2, 5, and 6 says, “For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man, Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all.” And what a far superior mediator we have in the person of Jesus Christ, far better than Moses. Moses was a great man, but he was only a man. He was human. But Jesus, he is the God-man. He is true God, true man, fully human, fully divine.

Because he is true man, he can represent you, he can represent me. He is one with us in his humanity. He can come before God in our place as man and for us. And he is fully divine so that when Jesus comes to us, it is not just a great man coming to us, but it is God himself. It is the father who comes to us in the person of his son.

I once met an army chaplain who had served as an enlisted soldier before he became a chaplain in the army. And he told me that as a soldier, before he was a chaplain, he had served and he was in combat missions. And apparently, he could wear on his chaplain uniform a certain badge that indicated that he had been involved in combat. And he said that when another soldier would see that badge, it would create an immediate connection or rapport between the chaplain and that soldier. There would be this immediate relation between them because the soldier would see the badge and he would say, “Oh, this guy’s one of us. He knows what it’s like. He knows that experience of being in combat. He didn’t just come right out of seminary, but he’s been there. He knows what it’s like.”

And in the incarnation, when the son of God took on our flesh, when he became man, he put on a badge of humanity, our human nature. And it tells us he is one of us. He knows what it’s like to live in this fallen world. He was made like us in every way, except for sin. And that’s a good thing that he’s free from sin. But he’s made like us in every way. He shares fully in our humanity. He knows what it’s like to be tempted and tried. He knows that experience that you have experienced, what it’s like to suffer, to grieve. He knows what it’s like to be the victim of the sins of others. Jesus knows what it’s like to serve God in a world that is hostile to God and His righteousness. And so He is filled with compassion, with sympathy, with mercy towards us in our weakness, in our creatureliness, in our humanity. He is able to sympathize with you and me.

And at the same time, Jesus is fully divine. And so to have Jesus with us is to have God with us. So he is the perfect mediator. He is the one mediator between you and God. There is no man, there is no priest, there is no pastor, no church that can stand between you and God. Only Jesus Christ can do that. That’s why it says in Acts chapter four, verse 12, “There is salvation in no one else for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.”

And this is really what matters when it comes to that ultimate question of, when I stand before the judgment throne, when I stand before God, the only question that really matters is this: will you have a mediator? Will you have one who can plead for you? Because if Jesus Christ is not your mediator before God, it does not matter how much good you have done. It does not matter how moral and upright you have been. You cannot be saved apart from Christ. At the same time, if Christ is your mediator, if He is your Savior and Lord by faith in Him, then it does not matter how much bad you have done. It does not matter how sinful you have been in this life. If you truly belong to Christ by faith, you will not be condemned.

Can you say, “My hope of salvation is not in myself, not in my good works, not in my decency, not in my morality, not in my being even a good Christian, but my salvation, my hope on that day of judgment is that the Lord Jesus Christ is standing for me, that he speaks for me. He pleads for me. He is my mediator.”

And Jesus is also himself the one perfect sacrifice that takes away your sins forever. The Israelites knew, again, that they could not come before the living God without the shedding of blood, without a sacrificial animal being slaughtered. And as a sinner, you cannot come before God without the shedding of blood. Hebrews 9:21 says, “Without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins.” And of course, with Jesus, the blood he brings is not the blood of animals. The altar he uses for his sacrifice is not an altar of earth or stones, but the blood that he brings to God the judge is his very own blood.

And the altar at which he offered that was the cross. And there on the cross, Jesus offered to God the only blood that can take away your sin, that can take away my sin. And know this, because of who Jesus is, because he is God himself in the flesh, the blood that he shed has infinite value, infinite worth. His blood is able to atone for all your sin, all your guilt, no matter how heinous, no matter how evil it is, the blood of Jesus purifies and cleanses you from all unrighteousness.

As we saw in our passage, one of the features of the altar on which the Israelites were to bring their sacrifices was that it could not be the handiwork or the craftsmanship of man. It was to be made of earth, dirt, or uncut stones. And in this way, the Lord was showing the Israelites, He was teaching them that for them to come near to God, for them to be accepted into His presence, that was a work of God alone. It was God alone who would bring the Israelites to Him. It was not the work of man.

And how much more true is that when we consider the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the ministry of Christ in bringing us to God? No human being offered Christ as a sacrifice to God. He willingly offered himself up to God as a sacrifice. No human, no man helped God or helped Jesus in his earthly ministry. In fact, we did the opposite. We did not ask God to send us his son, Jesus Christ. In fact, we did not want Christ to come into the world. We did not help Christ at all, but we hated him. We opposed him. The work of salvation that Jesus Christ accomplished for you and me in his ministry, his life, death, and resurrection was entirely of God. It was not of man. So that our salvation, all the glory for our salvation goes to God alone.

I once knew a defense attorney who happened to be a Christian. And by the way, I did not know him on a professional basis, in case you’re wondering, but if someone questioned his work—he defended criminals—if someone questioned him about that, he would probably say alleged criminals, but he would remind them that as Christians, we ourselves need and we have a defense attorney. Jesus is for us our defense attorney. He stands beside us. Before God, the judge, he is our advocate, our counselor.

And the plea of Jesus is not like a defense lawyer might say in a court of law, “My client is innocent because you cannot prove that he broke the law,” or “My client is innocent because he did not break the law.” Jesus does not plead that, but Jesus says, “My client is innocent because although he did break the law, although he is guilty of all that he has been charged with, nevertheless, I have suffered for him. In the sacrifice of my own life, I have satisfied the demands of the law, the penalty of the law, death to the one who breaks it. I have endured that judgment and punishment on his behalf. Therefore, he is innocent.”

That is the plea that Christ makes for you and me. And God hears his son. God hears the plea of his son, Jesus Christ. And he says, “Yes, this one is innocent. He is righteous. He is forgiven. No judgment, no condemnation. He is set free because of what Christ has done.”

So Christ is both your mediator and your sacrifice. Now, it would be wrong for us to think that because Jesus is our mediator before God, that somehow that means that Jesus saves us from the wrath of his heavenly father who himself has no care or concern for us personally. That would be far from the truth. The truth is far more glorious than that, and that is this: it was because the father so loved sinners, because God so loved the world, the sinful world, sinners such as you and me, because of his love, he sent his son into the world. He willed to save his people who were lost in sin through the mediation, through the ministry of his son, Jesus Christ.

And you could see something of that truth, even here in this passage in Exodus, when we consider Exodus in the context of the whole book. What is standing behind everything in God’s dealings with his people? It is his love for his people, that they are His chosen, those upon whom He has set His love and affection. And so even in the midst of this terrifying display of the searing holiness, the awesome majesty of God, even in the midst of all this, the Lord declares to the Israelites that His purposes for them are good, for their good. He says in verse 24, “In every place where I cause my name to be remembered, I will come to you and bless you.”

And so all that God did here was in order to bless the Israelites, to show them good. Even the revelation of his glory and greatness that terrified the Israelites so much, that was for their good as well. Look at verse 20. Verse 20 says, “Moses said to the people, ‘Do not fear for God has come to test you that the fear of him may be before you so that you may not sin.'” And so the purpose of God in instilling this fear in the Israelites was so that they would not sin against him. Notice how Moses says, “Do not fear, for God has come to test you, that the fear of him may be before you.” It almost sounds like Moses is contradicting himself. Do not fear, but do fear.

But what that means is, Moses is saying, do not be afraid of God that he is about to destroy you or crush you. Do not be afraid of what God might do now that you have witnessed His majesty and His glory and His holiness. He has not revealed this to you in order to destroy you, but He has done it for the opposite reason, to put in your hearts a good, a healthy fear of Him so that you would not sin against Him, so that you will not meet Him in judgment. In other words, the fear of God is ultimately, fundamentally a good thing. It is a good thing.

A child may fear his father when he’s in trouble, but his father always has his best interest in heart. His father’s discipline is for his son’s or daughter’s good. And this is the sort of fear that we are to have of God, not an abject terror, the abject terror of a subject before a cruel and heartless king, but the respectful fear of a child towards his father, whom he loves and adores. The fear of a child who the last thing he wants to do is displease his father.

And also the rules for the sacrifices that the Lord gave to Moses, this also was for their good. The purpose of these sacrifices was so that through the atonement that was made in these sacrifices, or at least signified in these sacrifices, they could come into God’s presence. And so the underlying goal here with these sacrifices was for the Israelites to enjoy fellowship and communion with God. In fact, the peace offering is also translated sometimes the fellowship offering, so that they could have that communion with God.

That’s the reason why the Lord says in verse 23, “You shall not make gods of silver to be with me, nor shall you make for yourself gods of gold.” God was jealous for his people. He was jealous that they would be devoted to him alone. He wanted them to know him and worship him alone. And when we worship an idol, we take that love and affection and devotion that belongs to the Lord, and we place it on some thing or someone, and so we rob God of that communion that he wills to have with us. We rob ourselves of that blessedness that is found only in that communion with the Lord who created us.

And so everything here in this passage, the dreadful display of God’s majesty, the laws for his sacrifices, this was all for Israel’s good. And yet, and yet when you read this passage, what you’re impressed with, what you come away with is just that fear that the Israelites had. They stood far off. They begged Moses to go into the presence of the Lord.

But things are different now. With the coming of Jesus Christ, with the appearance of the one who is the fulfillment of everything here, the true mediator, the true sacrifice, the goodness of God, the love of God, the grace of God have come now to the foreground. The grace of God, the love of God, and now much more clearly and gloriously revealed in the gospel of Jesus Christ. Yes, God loved his people then just as he does now, but now with the coming of Christ, we see that so much more wondrously.

And this is the progress that the scripture shows us of the work of God for his people from the old covenant to the new covenant. That’s why we read from Hebrews chapter 12. Because in Hebrews, the author there in chapter 12, he’s comparing the situation of the Israelites here in Exodus with our situation as believers in Jesus Christ. And he says, you have not come to the terrifying presence of God at Mount Sinai, but he says, you have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, to innumerable angels of festal gathering, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkle blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.

If the goodness and love of God was the reality behind everything that we read about here in Exodus, how much more is the love of God the reality behind his sending his son, Jesus Christ, into the world? Because he loved sinners such as us, He has given us his son. And so put your hope in Christ. Outside of Jesus Christ, there is no salvation. But if you are in Christ by faith, if you belong to Jesus by faith in Him, you have a perfect Savior. And you have the promise that there is nothing in all creation that will ever separate you from the love that God has for you in His Son, Jesus Christ. Let’s pray.

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The Old Testament reading, our first Old Testament reading, is Exodus chapter 20, verse 17. And this is the inerrant and infallible word of God. You shall not covet your neighbor’s house, you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor’s.

The other Old Testament reading for this morning is from 1 Kings chapter 21, 1 Kings chapter 21, a passage that we will consider this morning. And this is beginning at verse one and going to verse 16. So 1 Kings chapter 21, one through 16.

Now Naboth, the Jezreelite, had a vineyard in Jezreel, beside the palace of Ahab king of Samaria. And after this, Ahab said to Naboth, give me your vineyard that I may have it for a vegetable garden because it is near to my house. And I will give you a better vineyard for it. Or if it seems good to you, I will give you its value in money. But Naboth said to Ahab, the Lord forbid that I should give you the inheritance of my fathers.

And Ahab went into his house vexed and sullen because of what Naboth the Jezreelite had said to him. For he had said, I will not give you the inheritance of my fathers. And he laid down on his bed and turned away his face and would eat no food. But Jezebel, his wife came to him and said to him, why is your spirit so vexed that you eat no food? And he said to her, because I spoke to Naboth the Jezreelite and said to him, give me your vineyard for money or else if it please you, I will give you another vineyard for it. And he answered, I will not give you my vineyard.

And Jezebel his wife said to him, do you now govern Israel? Arise and eat bread and let your heart be cheerful. I will give you the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite. So she wrote letters in Ahab’s name and sealed them with his seal. And she sent the letters to the elders and the leaders who lived with Naboth in his city. And she wrote in the letters, proclaim a fast and set Naboth at the head of the people and set two worthless men opposite him and let them bring a charge against him saying, you have cursed God and the king, then take him out and stone him to death.

And the men of his city, the elders and the leaders who lived in his city did as Jezebel had sent word to them. As it was written in the letters that she had sent to them, they proclaimed a fast and set Naboth at the head of the people. And the two worthless men came in and sat opposite him. And the worthless men brought a charge against Naboth in the presence of the people, saying, Naboth cursed God and the king. So they took him outside the city and stoned him to death with stones. Then they sent to Jezebel, saying, Naboth has been stoned. He is dead.

As soon as Jezebel heard that Naboth had been stoned and was dead, Jezebel said to Ahab, arise, take possession of the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite, which he refused to give you for money, for Naboth is not alive, but dead. And as soon as Ahab heard that Naboth was dead, Ahab arose to go down to the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite to take possession of it.

Our New Testament reading is Luke chapter 12, verses 13 through 21. Someone in the crowd said to Jesus, teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me. But he said to him, man, who made me a judge or arbitrator over you? And he said to them, take care and be on your guard against all covetousness for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.

And he told them a parable saying the land of a rich man produced plentifully. And he thought to himself, what shall I do? For I have nowhere to store my crops. And he said, I will do this. I will tear down my barns and build larger ones. And there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years. Relax, eat, drink, be merry. But God said to him, fool, this night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be? So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.

The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.

As we look at the 10th commandment this morning, a good place for us to start is to ask the question, what does it mean to covet? The word in Hebrew that is translated covet means desire. And so to covet is to desire. And what the commandment specifically forbids is desiring something, some specific thing that belongs to someone else. And so covet or to covet may be defined in this way as one author has defined it: an intense and consuming desire to possess something that rightfully belongs to another.

Of course, that’s what the commandment explicitly forbids. The truth is we don’t really have to have a dictionary define coveting for us because we all understand it. We’ve all seen it in some ways. Sometimes we’ve seen it in others, but we’ve all certainly have experienced it ourselves. You’ve probably had the experience of seeing two children playing together in a nursery, and one has a toy and the other doesn’t. And they’re playing in a nursery that’s littered with toys all around the place. And guess which toy the child who doesn’t have one in his hand just has to have at that moment. He has to have the toy that’s being held by the other child. And he has to have that toy because it’s in the possession of the other kid. And he cries and is unhappy until he gets that toy.

And we might roll our eyes at that a bit when we see that in children, but sadly, you and I never really grow out of completely that way of thinking. And anytime we have been envious of another person because of something that they possess, something that they have, and we don’t, we are thinking, feeling in the same way. We are guilty of coveting. It may be the nice car that your neighbor drives or the spacious house of your friends. It may be the exciting vacations that others take. It may be the good looks of others, or their talents, or their seemingly perfect spouse, or their well-behaved kids, or their quote-unquote normal parents.

We’ve all wanted something that others have, something that belongs to another. And at the same time, we’ve all experienced that sense of dissatisfaction, of being disgruntled, unhappy with what God has given to us. And when we feel that sense of unhappiness, that envy, that jealousy, because we don’t have what others have, we are guilty of breaking the 10th commandment. We are coveting.

And the Bible has a lot to say about this sin of coveting. I don’t have time to go over everything that the scriptures say about it, but there is one passage in particular in the Old Testament that shows us how evil the sin of coveting really is, and that is the passage that we read from 1 Kings chapter 21, the story of King Ahab and Naboth.

Ahab, he was king over the northern kingdom of Israel, and he was one of the worst kings to reign over Israel that ever lived. If you’re familiar with the books of 1st and 2nd Kings, 1st and 2nd Chronicles, you know that’s saying something to say that he was one of the worst kings. 1st Kings 17:30 sums up Ahab’s reign in this way, and so Ahab was a wicked king.

Now, he had a royal palace in the city called Jezreel. In fact, archaeologists have uncovered the remains of what may have been that very palace that the scriptures refer to here in 1st Kings. We don’t know if it was his or not exactly, but in any case, there’s no question that the palace, the estate that Ahab had in Jezreel would have been one that would be befitting a king. It would have been large, it would have been luxurious and so on.

However, Ahab noticed that next to his royal palace there was a little vineyard there. And this vineyard was not his, it belonged to another man, a man named Naboth. And as King Ahab looked at Naboth’s vineyard, he thought to himself, wouldn’t this property make a splendid vegetable garden? And the more he thought about it, the more he envisioned this little piece of land, the more he could see in his mind’s eye the rows of the tomatoes and cucumbers and lettuce growing there, the more he wanted to have that property, the more he began to think, if I can just get my hands on this vineyard, my palace would be so much better. I would be so much happier. I’ve just got to have this land.

And so Ahab, he makes what no doubt he considered a deal too good to refuse. He makes a deal with Naboth, or at least he proposes a deal. He says, give me your vineyard. I will give you a better one in its place. Or if you’d rather have cash, I’ll pay you money for it. And we can imagine that Ahab just assumed that his generous offer would be gladly accepted by Naboth. And so in Ahab’s mind, as he’s making this offer, there’s no question that this little piece of land is about to be his. He’s already purchased his little packets of seeds. He’s already thinking about what plants he’s going to put where in the garden.

But to his great consternation, Naboth says, no. He refuses the king’s offer. He says, you can’t have my land. And in verse three, he says, the Lord forbid that I should give you the inheritance of my fathers. Now, no matter how generous this offer of Ahab may have been to Naboth, no matter how much pressure Naboth may have felt to do what the king of Israel wanted him to do, nevertheless, he righteously insisted on holding onto his land, and he did so because selling the land would have been going against the law of God. He could not sell his ancestral property. The righteous Naboth could not bring himself to do that because that would be a sin against God.

Now, if Ahab had cared at all about the law of God, which he didn’t, but if he had, he would have respected Naboth’s concerns. He would have found some place on his own property to plant his vegetable garden. But instead, Ahab goes away from that meeting, sulking and pouting. Verse four says, and he laid down on his bed and turned away his face and would eat no food.

Imagine this site, what a pathetic scene this is. Here is the king of Israel. He is the king. No doubt he has lands and servants and wealth at his disposal. And yet he’s miserable because he can’t get his mitts on this little plot of land so that he can plant his vegetable garden. King Ahab was acting no differently than that little boy in the nursery who cries and throws a fit because he can’t have the one toy that the other little boy has in his hands.

When Ahab’s wife Jezebel comes home, she sees just how unhappy and upset her husband was because he couldn’t have Naboth’s vineyard. And Jezebel, as you know from your own reading of scripture, she was not a good person. She was wicked. She was evil through and through, but perhaps she had one redeeming quality, and that was she wanted her husband to be happy. And so Jezebel tells Ahab, Honey, cheer up. Don’t be sad. I’ll see to it that you get that vegetable garden.

And then Jezebel carries out this elaborate scheme, a conspiracy really, in which false witnesses testify against Naboth. They say at a public gathering that Naboth has cursed God and the king. Of course, it’s a complete lie, but the result was is that Naboth was promptly stoned to death. And no sooner had the last stone been thrown that pounded the life out of Naboth that Ahab went down to his vineyard to make it his own so that he could have that little plot of land for his precious garden. And that’s how Ahab finally got the vineyard that he wanted.

And this is a very dark, very sordid episode, account from the history of Israel, but it does teach us some important lessons about coveting. First of all, we learn from this that coveting will lead, or it can lead, often does lead, to greater sin. Coveting will lead to greater sin. Listen to what James says. This is James chapter one, verses 14 and 15: “But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.”

Consider James uses the language of conception and birth. Consider a baby who is conceived in the womb at the time of conception and the days following, the weeks following that little baby’s just a tiny, tiny little thing, but it doesn’t stay tiny. The baby grows, the baby develops, the baby gets bigger and stronger until he or she is ready to be born. And in the very same way, a covetous desire, it starts out as a tiny little thought in the heart, a new interest, a spark of desire. But then it grows from there until it gets bigger and stronger until it comes out or it is born a much greater, much more evil sin.

When King Ahab first noticed Naboth’s nice little plot of land, he started to think how great this would be for him to have as a vegetable garden. But in those initial thoughts that he had in that first instance of his thinking about this land, of deciding that he wants to have it and so on, he had no idea that that desire of his, that coveting of his, that it would eventually bring forth such great evil. The end result of that was murder, theft, false witness.

And so his sin began small enough. It began as a tantalizing thought, then a desire in his heart. Then that desire grew into an obsession. Then with the help of his wife, Jezebel, it developed into a plan. And then that plan brought about the murder of an innocent and righteous man. An evil action almost always begins its life as an evil desire. And so often that evil desire is coveting. It is coveting, wanting something that does not belong to you.

Now, thankfully, by the grace of God, this progression from evil desire, evil thoughts to evil action doesn’t always come to full fruition by God’s grace. However, the seeds of great evil are already there in the human hearts. In fact, it isn’t too hard to see those very same seeds of evil in our own hearts. Have you ever said to yourself, or have you ever began a sentence and saying to yourself with these words: if only, if only, if only I had a little more money, like my friend. If only I could afford a nicer house. If only I had a newer car.

Now, you may not turn to murder and theft to get those things, but so much outward evil begins with those same inward longings that we’ve all experienced by saying, if only. Ahab looked at that little piece of property. He said, if only, if only I could have this land. And that covetous desire, it grew, it bore fruit, and not only resulted in the wicked murder of Naboth, but it also resulted in the Lord’s judgment of death against Ahab and Jezebel. So much evil, so many terrible things came from that seed, that thought that began in the heart of Ahab. If only I could have this land.

And this is just one event in the history of Israel, however, we can say that this is essentially, this is one way we could characterize the entire story of human history. Virtually every evil that humanity has committed began with coveting. Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. They had everything that they could possibly want to be perfectly happy. They were righteous. They were holy. They had perfect communion with God. And yet they coveted. They coveted the status of God. They wanted to be like him. And so they sinned against him. And of course that started it all.

Think how different our world would be if no one was guilty of coveting. If no one was guilty of coveting, there would be no stealing. There would be no adultery. There would be no class warfare. There would be no politics of envy. Probably there would be no war at all. According to James, there would be no church conflicts. One author put it this way, you could describe the history of the human race of entire nations and families under the theme, you have coveted what belong to another. So much evil has been the fruit, has resulted from that seed of thought that began in the heart of man, that covetous desire to have what did not belong to him.

Now, when we say that coveting leads to greater sin, that’s not to say that as long as coveting is contained within your heart, that it’s not sinful or it’s not evil, it is a sin. Even if you manage to keep it bound up in your hearts, that’s exactly what the 10th commandment is saying. It’s not saying do not steal, that’s the 8th commandment. It’s not saying do not commit adultery, that’s the 7th commandment. But it’s saying do not entertain those thoughts which lead to stealing, which lead to adultery, and so on. Do not covet. So coveting itself is a sin and condemned by the 10th commandment.

And so coveting will lead to greater sin even if it doesn’t, it is sin in itself. But the second lesson that we learn from Ahab and Naboth is this, that even at the level of inward desire, even when we’re speaking of coveting just as it is in the heart, it itself has consequences. One thing that Ahab’s story shows us is that even before we take a step to act on a covetous desire, that desire itself, as it grows in our hearts, as it begins to overtake our thoughts and our emotions, it has negative consequences in our lives and in the lives of others.

You’ll notice that after Naboth refused Ahab’s offer to buy his land from him, verse four says, Ahab went into his house, vexed and sullen. So Ahab lay on his bed. He pouted. He felt sorry for himself. He wouldn’t talk to anybody. He wouldn’t eat any food. Now he hadn’t done anything yet to steal Naboth’s land. He hadn’t hatched a plan as far as we know. He hadn’t taken any action. And yet already this covetous desire that had grown so strong in his heart was changing his behavior.

One thing that the 10th commandment says is that you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife. A married man may have such an infatuation with another woman that although he doesn’t actually commit adultery with her, though he may not act on that infatuation, that covetous desire, nevertheless, because his heart is no longer with his wife, he talks to her less, he begins to shut her out, his love grows cold, and soon their marriage is disintegrating. And that sin may have just been in his heart. And yet, although he hasn’t acted on it in any way, but because he hasn’t put that evil desire to death, the coveting has leaked out, as it were, and it’s damaging his wife, it’s damaging his marriage.

And so coveting has consequences, even if we don’t act on those sinful desires. And that is why as Christians, we must be so careful to guard the thoughts of our hearts. We must be so vigilant in not entertaining, not allowing, not nursing, not dwelling upon a covetous desire that we know to be wrong. Because even if we stop short of acting on that desire, because our heart is not right, because our heart is not where it should be with the Lord Jesus Christ, because of that covetous desire, we will fail to give ourselves in love and service to Christ and to others as we should.

Have you ever wanted something so badly that that was all that you could think about? You were obsessed. You were distracted. You couldn’t keep your focus on what you’re supposed to do. And maybe you actually hadn’t taken one positive step to getting what you wanted. And yet already that desire was changing you and it was changing you for the worse. And that’s why the Bible says we must guard our hearts. Proverbs 4:23, “Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life.” Jesus said in our New Testament reading, “Take care and be on guard, be on guard against all covetousness for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.”

The third thing that we learn about coveting from Ahab and Naboth is this, that coveting enslaves a person. When coveting rages in the heart unchecked, when it’s not put to death, when someone gives himself over to this passion, this desire, this coveting of something, he becomes a slave. He becomes a slave to his evil desires. And in 1 Kings chapter 21, we are not told explicitly that this is what happened to Ahab, but no doubt that’s what happened. You get the definite impression that if Jezebel had not come up with the scheme to steal Naboth’s land, that Ahab would have one way or the other come up with some kind of plan to take his land. He was the king, somehow he could have managed that.

But Ahab was completely under the control of his longing. He became a slave to his desire. And when you consider that in light of the purpose of the 10 commandments, you see that that enslavement, that bondage to sin is exactly the opposite of what God’s will was for his people when he gave them the 10 commandments. God gave his people this law that they would walk in the freedom which the Lord had just given to them by redeeming them, by rescuing them from the land of Egypt where they were in bondage to Pharaoh.

The Lord had just delivered Israel from Egypt, from the house of slavery, and he brought them into this covenant relationship with himself so that they could continue to enjoy that freedom of knowing the Lord, that they could continue to enjoy true liberty, true freedom, which consists of serving the Lord, knowing him, worshiping him. But they would only remain free as long as they walked according to God’s will, as long as they kept his commandments.

Nothing would bring the Israelites back into bondage more quickly than if they gave free reign to their evil desires. They would become slaves once more, not to Pharaoh, but to sin. And the same is true for us at the point that we surrender ourselves to our sinful desires, to our coveting, desiring what we don’t have. We have become slaves to those desires.

In Genesis chapter four, the Lord said to Cain, after Cain was envious of his brother Abel because God showed favor to Abel and to his offering, the Lord said to Cain, sin is crouching at the door. Like an evil beast about to attack someone, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, which means its desire is to have you, to rule over you, but you must rule over it. And this tells us something about the nature of coveting, that it will not be satisfied. It will not die until it has completely overtaken and overcome somebody and made that person a slave. And so coveting, unchecked, leads to bondage, leads to slavery.

The fourth lesson about coveting that we learn from Ahab and Naboth is this: coveting is a failure to be thankful for God’s provision. Again, we have to consider Ahab’s situation. He was the king of Israel. He had a palace, he had an estate, it was a royal estate. And yet he would not be a happy king until he had his hands on Naboth’s little piece of land.

And for you and me, isn’t it true that no matter how much we have, no matter how much God has blessed us with all that we need and more in this life, we always think that if we just had a little bit more, if we just had a little more money, if we just had this one more thing, then finally we’d be content, we’d be happy. The problem is, is that enough never seems to be enough. You have a perfectly good working phone in your pocket, but then when you find out that the latest phone has come out, all of a sudden that perfectly usable phone becomes inadequate. It seems so lame. You got to have the new phone.

I don’t know how many times I’ve been sitting in my office surrounded with all my books and I’ll get an email from a publisher about a new book that I’ve never heard of, by an author that I’ve never heard of, about a subject that I’m not particularly interested in at that time. And all the famous theologians and pastors are saying, you have to read this book, you must buy this book. And so all of a sudden, I feel like I just have to purchase this book, a book that I did not know that, you know, five minutes ago, I did not know even existed.

And so we are never satisfied with what we have. We always want a little bit more. The billionaire Nelson Rockefeller, he was asked by a reporter, how much money does it take to be happy? And his answer was, just a little bit more. I think we can all resonate with that. Just a little bit more and I’ll be set. Rockefeller, I don’t know if he knew it or not, but he was echoing what scripture says. Ecclesiastes 5:10, “He who loves money will not be satisfied with money, nor he who loves wealth with his income. This also is vanity.” What an irony that the one who loves money will never find true satisfaction in that thing that he loves because he’ll never have enough. He’ll always need more.

The opposite of coveting is contentment. Contentment means being thankful, being satisfied with what God has given you now, today. And this applies not just to what’s in your bank account, but it applies to everything that you possess. We need to be content with all that we have and all that we are. We need to be content with our looks. We need to be content with our bodies, with our intelligence, with our possessions. We need to be content with the family members that God has given to us.

Now, this is not to say that you should never or can never want to change your life circumstances. There are many desires that are good desires. There are many good things that we should desire. The desire, for example, to marry, the desire to have kids, the desire to move for a good reason, the desire to take another job that has more responsibility, more pay. These can be, and often are, these are good desires, holy desires. But for the Christian, even if he has these desires, he should be content for the time being with what the Lord has given him.

We ought not to be like those who are endlessly restless, always itching for something new, always looking for something different, always hoping that this one change in their life, this one addition, this one gain in their life will somehow make them happier, more fulfilled, more content. Our disposition should be that no matter how much or how little we have, we recognize that it has been given to us in the providence of God, by the hand of God. He has given us what he knows that we need to be happy and to be thankful, to be grateful for what we have right now. 1 Timothy 6:6 says, “Now there is great gain in godliness with contentment.” And so coveting is a failure to be thankful for God’s provisions.

So Ahab’s bad example shows us a lot about coveting. And if we’re honest, we have to confess that we see ourselves in Ahab far too often. We think like him that if we can only have this one thing, if we can only get a little bit more, if we can only have this one change, finally we’ll be happy, we’ll be content. In my reading for the sermon, I came across this poem:

It was spring, but it was summer I wanted, the warm days and the great outdoors. It was summer, but it was fall I wanted, the colorful leaves and the cool dry air. It was fall, but it was winter I wanted, the beautiful snow and the joy of the holiday season. It was winter, but it was spring I wanted, the warmth and the blossoming of nature. I was a child, and it was adulthood I wanted, the freedom and the respect. I was 20, but it was 30 I wanted, to be mature and sophisticated. I was middle-aged, but it was 20 I wanted, the youth and the free spirit. I was retired, but it was middle-age I wanted, the presence of mind without limitations. My life was over, and I never got what I wanted.

When you and I come to the end of our lives, how do we avoid feeling this way? How do we avoid repeating the sentiment of this poem that my life is over and I never got what I wanted? How do we avoid looking back and realizing that we were never happy with who we were, with what we had?

What is the answer to coveting? Well, part of the answer to coveting is to learn to tune out all the voices out there that are telling us that we should be unhappy. Isn’t that what so much, isn’t that what advertising is all about? Isn’t that what advertisers are constantly telling us? We’re bombarded with ads all the time, telling us, shouting at us: You can’t be happy until you have this. You can’t really be fulfilled and content until you buy this.

Isn’t that one of the moral problems with gambling? It tempts us to seek our happiness in getting more money with no work or effort. Isn’t that the siren song of so many politicians? Vote for me and I’ll take what belongs to others and I’ll give it to you. We live in a world that does absolutely nothing to help us not to covet. We live in a world that encourages us, that feeds this covetous desire of our hearts.

Isn’t that why advertising is so successful? That’s why lotteries and casinos are always bringing in big money. This is why promises of wealth redistribution will always win a lot of votes. It’s because these appeals gain traction to what is true about us in our hearts. And that is we do covet. We want more. We want what belongs to others. We aren’t happy. We aren’t satisfied with what we have now.

Coveting is a sin that is endemic in the human condition. It is completely ingrained in the human heart. One theologian wrote this: ever since the fall, a voice has been whispering in every person’s ear that he should have been more than he was and he should have had more than he had. And this voice is a voice that comes from within. We tell ourselves, we convince ourselves, I should have been more, I should have had more.

So coveting is a heart problem. It is a problem of the heart. And so the answer to coveting is a new heart, a new heart. And this is the key. What you and I need is not a new heart that is free from all desire. Our aim is not to become like the Buddhist who has reached some kind of state of not feeling a desire for anything in this world. No, what we need is a heart that is filled with right desires, with holy desires, with what God desires.

And that’s what Jesus Christ came for, to give us in the gospel. He came to give us a new heart. Now, first of all, the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, He came into the world in order to save us from our sin. God sent His Son into the world so that whoever comes to Him in faith, whoever turns from his sin and comes to the Lord Jesus Christ and entrusts himself to Him as his Lord and Savior, he will be saved. He will be delivered from sin and guilt forever and ever. And if you have not come to Jesus Christ as your savior, then come to him today. Put your trust and faith in the Lord Jesus, because he came to save us from all our sin, including the sin of coveting.

But he also came to give us a new heart, to make us new people, to give us new desires. And so God wants your heart to be filled with desire. God wants you to desire, to long, to be motivated, to have, but He wants it to be a righteous desire, a holy longing, a controlling motivation for one thing, and that is to grow in the knowledge and the love of His Son, Jesus Christ, to long for, to desire that communion with God through His Son, Jesus, to desire to grow in the grace and the knowledge of Christ, to desire to be made more like Jesus in joy and holiness and obedience.

Those are the kinds of desires that God wills to put on your heart. And when you come to faith in Jesus Christ, he not only forgives you, but he gives you that new heart so that you can desire what God would will you to desire. The Puritan Thomas Watson defined coveting in this way: an insatiable desire of getting the world. And if that is true, then the opposite of coveting is an insatiable desire of getting Christ.

And so this is the answer to coveting. By the grace of God, by coming to faith in Christ, by resting in him, you have right desires. And these right and holy desires and longings so fill your heart that they push out the evil desires of coveting. And when your heart is set on the things that God himself wills and desires to give you, then you can take to heart and know that this promise that the scripture gives us for you, the promise that is in Psalm 37:4: “Delight yourself, delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.”

Let’s pray.

The post Coveting and Contentment appeared first on Mt. Rose OPC.

The Old Testament reading is Exodus chapter 20, verse 16. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. 

And let’s turn to John chapter eight for our Old, or rather our New Testament reading, John chapter eight, verse 31. John 8, 31 through 47.

So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, if you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples and you will know the truth and the truth will set you free. They answered him, we are offspring of Abraham and have never been a slave to anyone. How is it that you say you will become free?

Jesus answered them, truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not remain in the house forever. The son remains forever. So if the son sets you free, you will be free indeed. I know that you are offspring of Abraham, yet you seek to kill me because my word finds no place in you. I speak of what I have seen with my father, and you do what you have heard from your father.

They answered him, Abraham is our father. Jesus said to them, if you are Abraham’s children, you would be doing the works Abraham did. But now you seek to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God. This is not what Abraham did. You are doing the works of your father.

They said to him, we were not born of sexual immorality. We have one father, even God. Jesus said to them, if God were your father, you would love me for I came from God and I am here. I came not of my own accord, but he sent me. Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot bear to hear my word. You are of your father, the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies. But because I tell the truth, you do not believe me.

Which one of you convicts me of sin? If I tell the truth, why do you not believe me? Whoever is of God hears the words of God. The reason why you do not hear them is that you are not of God. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.

The Bible tells us there is a certain creature in the world that is so wild, so savage, that no man has been able to tame it or to bring it under control. It’s a creature that is so dangerous, you’ll never see one in the zoo. You’ll see polar bears and alligators and crocodiles in the zoo, but not this beast.

What is this terrible creature? Well, it lives in your mouth. It is your tongue. It is the words that you speak. James in his letter says this about the tongue in James chapter three, for every kind of beast and bird of reptile and sea creature can be tamed and has been tamed by mankind, but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil full of deadly poison. There is great power in the tongue.

With your tongue, by the grace of God, you can do great good, but also you can do incalculable harm. James goes on to say, with it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God. With your tongue, you can bless God, you can praise God, you can also comfort the sick, you can encourage the discouraged. With your tongue, you can even tell someone the way of salvation by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Or you can do great evil with the words that you speak. With your tongue, you can emotionally damage someone for life. With your hurtful words, you can ruin a person’s reputation. With malicious rumors, you can drag their good name through the mud. You can curse someone who is made in God’s image.

And because of the mighty power of the tongue, the Bible has much to say about the words that we speak and what we say and how we say it. And the Bible’s teaching on the right and the wrong use of our tongue is essentially summed up in these short words or these few words that we read today from the Old Testament in the ninth commandment: You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. And so today, as we look at this commandment, we’ll see what the Lord has to say about this subject, about falsehood and truth in our speech.

First of all, on the surface, the Ninth Commandment has to do with a rather specific set of circumstances, and that is a person is forbidden to falsely accuse another person in a court of law. This is the first concern of the Ninth Commandment. It is telling the truth in matters of public justice. And the reason why the ninth commandment presents this whole issue of lying and falsehood and truth and so on, the reason why the whole commandment frames it in terms of a court of law is because the potential to do evil with one’s words was especially pronounced in the ancient justice system of Israel.

Verdicts of innocence and guilt were decided almost solely upon the weight of verbal testimony. A witness could either contribute to the acquittal or to the condemnation of the person who was charged with the crime. And it makes sense when you think about it because in those days there was no – there weren’t the kind of things that we have today such as fingerprint records or DNA testing or computer records, surveillance cameras and so on. And so what we consider to be evidence today simply didn’t exist in those days.

And so for the justice system to function properly, for it to render true verdicts based on what is true, witnesses had to be absolutely trustworthy. They had to speak the truth in a court of law. And since many crimes were capital offenses, often people’s lives were at stake. The defendant could die as a result of a guilty verdict. Proverbs 25:18 says a man who bears false witness against his neighbor is like a war club, a sword or a sharp arrow. All it took is one false word from a witness and the innocent person could die just as surely as he would be bludgeoned by a club or slashed with a sword or pierced with an arrow. And so a word was dangerous. Testimony could lead to the death of the defendant. And so the testimony of witnesses in a court of law had to be absolutely trustworthy and true. And so that’s the first concern of the Ninth Commandment.

But secondly, the Ninth Commandment extends to any kind of lying or really any kind of speech that destroys unjustly the name or reputation of another person. For starters, there is slander or libel, that is, spreading falsehood against somebody with the intent to do them harm, to destroy their reputation. And of course, we see this often in our world. We especially see examples of this whenever there are elections. It is a sin, of course, to slander and to libel. Often there is political advantage to the politician who smears his opponent with half-truths or deceitful exaggerations or outright lies.

But it’s not just politicians who do this. Anybody can be guilty of slandering another person for personal advantage. An ambitious company worker may spread rumors about his rival at the company in order to get a promotion. A child may make up something against his brother or sister to tell his parents to get his sibling in trouble. And these are obvious examples of slander, and we could come up with many more.

But there is a much more common and insidious way that speech is often used to hurt others, and that is gossip. And if we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that there is a part of us that loves to hear gossip. The juicier, the better. Proverbs 18:8 says, the words of a whisperer are like delicious morsels. They go down into the inner parts of the body. And so, although we acknowledge that we like to hear gossip, perhaps we are even tempted to spread gossip. But speaking or willingly hearing gossip, it is a sin according to the ninth commandment because it is damaging the reputation or name of another.

And strictly speaking, it could be the case that what is being gossiped is actually factual or true. However, since the intent of spreading that, of telling others what may be factually true, is in order to make them look bad or to destroy their reputation, gossiping is really a kind of slander. And in this way, we, by our gossiping, can break the ninth commandment. And commentators and the history of the church have always included this kind of sin as part of the ninth commandment. Even if what we say is true about a person, if we say it in order to gossip about that person, that is breaking the ninth commandment. And the reality is usually gossip isn’t 100% factually true anyway. Usually it’s a mixed bag of half-truths, exaggerations, and lies. And as we know, the further gossip spreads, the less true it becomes.

Another form of lying that hurts others is making rash judgments against a person. James says in chapter one, verse 19, let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak. Quick to hear, slow to speak. How much, how true it is that we do the opposite. We are quick to speak and slow to hear. And so before we patiently listen to somebody’s side of a story, before we try to understand their perspective, before we try to understand their understanding of things, we jump to unwarranted conclusions. We rush to a judgment, and then we go off and share our harsh or rash judgments by talking to others.

The problem is, of course, that we could be completely wrong. We could have completely misunderstood things. But in the meantime, we have done great damage to that person’s reputation by rushing to a judgment and then telling others about that. And this is something that almost always happens, not always, but almost always happens when it comes to conflict between two people. When two people are in a conflict situation, almost always the first casualty is truth itself. One person jumps to a conclusion about the other person. He interprets his words or his actions in a certain way. He makes a rash and untrue judgment. And then he compounds his sin by going and telling his friends his false version of what has happened.

And so the truth, a person’s reputation, is destroyed by a false judgment and then slander. And so often it is the case, not always, but so often it is the case that in conflict, both sides to one degree or another, are guilty of doing this. In fact, in a conflict situation, as you know from experience, it’s very hard not to fall into this trap. It’s very hard not to rush to a judgment, to interpret someone’s words or actions in a way that only reinforces what you already think about them.

This is why any time you are in a disagreement or in a conflict with another person, as a Christian, your duty is to engage that person in open and honest communication. Your goal is, with that person, to seek the truth. And part of what seeking the truth is, with that person with whom you are at odds, is your readiness to acknowledge and confess that, yes, I failed here, I sinned here, I shouldn’t have said that. And of course, in the conflict, your goal is obviously resolution, restoration, and so on, but also at the same time throughout that conflict, to protect the good name of the person that you are at odds with.

And so the Ninth Commandment forbids any speech that unfairly ruins the good name of our neighbor. It could be by slander, by gossip, by making rash judgments. But this is a very serious thing. God takes this very seriously because there is nothing more precious that belongs to us than our name. There is nothing more valuable, more worthy to be protected than the good name of somebody. Proverbs 22:1 says, a good name is to be chosen rather than great riches and favor is better than silver or gold. And the nature of a lie about someone is that it always travels faster and farther than the truth. A lie has amazing power to spread quickly. C.H. Spurgeon said, a lie will go around the world while truth is pulling its boots on.

If the ninth commandment forbids all speech that unjustly harms our neighbor, then what is implied in that, and we’ve seen this with all the commandments, that when the commandment forbids something explicitly, then implicitly, just as present in the commandment, is a positive commandment to do something. And so what’s implied in the ninth commandment is that we are to use our speech to benefit, to build up others. We are to speak the truth, to speak the truth in love in order to build up others. That’s what the positive commandment is here in the ninth commandment.

And so God calls us to speak truthfully to one another, to edify one another, to speak words that bring comfort, encouragement, and love to others. He calls us to speak honestly and openly with one another, not using deceit, not hiding the truth, but speaking the truth in love. And as you do this by the grace of God, God will use your speech, use your tongue to be a wonderful means of building up others in the body of Christ, of drawing others nearer to Christ. God has given us this amazing power in the tongue by His grace to love others, to encourage them, to build them up in faith and hope. And that’s really what the ninth commandment positively is telling us to do.

Thirdly, the ninth commandment condemns not just falsehood that hurts another person, but any kind of lie by which a person deceives another person. We face all kinds of situations in which we are tempted to obfuscate the truth, hide the truth, twist the truth, deny the truth. We do it not because we have set out to lie, but because we instinctively want to protect ourselves. Or we want somebody to do something for us. Or we want to somehow advance our own interests. And so we find ourselves tempted to bend the truth sometimes. But the ninth commandment condemns that. Anything that falls short of the truth or distorts the truth is forbidden by the ninth commandment.

Now, if God forbids deceiving others in the ninth commandment, does that mean then that there are absolutely no circumstances in which it is permissible to tell a lie? In other words, is it always wrong in every conceivable situation to deceive another person? Are all forms of falsehood categorically forbidden by the ninth commandment in all circumstances? And the short answer to that question is no.

First of all, there are forms of bending the truth or playing with the truth that are rather innocent. For example, when we are joking or jesting in a good-natured way, we often play with the truth a little bit. When you hear a comedian tell a funny story about something you did, you know that he’s either exaggerating that story or he’s making it up. He’s doing it for comedic effect. He’s not trying to deceive anybody. We also use certain words and phrases in conformity with the standard practices of etiquette in our speech with one another that, strictly speaking, may not be true.

For example, say you’ve had a terrible day. You’re very upset. You’re very sad. And you go to the store and the clerk says, how are you doing today? And you kind of mutter, fine, thank you. Have you broken the Ninth Commandment? Well, no, you’re just answering in a way that’s more of a social custom than trying to hide or to deceive the truth or trying to deceive the truth in some kind of malicious way. There’s also deception that takes place in games and sports. Would the ninth commandment forbid a quarterback from ever faking a handoff to his running back? No, that’s not really what is in view here. Much more seriously, would it be wrong for a military to… would it be wrong for them to deceive or to trick the enemy in order to advance their goals? Of course not.

But a much more difficult question arises when we ask this. Is it ever okay to lie in order to protect our own safety or the safety of someone else? This is a question that theologians have wrestled with. It is called the question of the lie of necessity. And the classic example that always seems to come up in this debate is, what if you lived in the Netherlands during World War II, and like Corrie ten Boom, you were hiding Jews in your house? And when the Nazis came by to ask if any Jews were there, would you be morally bound by the ninth commandment to tell the truth to the Nazis? Yes, we are hiding Jews in our house. Or would you be justified to lie to them and say, no, there is nobody here?

Now on this question of the lie of necessity, there has not been a unanimous answer given by the church, by the theologians, by the scholars, by those who think deeply about these things. In fact, for a long time, Christian theologians completely ruled out the lie of necessity. They said there is never a time when it is right to deceive another person. But we have to ask, is that biblical? There are, in fact, examples in the Old Testament of people who not only told lies to deceive others, but were commended for that.

To take just one example of many, consider Rahab in the book of Judges, or the book of Joshua, rather. Before the Israelites destroyed the city of Jericho, they sent spies into the city, and the prostitute Rahab, she hid the Israelite spies in her house. And when the king of Jericho sent messengers to her to see if the spies were there, she lied to them. She said that they had already left the city. And then she sent the messengers out the wrong way so they would never find them.

Now, how does the Bible view Rahab and her actions? Well, first of all, she’s included in the Faith Hall of Fame in Hebrews chapter 11. So that tells you something, although that doesn’t necessarily mean that her lie was justified. But consider what James 2:25 says. And in the same way, was not also Rahab the prostitute justified by works when she received the messengers and sent them out by another way? And so here, Rahab is specifically commended for her actions, and those actions consisted of telling a falsehood, telling a lie, deceiving the messengers, sending them out the wrong way so that they would not find the spies.

And there are many other examples that we could add, along with Rahab’s example. But the point is that the scriptures do not condemn a lie if there is some extreme, dire circumstance that makes it necessary. Specifically, when someone’s life hangs in the balance, when it is a matter of death or life. So Rahab didn’t sin when she lied. The Hebrew midwives did not sin when they lied to Pharaoh. The Christians in Holland did not sin when they lied to the Nazis about the Jews that they were hiding in their house.

But having said that, at the same time, we need to have an appreciation for the reason why, historically, the church has been very reluctant to admit that there are times when it is permissible to break the ninth commandment. And the reason for that is this: that those who have had that reluctance have a good appreciation of the truth of what a lie is. And that is, a lie is inherently evil. It is wrong. To put it simply, lying is of the devil. There is nothing more quintessentially evil or satanic than to lie.

We heard from John chapter eight, Jesus says in verse 44, you are of your father, the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and has nothing to do with the truth because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character for he is a liar and the father of lies. And so what is the origin, the source of all falsehood? It is Satan. And so a lie then comes from the evil one. It is evil in itself.

And what’s more, there is nothing that is more basic to the character of unbelief than that it is based on a lie. In Romans 1, Paul is speaking about the nature of unbelief, how the unbeliever suppresses the truth of God that is revealed in all of creation. And he says this in Romans 1:25, that the unbeliever has exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the creator who is blessed forever, amen. And so what the Bible teaches then, the Bible says is this, that unless God changes our heart and he sheds his light and truth upon our hearts, in the most basic way, the most fundamental way, spiritually, we, by nature, have nothing to do with the truth.

Now, this does not mean that a typical unbeliever is always going about speaking lies. That’s not what it means. But what it does mean is this: at the very center of a person who is apart from Christ, unregenerated, one who has not come to know the Lord Jesus, at the very center of that person, in his heart, he is controlled and animated, not by the truth of God, but by the lie of Satan. The person either walks in the truth and the light, or he walks in darkness and in lying and falsehood. And so the unbeliever is oriented towards what is untrue.

And we could put it this way, bringing it home to us: by nature, apart from grace, we are liars. We are liars. Apart from grace, apart from Christ, our whole way of thinking, our understanding of ourselves, of the world, the way that we live, everything is based upon a complete lie. It’s not just that we tell a fib here and there, but it’s that our whole being as fallen human beings is constituted by a falsehood. And so lying is part of the very fabric of who we are apart from grace.

And this leads to a very important observation that we need to make, and that is lying goes much, much deeper than instances of slander or gossip. We’ve talked about these forms of lying, how we might, in our sin, engage in these in order to hurt others. But the lying that we are most tempted to engage in is far more insidious, far more habitual. And that is we are prone to lie to promote ourselves, to protect ourselves, to manipulate others.

When you apply for a job, it’s so tempting to stretch the truth a little bit about your experience or your qualifications or to hide something that you know your employer really should know. Or when you’re trying to get health insurance, it’s convenient, it’s easy to, quote, forget to mention that little health problem that you had a couple of years ago. And sometimes without even thinking, we instinctively hide the truth. For example, let’s say you’re at home, you’re working on your computer. You’re supposed to be working on your sermon, say. And instead, you’re wasting your time. You’re checking out the baseball scores. You’re checking out the latest headlines because who knows, there may have been some earth-shattering events in the last five minutes since the last time you checked the headlines.

And there’s nothing terribly wrong with that. It’s wasting time and so on. But then you hear your wife open the door. And the first thing you do is you close out the website and pretend like you’ve been working all along. I’ve heard of people doing that. It’s shocking, honestly. But we are tempted to lie to save ourselves from embarrassment. You meet someone and they say, it’s good to see you again. We met at so-and-so’s house. And you have no idea who this person is. You can’t recall ever meeting them, but you don’t want them to think that you’ve forgotten them. And so you say, that’s right. I remember, how are you doing?

And so a lie can make life easier. A lie can get us out of a sticky situation. Mark Twain defined a lie in this way: an abomination before the Lord and an ever present help in trouble. And in different ways, we seek to protect, in different ways, we seek to project an image of ourselves to others that isn’t really according to what’s true about ourselves. We do this on social media. Our lives that are broadcast on social media are idealized versions of ourselves. Someone might get the idea, if all that they knew us by was Facebook or Instagram, that everything in our life was awesome.

And even in our real life interactions with others, we put up a good front. We hide the ugly realities about ourselves from others. And that’s especially true in the church, because in the church, we all share certain expectations and values of what a Christian life should look like, what a Christian marriage and family should look like. And so we are very careful, we become very skilled at making a good showing to others. For example, there is the dad who verbally abuses his kids at home, but then he comes to church on Sunday and he loudly dotes on his children so everybody can see and hear what a loving and caring father he is.

That’s an extreme example, but as a Christian, I am tempted to hide behind an ideal version of myself so you don’t know what I’m really like or what I’m really doing. And even if we don’t tell outright lies, we all experience the temptation to hide that part of ourselves to others. Some part of the truth we hide from others. And at the same time, we work hard to project to others what we want them to think of us. One author put it this way, very convictingly. He said, the biggest lie we tell every day is that we are on the inside what we pretend to be on the outside. And in this way, lying is so ingrained in us, it’s so habitual, so part of our fallen nature, that if we were like Pinocchio, we would all be walking around with extra long noses.

And insofar as we are guilty of this kind of habitual, instinctive resort to falsehood and deception, we are not reflecting the glory of God. Insofar as we engage in falsehood, we are not yet like Christ. And again, that’s because God is truth. The truth is from God. There is nothing more God-like than truth. There is nothing more devil-like than falsehood and lying.

One of the most fundamental truths about God is that he is true. God cannot lie. There is no possibility that he can say anything that is false. Romans 3:4, speaking of God the Father says, by no means! Let God be true, though everyone were a liar, as it is written, that you may be justified in your words and prevail when you are judged. The son of God, because he is God himself, the Lord Jesus Christ, he is truth, he cannot lie. John 14:6, I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the father except through me. The Holy Spirit is truth as well. John 16:13, when the spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears, he will speak and he will declare to you the things that are to come.

And so truth is inherent. It is inseparable from each of the three persons of the Trinity: father, son and spirit. The Bible testifies of each one that they are truth, that there is no falsehood in them. And for this reason, all that God says is truth. His word is truth. All that he has revealed is true. And so to speak the truth is to be like God. To tell a lie is to contradict the very character of God. It is to be like Satan. And this is the reason why God hates lying. This is why he gives us the ninth commandment. It is a complete contradiction of all that he is as God, the God who is truth.

God hates lying, but God loves sinners. God loves even sinners who are guilty of falsehood and deception and lying. And once again, as we have seen with the other commandments, when we really begin to dive deep into the ninth commandment and to unpack all that it says and how it applies to our lives, not just in a court of law, but how it speaks to the inclination of our hearts, how it uncovers that sinful tendency we have to use deception to avoid the truth.

When we realize that the ninth commandment is hitting close to home, that’s when we come to see again that there is only one who can save us from the judgment of the law. There is only one who can bring us salvation from the condemnation that belongs to us because we have broken the law, we have broken God’s commandments, and of course that is Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the one who came into the world, the one who came into the world to lay down his life for sinners such as you and me, that all who come to him in faith may be saved, may have their sins forgiven, and receive eternal life.

In John chapter eight, Jesus is speaking to the Jews who want to kill him. And he says that the reason that they are seeking to kill him is because, he says, you are of your father, the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desire. Because the devil is at heart a murderer, those who are of the devil, those who are sons of the devil also will murder. By the same token, because the devil is the father of lies, because all lying originates with him, the evil one, those who are of the devil will also walk in falsehood, will live according to a lie, and they cannot know the truth. They cannot bear the truth. They cannot accept the truth until God, by His grace, changes their hearts.

And so what Jesus said to the Jews in John 8 applies to every single one of us in our natural condition. By nature, in our flesh, we are not of the truth, nor can we hear the truth, or at least we cannot receive it, we cannot bear it, we cannot accept it. And this is what Jesus refers to when he talks about being in bondage to sin, being a slave to sin. Who can deliver us from this bondage? Who can rescue us? It is Jesus who alone can do that. He says, you will know the truth and the truth will set you free. He says, I am the way, the truth and the life.

All who come to Jesus Christ by faith are delivered from their bondage to sin. Verse 32, John chapter eight, you will know the truth and the truth will set you free. Verse 36, so if the son sets you free, you will be free indeed. And so falsehood and deception are so ingrained in us, the only solution, the only hope is that radical conversion to Jesus Christ, a new heart that only the Lord Jesus can give us. Only in this way can we hope to walk in the truth, to love the truth, to speak the truth, to pursue the truth.

And once we are freed by Jesus Christ, once we are set free by the Savior, we can abide in the truth. We’ve become people of the truth. And by the spirit of Christ dwelling in you, you can begin not only to speak the truth, but to use your speech to build up your neighbor, to love your neighbor, to strengthen your neighbor. And only then, only then, are you truly, by the grace of God, keeping the ninth commandment? It’s not just avoiding falsehood and lying, of course it’s that, but it’s also using your tongue for good, by the grace of God, to love others, to build up others, to speak the truth and love to others. When God in his grace gives us that heart and that spirit to desire that, to pursue that, that is when we begin to truly keep this commandment. Let’s pray.

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The Old Testament reading is Exodus chapter 20 verse 15. You shall not steal. That’s the eighth commandment. 

And now you can, we’ll turn back to that in a minute, but now let’s go to the New Testament for our New Testament reading, which is Ephesians chapter four, Ephesians four, verses 25 through 32.

Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another. Be angry and do not sin. Do not let the sun go down on your anger and give no opportunity to the devil. Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor doing honest work with his own hands so that he may have something to share with anyone in need. Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear.

And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God and Christ forgave you. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever. And this is the infallible and inerrant word of God.

So this morning we are looking at Exodus chapter 20, verse 15, the eighth commandment. And as we have been taking a closer look these past several weeks at the Ten Commandments and taking a close look at each one of these commandments, one thing that we have seen is that with these commandments, there is always more than here that meets the eye. Most of the commandments are very short. In fact, some of them, like the commandment we are considering this morning, the Eighth Commandment, in Hebrew, it’s only two words long. So they are very brief, very short.

Despite that, though, the way in which each of these commandments applies to our lives is very comprehensive, very thorough. In fact, if we take the Ten Commandments as a whole, there is no sin that is not forbidden here, and there is no obedience that is not commanded here. And so God’s law comes to us in this very concise, succinct list of 10 commandments, and yet this law applies to the entirety of our lives, to everything that we do or say or think.

The brevity of the 10 commandments also tells us something about God’s view of sin and how different that is from our own way of dealing with sin. We tend to rationalize our sin, to explain it away. We use euphemisms to speak about our sin. But when we read these 10 commandments, we’re reminded that sin is sin. Particularly when we consider the teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ about these commandments, we know that God calls a spade a spade. Jesus said that to lust after a woman in your heart, that is nothing less than to commit adultery with her. To be angry at someone is nothing less than to commit murder.

In this truthful, this straightforward way of identifying a sin for what it is, this is especially applicable when we come to consider the eighth commandment. You shall not steal. Very few people consider themselves to be thieves. Very few people will confess to the sin of stealing. But stealing and thievery are exactly the right words to describe so many practices that are so universal, so accepted, that they are essentially regarded as normal human behavior.

For example, what is more normal than for an employee to take it easy at the office when the boss is away that day? And yet, despite the fact that that’s normal and accepted, that’s really a form of stealing. A person is stealing from his company the work and productivity he is supposed to give to it. But who considers that thievery or stealing? Well, God does. And he considers many other things to be stealing that we may consider to be accepted or just part of the world. And so we may not consider ourselves thieves, but we have all been guilty in one way or the other of stealing. We have both stolen from God and we have stolen from man.

And as we take a look at this eighth commandment this morning, that is the basic outline that we will use to unpack this commandment. When we are honest with ourselves, we’ll see that we have been guilty of robbing God and of robbing our neighbor.

And so first we’ll consider how the eighth commandment forbids robbing our neighbor. It’s hardly necessary to give a definition of what stealing is. We all know it. We’ve all have experienced it, either the victim of stealing, or we have one way or the other taken something that doesn’t belong to us. But it simply means to unlawfully take away something that belongs to another person.

And before we explore the various ways in which stealing takes place, it’s important to see that one thing that this commandment assumes, presupposes, is that there is such a thing as a right to property. There is such a thing as individual ownership over things. And so biblically, we can say that as far as our relations to one another are concerned, God has given you the right of ownership over certain things. If everybody owned everything in common, it would be impossible to steal anything because everything would already belong to you. But God has given us an inherent right to have ownership and possession over certain things that other people do not have any claim to own.

And we all do possess all kinds of things. Things that are both tangible and things that are intangible. But the most obvious things that we own are the material things that we possess: our property, our money, our stuff. And when you hear the eighth commandment, you shall not steal, that is naturally the first thing that comes to mind. That has to do with stealing someone’s property, someone’s stuff, their money.

This can take place in many, many ways. It can take place by robbery. Robbery is when someone takes something from you in person with the force of violence or the threat of violence or using violence. But far more common than robbery is secret theft. As we know, most thieves will steal from us when we’re not around. For example, you go away for the day, a thief breaks into your house, or you leave your car in the parking lot, someone breaks into your car. In fact, the Hebrew word that is used here in the Eighth Commandment has reference primarily to that kind of secret theft of taking something away when that person doesn’t know it.

And the number of ways that this kind of secret theft takes place is only limited by the depraved imagination and ingenuity of man. Just to name a few ways this kind of secret theft takes place: there is burglary, fraud, identity theft, stealing credit card numbers, and on and on and on.

Another common form of theft that the Eighth Commandment forbids is dishonesty in business transactions or dishonesty in any kind of transaction involving money or property in which one person takes more than they are entitled to through shady dealings or deception or lying. When I was in high school, my best friend and I, for money, we mowed yards in the neighborhood, and one day, when we finished mowing the lawn of a lady in the neighborhood, she paid us with what she thought was a bunch of quarters. We didn’t get a lot of money for each yard, so we could actually be paid in quarters sometimes.

When we looked at the quarters later, we realized that what she had actually given us was a bunch of Susan B. Anthony dollars. And if you’re old enough, you’ll remember the Susan B. Anthony dollar was about the same size as a quarter and they were very easy to confuse or to be to confuse. And so she paid us four times the amount that we had agreed upon for us mowing her yard. And obviously, the honest, the right thing for us to do would have been to return that excess money back to the woman who gave it to us. But I’m ashamed to say we kept it for ourselves.

And the thing is, neither my friend or I would have considered ourselves to be thieves or burglars or robbers. We would not have dreamed of breaking into the lady’s house and stealing her purse. And yet what we did amounted to the very same thing. And so we were thieves. We stole her money. We’d broken the eighth commandment.

Yet another way to steal someone’s property is to borrow something and never give it back. Psalm 37, 21 says, the wicked borrows but does not pay back, but the righteous is generous and gives. Loaned books have a way of never finding their way back home. I once heard of a pastor who put a stamp in each one of his books in the library that quoted Psalm 37, the wicked borroweth and returneth not. So when the person saw that stamp, they were reminded that they needed to return that book.

But people steal much more than just tangible things, such as your wallet or your jewelry. Virtually anything that can be owned can be stolen. You can steal someone’s intellectual work or intellectual property. That’s called plagiarism. A classmate in seminary told me one time how he had visited a church on a Sunday morning and the pastor of that church preached an excellent sermon. And this student on his way back home from church, he happened to have some tapes of recorded sermons by Dr. James Boyce. Some of you will remember him. He was the pastor of 10th Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia.

And as he started to listen to one of Dr. Boyce’s sermons, he realized he was hearing the exact same sermon word for word that he had heard preached in the church that morning. And so the pastor was guilty of theft. He had stolen a sermon written by another person and claimed it as his own. And you’d be surprised how often that happens. You would think that that would be unheard of, but it’s not.

Another form of stealing intangible property is violating copyright laws. The very same people who would vehemently deny that they are thieves or robbers or guilty of stealing, they will have no problem downloading copyrighted music or movies from the internet. Again, that’s another practice that so many people consider just to be normal, and yet it is a form of theft.

Another common form of theft is employees stealing from their companies, and that’s just not taking home office supplies, but anytime an employee fails to put in a full day’s work, an honest day’s work, anytime he fails to give himself wholly to the job that he is paid to do, anytime he calls in sick when he’s not sick, he is stealing from his employer. That, too, is a kind of theft.

The general rule is that the more impersonal the victim, the less hesitant people will be to steal. I had a friend in college who every time we went to the store for fun, he would put a candy bar in his pocket and walk out with it. And I remember him telling me, explaining to me why this was okay. And it was because he was stealing from a big company and he would never steal something from an individual. And yet he was stealing from individuals because guess who pays the cost of the goods that we purchase that are much higher because of theft? It’s you and me, it’s individuals. I read somewhere that up to one third of the price of any product can be attributed to the cost of theft that happens along the way as that product goes to market.

But people don’t see it that way. They see a big and personal company, it’s okay to steal from them, they have loads of money, and that’s especially true when it comes to the government. The government is such a huge and personal entity that even otherwise, usually honest people will be tempted to steal from it. And so people will fudge their numbers on their tax returns, or they may apply for government assistance or disability payments that they don’t really need. Contractors will pay or they will charge the government inflated prices for their goods and services.

And all of them believe that their little indiscretions don’t amount to much. They don’t really hurt anyone. After all, it’s the government. I mean, the government has all kinds of money, right? The government literally makes money. Well, no. Government money is taxpayer money. Government money is people’s money. And so stealing from the government is just another way of stealing from your neighbor.

And of course, the government itself is far from innocent in regards to the Eighth Commandment. Government waste, fraud, corruption, mismanagement: these are all ways in which the government steals from the taxpayers who support it. And not only that, but out-of-control deficit spending, like we’re seeing today, that too is tantamount. It’s essentially stealing from future generations. Future generations will have to foot the bill for the profligate spending of the government that their parents and grandparents.

Private companies can engage in all kinds of larceny, price gouging, false advertising, deceptive packaging, falsified financial reports and performance records to keep stock prices artificially high to give the board or the officers of the company a big bonus or a big income. These are all ways that companies will break the Eighth Commandment.

And finally, the Eighth Commandment forbids not only stealing your neighbor’s property, but also stealing your neighbor’s person. The Eighth Commandment forbids kidnapping. In 1 Timothy 1, Paul writes about the law of God, and he lists various sins, and those sins follow the structure or the order of the Ten Commandments. Let me read this passage to you. It’s 1 Timothy 1, verses 9 and 10.

It says, understanding this, that the law is not laid down for the just, but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who strike their fathers and mothers. That’s the 5th commandment. For murderers, that’s the 6th commandment. The sexually immoral, 7th commandment. Men who practice homosexuality, 7th commandment. Enslavers, 8th commandment. Liars, 9th commandment. Perjurers, 9th commandment. And whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine.

The sin that the Apostle identifies, that he corresponds with the Eighth Commandment in the ESV is called enslavers. The Greek word literally means kidnappers. I think the King James Version has it as man-stealers or men-stealing, something like that. That is, taking a human being to be used or sold for slavery. And so the Bible very clearly condemns stealing human beings in order to enslave them.

Now, it is true that there were specific forms of slavery that were condoned or at least permitted in the Old Testament. And it’s also true that the New Testament nowhere explicitly condemns the practice of slavery as it existed in Greco-Roman society in that day. However, we can say without doubt, we can say without qualification, that the Bible condemns the institution of slavery as it existed in our country up to the Civil War. Because American slavery was based upon the stealing of human beings in Africa to make them and their children and their grandchildren and so on slaves. Therefore, it was an evil institution.

And there are so many other biblical considerations we can bring into view here. But even leaving those aside, just the very nature of the chattel slavery that existed in the South in our country, because it was founded on the stealing of people in Africa, whether they were stolen by the slave traders themselves or whether they were purchased from other tribes who had stolen them from other tribes. Nevertheless, those people were stolen. And what that means is that that institution of slavery, the institution of slavery that existed in our nation, was intrinsically, inherently wicked in God’s sight.

And so no matter how some people may want to defend it, rationalize it, romanticize it even, the institution of slavery in the South was evil. It was irredeemably evil because it was based on breaking the Eighth Commandment. And if we broaden our view from the institution of slavery to more general forms of injustice in society, we can say that any laws, any customs that are based on racial prejudice or sinful discrimination, laws or customs by which people’s freedom or their opportunities for advancement are unjustly taken from them, that too is a form of theft.

And we can bring this down to an even more personal level. Anytime I fail to give my neighbor, for whatever reason, the respect, the honor, the consideration that is his due as a fellow image bearer of God, essentially I am stealing from him what I owe him. I owe him respect, I owe him consideration, honor, because he bears the image of God, even if he looks very different from me.

And so when we consider the comprehensive scope of the Eighth Commandment, when we consider all of the ways in which we have stolen from others, we can understand why Martin Luther said what he did. Martin Luther said this at one point, he said, if we look at mankind in all its conditions, it is nothing but a vast, wide stable full of great thieves. That’s not a real rosy, outlook on the state of humanity. It’s not the kind of inspirational quote you’ll find in your daily devotional calendar. And yet it is true. Stealing is endemic. It is widespread. In one way or another, we have all robbed our neighbor.

And because stealing is robbing your neighbor, it’s very personal. You know that feeling. You have had things stolen from you. You have had things taken from you and it feels like you have been personally violated. It feels like someone has walked up to you and slapped you in the face. And we feel this way because our possessions are really a kind of extension of ourselves. It is a very personal violation when somebody steals from us.

But we need to go beyond that because the fact that stealing is robbing our neighbor doesn’t give us the whole truth about theft and stealing. Because ultimately, stealing is stealing from God. It is robbing God. And that’s our second point: the eighth commandment forbids robbing God. And that’s because the true owner, the one who has possession of all things, the one who has the title, the right to say, this is mine, of all things, of course, that is God.

Psalm 24, one and two: the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein, for he has founded it upon the seas and established it upon the rivers. Because God alone is the creator of heaven and earth and all things in it, God alone has the right to say of all things, this is mine, this belongs to me. And this is so crucial for us to understand because how we define stealing depends so much on how we understand who owns what, what belongs to whom.

We have missionaries and we’ve had missionaries in the country of Uganda for many, many years now. And one of the places where they minister is an area called Karimoja and the Karimojang people who live there. Traditionally, they have been cattle raiders. However, they have a very interesting way to justify that way of life. They believe that God has given the Karamojang people all the cattle in the world. And so for that reason, in their eyes, it becomes necessary from time to time to visit a neighboring tribe and reclaim some of their cattle that belongs to them. And the reasoning is certainly sound, the logic is there, but of course the premise is faulty, the premise is bad. They are not the rightful owners of all the livestock in the world.

And as Christians, our understanding of who owns what must be based on the word of God. And the word of God tells us clearly that it is God who owns all things. Romans 11, 36: for of him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever and ever, amen.

My grandfather was a cowboy from Western Montana, and he had his own brand, RJ Bar, capital R, capital J with an underline underneath it. And he loved to put his brand on everything he owned, on his shoes, his boots, his hats, his t-shirts. He wrote RJ Bar. And so there was no question what belonged to Grandpa Romaine. He had his brand on everything. And in the same way, because God is the creator of all things, he has stamped his brand on everything. Everything that exists is stamped with the seal of God’s ownership. This is mine, I created it, it belongs to me.

And what that means is that for us, we don’t own anything in that ultimate sense. We are only stewards of what God has entrusted to our care. We are only caretakers of what God has given to us, we might say loaned to us to be used for his glory. And when we fail to use or we misuse or we abuse what God has entrusted to our care, we are really then stealing from God. We steal from God when we do not use all the resources, all the abilities, all the gifts, talents that he has given us in order to serve him. When we hold back anything from God for ourselves, we are robbing God.

In the parable of the talents, the wicked servant who did not invest his talent in the bank, but he hid it in the ground, he had to answer to his master for that sin. And we too will all have to answer to God for the way that we have used or have failed to use the gifts, the resources, the talents that God has given to us.

And so the negative side of the Eighth Commandment is just what it says, you shall not steal. The positive side of that is that we are to be faithful as stewards. We’re to be faithful stewards to use for God’s glory everything that he’s given to us. And part of that means sharing, sharing with others what God has given to us.

The late author Jerry Bridges said that there are three basic attitudes that we might have concerning our possessions or money. The first one is, what’s yours is mine, I’ll take it. And that of course is the mindset of a thief. The second attitude that we may have is, what’s mine is mine, I’ll keep it. And this is a self-centered attitude towards what we own. It’s seeking to use and to accrue, to gain what we have, only in order to please ourselves. And this is probably the area where most of us struggle.

But the third attitude, the one that is right, is to say, what’s mine is God’s, I’ll share it. This is godly stewardship. And you see this contrast between self-centered or really the contrast between what the 8th commandment forbids and what it commands and what Paul says in that passage from Ephesians 4 that we heard earlier. Ephesians 4 28: let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor doing honest work with his own hands so that he may have something to share with anyone in need. And so Paul is saying the thief, who was once a thief, but by the grace of God, he’s no longer a thief, he must do the opposite of stealing, and that is sharing, working with his hands, and then giving to others what he has gained by his honest labor.

And that is what we are commanded in the Eighth Commandment, to share. Share what you have gained rightfully, or what is already rightfully yours, in order to share it with others. And of course, this stewardship applies to our giving financially, our giving financially to the church, our giving financially to support ministries of the gospel. This is a part of what God requires of us.

This raises the question, well, how much do I give? The Old Testament had a very definite numerical standard, 10%, 10% of what you receive is what you are to give back to the Lord. I don’t believe that in the new covenant that the church today, that God requires a numerical amount of 10%. However, God does command us to give to the work of the kingdom. As we are able to give, we are commanded to give faithfully, sacrificially, cheerfully. For some, that may be less than 10%. For others, it may be way more than 10%. But either way, to give nothing to the kingdom of God is the equivalent of robbing God.

Malachi 3, 8 and 9: Will man rob God? Yet you are robbing me. But you say, how have we robbed you? In your tithes and contributions. You are cursed with the curse, for you are robbing me, the whole nation of you. And that’s what God had said to the people of Israel. And that applies today as well. If we fail to give what we can to God’s work through the church and the kingdom of God, then we are robbing God.

But as sinners, we rob God in much more profound ways than withholding our finances from him. Our entire being, all that we have, all that we are, belongs to God. He is your creator, he is your redeemer, and therefore you owe him obedience. You owe him the obedience that is his due as the one who made you and the one who saved you. You owe him your love, your worship, your praise, your devotion, your service. You owe all that to God.

And God in Christ claimed absolute sovereignty over you. There is no part of you, there is nothing that you own that you can call your very own. And therefore, anytime that you fail to honor Jesus Christ, anytime that you fail to give glory to God, you are robbing God. You are keeping from him what is rightfully his. And so every self-centered act, every selfish desire, every selfish thought is really an act of larceny against Christ. And so in the deepest and most profound way, as sinners, we are thieves because we have robbed God of the glory that we are bound to give him with our lives.

Now, when someone steals from you, you know how you respond to that, unless you are a much better person than me. Your first response is revenge, justice. I want that person to pay. He has wronged me. But thankfully, the Lord Jesus Christ is not like that. He is merciful. He is gracious to sinners such as us who have robbed him of his glory.

The scriptures give us a very powerful picture of the mercy of God towards those who are guilty of breaking the eighth commandment. When Jesus was crucified, there was one man on his right and one man on his left who were being crucified with him. Mark 15, 27 says, and with him, they crucified two robbers, one on his right and one on his left. We don’t know a lot about these men. We don’t know what they stole, but they were thieves. They were robbers. And according to the Roman system of justice, they were getting exactly what they deserved.

And in Luke’s gospel, we read that one of the robbers says to Jesus, as both were hanging on their crosses, dying that slow, agonizing death, the robber said to Jesus, Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom. And Jesus said to him, truly, I say to you, today, you will be with me in paradise. Again, there is not one of us here who could not take the place of that thief on the cross. There’s not one of us here who has not broken the eighth commandment in some way or some form of taking what was not lawfully ours. We are guilty of robbing our neighbor and of robbing God.

But just as Jesus spoke a word of mercy, forgiveness, promise, and hope to that thief on the cross, so he speaks that same word of forgiveness and mercy to you and me: today you will be with me in paradise. Isn’t it amazing what Jesus did for us in his life and in his crucifixion and death? We are guilty of stealing. We have taken what does not rightfully belong to us and taken it for ourself. But at the cross, Jesus took what was rightfully his already: His righteousness, His purity, His obedience, His status as the Son, the eternally beloved Son of God, and He has given it to you and to me.

And that gift that Christ gives to sinners such as us, that is yours if He is your Savior by faith, if you have come to Him by faith, if you have entrusted yourself to Him as your Savior from sin and death. That gift of his life, his righteousness, his sonship, he gives to you. He does not take from you. Well, he takes your sin and guilt, but he gives you his righteousness.

And as a believer in Jesus Christ as one who has received that gift of eternal life with the forgiveness of sins, what is your response? How do you respond to that? Well, you give yourself to Christ. You give all that you have to Christ: your possessions, your wealth, your time, your talents, your heart, your life. All of this, all of you belong to Christ.

The first answer in the Heidelberg Catechism puts it this way: I am not my own, but belong body and soul and life and death to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. It is only by the grace of God that you and I can say, I am not my own, but I belong to Christ, body and soul, in life and in death. I belong to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. And the eighth commandment then is a call for you and me as those who belong to Jesus Christ to live according to that grace, to live according to that truth, to give ourselves to our faithful Savior who gave himself to us. Let’s pray.

The post Robbing God and Man appeared first on Mt. Rose OPC.

The Old Testament reading is Genesis chapter three, verses 14 and 15. And this is the inspired, infallible, and inerrant word of God. The Lord God said to the serpent, Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock, and above all beasts of the field. On your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.

And now let’s turn to Matthew chapter one, and this is our sermon text for today. Matthew Chapter 1 verses 18 through 25.

Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph before they came together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit and her husband, Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.

She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins. All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which means God with us. When Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him. He took his wife, but knew her not until she had given birth to a son, and he called his name Jesus.

The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.

Last Lord’s Day, we looked at the same passage from Matthew, and we considered the name Emmanuel, God with us. This was one of the two names that were given to Jesus at his birth. And the other name that was given to him, of course, was Jesus. And many of you probably know that the word Jesus, our English word Jesus comes from the Greek word, which is a word that is taken from Hebrew. And in Hebrew, it is Yeshua or Joshua. And the word means the Lord is salvation or the Lord saves.

In this name of Christ, Jesus signifies that with his birth, God was fulfilling his ancient promises that he had given to his people from long ago, that he would bring salvation to his people specifically, that the Lord would save his people from their sins. And that’s what we’ll focus on today. We’ll consider how the birth of Jesus was God’s accomplishing for us, a salvation, a salvation specifically from sin and from the death that we all deserve, the eternal death that we deserve because of our sin.

The good news of God saving us through his son, Jesus Christ, we hear this so often that it can become familiar to us. And we might forget that God was not under any obligation. God was not bound by anything outside himself to save us. God could have, and He would have been perfectly just, He would have been perfectly righteous, He could have simply left us in our lost condition, in our condemned state. And He would have been just as good, just as glorious, just as praiseworthy if He had done that.

But the fact that God did decree our salvation in eternity, the fact that He did send His Son into the world for that salvation, because he did not have to, this is purely the result of the unsearchable riches of his love and grace to us undeserving people, to undeserving sinners such as us. God freely chose to save his people, although we did not deserve it. And because God bound himself to this purpose because he did determine in eternity that he would save a people, that he would save a sinful people, there was only one way that he could do that, and that is the way in which he did it, by sending his son, Jesus Christ.

Normally, rightfully, we are hesitant to speak about what God has to do or what God cannot do or what God must do because God, of course, is absolutely free, is not bound by any external considerations whatsoever outside of himself to determine what he does. However, we can say that because God did determine that he would save a sinful people, because he would take a people for himself through his son, that there was three things that the son of God had to do in order to accomplish the salvation.

First of all, the son of God had to humble himself. Secondly, the son of God had to become fully human. And thirdly, the son of God had to maintain his divine holiness. And these are the three truths that we’ll consider today as we consider the incarnation of Jesus, the humility of Jesus, the humanity of Jesus, and the holiness of Jesus.

The first truth, then, that the incarnation teaches us is the humility of Jesus, that the Son of God, in order to save us from our sins, He had to humble Himself. He had to come down to us. Since we looked at this passage last week, I’ll just briefly go over the details of all that this passage describes.

It’s a familiar story to us. Mary, the mother of Jesus, of course, she was betrothed to Joseph. During that time of their betrothal, which was like an engagement, they did not actually come together yet, they were not married yet, they weren’t living together, but during that time, Joseph discovered that Mary was pregnant. And of course, naturally, Joseph assumed that Mary had been unfaithful to him, that she had been with another man. And so, as Matthew tells us, Joseph decided that he would divorce Mary. But he would do so quietly. Joseph was not interested in exposing Mary to public disgrace, but he decided that he would put her away or divorce her discreetly.

But we know that Mary was not pregnant because she had been with a man, but she was expecting a child because the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, had come upon her and by the power of the Spirit in her womb, the baby Jesus was conceived. Now, after Joseph determined to divorce Mary, an angel appeared to him in a dream. And the angel told him this in verse 20, do not fear to take Mary as your wife for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. And so now Joseph learns the truth that Mary has been faithful, but something extraordinary has taken place, something unheard of that, as a virgin, she is conceived by the power of God, by the power of the Spirit.

Then the angel said to Joseph in verse 21, she will bear a son and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins. And Matthew tells us that Joseph was obedient and he did exactly what the angel told him to do. Verses 24 and 25, when Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him. He took his wife, but knew her not until she had given birth to a son, and he called his name Jesus.

Now, there is much to learn in this passage from the example of Joseph, from his obedience, his faith. He believed the word of the Lord. He received this message from an angel of God in heaven, and he believed it, he trusted it, and he acted on it. He did exactly what the Lord had called him to do. He showed himself to be what Matthew tells us what he was. He was a just man. But that is not the main lesson that the Lord would have us to take from this passage, but the greater lesson, what we are to learn from this passage is what God has done, what the Son of God has done, that He humbled Himself, He lowered Himself by taking to Himself a human nature.

And this is the wonderful mystery of the Incarnation. Something that we cannot begin to comprehend with our minds or to explain or to describe. How is it that God himself became man? That the eternal, the infinite God, that he took on a finite human nature. This is something that we simply trust. We believe that it is so because the scriptures declare it to us. We adore it. We stand in awe of it. We marvel at this mystery, this wonder that God became man. The second person of the Trinity, God the Son, the one who with the Father and the Spirit is true God from all eternity, he became man in the womb of Mary.

The Lord of glory, the one of whom Job said, the heavens are not pure in his sight. He not only became man, but he became a baby conceived in the womb. And so Jesus humbled himself. And it wasn’t as we might thought it may be. If we were told that almighty God would come to us as a man, we would assume that he would come to us as the emperor of a great empire, a powerful king, a mighty warrior. But no, he came to us in the lowliest of conditions.

He was born to this obscure country girl in an animal stable, as you know, he was laid in a manger, born in this obscure little village in a far-flung province of the Roman Empire. And so he came in the most humble of conditions. When the Son of God became man in the incarnation, we always must remember that he remained true God. He did not become anything less than what he has always been, Almighty God. And yet he did set aside his divine glory, his outward splendor, his majesty as God. He set it aside when he became man. And so if we were to lay eyes on the baby Jesus and did not know who he was, we would think he was just another baby boy.

And as incredible as it is, as amazing as it is that the Son of God should humble himself in this way, that he should leave the blessedness of heaven in order to come into our world in this lowly condition, that was only the beginning of an even greater humiliation to which Jesus would subject himself. And that is he would ultimately lower himself to the lowest possible place on earth, and that is he would be condemned to die the cursed, the painful, the shameful death of a Roman cross.

At that cross, though Jesus himself was and remained without sin and holy, nevertheless, he willingly took to himself the sins of his people. He bore them at the cross, and Jesus took on sin and guilt as though it were his very own, as though he were guilty before God and he bore that judgment, that condemnation that belonged to us at the cross. But Jesus had to humble himself in this way in order to accomplish our salvation. If Christ did not bear our sin as though they were his sins, if he did not come as a true man, as our representative, he could not have received in himself that judgment, that condemnation that belonged to you and me. And if that was the case, then God could not forgive us. We would still be in our sins. We would still have our guilt upon us because there would be no one to take that for us.

But praise God, that’s exactly what Jesus Christ did. That’s what the son of God did. Romans 8, three says, for God has done what the law weakened by the flesh could not do by sending his own son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh. And so when we consider the birth of Jesus, we have to see it as the beginning of a greater condensation, a lowering of himself that would culminate at the cross. Philippians 2:8, to being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. And if you are Christ’s, if you have come to him in faith, if he is your Lord and Savior, all this was for your salvation, for your redemption.

There are two other implications of the fact that Jesus humbled himself in his incarnation and birth. First of all, it demonstrates our helplessness as sinners. The fact that God became man for our salvation, the fact that the Son of God came down to us in this way, it demonstrates the impossibility it is for us to do anything to save ourselves. Because of our sin, we are absolutely, utterly unable to please God, to render to God any kind of works or service or obedience by which we would be saved.

We cannot make ourselves right with God by our good works. We cannot atone for our sins by extraordinary acts of penance. Apart from the grace of God, you and I are as helpless to save ourselves as a corpse is helpless to make himself come back to life. The Bible says that we are dead. We are dead in our sins and trespasses. We are spiritually without life, completely unable to do anything to help ourselves or save ourselves.

And so God had to come into the world as man. He had to, as man, live the righteous and obedient life that we did not live and cannot live. He had to come into our world as man to offer himself a sacrifice, to atone for the sins that we could not atone for. And for that reason, the angel said to Joseph, he will save his people from their sins. It does not say he will help his people to find redemption. He will assist his people in obtaining salvation. He will save. He will save his people from their sins.

And this is why when you think about the baby Jesus, and this time of year we have images in our head or we see, you know, nativity scenes and so on, or movies. And we think about the baby Jesus, a precious little baby wrapped in a swaddling cloth, lying in a manger. And what might be our natural response to that is probably the wrong response, because our natural response may be to think something like, what a precious thing this is, a helpless little baby boy born to Mary. But what we should be thinking is this, if God came into our world in this way for my salvation, how utterly and completely helpless and weak am I that I should do anything to save myself?

The baby Jesus should be reminded to you and me that God has accomplished a salvation that we could never do for ourselves. He has redeemed us through his son, Jesus Christ, and coming to us in the person of Jesus Christ. He has done what we could not do. And so the baby Jesus is a testimony to our helplessness as sinners before God.

A second implication of the humility of Jesus in the incarnation is that it demonstrates the greatness of the love of God to us. If I can speak in this way, what was it that compelled or drove the Son of God to come into the world to humble himself in such a way that he would be born of woman, born in these lowly conditions? Well, the answer is it was love. It was love. God’s love for sinners such as you and me.

1 John 4:10, in this is love, not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins. Now that speaks of the love of the father for us, but we can equally speak of the love of the son for us as well. because the love that the Father has for us is shared by the Son and the Spirit. And so we could change 1 John 4:10 to say not that we love Jesus, but that Jesus loved us and humbled himself by coming into our world as man to be the propitiation for our sins. This is what love is. This is the greatest manifestation there is of what true love is, the love of God for us, Christ coming into our world.

One thing that comes naturally to us is that we flatter ourselves in thinking that we are pretty good at showing love to others. We like to think of ourselves as basically loving people. And so we think, something like, as long as I have not offended my neighbor, as long as I have not committed some great crime or offense against other people, I’ve loved others. I’m doing pretty well. We like to pat ourselves on the back for our good deeds. On the way into Walmart the other day, I put some change in the Salvation Army bucket. On social media, I follow or like several Christian ministries. I’ve provided for my family, I’m kind to my children, I’m nice to my wife, I must really be a loving person.

But the incarnation shows us that true love means so much more than that. It means lowering yourself as Jesus did, denying yourself as the Son of God did, sacrificing yourself for the sake of another, just as Jesus did. He came not to be served, but to serve, to give his life as a ransom for many. And Christ-like love, true love, means that you are willing not just to not give offense to others or be nice to others or kind to others, but you are willing to serve others for their good, even serving others in a way that may be tedious and unexciting and unnoticed by others and even unthanked by the person whom you are serving.

And what’s more, just as Jesus in the incarnation impoverished himself, that we might become rich, even though he set aside the riches of his divine splendor and majesty in order to come to us as man. So Christ-like love, true love, means that you make yourself poor for the sake of others by giving of what you have, of your time, your attention, your resources. And so the incarnation teaches us the true cost of love, what true love is all about. And that is self-giving, self-sacrifice, self-denying. In a sense, we can say true love costs nothing less than our very lives. We give ourselves up in order to serve others. And so the humility of Jesus demonstrates the greatness of the love of God. It shows us what true love is. The Son of God loved us and he came to us. He lowered himself for us and he gave himself up for us.

The first lesson then that the incarnation teaches us is the humility of Jesus. The second lesson is the humanity of Jesus. The Son of God had to become fully human in order to save us. When the angel spoke to Joseph, if he had said this, it would be a different gospel. The angel said to Joseph in verse 21, she will bear a son and you shall call his name Jesus for he will save his people, period.

If that’s all that the angel had declared, it may not be a different gospel, but Joseph certainly would have understood it in a different way. What Joseph would have thought is, praise the Lord. God is going to raise up our savior, our Messiah, our Christ to save us. And in his mind, he would be thinking to save us from our enemies, from the Romans, for those who occupied our land, our overlords. The Messiah is going to establish his earthly kingdom in Jerusalem and bring his people Israel into a glorious new age of freedom and prosperity.

That’s the kind of savior that the people of Israel were waiting for. That’s the Christ that they were hoping for, a political savior, one who would destroy the Romans and establish his reign over a restored people of Israel in Jerusalem, an earthly kingdom. Now that’s why when we read on in Matthew, King Herod was so bent on destroying the baby Jesus. Why? Because he was called the King of the Jews. And King Herod was the King of the Jews. He didn’t want the competition. And so he set out to destroy the baby Jesus.

But when you consider it, if the greatest need of Israel was that they should be saved from their enemies, from the Romans, there is no need for an incarnation. God could have easily have done that. Just as easily as he brought the people of Israel out of Egypt, he could have destroyed the Roman occupying forces and freed Israel from their bondage to the Romans. But when the angel spoke to Joseph, He proclaimed that the child would accomplish a far greater salvation than deliverance from their enemies.

He said in verse 21, you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins. The greatest need that the people of Israel had then, the greatest need that you and I have now is salvation from sin, salvation from sin. And in order to bring about that deliverance, there was no other way for God to make it happen, then for his son to come to us as man. He had to take on a human nature. He had to become true man. And the reason for that is because only a mediator who is truly and fully human can represent us before God and bear our sins.

That’s one of the lessons that we learn from the book of Hebrews. The old covenant had all kinds of animal sacrifices. They sacrificed bulls and goats and lambs and so on. But there wasn’t one animal sacrifice that could possibly take away the least amount of sin for a person, for a human. And that’s because they do not perfectly represent us. They are not man. And so for a true mediator between God and us, we needed one who was true, true man.

Hebrews 10:4, for it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins. We needed one who would share our nature. Hebrews 2:17, therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God to make propitiation for the sins of his people.

And one of the reasons that we have in Matthew and Luke, the accounts of the birth of Jesus, and even though the Bible doesn’t tell us a lot about the infancy of Jesus or the childhood of Jesus, nevertheless, what it tells us is that he was a true baby boy. He was a true human. He was made like us in every respect. Apart from the fact that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit, everything about the birth of Jesus was very ordinary.

After he was conceived, he grew and developed in the womb of the Virgin Mary for nine months, just like we did. Like many unborn babies, it’s probably safe to assume that he probably gave Mary some morning sickness. After he was born, just like every baby who has ever been born, he cried. His umbilical cord had to be cut. He had to be nursed by his mother, just like you and me. And again, it’s safe to assume this, the Bible doesn’t say this explicitly, but we can assume that Joseph and Mary probably had a lot of sleepless nights after Jesus was born. He woke up every couple of hours, he was hungry, he cried.

And so Jesus was and is fully human. And that’s so you and I might have a perfect savior before God. Only He could be our substitute. Only He could bear our sin and guilt before a just and righteous God and take away that condemnation that was ours. And that’s what He did at the cross.

Theologians throughout church history have asked the question, would it have been possible for God to save us in any other way than through the incarnation of the Son of God? And we know that the answer is no. And the answer is no because only in this way could God forgive sinners and bring us into his presence and uphold his perfect righteousness and holiness and justice. It was only in this way by giving us his son as man to represent us, to take away our sin. And so if Jesus is not truly human, he cannot be our savior, but praise God, he is true man and he is able to save us.

So the second truth of the incarnation is the humanity of Jesus. The third truth is the holiness of Jesus. In order to save us, the Son of God had to maintain his divine holiness and righteousness. The angel tells us in verse 20, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. Of course, this is the virgin birth of Christ. Jesus was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit. He was born of the Virgin Mary.

And one reason why it’s profitable for us to reflect on the virgin birth of Christ is because if Jesus had not been conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary, there would be no salvation for us. Really, the gospel depends upon this teaching, this truth, that Jesus was conceived not by man, but by the Spirit of God. And the reason for that is because if Jesus had been conceived by ordinary and natural means, he would have been born with the very same sin nature that you and I are born with. And therefore he would not have been able to offer himself a perfect sacrifice for us.

And so his conception had to be by the Spirit of God that he might be perfectly sinless and holy from birth. And of course he remained so throughout his life. Charles Spurgeon said, he is born of a woman that he might be human, but not by man that he might not be sinful. When the Israelites, they celebrated the Passover every year, the lamb that they offered to God, it couldn’t be one who had defects or who was injured in some way, but it had to be a perfect specimen, a lamb that was without spot, without blemish, only such a lamb could take away, sacramentally, could take away the sins of the people.

As you know, in the Old Testament, Joshua was a type of Christ. Joshua is the same name as Jesus. They share the same name. It’s not a coincidence because just as Joshua led the Israelites into the promised land, so Jesus, the new Joshua, the greater Joshua, by his death and resurrection, he would lead his people into the promised land of eternal life and heavenly glory.

But did you know that there is another Joshua in the Old Testament who was also a type of Christ? And that is the Joshua that we read about in the prophets Haggai and Zechariah. When the Israelites returned from exile in Babylon back into the promised land, the high priest at that time was a man named Joshua, the son of Jehozadak. And so Jesus is both a Joshua who leads us as a conqueror to bring us into our promised land, but he is also a Joshua who is our great high priest.

And as our great high priest, he offered up a perfect sacrifice himself. Holy, sinless, pure, a sacrifice that alone could take away our sin and guilt. And so it’s fitting that Jesus should be called Jesus, the Lord of salvation. And because he was holy from the moment of conception, because he was sinless and righteous throughout his life, perfectly without sin, he is our perfect savior. And if you belong to Jesus Christ by faith, you have a savior who has delivered you from all the ways in which sin has brought destruction and misery and condemnation to us.

When the angel says he will save his people from their sins, that means that he will save his people from every aspect of sin, from every way in which sin has destroyed us and has robbed us of life. Now J.C. Ryle puts it this way, he says, he saves us from the guilt of sin by washing us with his own atoning blood. And so we are justified in Christ. We are declared righteousness for the sake of Christ. He saves us from the dominion of sin by putting in our hearts the sanctifying spirit. We are saved from the power of sin. He saves us from the presence of sin when he takes us out of this world to rest with him. And he will save us from all the consequences of sin when he shall give us a glorious body at the last day.

And this is why the good news of the gospel is such good news, because we have a Savior who has come into our world to save us from all sin, to save us from all the consequences of sin, to save us from every way which sin has robbed us of that life that God created us to have forever with Him. Another way to put it is that in Jesus Christ, God has met our deepest and most desperate need as sinners. This is what we need most of all, to be saved from sin.

When Adam and Eve made that fateful decision, or that fatal decision, in the garden, take of the fruit and eat, when the Lord had told them not to, when they disobeyed God, did they have any inkling, did they have any idea of the magnitude of what they had done, of the misery that they had just brought upon themselves and the entire human race that would come from them. Every war, every act of violence, every selfish deed, every hatred of the hearts, every sickness, every death, everything in this life that is the source of human suffering and misery in this world is because of sin.

That is why the world is the way that it is, because sin entered into the human race. And now we live in a world that is always under the shadow of death. And not only that, but what’s more, the life to come apart from grace is only the prospect of an eternity, an eternity spent under the wrath of God again because of sin. And it’s not because of his sin or her sin or their sin that we need to tell ourselves it’s because of my sin, because of my sin. I too have sinned against God. I too am part of the problem.

And so the world that came to be after our fall into sin is a world in need of salvation. We need a certain kind of savior. We don’t need a savior who is a political leader to bring us prosperity or peace. We don’t need a savior who is a scientist to cure all our diseases. We don’t need a savior who is a guru to teach us how to live happy and prosperous lives. We need a savior who is a mediator, who can stand between us and a holy, a righteous God who is uncompromising and is justice. One who is both God and man, who can take our sin and guilt that we might be forgiven.

And that’s exactly what God has given us in his son, Jesus Christ. And for that reason, there has never been any gift that was given that is as great as the gift that God has given to us and his son. And that gift came to us that night in Bethlehem when the baby Jesus was born to Mary. Let’s pray.

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