Lesson 35
Righteous Civil Officials – 17:1-13
We’re in Deuteronomy 17, I’d like to turn to Deuteronomy chapter one and
go to verse 17. Deut. 1, all the way
back to the beginning of this book to 1:17. The book of Deuteronomy is written in the form
of an international treaty. This has
been suspected for many years, it is now proved by archeology that this is
written up in the format of the second millennium and therefore it describes a
legal relationship between Yahweh, known to you as Jehovah, and the twelve
tribes of Israel, and it’s a covenant that He entered into with these twelve
tribes and established a legal relationship between Him and a certain portion
of the human race. This is called in the
Bible the Kingdom of God, and the Kingdom of God lasted on earth from about
1440 when this was made on down to 586, it was withdrawn, it was offered again
to Israel during the times of our Lord Jesus Christ and it’s withdrawn because
of their rejection of Him and will ultimately come to earth for a one thousand
year millennial reign of Jesus Christ.
So what we have in this treaty is an opening up and description of the
The theme song from Deut. 12-26 is how to love the Lord your God with
all your soul, or as we have transliterated with all the details of life. And we go back to the idea that here is your
life and your life is made up of many things, fellowship with other believers,
relationship with family, relationship with society, relationship with
government, it’s made up of things like a job with all the details concerned
with work, it’s made up of things with health and recreation; it’s made up of
sex, of various things in the home, etc. these many, many details and all these
details are covered in chapters 12-26 because these details are important to
God. However, we always want to remember
that chapters 5-11 dealt first with the inner mental attitude because without
the inner mental attitude the outward works are just sham.
In chapters 12-26 we moved first from chapters 12-16, now we’re moving
from 16-21 and chapters 12-16 dealt with one central theme, the unity of the
nation. By this we mean the religious
unity of the nation
Now we’ve been moving to this next unit in the book and this has to do
with another theme and this is the righteousness of the nation and the order of
these two sections, proceeding from unity first then to righteousness is
important because we have the cry abroad in our day to bring law and order back
into the United States and yet if this is really the mechanics of the operation
of history as we are learning from Deuteronomy, this is wrong. This is putting the cart before the
horse. It does no good to station a
policeman on every corner unless you first have a convinced populous and a
populous that agree to the standards a policeman is going to enforce. Otherwise you have nothing but a police state
and therefore the order, the divine order is first you get a consensus in your
society and then after you get your consensus, then you build your law and
order.
And this is a dilemma we face in
When that assumption is cut as it is being done in our day, then we have
to move to the third source of law and this is consensus again, but it’s based
on some other thing, such as sociology, such as psychology, such are
aristocracy or the ruling class or something like this. You have to establish a consensus based on
something else other than the Word of God.
And of course we’re in the throes of trying to establish a consensus,
trying to establish an American form of right and wrong and we’re having
trouble doing it because w have a lot of diverse elements in our society.
Then the fourth and final area is anarchy and hear is where the
individual himself is the source of his own law. And this is the student radical of today who
is answering his professors on the campus and saying what right do you have to
enforce your law upon me; no one has given you the right to tell me what to do
and I intend to live the way I want to.
A person has no authority of law if it doesn’t ground itself in the Word
of God and what the student radicals are doing is simply they are the birds
returning to the roost when the professors and the faculty of many college
campuses for the last 30-40 years have systematically undermined the faith of
the student and now they themselves are reaping the fruits of this attack.
So these are the four sources of law, direct revelation available only
to Israel; consensus based on the Word of God, available to northern Europe,
Great Britain, United States up until this century; consensus based on some
form of sociology, as we’ve illustrated before, the United States after 1930;
anarchy which is the United States of the 1960s. There are the only four sources of law, you
can take your pick. I for one would
choose number two but we don’t have people conform to this and there’s going to
be struggle going on and on in this nation until we settle down to
something.
Deut. 1:17 gives you the concept of law in Israel. This is law under the Kingdom of God; this is
law as it will be in the Millennium.
This is a picture, the divine viewpoint of civil operation of law. This ought to be the motivation; this ought
to be the memory verse of every policeman, of every person functioning in our
court system today, of every civil official, of every civil servant.
Verse 17, Moses instructs these men that he has appointed, “Ye shall not
respect persons in judgment, but ye shall hear the small as well as the great;
ye shall not be afraid of the face of man, for the judgment is God’s,” and the
key phrase is “the judgment is God’s.”
This is the reason for government.
This is the source of capital punishment; this is what authorizes human
beings to take the life of another human being.
I’m preparing to go to speak to some servicemen and I know one of the
great questions as Christian soldiers is going to be when I’m manning my
weapons and all of a sudden I get human bodies in front of my gun sights and I
have to pull the trigger, is this wrong.
My answer will be no, it is not wrong, because God has authorized the
instrument of government to provide for justice and by execution of other
people you are conforming to God’s role of government. Capital punishment is authorized in the Word
of God. Now this doesn’t authorize every
cotton picking revolution that goes on, this doesn’t authorize promiscuous
killing, as we shall see in Deut. 20 to the doctrine of war. But it does authorize in principle the
government to take life of its citizens, for the government itself does not
possess the authority, the judgment is God’s.
This is the classical concept of the divine institution of government,
the judgment is God’s. This is the theme now that we are going to see from
Deut. 17-21. Over and over again these
officials are charged, it’s not their authority, you don’t respect a civil
servant because of who and what he is; you respect a civil servant because as a
Christian you respect the concept of law and order.
This is why the early Christians in the apostolic era supported the
Roman government. Why, contrary to some
Christian pacifists you had an entire legion of Roman soldiers who were born
again Christians and they had the reputation for being one of the most
aggressive legions in the Roman army.
And these legions would go across and they’d have prayer meetings before
they went into battle and this was an entire Christian legion in the Roman
Army. These men were all born again
Christians and they killed as functionaries of the Roman government.
Now, here the theme song is the judgment of God and to see it in detail
turn to Deut. 16. We’ve already gone
through the stages of government, verse 18, “Judges and officers shalt thou
make in all thy gates, which the LORD thy God gives thee, throughout thy
tribes, and they shall judge the people with righteous judgment.” If you diagram the government it looks like
this: Yahweh or Jehovah was the King, He ruled through His law. Every government had three functions,
legislature, executive, judicial. Notice
Israel had no human legislature; there was no Congress, no House of
Representatives because God made the Law.
Legislature is absent in Israel, God was the legislature. Then you have the executive and judicial
combined into one branch of go, the “judges and officers.” And it looked this way, you had the Law and
then you had underneath the Law something
we’ll see called the supreme council and underneath this, in each town you had
a little township type of government, a judge or judges, plural, the shoterim, these were the assistant
judges and you had sarim, who were
the appointed town officials. You had
the garbage man and somebody else, and whoever they appointed were the sarim.
So you have the judges, the shoterim
and the sarim, and you have these in each township.
This is what it means in verse when it says “judges and officers,”
“judges and shoterim shalt thou make
thee in all thy gates,” gates is an idiom, it’s a metonymy for all your cities,
“which the Lord thy God gives thee, throughout thy tribes, an they shall
judge,” and the charge is given to them in verses 19-20 with the theme being in
verse 20, not “that which is altogether just shalt thou follow” but in the
Hebrew it says “righteousness and only righteousness shalt thou follow.” In other words stay right on the track, for
the very Hebrew righteousness, zedek,
this Hebrew righteousness means standard, line, absolute, “and this and only
this shall you follow.”
Now verse 21, there’s a strange set of three verses, verses 21, 22 and
17:1. You look at that carefully and you
wonder what has that got to do with judges and officers. So we’ve had liberals say who study the Bible
with a razor blade, they like to cut this section out and say this is the work
of some later editor and he brought this in here because he couldn’t think of
anything else to put there. Let’s look
at it and see if it does or does not fit.
“Thou shalt not plant thee a grove of any trees near unto the altar of
the LORD thy God, which thou shalt make thee. [22] Neither shalt thou set thee
up any image, which the LORD thy God hates. [17:1] Thou shalt not offer unto
the LORD thy God any bullock, or sheep, wherein is blemish, or any evil
favouredness [blemish] for that is an abomination unto the LORD thy God.”
What has that got to do with a civil government, operation civil
government if you were religious? And
that’s precisely the point. For Israel
recognized the fact that civil law and order, or civil law was always erected
on a foundation of the Word of God. And
you could not disconnect the two. This
is why I always challenge people who walk around and say this famous slogan, it
doesn’t matter what you believe it’s just how you live. Nothing could be further from the truth,
that’s absolutely wrong. Everything matters
on how you believe because this sets up the concepts and approaches to life. So the civil law is grounded on the
Word.
Now what these verses, verses 21-22 & 17:1 are teaching is that they
do not want to pollute the sanctuary which is the ultimate base of the
law. There shall be no pollution, and
the charge in verse 21, “Thou shalt not plant thee a grove of any trees,” has
reference to the idea of Asherah. Asherah was a sex goddess of the ancient
world, a very promiscuous type of worship and she always had her converts plant
groves of trees. They’d have these trees
and have all sorts of orgiastic rites underneath them, they liked to do
everything in the shade. So they had
these trees, it was a hot desert land, and when they lived it up they at least
wanted some air conditioning, so they planted trees and they did everything
under these trees. And one of the
results of these orgies they had with Asherah was to divinate, or to try to
understand the future. And they would do
this when they were pressed to understand who was right or who was wrong,
they’d go to Asherah to ascertain whether this person was guilty or not
guilty. And there was a tendency in that
time of history to pollute the law and order of the Word with these mystical
practices of pagan religion.
And thus you find verses 21, 22, and 17:1 do fit into the context
because these three verses are saying thou shalt preserve the fountain of law;
the fountain of law is Jehovah, thy God and His sanctuary. Thou shalt not allow it to be mixed with
pagan worship. And today in our country
if we were to apply this as Bible-believing Christians we would insist upon the
fact that there are absolutes and standards in the Word of God and we cannot
compromise those standards regardless of who we are, to whom we’re voting
for. Therefore these standards in verses
21, 22 and 17:1 all have to do with the preservation of the fountainhead of
law.
Deut. 17:1, “Thou shalt not sacrifice unto the LORD thy God” approaches
the same problem from a slightly different perspective. In verses 21-22 we dealt with a problem of
pollution. In verse 1 you deal with a
problem of sloppiness. Here you have
the people going to Jehovah, they’re sacrificing to Jehovah in verse 1 but
they’re doing something wrong, they’re getting sloppy about it. This indicates an attitude. People who are sloppy always show their
attitude. You see it around any
organization; people that you tell to do a job and they say oh yeah, we’ll do
it, and then you look around six months later and nothing’s happened, that
tells you something; that tells you that they don’t care, they just flat don’t
care. It’s the same thing in verse 1,
they should have an active interest in Jehovah and His law; don’t get sloppy.
Beginning in verse 2 we have the functions of these judges and this
section will take us down to verse 13.
At verse 13 we terminate so next week we’ll go into the king, the
problem of federalized government and centralization of power beginning in
verse 14, but verses 2-13 deal with the role of the judge. Now don’t think of the judge here as a judge
today in our system, although this context will tend to make you think that
way. Just think of a judge as one who is
both executive and judicial official; think of them both in one person and
you’ve the concept of a judge. This is
the idea of the Scripture at this point.
Samson was a judge, so you see what I mean, there was more than just the
fact that he decided controversies, right and wrong, it was that he was a
military leader also, he performed executive functions.
Verse 2, “If there be found among you within any of thy gates, which the
LORD thy God gives you, man or woman who has wrought wickedness in the sight of
the LORD thy God, in transgressing His covenant,” now why pick this particular
crime to illustrate the function of a judge.
In verses 2-7 there is one crime that is outline and this crime is the
crime of all crimes in the nation, it is treason. Everything depends on
Jehovah, He’s the King, and if you violate His law it’s treason against
Him. Therefore if you bring in
anti-Bible doctrine or something that is not Biblical you are a traitor to the
nation and summarily executed. Therefore
they take this crime of treason, and this is the highest of all crimes, and
this is going to be an example, for if the judge knows how to handle the one
crime of all crimes, then by implication he can handle the other lesser
crimes. So that’s why in verses 2-7
Moses selects the worst of all possible crimes in that day and uses it as an
illustration of what the judge is to do.
Verse 2 illustrates, he has the report, verse 3 is what they have done
[And hath gone and served other gods, and worshiped them, either the sun, or
the moon, or any of the host of heaven, which I have not commanded], now verse
4, the report comes to the judge. “And
it be told thee, and thou hast heard of it, and inquired diligently, and,
behold, it is true, and the thing certain, that such abomination is wrought in
Israel,” and when we get to this word “is wrought” we have to go back to Hebrew
grammar to understand a little point here.
“Is wrought” is the way it looks in the King James, that’s not the way
it looks in the Hebrew. In the Hebrew
it’s a participle; a participle in the Hebrew language always indicates action
that is going on at the moment you’re looking. So therefore it’s a moving picture
type of tense; the action is going on before you. And what this tells us in verse 4 is that the
judges get the report while the crime is still being perpetuated. In other words, it’s not a retroactive
report, someone sees this thing going on and they are immediately reported to
the judge, he gets the report, you might say, catching them red-handed. This thing “is being wrought in Israel.”
Verse 4 is the procedure, “inquire diligently,” and here is the command
to conduct an investigation; you do not operate on hearsay alone. We’ll get
into the court procedures in detail later but this is just to outline the job
description of a judge. He is to
“inquire diligently,” so there’s one of the aspects of the job of a judge in
the nation, to check gossip out because the worst thing you can do in any
organization is to learn something from somebody that comes to you on the
telephone, did you see so and so do such and such, oh, let’s get together and
have a prayer meeting for so and so.
Usually if you’re smart you will discount it until you get it confirmed
from other sources. So this is the first
job, to separate gossip and maligning from the real thing, “inquire
diligently.”
As a result of this think it’s obviously true, so then in verse 5 is the
next step the judge is to do. “Then
shalt thou bring forth that man or that woman, which has committed that wicked
thing, unto thy gates, even that man or that woman, and shalt stone them with
stones, till they die.” That’s not for
every crime, that’s for the crime of treason as we covered in Deut. 13. The procedure was that they would bring forth
the accused to the gate. I said that
gate is metonymy for city and it, but it also means something else, it means
that in these ancient towns they had sort of a town square and this town square
bordered on the gates of the wall, and it’s here where the elders would
meet. Those of you who ever read the
book of Ruth know what Boaz did; he went down to the gates to get this legal
matter cleared up with the family. So these
are where the elders met. We would make
a translation today, the city council, or some function like that, you go to
whoever the ruling elders and you have a bunch of the men that are the
respected leaders of the community, you have a group of elders and they have
among them, some are judges, i.e. they have been officially installed in an
office.
Therefore, you bring the accused and the trial is done at the gate. When the trial was finished, the person was
convicted; the execution always took place outside the city, never at the gate.
They would take the person out here and stone them, and this was a tremendously
important ceremony. Execution never
occurred on city property; it always occurred outside the city because they
felt to execute inside the city was an act of pollution.
Now you can understand, if you turn to Hebrews 13 why the author of this
book says what he says about the Lord Jesus Christ in verse 12, once again
showing us that if we understand the Old Testament we will understand the New
Testament. Keep in mind that these New
Testament epistles were written to people who had an excellent background in
the Old Testament and this is why Christians have trouble with the New
Testament, because we don’t have the background of the Old Testament. If we had the background these people had, no
trouble at all in most of the passages of the New Testament.
Here in Hebrew. 13:12 he says, “Wherefore Jesus also, that He might
sanctify the people with His own blood, suffered outside the gate.” What does that mean? It means the Lord Jesus Christ suffered as a
criminal, and that is a nuance; it just doesn’t mean that the Lord Jesus Christ
felt like He wanted to go outside the gate to suffer. The fact that the cross was set up outside
the city of Jerusalem and it’s referred to here in verse 12 is an indicator
that this was horrible to the Jewish mind.
And you can’t understand this until you sense the horror of the Old
Testament for this, something that’s outside the gate that’s been
executed. They dumped garbage outside
the city, they executed criminals outside the city, something outside the city
was filth. Now this is the thing that
the early Christians had to fight. You
mean to tell me that your God, Lord and Savior would die outside the city. And this is one of the great things the early
Christians had to fight off, that the God-man Savior, the King of Kings, the
Lord of glory was outside with the garbage and the dead bodies. He was executed as a common criminal and this
is what it means, therefore in verse 13, when he says by way of application,
“Let us,” as believers, “go forth, therefore, unto Him outside the camp,
bearing His reproach.” Now you
understand what that means. It means
that you go outside and you are identified with a criminal. You are identified with the off-scouring of
society. You are identified with one to whom all the decent people looked down
upon.
You have this manifest in our day, people look at you and I have had
this happen to me, after explaining the gospel and they say what, you mean
people are saved by blood, how gory, slaughter house religion; you’re saved by
the death of a man. Of course you are,
how else do you expect to be saved? The
Lord Jesus Christ made it very clear. God’s essence looks like this:
sovereignty, righteousness, justice, love, eternality, omniscient, omnipresent,
omnipotent and immutability. Here is a
member of the human race, we are sinners in His sight, righteous and justice looks
down and everywhere righteous and justice looks at the sinner it decrees death.
God is not going to compromise His righteousness and justice. Let’s put ourselves in God’s place for a
moment and say all right, here’s the problem; you have to figure out how you
are going to save this individual without destroying God’s righteousness and
justice. How are you going to salvage
the human race that you love? Love pours
out, love wants to do something but righteousness and justice say no, the
person is a sinner must die. Could you
design a plan of salvation that would at the same time bring this person in
answer to your love would save the individual and yet preserve God’s
righteousness and justice? The Old
Testament wasn’t very clear but it gave hints and in the New Testament we have
this.
God in His sovereignty works out a plan of salvation in the cross of
Jesus Christ. The cross of Jesus Christ
is the means by which our sins, which are credited to our account are
re-credited to Christ’s account; we call this the substitutionary death of
Jesus Christ. So legally what happened
was, since sin was the issue and not the personality, God simply took your
sins, every one of the sins that you have never ever committed yet, you can
tell the 5,800 you’ve already committed, but what about the 10,899 sins that
you haven’t committed yet? Think of all
the sins that everyone can commit; Christ took every single one and had it laid
on Him on the cross. That was the plan of God and so therefore righteousness
and justice looked down and said “die” and Jesus Christ died. Therefore since
the penalty of sin was paid and since you can’t have double jeopardy, once
something is judged it’s always judged, therefore there’s no such thing now as
sin separating God from men. What separates God from man now is only the, what
we call the unpardonable sin and that’s the sin of rejection of Christ,
negative volition, I reject Jesus Christ.
But when God laid all the sins on Him, this means that these sins were
credited to Christ’s account and in turn therefore righteousness and justice
are satisfied; love now can pour out to this person. Love is free to pour out without violating
the attributes of righteousness and justice because of the cross of Christ.
That is a perfect plan of salvation and you can study every religion on
the face of this earth and you will never find a religion that does this. Every religion apart from Judaism in the Old
Testament and Christianity in the New Testament, all religions fail to
reconcile the righteousness and justice of God with His love. You’ll never resolve this tension apart from
the cross of Christ. Therefore the issue
today is here I am, here God is, and what stands between me and God is Jesus
Christ. “I am the way, the truth and the
life, no man comes unto the Father but by Me,” and this is what Jesus Christ
meant by this. He wasn’t being a narrow
dogmatist. When I was a freshman in
college this was one of the things that repelled me as a non-Christian about
Christianity, the arrogancy of Jesus Christ to get up and say “I am the way,
the truth and the life, no man comes unto the Father man,” the sheer arrogancy
of the claim. But when I understood
through the Holy Spirit’s illumination why He said that, it made all the sense
in the world because it’s the cross that resolved the problem.
Therefore a person can go two ways; he can go positive or negative. A person can go positive volition, I accept
Jesus Christ as Savior. How does a
person accept Christ as Savior—reaching out with the empty hands of faith to
grasp God’s gracious provision in Christ. Simply in a moment of time in prayer
you can tell the Father that you are trusting in Christ’s work for your
salvation and not our own good works. Or
you can reject, and this is your privilege, we never cram, ram or jam the
gospel down anyone’s throat, you shouldn’t if you’re a Christian. Just present the issue and respect human
volition; he has a right to reject, and if he rejects generally it will be on
the basis of human good. People like to
say I’ll trust in my good works to gain me credit with God. If people want to trust in that fine, it’s
their choice. There’s the plan of
salvation outlined, and our Savior, then, becomes an executed criminal.
Now back to Deut. 17. We have the
next item on the agenda for the judge, it’s to deal with witnesses, and when he
deals with the witnesses he has another problem. He must have two or three witnesses, and only
two or three witnesses; he can’t have one.
If a person is going to be executed, in fact later on we’re going to
see, if any crime is solved in the nation it’s got to be by two or three
witnesses. The reason for this is that
you have conflicting testimony. It’s interesting,
turn to Mark 14:56 where you’ll see one of the great miscarriages of justice in
history at the trial of the Lord Jesus Christ.
It was a most amazing thing that happened at the trial of our Lord. Jesus was tried by the judges of Deut. 17 and
the judges realized that God had entrusted them with the proviso that there had
to be two or three witnesses that would agree to the crime before anybody could
be executed.
Look carefully at Mark 14:56, “For many bore false witness against him,
but their witness agreed not together.”
In other words, at the trial of Jesus Christ they had gobs of witnesses,
that wasn’t any problem, the problem that out of the hundreds of people that
would step forward and say this man blasphemes, this man claimed to be God,
it’s interesting, skeptics always say Jesus never claimed to be God; the basis
of His whole trial was blasphemy. The
people that were there had no question about whether He claimed to be God, that
was the whole point of the trial. Now
the point is here that even though they could get many witnesses to come to
this courtroom, they wouldn’t even agree.
And at the trial of Jesus Christ two people weren’t even present that
would agree on one thing about Jesus Christ.
And if you go down to verse 59 you see the same thing, “But neither did
their witness agree together.” Jesus
Christ was therefore illegally executed.
The prerequisite of Judaism, of the primary justice of Deut. 17 was
never satisfied, absolutely not satisfied and it was an illegal execution.
Back to Deut. 17: 6, “At the
mouth of two witnesses, or three witnesses, shall” the capital punishment be
done. Only one witness is insufficient.
Now the next provision was a court of appeals. It sounds like a court of appeals except I
want to show you something, it wasn’t quite a court of appeals. You see in verse 8 it says, “If there arise a
matter too hard for thee,” now who’s “thee?”
“Thee” are the judges. This is
addressed to judges, not the plaintiff, not the defendant. “If there arise a matter too hard for thee in
judgment, between blood and blood, between plea and plea, and between stroke
and stroke, being matters of controversy within thy gates, then thou shalt
arise,” these are the judges, not the plaintiff, not the defendant, “and get
thee up into the place which the LORD thy God shall choose. [9] And thou shalt
come unto the priests, the Levites, and unto the judge who shall be in those
days, and inquire, and they shall show thee the sentence of judgment.” This is the supreme council of the nation. These were professionals.
These people in the towns were sort of like our mayor and government,
they were part-timers. In other words,
they were paid for their government duties but the towns were small and
couldn’t afford a fulltime staff. But
the supreme council was twenty-four day people, and they were the professional
judges of the time. And there were two kinds of people, they had priests and
they had judges for a reason I will show you.
They had this council made up of these two. Now notice, this is not the appeals system we
have today. The case had never been
decided in the lower court. Today we
have the case decided in a lower court and then the appeal is made to the next
higher court, and then it goes on up the ladder, but that’s not the way it was
done here. Here there were two
differences. First of all, the case was
never made, or never decided upon in the lower court and secondly, the people
that went to the higher court weren’t the accused. The people that went to the higher court were
the judges and officials of the lower court to get help.
Verses 10, “And thou shalt do according to the sentence, which they of
that place which the LORD shall choose shall show thee,” this sentence passed
down by the supreme council was the Word of God. These people had access to direct revelation
and therefore their sentence was final.
No appeal beyond this. Why no
appeal beyond this? Because their
decision was perfect, they had access… remember, they were sitting right there
in the Temple; they had the presence of God to consult, they had the Urim and
Thummim, they had these things to consult so therefore they had a perfect
choice.
In verse 11 you see two parts of a court decision. “According to the sentence of the law,” the
word there “law” is Torah, and this is the work of the priest. On the supreme council you had two categories
of people. The priest put out the
sentence of law and what this sentence… after you got through the court they’d
give you two pieces of paper. One was the
sentence of law and one was the judgment.
The sentence of law stated where you had violated the Word of God. And so the priest’s job in that day, these
were the Bible students, and their job was to hunt through the law to find out
where did this case violate the word of Yahweh, or Jehovah. So when they found
it they issued this sentence, and that is what is spoken of in verse 11, “the
sentence of law which they shall teach thee,” see these people were Bible
teachers and they were teaching the judges. The judges got a little rusty on
some portion of Scripture and so they’d come to this place for aid. The priest
would sit down, go through the Scriptures and say look, here’s where so and so…
they didn’t have verses but I’m just mimicking 20th century, here’s
where so and so violated the law and so they would teach the judge. See, right here, this is where they violated
the Word of God. So that is “the
sentence of the law” which they are teaching the judges.
“…and according to the judgment,” and this is mishpat and that is the rule of the judges. Now this is the second piece of paper you
would have. The first piece of paper
would have where you violated the Word of God; the second piece of paper would
have the punishment. And then the judges
would take these two pieces of paper back to the local town where they came
from and execute the judgment. This is
how justice was done in difficult situations.
[… according to the judgment which they shall tell thee, thou shalt do;
thou shalt not decline from the sentence which they shall show thee, to the
right hand, nor to the left.”]
Verse 12, “And the man who will do presumptuously, and will not hearken
unto the priest who stands to minister there before the LORD thy God, or unto
the judge, even that man shall die.” Now
here you have one of the other reasons for capital punishment in the Old
Testament. Defiance of the authority of government meant you were
executed. Either you left the country or
you stayed around and tried to make waves, they made waves for you; they
dragged you outside the city and stoned you and that was how they handled the
rebels of their day. So therefore there
was no tolerance. Now the reason for
this stiff sentence was that look where it came from; it came from the Temple. And we have shown previously that the Temple
was the presence of God and so when the supreme council passed down these two
papers, who were they acting for? They
were acting for Jehovah Himself and to violate those two pieces of paper meant
that you were violating the very words of God.
It was as though you had come before the throne of God and He hands you
this to do and you violated it, and there’s nothing left. These people that disobeyed and badmouthed
the central authority, the supreme council were eliminated, and that’s why at
the end of verse 12 it says “and thou shalt put away the evil from Israel. [13]
And all the people shall hear, and fear, and do no more presumptuously.”
Now we’re going to see there’s some deep meanings in that word
“presumptuously.” The word
“presumptuously” in the Old Testament means one of two things. It means either the sin unto death, which
believers can commit, or it means the unpardonable sin which unbelievers can
commit, and it means that… the sin of presumption is always used when you have
very clearly given to you the will of God.
The word “presumptuous” is used when God makes His will very clear to
you, so there’s no mistaken what His will is for you and you still violate
it. When this happens and God has given,
usually, by the way, this form is not in the moral law but in God’s specific
will. When God has outlined His will for your life and you say no, I’m not
doing, that is sinning presumptuously and that is the thing that always brings
on death in the Old Testament.
Now let’s review some of the features of the court system and apply it
to our day. First we’ll review the role
of witnesses. This is to give you some
background so as we go on through the Old Testament you’ll understand some of
these things, you’ll understand some of the prophets. This is not just dry culture, this is the
means in which we understand the Word of God.
The first amazing thing about witnesses in the Old Testament was that
everything, EVERYTHING hinged on the witness.
There were no police in Israel.
Isn’t that remarkable; there was no police force in Israel. They didn’t have a chariot with a little
siren on it to go chasing around the teenagers that hot-rodded through the
streets of Jerusalem in their chariots; they just had a witness, write down
their license on the back of the chariot, there goes so and so, I saw them
riding down through the street the other day, dragging out with another
one. All they had was witnesses.
In Lev. 5:1 there is a reference that tells us that if you are a citizen
and you see a crime committed and fail to report it, God charges you with the
crime. And this gets rid of this citizen
involvement business, where you have in New York city a girl gets raped and
40-50 people stand around watching the thing, don’t want to get involved! And isn’t it interesting in Israel you had
total involvement by the citizenry because you had no police department. You didn’t get up and call the police, you
were there and you took care of it.
Therefore they had total involvement by the citizens, everything hinged
on Lev. 5:1, if you were a citizen and you saw a crime committed, you reported
it or you were credited with the crime.
[Blank spot]
False witness in Israel was the major crime, it’s prescribed in the Old
Testament, the Ten Commandment, thou shalt not bear false witness. That’s what
that term means, it means gossip and maligning too, but it also means that in a
legal court you’d better not get up and charge your neighbor falsely or you had
some things coming to you which I’ll outline in a moment. This was the major crime and you can see why they
treated it as a major crime because if you couldn’t rely upon the witnesses,
the whole system of justice broke down.
Third point about witnesses in Israel; punishment for a false witness
was the punishment that would have come on the person to whom you gave false
witness. For example, you don’t like Mr.
X over here, Mr. X stepped on your toe and you don’t like him so you’re going
to eliminate Mr. X and you say hey, I saw Mr. X go down and knock off some
person down in the bar. So you come in
with this big report and you drag Mr. X before the gate and you falsely accuse
Mr. X. Do you know what the crime for murder was? Capital punishment, and so
guess what, all of a sudden the judges begin to spot some irregularities in
your testimony because you can’t get somebody else to witness exactly the same
way and they begin to suspect, wait a minute here, something’s wrong.
So they take you before the supreme council, we’ll see this procedure
later on, and they decide hey, you’re the one that’s a false witness, well
isn’t that interesting because do you know what’s going to happen to you? You want to get rid of Mr. X with capital
punishment, well guess what’s going to happen to you? You’re going to get eliminated. So the thing
that you tried to put off on someone else gets put right back on you and that
was the punishment for a false witness.
If you gave false testimony in a certain crime where there was
scourging, then you were scourged. So
you see, this cut down false witnesses a little bit, particularly the worse the
crime was the less tendency you had of false witness because you realize if you
got caught it was curtains for you. So that’s how they guarded their system of
false witness.
The fourth point they had was that it didn’t take one, it had to take
two, for every conviction in Israel there had to be two or three witnesses that
agreed on the same thing.
Fifthly, that is that witnesses to capital crimes were the ones who
threw the stones. For example, if this had been really true, and you saw Mr. X
go down to the bar and bump somebody off and you brought him into court and the
sentence was capital punishment. If you
were the witness you had to stand up right in front of Mr. X and heave the
first stone. Now do you know why they
had that little provision? Because when
you had to look into a man’s eyes and take his life, you’d better be sure that
you’re right and you’d better have convictions about the law. And so therefore the person who had… this is
not vengeance, this is something entirely different from vengeance. These
people came down and the executors of the person who was caught, the person who
was sentenced to death, the executors were the witnesses. They were the first people to pick up the rocks. That’s dealing with the witnesses, five
points on the witnesses.
Now let’s deal with the court procedure, and we have five points on
court procedure in the ancient world.
And this will understand, you keep these in your mind and these will
give you a clue as to some of the prophets, they used these analogies often in
the Old Testament.
The first principle of the court procedure was quick access for all
citizens. You didn’t have to wait three
years to get your case to court. It was
quick access. The reason for this was
they had a vast number of small courts, not a small number of large
courts. They had a tremendous number but
they were all small courts, but they had a lot of them and this way they could
handle the cases very rapidly. You find
this in Ruth 4, for example, an example of quick access. Boaz wants to get
vindication for his cause, he just walks down, makes an appointment with the
court and within 24-48 hours he has his case in the courtroom.
Two, the complaint was brought by the plaintiff, not by a DA, not by a
lawyer. The citizens did a lot of the
court work themselves, Deut. 21, 22, etc.
The third thing about court procedure was that the judge, the accused,
the accusers, and the witnesses all had one principle and that is that the
judgment is God’s, and it was conducted in a holy atmosphere. It was conducted with a seriousness because
they looked upon a court system, not as a means of gaining revenge but as a
means for execution of the will of God and there’s a tremendous distinction
here. People totally misunderstand
capital punishment in the Old Testament.
They think oh, this is gruesome, this is primitive justice. People who say that usually have no concept
of the holiness of God, absolutely none.
And they also misunderstand the motivations of the Old Testament.
The fourth thing is very interesting, punishment was immediate; there
was no delay. Once the sentence was
made, punishment was immediate. There was never a jail term except for one type
of crime and that was the crime that we saw tonight where they couldn’t figure
out who was wrong. And if they had this
crime and they suspected the witnesses were wrong and there was something wrong
with the case, then they did jail the person.
This is described in Lev. 24:12; Num. 15:34, but this is the only time I
can find in the entire Old Testament where jail sentences were used. They did
not lock up men like animals in the Old Testament. They flogged them and that may sound cruel
and vicious to you, but I just wonder as I’ve gone through these pages and I’ve
devoted many, many hours over the past months to prepare this serious on the
justice of Israel, the thought has gone through my mind, is it in the end more
cruel to take a man out and lash him than it is to lock him up as an animal in
a cage where he will have psychiatric problems the rest of his life, where he
will be in touch with other hardened criminals.
I’m not convinced in my own thinking that jail terms are less cruel or
less primitive than the systems of punishments authorized here in the Word of
God.
Finally we have the fifth one, if the crime was not solved, what
happens. And this is very
interesting. If the crime was not
solved, guess who took the responsibility?
The local government. So, for
example, if you had a crime committed in some local area and the murderer was
not identified, the local government assumed the responsibility and made due
payment for the people that lost their individual, as much as they could. Now this is a fantastic provision. We don’t
even have this in our country. We have
it in sections, but if a crime is not solved beyond a certain time limit in the
Bible the local government paid off the person who was injured.
Now out of this whole thing you see something. You see that the object of justice in the Old
Testament is God; the judgment is God’s.
And the concern of the court isn’t the accused; the concern of the court
is the crime that was done; that’s the concern.
The concern isn’t the person who did the crime; the concern is the crime
itself that was perpetuated.
Now we have four additional points on capital punishment itself. We’ve gone through capital punishment but
we’ll just outline four basic points of it here to give you the background for
this section we’re moving into.
Capital punishment in Israel was limited to the following crimes, and
this is quite a limitation when you compare the Code of Hammurabi, when you
work with the Hittite codes, when you work with some of the Mesopotamian law
codes, you’ll find that this is quite a limitation. Capital punishment was only for the sins of
murder, treason, certain sexual sins which we’ll outline later on as we go
through here, slave trading, defiance of civil and parental authority. That’s
an amazing one. If the parents had a
child that they couldn’t control, they just took him down to the elders and he
was eliminated. They solved their JD
problem in those days quite rapidly. So
capital punishment was limited to murder, treason, sexual sins, slave trading,
defiance of civil or parental authority.
Secondly, capital punishment could not be executed until it had been
thoroughly investigated. This was not arbitrary justice.
Thirdly, the execution, and this is interesting, it sounds gruesome when
you look at it but I don’t think it was, the more I think of this the more
wisdom I see in it. The execution was
public, in front of everybody. Now why
do you suppose execution would be public?
These people had feelings; don’t get in your mind if you hear this barf
in history about oh these primitive people back there, they didn’t have any
heart. Bologna. I can show you verse after verse in the Old
Testament where it says when you get in this situation, don’t let your eyes
pity. Now why is that command in there
if the people didn’t care; they cared.
People in that day had human emotions just like you have and it wasn’t
very pleasant for them to go out and find this person being stoned to death in
front of them. They had problems
emotionally with it too, but here’s why I think it was public. It was a graphic demonstration of the justice
of God. And people stood around and saw
the execution, the seriousness and the horror of an execution, and felt once
again that the law is serious. It wasn’t
just flippancy. We execute a man today and you never even hear about it, we
hide them, don’t let people go to see. It’s precisely the opposite in the
Bible.
Then they had another interesting thing and this gets into a detail
which we’ll see later, it has to do with the cross of Christ. The body was hung on a tree. Now that’s what that means in the Old
Testament, it doesn’t mean that they crucified them in the Old Testament. After
they killed them they picked up the corpse and hung it from a tree until night. At night they had to take it back down
because they felt it would pollute the land but it was hung on a tree for
display.
Do you see these two provisions; the gruesomeness, the horror, the blood
and guts of this thing was clear to all the citizens, and I dare say it had a
slight deterrent effect on crime. You
say it’s gruesome but I wonder.
Now this is the summary of the last section in verse 13 where we have in
Deut. 17, “And all the people shall hear, and fear, and do no more
presumptuously,” and here we have the information that apparently in the land
this whole display did have a deterrent effect because it says after people see
this kind of thing they’re not going to do any more presumptuously. It’s going to make them mend their ways.
Now, this is an interesting contrast, this quick criminal thing. So summarize what we’ve done tonight we’ve
worked with the judge a little bit; we’ve worked with his job description a
little bit. We’ve seen some of the
things that a judge does; we’ve noticed that one of the central features of the
judicial system of Israel was the promptness of justice. Throughout the whole
thing from beginning to end there’s a promptness of justice. Combine this with our system today. U.S. News and World Report reported, March,
1969, the average time between arrest and jury trial varied from 1.4 months in
western Kentucky to 22.8 months in eastern New York. The average time, some cases are more than
that, that means from the time of an arrest to the time of the trial, the first
trial, not even the second and third appeal, but from the arrest to the trial,
is over a year, almost two years. Now
you ask what’s happening to the justice system.
This is why in our country we do have a problem with the judge; the
whole judicial system needs to be overhauled.
And in Israel under the Kingdom of God you see one of the most perfect
judicial systems ever worked out in the history of the world. I suggest that we as citizens take careful
notice of some of these features because I am not convinced that this is
primitive justice at all in the Old Testament; I’m convinced that it’s very
wise justice. Gruesome, yes, but isn’t crime gruesome. We talk about murder and
we don’t like to execute a criminal but what about the person that was
executed? What about the person that was
murdered? Don’t their lives count? Let
me tell you something interesting about the Word of God and capital
punishment. I have studied for
comparative purposes and historical background the Hittite code, the Code of
Hammurabi, various other codes in the Mesopotamian valley to compare and see
what are the unique features of the Bible. And one of the striking features of
the Bible is this: that in all the other codes when a person was murdered
oftentimes the accused would be only fined.
It’s very interesting; in the Code of Hammurabi you find this; in the
Mesopotamian valley you find this, that the people could get off from a capital
offense by a fine.
Now think it through for a moment.
Why in the Bible does every capital offense, every murder, every time
someone is murdered does it require the taking of a life? I think the reason is this, not because of
vengeance but because the Bible places such a high price on human life that it
can’t be held for by any fine and so therefore when you go to these other codes
and so and so killed so and so and they get off with a $3,000 fine, do you know
what you’ve really done by that sentence?
You’ve said that the life of the person that was killed is only worth
$3,000 and in the Old Testament that wasn’t true. In the Old Testament a person who killed
someone else deliberately had to pay for his own life because the life that he
took was so valuable that all the riches in the world could not pay for
it. This is the reason, I think, behind
the motivation for capital punishment in the Old Testament; not a motivation of
vengeance, a motivation to teach men the value of human life. Blood spilt, God says, pollutes the land and
I will not stand it until the blood of the one who did it is taken because
blood spells value and this is why when the Gospels say Jesus Christ shed His
blood for you it means Jesus Christ paid with His life for your sins and no
religion, no amount of good works, fines or anything else can pay for your
sins. It requires a life for a
life. You see that principle on the
cross. Think of it; if it wasn’t the
principle a life for a life then God would never have sent His Son to die on
the cross for your sins, He would have had some other solution. But the matter of the fact is that when God
says this life shall die with sins the only way He can pay off your debt and
mine is by another life and that was the life of His Son.