Lesson 39
Safeguards Against Emotionalism in Court –
19:21
We have gone through the book of Deuteronomy; we have seen many
important things that apply to a national entity. In the recent weeks we have gone through many
of the government officers and the offices that have been occupied by the
leaders of the nation
Tonight you’re going to see a principle that we can apply both
corporately and a principle that every one of us can apply personally and it
goes back to the character or the essence of man. Man has volition, he has conscience, and he
has personal affections; he has temporality which we won’t get into, but he has
rationality and memory. He has four
basic characteristics that are given in the Word of God that tell you what the
Bible means when it says the heart of man.
That is the heart of man: volition, conscience, personal affections,
rationality and memory—the heart of man.
And one of the most crucial parts of your soul is your volition. And your Christian life depends upon your
volition deciding for or against God and deciding with clarity, deciding in
knowledge of what an issue is and choosing, not ignorance, not emotionalism,
not all of the paraphernalia that goes along with a lot of Christian decisions. This decision has to be made so it is
absolutely clear; every decision in the Christian life.
This is why any time you can design a program or an approach in
Christianity that resolves false issues, as we saw this morning, such as
approbation lust, any times you can design a program that gets rid of a lot of
extraneous emotionalism, now we’re not against emotions. We have emotions; it comes out of personal
affections. God has given us emotions,
but we’re not to use emotions in the volition because when we do then we become
servants of our emotions and if you are a servant of your emotions you’re in a
very dangerous position. Emotions are to be enjoyed but the only way you can
enjoy your emotions is to make them your servant, not your master. So therefore in Bible Christianity the
emphasis is on volition and emotionalism second.
In Deut. 19 God is going to give them certain ways in which the
individual citizen of this nation was to use their volition in deciding legal
cases. And in chapter 19, which we will
finish this evening, we have the righteous judicial process. From chapters 16-18 we had righteous
government officials. From chapter 19-21
we are dealing with righteous government policies. So in the first section we dealt with the officers,
we dealt with the responsibilities of each job, and now we are going to come to
the policies that were laid out both domestically and the foreign policy of the
nation. And to start off tonight we are
going to deal with the policies that the nation Israel used in their court
system which have been used through British common law and have come down to
western civilization from the Old Testament, which are, as we will see, are
being thrown down the drain at a rapid rate in our culture today.
Verses 1-13 deal with the triumph of principle over emotion. Verse 14 is the third section alone and here
we have the safeguarding of the legal testimonies or the legal records. Verses 15-21 we have the safeguard for the
witnesses in the courtroom. So from verses
1-13 we have the triumph of principle over emotions; verses 14 we have the
safeguarding of legal evidences; verses 15-21 the safeguarding of witnesses in
the courtroom.
Now verses 1-13 deal with the problems of the triumph of emotion over
volition and God knew, because man has a sin nature that man basically is
incapable of controlling his emotional patterns so that his emotions will tend,
when the sin nature controls him, to get control of him and ruin him. If you want to be ruined and bring on self-induced
misery, just let your emotions run your life and that’s the easiest way I know
of of producing a very miserable existence.
Emotions are to be enjoyed; every one of the emotions are to be enjoyed,
they are given for enjoyment but they are not given to be used as a criterion
of judgment. So we have two dangerous
emotions fought off in the first 13 verses.
They are opposite emotions and they will come into your life any time
you face another person who has wronged you and stepped on your toe, who has
wronged you in some way in the details of life, you will face one of these two
emotions. You will either adapt, if you
are walking in the energy of the flesh, revenge tactics, you’re going to get
back at that person and you don’t particularly care how; it might not be today
but it’ll be tomorrow and someday you’re going to get back at somebody. That is revenge tactics and there is where
your emotions are taking over and they are going to get you in trouble. This is the person that’s always got a chip
on their shoulder, always looking around to try and get even with somebody.
Then the opposite problem that a court system has is maudlin
sentimentalism. Here is where we have
people that are usually found in Christian fundamentalist circles who say it’s
not spiritual to adhere to certain principles and we don’t believe in making
issues of things, etc. so these people are very sentimental and they can’t
choose either. So verses 1-13 deal with
both of these emotions that have to be somehow dealt with if you’re going to
set up a system of lawmaking that will be impartial and just.
Verse 1, “When the LORD thy God has cut off the nations, whose land the
LORD thy God gives you, and you succeed them and dwell in their cities, and in
their houses, [2] Thou shalt set apart three cities for you in the midst of the
land, which the LORD thy God gives you to possess.” Now these three cities are called the cities
of refuge. And if you have a map in the
back of your Bible I will show you where these cities are located. There are three cities that have already been
established in the book of Deuteronomy, they are listed in Deut. 4. Remember the book of Deuteronomy was the swan
song of Moses before he died; this was his last will and testament to the
nation and Moses was going to do one thing, he was going to teach them Bible
doctrine and to his dying day, his last breath was focused on Bible
doctrine. Please remember this when you
realize that this was the age of miracles.
Moses could have asked the Lord to perform a miracle; he could have gone
out on a big shower of fireworks, he could have given these people fantastic
miracles but Moses didn’t emphasize miracles or experience. He emphasized Bible doctrine which is not being
emphasized today. Moses did, as we saw
when we introduced the book of Deuteronomy.
Moses preached this sermon just to the east of the Jordan valley and
before he died he set up three cities on the east side of Jordan, one of these
just east of the Dead Sea is a place called Beser, it’s a small city and it was
a city of refuge. Then to the north of
Beser was Ramoth-Gilead, and it is located to the north and just to the east of
the Jordan Valley. This particular city
was the second in a series of cities that Moses set up. Finally, Golan, which is located way up in
the north end, just east, practically northeast of the Sea of Galilee. You should know Golan if you read the
newspaper because it’s the Golan Heights that the Syrian artillery had commandeered
to use their artillery to fire down on the Jewish settlements. At least in the case of Israel we have one
nation that understands how to use their military, so they went in there and
took over and took the artillery; the United Nations didn’t like it, the United
States didn’t like and the answer to that was just too bad.
So here are three of these cities that were set up. These three cities were to be used as cities
of refuge; Moses established these. The
cities before that we have listed that were ultimately established out of this
text of Scripture were one called Kadesh, another one called Shechem and one
called Hebron. These are a second series
of three cities, now located on the western side of Jordan. So God tells them I want the land divided.
Verse 3, “Thou shalt prepare thee a way, and divide the coasts of the
land, which the LORD thy God gives thee to inherit, into three parts, that
every slayer may flee there.” The coasts
of the land are actually regions or territories and we don’t know what these
districts looked like but the Jews were supposed to divide their nation up into
districts. And each district, if you
live in that district, would have a city of refuge. Now it’s not a garbage dump, that’s a city of
refuge for people who want to flee there.
And over on the east side of Jordan they were similarly to have these
three districts. So the nation was to be
divided up into six districts and God said later on if you want to have three
more, fine, but I want you to divide your nation up like this and have these
cities of refuge. Why?
As we’ve said again and again the book of Deuteronomy is an updating of
the Old Testament given before this time.
In the Old Testament you have the altar in the Law of Leviticus. The altar was to be the place where such a
criminal accused of manslaughter would come and he’d hold on to the horns of
the altar and God would proclaim his mercy.
By holding on to the horns of the altar it was an identification with
the grace of God that he had been forgiven, that manslaughter is not
accountable to man, it was accountable to God and it’s God’s problem, so
therefore the altar had served up to this time as the place of refuge. And it could because the people were in one
camp. Now what do you do when you spread
these two or three million people out?
You obviously can’t have them running to the altar. So you have to set up what are now the six
altars, except they’re not altars, they’re refuge cities where they can go and
have the same legal status as they used to back in the camp days when they could
all gather around the Tabernacle and cling to the altar.
This shows you something about Jewish justice in the Old Testament. They never got away from the principle that
justice, government, civil justice is from God.
It is not the government doing it for the government’s sake; it is the
government as a divine institution operating for God. In the Old Testament and in the New Testament
there are four divine institutions recognized and everywhere you have communism
or socialism or apostasy of any form you will find one of these four divine
institutions being destroyed.
The first divine institution in the Bible is volition. This means by divine institution the same way
the language of the Reformers, i.e. an institution that is for the whole human race,
Christian and non-Christian alike. Everyone shares this, volition, and that is
the first one of importance. The second
one that all men share is marriage.
Marriage is a divine institution, not a Christian institution. And then we have family, that is the third
divine institution. And finally the
fourth divine institution is government given after the fall. These first three institutions are pre-fall;
the fourth divine institution is given after the fall and it was given to cope
with the problem of sin.
So therefore civil justice, or the functioning of government is looked
upon in the Bible as a functioning for God.
Now it may function poorly and the leaders may rebel at God but the
institution itself is a divine institution and therefore all forms of anarchy
are anti-Biblical. So God has instituted
a divine institution of government. This
institution, as the motto of the Bible says, the judgment is God’s. This is a slogan behind all of this: the
judgment is God’s. And the command or
the charge that Moses gave the judges and the juries of his day is remember
when you decide a case of law, when you decide some issue, you are deciding for
God. You are not deciding for society
and you are not deciding for some class of people; you are deciding for
God. Government is a divine
institution. Therefore in verse 2, when
the Lord is giving you the land you are separate these three cities, you are to
pick them out, and then you divide it up verse 3.
Now verse 4, “And this is the case of the slayer who shall flee there,”
we’re going to have to watch the sentence structure here so you’ll pick it up,
it’s all one sentence beginning with “whoso.”
Verse 4, “And this is the case of the slayer who shall flee” to one of
these three cities, “that he may live:” colon, this means that this tells you
what these cities are for, “whoso kills his neighbor ignorantly
[unintentionally], whom he has not hated in the past,” and then they give an
example, [5] “As for example when a man goes into the wood with his neighbor to
hew wood,” now this is an important clue for the date of Deuteronomy. By the time Deuteronomy was supposed to have
been written according to the liberals and according to most religious
professors, there were no woods in Israel.
So this is an obvious reference to natural resources that had become
extinct by the 6th and 7th centuries, so therefore
Deuteronomy was not written late as liberals say, it was written early, because
this would have been a nonsense command.
“As when a man goes into the wood with his neighbor to hew wood, and his
hand fetcheth a stroke [swingeth] with the axe to cut down the tree, and the
head slips” he has an accident “from the helve and lights upon his neighbor,
that he die,” so here you have what would call in our day what we would call
manslaughter or less important, but you have an accidental crime or murder
committed. A person’s life has been
taken; you’ve had murder in one sense.
You’ve had a person’s life violently ended. But it is not due to the person who had his
axe in the wrong kind of condition, etc. it’s not his fault. So the law gave protection to this man. It distinguished between murder and
manslaughter in other words.
Verse 6,”Lest the avenger of blood pursue the slayer, while his heart is
hot,” now we want to look at this “avenger of blood,” it’s a most important
thing and it isn’t as primitive as it sounds.
The word “avenger” is goel,
and the Hebrew word means redeemer; it means to make right, it means to come to
someone’s aid that needs help, the goel. In the book of Ruth you have Ruth marries a
man, she is a Gentile but she marries a Jewish man and the Jewish man is the goel of her former husband, her former
husband has died, and her former husband belonged to a family and Boaz was the goel, or the man who would take care of
family affairs, from which get the word goel
which means this. A goel was a kinsman redeemer; this is the best way to translate it,
a kinsman redeemer i.e. he had to be a member of the immediate family and his
job was to protect members of that family from injustice. In Israel they had an amazing system of
justice; an amazing system. They had no
police force, they had no lawyers, they depended solely upon citizen
involvement and participation so that if a crime was committed the citizens
brought the people to the judge… the citizens brought them, not the police,
there wasn’t any police. Therefore who
was it, for example, when a child would be killed or a widow would be attacked
or something, who would go to her aid and who would see to it that the right
people are brought to justice? It would
be goel, or the kinsman redeemer and
he would stand up for his family and make sure that his family got
justice.
So the goel was an important
person and here he is the avenger of blood or the goel of blood and it doesn’t mean that he goes around killing
people; it means he avenges or sees that justice is done. He is the family inspector, the private
detective and he is sent out to handle this problem. People handled their own
problems in that day, and I would dare say we’d have a lot less crime if we had
some of the fathers of some of the girls that are attacked went out and took
care of the problem, I’m sure there would be a lot less attacks going on. It’s amazing when the fathers get involved
how things begin to calm down. So you
see that this is not such a primitive form of justice. The man of the family takes it up and he
makes sure that justice is executed, but he is a man who has a sin nature, and
he is a man, therefore that is subject to carnality. Here he is, and in an analogous situation to
the Church Age, he’s in Christ, he’s saved, but he also is controlled by the
Holy Spirit or he is controlled by the old sin nature, one or the other, in
fellowship or out of fellowship, no neutral ground.
All right, so here’s the goel,
he gets this call, frantically some night somebody has been killed in this
household, so they call Uncle Joe and Uncle Joe happens to be the goel of this family and they say Uncle
Joe, Suzie Q just got hit over the head with an axe. So Uncle Joe becomes the man who is going to
see to it that if Suzie Q was murdered that that murder is brought to justice. So Uncle Joe goes out and all of a sudden on
the way he gets to thinking about Suzie Q and his emotions to begin to get the
better of him and so instead of impartially investigating this thing he says I
know who did it and I’m going to get them.
Therefore goel ceases to
function as a just officer; he’s working in the power of the flesh, the old sin
nature controls, etc. Therefore the
Bible says in verse 6, “while his heart is hot,” it’s an expression for being
out of fellowship, he has now let his emotions get the better of him, and he is
now going to do something irrational, and unbiblical. He is going to exceed his rightful
domain.
“…while his heart is hot, and overtake him, because the way is long,” in
other words, the man that is fleeing to this city, he had two flat tires so he
has to walk and Uncle Joe comes driving by and says want a ride, and he gives
him a ride and its his last ride. This
is the problem, Uncle Joe is just about ready to knock off this person without
a trial and this violates judicial principle.
Therefore this man is to have a city of refuge where he will be safe
from Uncle Joe in case Uncle Joe goes carnal.
This is a protection system worked out to protect innocent people from
other people who just got out of fellowship and were going to misuse their
office.
There’s a phrase in the last part of verse 6 I want you to see, “the way
is long, and slay him;” semicolon, “whereas he was not worth of death, inasmuch
as he hated him not in time past.” Now
I want to give some principles on why a man is worthy of death and not worthy of
death in God’s Word. The first
principle, and this is a principle expressed in the Ten Commandments. Only God has the right to take life and this
is a universal principle of the Old Testament.
It’s a universal principle in the New Testament, and this is why you’re
not to judge. Judgment is a function
only of God and you can’t put yourself in His position. And killing is only a position of God, so
therefore we come to one position—only God can kill. Now we’ll modify that in a moment, but only
God can kill. That’s the basic operating principle. Only He can authorize the termination of
life. Therefore what do we get with our
second principle, that comes easily out of the Ten Commandments.
The second principle is that accidental death is His responsibility and
not man’s. I’ll show you two verses on
fatal accidents in the Bible and show you that the Bible clearly says that this
is a problem with God and it is His responsibility. In Exodus 21:13 you’ll see a fatal
accident. These are accidents in which
no man is to blame, through an accident in history a person loses his life, who
is to blame, and the Bible clearly lays it on God, it is God’s problem, for
some reason He has done this and it’s up to Him. “And if a man lie not in wait,” look at verse
12 to get the context, “He that smiteth a man, so that he die, shall bee surely
put to death.” There’s the
principle. “And if a man lie not in
wait, but God deliver him into his hand; then I will appoint thee a place to
which he shall flee.”
Now “God deliver him into his hand means” in modern terms, you’re
driving your car down the street and something that I often fear when you see
these little kids running around these side streets, that some kid is going to
pop out in front of a car and you’re going to him. Now do you go around with a guild complex the
rest of your life like I’ve seen some Christians do? No, you would quote this verse, Exodus 21:13,
God has delivered that child into My hand, it is His problem and I leave it on
His shoulders. There was nothing I could
do, the brakes couldn’t work, there was absolutely nothing I could have done, I
was driving slowly, I was watching and yet this child just ran right in front
of me and splat, that was the end of him.
Of course there’s grief, but I want you to remember something, that
there is such a thing as a fatal accident not due to any carelessness on
anyone’s part and in that case this principle of Exodus 21:13, God has
delivered him into your hand, you are not responsible and you are being out of fellowship
and carnal to worry about it and to feel guilty about it. People say oh, how can you be that way. Well I’m operating according to Biblical
principles, Bible doctrine and the reason people react that way is because we
have Christian ignoramouses who don’t know Bible doctrine. But Bible doctrine
tells me that God has delivered him into my hand and that’s it, period, I’ll
leave at there.
Another reference for fatal accidents is found in Luke 13:4, over in the
New Testament, there was an accident one day in the life of Jesus Christ and He
commented on it. And you’ll see how the
Lord deals with fatal accidents. “Or
those eighteen, upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, and killed them, think ye
that they were sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem? [5] I tell you,
Nay. But, except ye repent, ye shall all
likewise perish.” Jesus did not make an
issue of a fatal accident and He did not say that this happened to those people
because they were sinners. He said
nonsense, they weren’t any more sinners than anyone else, it has nothing to do
with it. This is in the mystery of God’s
sovereign will in history and you leave it there. We as believers have enough confidence in
God’s essence box to realize that it is sufficient for every problem. Sooner or later I’m going to put out a little
panic pack for Christians, and it’s going to consist of the essence box,
because no matter what your problem is in life you can always apply this
principle, look at your God and who He is.
First, He is sovereign, which means He controls all details of history
through time and space. He is absolute
righteousness, absolute justice, love, eternality, omniscience, omnipresence,
omnipotence, and immutable and these are His attributes of His divine
characteristics.
The attribute I look at in this case is His sovereignty, it wasn’t my
responsibility, I had nothing to do with it, it’s His responsibility and I will
leave it on His shoulders. And the
Christian faith says I do not ascribe these things to chaos or chance; there is
a pattern, I may now know the pattern but there is a pattern and the Bible
tells me enough and gives me a sufficient base for saying that in the
sovereignty of God, so therefore I just simply relax and if this tragedy
happens to you and you get involved in an accident like this, a fatal accident
that is not due to your carelessness, you just toss it on the sovereignty of
God and leave it there. And don’t walk
away for the rest of your life with some big fat guilt complex because you’ll
be out of fellowship the rest of your life and miserable. You have no business feeling guilty for fatal
accidents for which you’re not responsible.
It’s the sovereignty of God; leave it there. Guilt is a short-circuit to insanity; guilt
was given by God to point to your sins and once you’re aware of it, turn it
off. You know what to do with sin, 1
John 1:9 and that’s it. [Blank spot]
Deut. 19, we come to the third point.
First only God can kill; secondly, accidental death is His
responsibility, not mine or any other member of the human race. Thirdly, the issue at point in the Bible is
hate; this is the thing that God is after.
Matt. 5:22, this is why it says, Jesus is talking in the Sermon on the
Mount and they say, oh, thou shalt not kill, but Jesus takes it one step
further and shows you what that means; it means you usurp the position of God,
you are trying to usurp the position of God because of your revenge tactics,
because you want to put yourself in His place and that is the killing that’s
unauthorized.
Fourth principle, there is such a thing as authorized killing in the
Bible and that has to do when God authorizes it. He is the only one that kill but He can
delegate this responsibility and there you have the base for the divine
institution of government, divine institution number four, government. All men who are in the service are trained to
use lethal weapons and sooner or later they’d be behind the gun and aim, and as
one Christian said I don’t know whether I should aim to fire over the head or not. No, you aim and hit him in the head, that’s
what you aim for, you aim to kill and because you are an authorized agent, God
has authorized killing in government.
This is found in Genesis, in the Old Testament and by the way, it is
found in the New Testament, Rom. 13. So
therefore killing is authorized but the killing that God authorizes isn’t
random killing, it is killing inside a careful set of controls; judicial system
for domestic killing, military policy for foreign killing. So therefore since God alone can authorize
killing the only legitimate killing that can go on is if you are acting as an
agent of a duly authorized government and there you are authorized to
kill. And there, a Christian, if he is
doing his job, must kill because that is the objective.
Verse 7, “Wherefore I command thee, saying, Thou shalt separate three
cities for yourselves. [8] And if the LORD thy God enlarge thy coasts, as He
has sworn unto thy fathers, and give thee all the land which He promised to
give unto thy fathers,” three more. [9,
“If thou shalt keep all these commandments to do them, which I command thee
this day, to love the LORD thy God, and to walk ever in His ways, then thou add
three cities more for thee, beside these three.”]
Verse 10, “That innocent blood be not shed in thy land, which the LORD
thy God gives thee for an inheritance, and so blood be upon thee.” Now I want you to see something. I have been in several debates about this
problem of capital punishment and the opposition always tries to paint the
picture that if you’re for capital punishment you’re for something primitive
and it’s so ridiculous because the Word of God puts the shoe right on the other
foot; if you allow murder to go unpaid you are primitive because you are
allowing the land to be polluted by the blood of people that have been
innocently killed. You, the people who
are against capital punishment, are the people that are looked upon as unjust
in Scripture.
For example, turn to Num. 35:33, now of course if you execute capital
punishment you have to have some sort of a judicial system. The only thing I would grant in a debate on
capital punishment for the other side would be if you have such a fouled up
judicial system as we have you might want to stop it for a while until it gets
straightened out so you don’t make some mistakes. Look at the strong language of this verse,
this is how God considered murder. “So ye shall not pollute the land wherein ye
are; for blood defileth the land: and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood
that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it.” Now do you need any special exegesis to
understand what that verse is saying?
No, it’s very clear. God hates blood of innocent people being shed. Do you know why it’s so much an issue? Do you know why murder is one of the big
overt sins? You take all the overt sins,
adultery, stealing, all of these sins, do you know why murder stands first in
the list. Because look at what you’ve
done; suppose you kill someone, do you realize what you’ve just done? Here is a person that goes on in life and you
suddenly cut him off and throw him into eternity where he can no longer change
and so you have terminated a man’s right to choose before God. That’s what
murder is. You, by your actions have
forcibly terminated the life of an individual who had an opportunity to accept
and reject and now he’s in eternity and can never accept or reject. He goes into eternity with the attitude he
had at the moment you killed him. That
is why murder is such a serious crime.
How do we treat murder in our country?
We’ve had an example here in Texas, we’ve had a man whose murdered two
individuals, a boy and a girl on a date; suppose they’re unbelievers, they’re
in eternity, robbed of the choice to choose Jesus Christ because some cluck
came along and bumped them off, murder, and God hates it. And God says innocent blood has been spilled
and the cost of that is not going to be redeemed until the blood of him who did
it… etc. There’s always the question of
mentally ill, but I want you to see something, I want you to see the pleas of
the court as we go on and I will compare the pleas of this trial with the norms
given in the Word of God.
Verse 11, “But if any man hate his neighbor, and lie in wait for him,
and rise up against him, and smite him mortally that he die, and flee into one
of these cities, [12] Then the elders of his city shall send and fetch him from
there,” now here is a bona fide case
of murder, “and deliver him into the hand of the avenger of blood, that he may
die.” Why do they do this? Because this
is a legitimate operation. Here you have
the elders, who does not go over to that city to get him? The avenger of blood; the avenger of blood is
not the one that goes and gets the criminal in this case; the elders go get the
criminal. Why? Because this is his
trial, he has been convicted of murder; the elders are the ones that convict
him. He has had a trial, now after the
trial the elders hand him over to goel. And this follows the principle that we have
seen earlier in God’s Word that in Israel it was the family of the one who was
the victim of the crime that executed the person in capital punishment, the
witnesses or the people that were left, so therefore in verse 12 and 13 “the
avenger of blood, that he may die,” the avenger of blood is the one who
executes him.
Now it’s a rather gruesome task and it may shock and sicken some of you
to consider what you would think is a primitive thing. But listen to my words carefully, in all
seriousness, before God, after praying this through and making sure that I had
no revenge tactics, I would feel no qualms of conscience about pulling the
switch on an electric chair to execute someone; after praying about it,
considering this person has been legitimately tried as a murderer, I would feel
called by God and absolutely no guilt for it.
I might feel some personal affection to that individual but if I was
honest before my God I would have to do that.
That is what the Bible tells you to do, get serious. You don’t like to hear this, I know some of
you don’t like to hear it by the look on your face; either that or you’re
bothered by the thunder storm.
Here we have then the shedding of blood by the avenger of blood and the
avenger of blood is the person, the goel,
who executes it. He is actually the one
who executes. Let’s look at verse 13 and
conclude this first section. “Thine eye
shall not pity him, but thou shalt put away the guilt of innocent blood from
Israel, that it may go well with thee.”
What does it say in verse 13, again in the first part, “that thine eye
pity not,” and here you have the opposite thing. Remember I said there are two
types of emotion, revenge tactics and that is protected in this system of law
and the other is maudlin sentimentalism, that can’t stand to see the principle
of justice applied. And you have to
fight these two things continually.
If you’re a Christian and called to jury duty, don’t decide it by
emotional appeal, you decide it by your standards, not emotional gimmicks. Capital punishment from the Biblical point of
view is he guilty of murder, would he consciously do it, is this the issue and
if he did, God’s answer is clear, but it’s not because I have a personal vengeance. The principle is if he is a murderer, he must
die. In Israel they had a very enlightened system of justice, they guard it in
one hand against revenge tactics by providing refuge cities against the goel, and they also provided against
maudlin sentimentalism by saying in verse 13 don’t let your eye pity him, you
put away this man.
Verse 14 is the third section of our text for this evening and this is
one provision and section in itself, it’s one verse. “Thou shalt not remove thy neighbor’s
landmark, which they of old time have set in thine inheritance, which thou
shalt inherit in the land that the LORD thy God giveth thee to possess.” Let me explain inheritance here. You had a group of tribes go into the land of
Israel, and each family was to receive a parcel of land and keep it
forever. Each piece of land, therefore,
had land marks. The surveyors were busy
and they worked out land marks. Every family had a piece of property. This is how the thing started and as the
family multiplied, the children would share this property. They had great,
great tracts of land and these landmarks were the legal evidence. So in verse 14 Moses is providing for the
fact that let your court records be protected, let there be legal records kept
and let these legal records be left undisturbed.
Beginning in verses 15-21, now we have the problem of safeguarding
witnesses. Everything hinges on the
witness in the trial, so now God is going to provide means of protecting these
witnesses. Verse 15, “One witness shall
not rise up against a man for any iniquity, or for any sin, in any sin that he
sins; at the mouth of two witnesses, or at the mouth of three witnesses, shall
the matter be established.” Do you see,
therefore, that capital punishment was not an arbitrary thing? It was simply something that was given to the
nation Israel under strict provisions of verse 15; you have everything done
after two witnesses or three witnesses, you had to have before someone was
executed two or three witnesses.
Verse 16, And “if a false witness rise up against any man to testify
against him that which is wrong,” the Hebrew word for false means the person is
out to get you, this again we have revenge tactics. So here’s the person who is out to get you
and the false witness rises up against a man to testify against him.
Verse 17, “Then both the men,” now watch this, here they suspect a false
witness is involved, now watch the procedure of appeal, “Then both men, between
whom the controversy is, shall stand before the LORD, before the priests and
the judges, who shall be in those days.”
Shall “stand before the LORD,” now where is the Lord’s presence in the
nation? The Temple; all right, they are
to go back to the Temple. What’s at the Temple?
I told you before, the supreme council.
Who is on the supreme council?
Full time priests and full time judges; these were the
professionals. In the local towns it was
all part-time help, it was all strictly part-time, but here at the Temple they
had paid people. These were the experts
and so therefore we have the priests and the judges who did nothing but discern
the will of God and they had at their disposal the Urim and Thummim in which
they could actually ascertain your guilt perfectly. So in verse 17, when they get to a situation
where they suspect a false witness is involved, then they are to stand before
the priests, they are to go to the Temple before the Lord because the judgment
is God’s.
Now do you see something ironic that has happened in history over this
single point? When the Lord Jesus Christ
was brought to trial, do you realize He had six or seven trials; every one was
illegitimate, and they couldn’t find more than one witness that would testify
against Him the same thing. In other
words, Jesus Christ, God’s Son, was jammed in the wheels of justice, set up by
His Father through the institution of government. That ultimately is a Christian answer to the
objection to capital punishment that says what if you make a mistake. The ultimate Christian answer is God knew
that we would make mistakes, He risked it, He risked His own Son because He
knew in the year 33 AD there would be some judges that were false and He knew
that His own Son would become a victim of court injustice, where this rule was
not applied, where you had false witnesses come up and they couldn’t even get
two false witnesses that would agree on anything. So what are they to do in verse 17, they
shall stand before the Lord.
Now isn’t this ironic, who were the courts standing before in Jesus
trial? Before the Lord, for Jesus said
when He was captured on the Mount Gethsemane, when the Roman soldiers came up
to capture Him, do you remember He says a strange thing in one of the Gospels,
He says “I AM” and they all fall down.
Do you know what He was saying?
“I AM” is the word for Jehovah and He was declaring His deity and as He
declared His deity, we don’t know why but Roman soldiers are pretty tough
individuals and they didn’t just fall down because someone popped a
balloon. Something happened and you have
this police force come up to Jesus Christ and He says “I AM” and they all go
down. Why is that? Because of the power
of His deity, and here an ironic thing of history. This man, who was God and man, they are
standing in His presence when they violate this very principle of verse 17.
Verse 18, “And the judges shall make diligent inquiry; and, behold, if
the witness be a false witness, and hath testified falsely against his brother,
[19] Then shall ye do unto him, as he had thought to have done to his brother.
So shalt thou put the evil away from among you.” So you see this, if you decide you were going
to use revenge tactics and you’re going
to get out and get somebody, just remember, some day you might be discovered
and what you had thought you would do to someone else comes right back on you
and you have the problem of triple discipline.
First of all you suffer by self-induced misery because you are out of
fellowship. You suffer again because of
God’s discipline upon you. And you
suffer because you are judging another one so you get discipline for both
things. Actually there’s triple here,
you get self-induced misery because you are out of fellowship; you get
disciplined because you out of fellowship, and then you get disciplined again
because you’re judging someone else. Now
isn’t that a fast way to get spanked.
Judge other believers, go ahead, that’s the way to do it. So in verse 19 you have the same thing, a
person that was out to get somebody else, maligns someone else, pulls someone
else down with revenge tactics, all right he got it, and he got exactly what he
thought he was going to do to the other person.
If you look at history you’ll see that happen so often. Hitler set out to exterminate the Jewish race
and who in the end was exterminated? You
can see this work again and again in history. I’ve seen it work in people’s
lives, people that are out get somebody always wind up getting exactly what
they’ve dished out, it’ll come sooner or later.
Verse 20, “And those who remain shall hear, and fear, and shall
henceforth commit no more any such evil among you.” And verse 21, “And thine eye shall not pity,”
notice a warning against maudlin sentimentalism, “thine eye shall not pity, but
life shall go for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for
foot.” This has been known in the study
of ancient history as lex talionis;
now this not saying that if someone knocks your tooth out, go knock their tooth
out. This is an idiomatic expression for
graduated compensational punishment.
It’s simply an expression, let the punishment fit the crime, that’s what
it’s saying. This is not lex talionis as most people interpret
it, by this time in history it’s become an idiom and you can check scholars on
this, by this time it was not taken literally, it was simply an idiomatic
expression for personal compensation or let the punishment fit the crime.
Conclusion to the matter of chapter 19.
We have looked upon the judicial policy of the nation Israel. We have
seen basically three things. We have
seen a safeguard against emotion, something that you should remember in the
Christian life; safeguard your decisions against emotion and that means, by the
way, if someone stimulates you through some service and asks you for a decision
you’d better think twice, think through what you’re deciding. This goes in
witnessing, when you present the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ to someone,
don’t twist their arm. If they’re ready
to believe fine, urge them do, don’t be hesitant on that but if they are not ready
to don’t force them to because you’ll hurt them and you’ll hurt yourself. So the principle here simply is this: let
emotions have their proper role in life, always submerge them to volition.
The second principle that we have seen is safeguarding of legal records
and this would say keep the data around so you can make a decision.
The third thing is to safeguard the witnesses and this is simply to
protect the witnesses or protect people that you have to rely upon for
objectivity. So wherever you go these
are principles that you can apply personally, they are principles that sorely
need to be applied in our country.