|
|
GOD REVEALS HIS RIGHTEOUSNESS AS PART OF HIS ETERNAL PLAN TO SAVE A PEOPLE FOR HIMSELFEXODUS 21:1-23:19INTRODUCTION On the editorial page of the March 11, 2006 Janesville Gazette columnist Leonard Pitts wrote an essay titled: “Gays and God: Homophobics shall not quote Bible selectively.” The column was prompted by an email he received from a high school student in Miami, FL. Her school aired over its in-school video link on three successive days, student produced segments on the subject of gay rights. The first day were students who were pro gay rights, the second day was the school counselor talking about respect and acceptance of diversity and the third day were those who were opposed to gay rights. Mr. Pitts took issue with one of those who opposed gay rights quoting the Bible. This is what he said, “I’ve had it up to here with the moral hypocrisy and intellectual constipation of Bible literalists. By which I mean people who dress their homophobia up in Scripture, insisting with sanctimonious sincerity that it’s not homophobia at all but just a pious determination to live according to what the Bible says. And never mind that the Bible also says… that the penalty for going to work on Sunday is death (Exodus 35:1-3). Never mind that the Bible says the man who rapes a virgin should buy her from her father and marry her (Deuteronomy 22:28-29). I’m going to speculate that you don’t observe or support those commands. Which says to me that yours is a literalism of convenience, a literalism that is literal only so long as it allows you to condemn what you’d be condemning anyways…” While Mr. Pitts’ complaint reveals a great deal of ignorance about the Bible and an unfounded and unexplained approval of homosexuality, yet he does identify a difficulty that faces everyone who reads the Bible and tries to make sense out of it. He is right; the Bible does contain those two commandments and many others, which few Christians are seeking to obey or teaching others to obey. There are Christians who would say that that Sabbath breakers ought to be killed and rapists ought to be forced to marry their victims, but they are and always have been a minority within the church. The vast majority of Christian pastors and theologians for the past 2000 years have always recognized that the laws of the OT given to Israel cannot be directly applied to the Christian or to the Christian church but must in some way be modified or ignored. However, deciding what to do with these laws has been the center of great debate throughout the history of the church. The question that faces all who believe the Bible to be God's Word is this: What process do we use to decide how we are to relate to these OT laws that is consistent and does not open us to the charge of being merely arbitrary? How are we as Christians to make use of the OT, especially the OT laws? The reason I am bringing this up now is because from the beginning of our church’s existence we made a commitment that our sermons were not going to be topical but we were going to go through books of the Bible from beginning to end. We have covered Genesis, Matthew, Galatians and Exodus 20:1-20. We are poised, right now on the brink of the first list of laws in the Bible that is not the Ten Commandments. Exodus 20:1-23:19 is a list of laws that God gave to Moses on Mt. Sinai after he personally told the whole community, including Moses, the Ten Commandments. These commandments along with many other lists contained in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy are, as 21:1 says, “the laws that Moses is to set before” the nation of Israel. Repeatedly Israel is told to obey all these laws and that if they do God will bless them and that if they disobey these laws God will curse them. Whenever we read in the OT God commanding Israel to follow every command he gave them, we cannot just think about the Ten Commandments, we must also think about the lists of commands like this one in Exodus 21:1-23:19. God expected Israel to do all these laws, our question is this: does he expect us to follow these laws and if not then how do we know that? If we don’t obey them directly, do they have anything to say to us or should we just ignore them? Let’s take a moment to just look over what is in this particular list of laws so we are at least aware of what we’re talking about: While there appears to be some organization of the list, yet it is notoriously difficult to detect an obvious organizational theme. Generally they fall into two kinds of laws: case laws (21:2) and universal laws ( 22:18). The opening sections appear to have some sort of organization to them: 21:1-11, Case law examples regarding slavery 21:12-17 Capital offences and an exception 21:18-36 Case law examples of personal injuries that don’t require the death penalty with two exceptions 22:1-17 Case law examples of loss of property with attendant punishments and restitutions but also including another example of a capital offense. However, 22:18-23:9 appears fairly random. But then 23:10-19 are clearly concerning the acts of worship that God requires, mainly concerned with the calendar but not exclusively. Most of the commands in this list deal with how the people are to relate to one another and to one another’s property but it is not exclusively horizontal. Mingled in are many statements regarding the true worship of God. In other words there is a horizontal dimension to this list as well. A. What is the problem and why should I care? The problem can be stated in a number of different ways. First, we believe that the entire Bible, containing the 66 books of the OT and the NT are God’s word, without error in all that they affirm and a perfect expression of God’s will for human beings. The Bible gives us everything we need to know to be saved and to live as a saved people. We believe this because Jesus believed it. He taught that the entire OT was the word of his Father and he predicted that the apostles would write the NT. The NT authors, along with the OT authors treated what they were writing as God’s word. The apostle Paul says in 2 Timothy 3:16-17, “All Scripture is God breathed and useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” The problem this creates for us is that we cannot simply ignore these laws because we believe they are God’s word. They tell us something that is useful to teach, rebuke, correct and train us so we can be righteous and adequate Christians. We don’t have the option of saying that some of the words in this book are God’s words and some are not. They all are God’s words. Therefore we are obligated to figure out what God is saying to us in the entire Bible, not just the easy or inspirational parts. The particular problem we are faced with in reading the OT, especially the OT laws, is because in the NT we have apparently contradictory things being said about the OT law. Pull out the sheet of Bible passages that are in your program. I’ve listed a few of the statements from the NT that seem to teach that we should ignore the OT law along with others that seem to indicate we should pay attention to the OT law. (Texts that seem to indicate the OT law is irrelevant to us: Matthew 11:13, Mark 7:14-19, Romans 6:12-15, 7:1-6, Gal 3:15-25, 5:18, Ephesians 2:14-15, Heb. 7:12, 8:31. Texts that seem to indicate the OT law is useful to the Christian: Matthew 5:17-20, Romans 3:9-21, 31, 7:12-14, 22, 25, 1 Timothy 1:8-11, 2 Timothy 3:14-17, Ephesians 4:2) The NT is vitally concerned with the relationship of the OT, especially the OT law to the Christian as evidenced by the huge number of statements in the NT that address the issue. Now the problem here is that, at least on the surface, the NT statements are both positive and negative in relation to the OT law. We are obligated to work to try to find out how we are to put these things together. The task is not easy as every author you read will tell you. Jonathon Edwards, the great American pastor/theologian of the 18 th century said this, “There is perhaps no part of theology attended with so much intricacy and wherein orthodox theologians do so much differ as stating the precise agreement and difference between the two dispensations of Moses and Christ.” The importance of this issue can be clearly seen in how much the NT depends upon the OT. “Henry Shires (in his book, “Finding the OT in the New.”) has calculated that ‘there are at least 1,604 NT citations of 1,276 OT passages. To this total could be added several thousand more NT passages that clearly allude to or reflect OT verses.’ An even more telling statistic is that 229 of the 260 chapters in the NT have each ‘at least two citations of or specific references to the OT,’ and another 19 chapters have one instance, leaving only 12 chapters in the entire NT without a specific reference to the OT. From another angle, it has been calculated that ‘32%… of the NT is composed of OT quotations and allusions.’” (Greidanus, p. 185) Understanding the OT and the OT law is a necessary thing for Christians to do because you cannot understand the NT without understanding the OT. B. What are the principles to apply when reading the OT law in order to determine how to apply it as a Christian? In other words, how am I, as a Christian to make use of the OT, especially these lists of laws in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy? 1. What everyone agrees about:
2. The big picture: God’s eternal plan (Matthew 25:34, Ephesians 1:4, 9-10, 3:10-11) and the law as a step in that plan (Matthew 5:17, Galatians 3:15-25) The Bible clearly asserts that God is working out a purpose or a plan that he determined prior to ever creating anything. His plan is an eternal plan, conceived in eternity past and going on into an eternal future. Psalm 33:11, “The plans of the Lord stand firm forever, the purposes of his heart through all generations.” According to Ephesians 1:4 God chose us in Christ before the creation of the world. That means that before the world began, before Adam and Eve sinned, God determined that he was going to save each person who belongs to Christ. Sin did not catch God by surprise. This world with all its sin and misery is not plan B but plan A. God, when he created the world, intended for the world with all its sin and therefore its need for a Savior to exist. He did not create sin but he planned for its existence. According to v. 12 of that same chapter God is working out all things according to the purpose of his will. The whole world, beginning with creation is going according to his plan. In Ephesians 3:11 we are told that the church currently exists according to God’s eternal purpose. 1 Peter 1:19 says that God chose Jesus to be the Savior of the world before the world began. The story of the Bible is the story of God working out his plan for this creation he has made. What is his plan? His plan is to save a people for himself through Jesus Christ and to bring his people to live with him forever in a restored heavens and earth to the praise of his glory. This is the story that the entire Bible tells. You cannot understand any part of the Bible without relating it to the progressive fulfillment of God's eternal plan to save his people and restore his world. A number of years ago I built a garage. The first thing I did was to draw up a plan that showed the dimensions of the garage and the materials I would need to build it. Once I had the plan I went out into the yard and staked out the corners of the garage and tied a string from one stake to the next to give the outline of the garage. Then I dug up the sod that was there and brought in sand to go under the concrete floor. Then I laid out the forms to contain the concrete. Then I called the cement company to bring the concrete to the site and organized some friends to be there when the truck arrived to help me smooth it out. You get the idea. In order to build the garage I planned to build, I didn’t build it in a day. I built it through a process that included lots of different activities and materials. At any point along the way, if you would have observed what I was doing you might wonder what it had to do with the final product, a garage. Digging up sod or laying down sand doesn’t appear, on the surface to have much to do with a garage. If you didn't know my plan, then you would have a difficult time seeing how each thing I did was necessary. When we read the Bible we are reading the record of how God is working to restore his kingdom to this earth. As his plan unfolds it is sometimes hard to see how each step along the way relates to the overall goal, but regardless of how obvious it is or not, every step is necessary in the accomplishment of his ultimate purpose. What comes later builds on what came before. The way that the NT describes God giving his law to the people of Israel is that it was one step in the process that served some very important functions in the accomplishment of the whole, but those conditions have now changed with the coming of Christ. The reason it has changed is because the coming of Christ is what the OT is about. In Galatians 3 we have one of the clearest expression of how the law fits into the overall plan of God. Verses 1-16 say that God’s salvation of his people is entirely a work of grace. In other words, God does not save his people and restore his world because of anything that human beings do or don’t do. God saves because he has promised to save and he does it not because of human work but in spite of human sin. God saves sinners through Christ, not through sinners obeying some law. Paul asserts this was the message of the OT, not just the NT. Notice in v. 17 that Paul says that the law, which was given 430 years after God made the promise to Abraham, which he received by faith, was only temporary. The nation Israel and the law which governed her was a temporary step in the plan of God to redeem all of his people. It was given to Israel for the purpose of showing human beings that there is no way to earn eternal life. There is nothing that any human can do to obligate God to be kind to you. God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy. The law shuts up all men under sin and it points all men to Jesus Christ, beginning with the nation of Israel . Or as Jesus says in Matthew 5:17, Jesus is the fulfillment of the entire OT. God, for the glory of his own name in the salvation of his elect people chose national Israel to be his visible people on the earth for a time and he gave to them his laws to prepare them and through them the rest of the world, for the coming of Christ. Now that Christ has come the law cannot be read as if you were a Jewish person living in the land of Palestine any longer. Those conditions no longer exist and therefore the law which was given to people in those conditions cannot be read as if we are still in them. It was specifically for that temporary condition to prepare the world for the arrival of the one who is the fulfiller of all God’s promises. In God’s story of saving his people, Jesus Christ, his life, death, resurrection, ascension, present intercession and future return are the main event. That is what the OT is about, preparing the world for his appearing and describing what that salvation will accomplish and ultimately look like. That means the OT and its laws serve three functions in our lives which we will now discuss. 3. Using the law to condemn sin and sinners (Romans 3:9-20, 7:7-13, 1 Timothy 1:8-11) If there is one thing that the NT emphasizes about the commands of the OT is that they are given for the purpose of exposing sin and sinners. God’s law, all of it, is not given for us to obey so God will like us, but in order to reveal and condemn our disobedience. This is not just something that began to happen when Jesus showed up but was the primary function of the law from the moment that God gave it on Mt. Sinai. The passage that immediately follows the giving of the Ten Commandments indicates that the law cannot save anyone but only condemns. As soon as God is done speaking the people tell God to no longer speak to them or they will die and they command Moses to be their mediator between them and God. Then the first thing God tells Moses as the trusted mediator is that the people need to have animals sacrificed on an altar. The animal sacrifices are necessary to pay the penalty for their sins. The people need to have blood shed for their sins or God will destroy them. Right from the start, the fact that the law condemns is seen. In Romans 3:9-18 Paul quotes a whole series of statements from the OT, the Psalms and Isaiah, to show that all human beings are sinners. He summarizes his point in vv. 19-20. He makes three points about the OT law. First, the law silences the mouths of every human being and makes the whole world accountable to God. All humans, including the Jewish people, naturally believe that they are good enough for God. The law declares that there is no one who is good and it gives particular commands to people to show they are not good. The commands of God give the definition of what “good” is and thus prove that no human is good. The picture in v. 19 is of the whole human race coming before God and one by one being asked why God should reward them with eternal life. Each human begins to give evidence to prove their goodness and God merely speaks his law to them, which requires perfect love for him and for neighbor and thus silences all self-justifying speech. God’s law shuts humans up about their supposed righteousness. The second point Paul then makes about the law is that no one is able to be declared righteous by observing the law because no one is able to keep it. As he said in Galatians 3, quoting Deut 27:26, everyone who does not do everything written in the book of the law all the time is under God’s curse. The reason no one can be declared righteous by keeping the law is that no one, except Jesus Christ, has ever kept the entire law, every moment of their whole life. The third and final point Paul makes is that the purpose of the law is not to save you but to show you that you are a sinner. The law cannot stop you from sinning, it merely reveals what is already true. It’s like Paul says about himself in Romans 7:7-8 that he would not have known that it was sinful to want what belongs to his neighbor if God had not said “You shall not covet.” Prior to his hearing and understanding the 10 th commandment he was coveting. However, he only knew that God hated coveting when he heard and understood God’s command to not covet. It is the commands of God in the OT and the NT that God the Holy Spirit uses to convict me of my sin and awaken me to the fact that I need a savior. 4. Using the law to see the glory of Christ, his church and his eternal kingdom (Luke 24:27, 44-47, Romans 3:21) Last year, when I was preaching through the book of Galatians I compared the law to a road map that you use when you are going to visit a friend. While on the way to see your friend you study the map and pay close attention to it. However, once you reach your friend, you leave the map in the car and enjoy your friend’s company. That illustration highlights the usefulness of the OT but also shows that its usefulness is temporary. The law, like the road map leads me to Christ and once I've reached Christ I ignore the law, like I ignore the map. The more I’ve thought about that illustration the less I like it. Here’s how I would change it. Rather than the OT being like a road map, it is like a topographical map that a person who is exploring a large wilderness area uses. The goal of the hiker is to enjoy the beauty of the majesty of the wilderness. However, he needs the map to find his way around the majestic wilderness. The map is not the wilderness but he cannot experience the glory of the wilderness without the map. The map with its contour lines and other symbols helps him to discover the glories of the wilderness while itself not being glorious. In the same way the OT, including the OT law, directs us as we seek to explore the glory of Christ and his salvation. The OT is not what is glorious. Christ and his saving work is glorious and the OT helps us to see how he is glorious and how his salvation is glorious. This is the point of what we are told in Luke 24 when Jesus enables first the two disciples on the road to Emmaus and then all the disciples in the upper room to understand, “everything written about him in the “Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms.” This is why he gets mad at the Jewish religious leaders. He condemns them for studying the OT in order to gain eternal life and yet it is these very Scriptures that talk about him. He accuses them of saying that they are disciples of Moses and yet Moses wrote about Jesus and they refuse to believe in him. Therefore, in spite of their protests to the contrary, they don’t really believe Moses because if they believed Moses they would believe him. When Jesus says in Matthew 5 that he did not abolish the Law and the Prophets but he has fulfilled them, this is what he is talking about. The commands of the law find their completion, their fulfillment in his life. This is why the NT is so full of the OT because the OT is full of Christ. The authors of the NT know, without question, that Jesus is the center of the OT and therefore they use the OT to talk about Jesus. Therefore, the way that we learn to read the OT is to pay attention to how the NT uses the OT. You cannot understand the OT correctly by starting with the OT. You must read the OT in light of the NT because the OT is talking about Christ and his saving work. Sidney Greidanus in his book, “Preaching Christ from the OT” says this about the NT authors, “…they now read the OT in light of their knowledge of Jesus Christ, the crucified and risen Lord… When they used to read the OT, from past… to future, they saw some indication of the coming Messiah but not the complete picture. But after Jesus’ resurrection, when they read the OT in the light of the crucified and risen Lord, the whole OT lit up like the White House Christmas tree, ‘a thousand points of light’ pointing to Jesus the Messiah…they… found it filled with promises of Christ, types of Christ, references and allusions to Jesus Christ. As Peter said to the Gentiles in the house of Cornelius, ‘All the prophets testify about him’ (Acts 10:43).” As we examine these laws over the next several weeks we are going to be working at reading them in light of the crucified and resurrected Christ. We believe that Moses, when writing these laws down was writing about the glory of Jesus and his saving work as expressed in the church and in his eternal kingdom. I do not pretend that this will be easy. However, on the basis of the overwhelming NT evidence I am convinced that we can see Christ and his salvation in the whole OT, including these laws. 5. Using the law to inform Christian conduct and Christian ethics (Matthew 5:17-19, 1 Peter 1:14-16, 1 Corinthians 5:1-13) Probably the question over which there has been the greatest amount of disagreement over the past 2000 years is this question: what moral authority do the OT commands hold for the Christian? At the two extremes are these positions: First, all the commands have binding moral authority for the Christian unless the NT specifically repudiates the command. So a writer like Greg Bahnsen will say that every part of the OT law except the laws concerning religious worship, cleanliness and food laws apply taking into consideration cultural differences. At the other extreme are those who say that none of the OT law applies to the Christian except what is restated in the NT. If the NT doesn’t say it again, then it is completely abrogated. I don’t think either of these positions can be adequately defended. The way I would say it is that the OT commands inform Christian conduct and ethics. As I’ve said when preaching through Galatians 5 the way we live the Christian life is not by paying attention to the law, either OT or NT. We serve others through love by means of the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives who produces his fruit through us as we live by faith in Christ. We are fixated upon Christ, not the OT or the NT law. We love the law, as the Psalmist says, because it points us to Christ and away from ourselves. However, there are going to be many occasions when we are going to be faced with puzzling and difficult ethical and moral questions. We do not always know exactly what love looks like in every situation. On those occasions we are to use the OT law as transformed by and fulfilled by Christ to discern the will of God. We have an example of how this works in 1 Corinthians 5. The situation is this: a member of the church in Corinth, a professing Christian, is having a physical relationship with his stepmother, his father’s wife. The church knows that this is going on and yet continues to treat this man like a faithful Christian brother. Paul says they are proud of their tolerance. They view their tolerance as an expression of true Christian graciousness. "Look at what forgiving people we are. We accept everyone, no matter what they do." Paul is furious with them. He says, in v. 2, “And you are proud! Shouldn’t you have rather been filled with grief and have put out of your fellowship the man who did this?” Paul assumes that they ought to know a couple of things. First, they should know that this relationship is sin and should not characterize the Christian’s life. Second, they should know that the proper response to a person who professes to be a Christian but who is living in this kind of relationship is not tolerance but excommunication from the church. The question I have is this: where would they have found out these two things? There is no command in the NT forbidding a physical relationship with your stepmother. Their culture did not forbid this kind of relationship. The only place where this relationship is forbidden is in the OT. In Leviticus 18:7-8 says, “Do not dishonor your father by having sexual relations with your mother. She is your mother; do not have sexual relations with her. Do not have sexual relations with your father’s wife; that would dishonor your father.” God forbids a physical relationship with both your mother and stepmother. Paul expected the church at Corinth to know that what this man was doing was sin because God called it sin in the OT. The OT law informed and filled out the repeated NT statements that there should be no sexual immorality among Christians. However, there is a problem. Leviticus 20:11 says, “If a man sleeps with his father’s wife (his stepmother), he has dishonored his father. Both the man and the woman must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.” Why does Paul say that the man is to be put out of the church and not killed? He isn’t requiring what the OT law requires. Look at what Paul says in vv. 4-5, “When you are assembled in the name of our Lord Jesus and I am with you in spirit… hand this man over to Satan so that the sinful nature may be destroyed and his spirit saved on the day of the Lord.” Do you see what Paul is doing? Paul has reinterpreted the death penalty in the law. Rather than killing the man and woman who are committing this sin, Paul asserts that the church is to excommunicate the man (presumably the woman is not a Christian) so that his sinful nature is killed. The church is to do this so that the man himself does not go to hell. In other words the death penalty of the law is taken to mean the death of the sinful nature now through excommunication or the death of the person in hell when Christ returns, if they don't repent and pursue Christ anew. The law is not literally applied though it informs Christian conduct and ethics. It is my hope as we examine these commands over the next few weeks that we will experience three things:
© Copyright 2006 John Swanson.
|