Dennis Tuuri

Certain scripture is found in Exodus chapter 21. We’re going to be dealing specifically with verses 12-14. But I want us to read the entire section dealing with violence, verses 12-36. So, Exodus 21:12-36 is what we will read this morning as we begin a series of sermons on this section of the scriptures. Please stand for the reading of God’s command word. Exodus 21 beginning at verse 12.

He who strikes a man so that he dies shall surely be put to death. However, if he did not lie and wait, but God delivered him into his hand, then I will appoint for you a place where he may flee. But if a man acts with premeditation against his neighbor to kill him by treachery, you shall take him from my altar that he may die. And he who strikes his father or his mother shall surely be put to death. He who kidnaps a man and sells him or if he is found in his hand shall surely be put to death.

And he who curses his father or his mother shall surely be put to death. If men contend with each other and one strikes the other with a stone or with his fist, and he does not die, but is confined to his bed, if he rises again, and walks about outside with his staff, then he who struck him shall be acquitted. He shall only pay for the loss of his time and shall provide for him to be thoroughly healed.

And if a man beats his male or female servant with a rod, so that he dies under his hand, he shall surely be punished. Notwithstanding, if he remains alive a day or two, he shall not be punished, for he is his property. If men fight and hurt a woman with child, so that she gives birth prematurely. Yet no harm follows, he shall surely be punished according as the woman’s husband imposes on him, and he shall pay as the judges determine.

But if any harm follows, then you shall give life for life and eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe. If a man strikes the eye of his male or female servant and destroys it, he shall let him go free for the sake of his eye. And if he knocks out the tooth of his male or female servant, he shall let him go free for the sake of his tooth.

If an ox gores a man or a woman to death, then the ox shall surely be stoned and its flesh shall not be eaten, but the owner of the ox shall be acquitted. But if the ox tended to thrust with its horn in times past, and it has been made known to his owner, and he has not kept it confined that it has killed a man or a woman, the ox shall be stoned, and its owner also shall be put to death. If there is imposed on him a sum of money that he shall pay to redeem his life, whatever is imposed on him, whether it has gored a son or gored a daughter, according to the judgment, it shall be done to him.

If the ox gores a male or female servant, he shall give to their master 30 shekels of silver, and the ox shall be stoned. And if a man opens a pit, or if a man digs a pit and does not cover it, and an ox or a donkey falls in it, the owner of the pit shall make it good. He shall give money to their owner. But the dead animal shall be his. If one man’s ox hurts another’s so that it dies, then they shall sell the live ox and divide the money from it, and the dead ox they shall also divide.

Or if it was known that the ox tended to thrust in time past, and its owner has not kept it confined, he shall surely pay ox for ox, and the dead animal shall be his own.

Let’s pray. Father, we do thank you for your word and for the reflection of your character that we find in it. We pray Lord God that your spirit would illumine this text for understanding. We pray that the spirit would apply to us the merits of the Lord Jesus Christ and indeed that we would be transformed and go from glory to glory so that we may properly reflect the character we find written in the context of your law.

Give us understanding, give us your grace. Grant us your law graciously, Father, for we ask it through the shed blood and work of the Lord Jesus Christ. In his name we pray. Amen.

Please be seated.

We do have a rainy Fourth of July, don’t we? They say in Oregon, summer starts on July 5th. Last year, for instance, it was 68 degrees with sprinkles on the 4th, 73 the next day, 80 the next day, and summer was off and running. The highest temperature reached—let’s see—the lowest high for the rest of the summer after July 4th didn’t happen till September 19th. So every day after July 4th was warmer than the 4th until September 19th.

There was even an article in the Oregonian yesterday on the front page about how rainy the 4th of July is. They had a chart of all the days in July, the probability of rain for each day based on data for the last 55 years. And the fourth is the highest point on the chart. Not the first, not the second, not the third—the fourth. That’s when the rain comes statistically speaking.

Now that’s probability statistics. I think, you know, one of you older geysers like me can remind me if I’m wrong, but I think Judge Bahnsen used to call probability “the statistical regularity of God’s will.” And when we look at a phenomena where we have a preponderance of something in terms of probability, we can say that God is in control of that somehow.

Why is God raining on our parade? Why is he raining on our day of independence? Well, I don’t know. And I’m not going to tell you today because I don’t know the answer to that question. I do think it’s good to remember though that God does control weather. It’s not some kind of abstract isolated fact apart from God. And the Psalms particularly make it quite clear that God sends winds and rain and storms—or rather, this is his stuff and he does this for a particular reason.

I’d like to suggest today we could at least think about it a little bit. I don’t know why God does these things on the 4th, why it’s so rainy and wet and cold usually in Oregon on the 4th of July, but you know, we can at least grab a hold of that fact and think about it in a particular way.

Today I want to talk about and begin really a series. Well, we sort of began it three or four weeks ago when I preached on the first of these case laws, so-called—the first section dealing with slavery. That really was part of the series on marriage that I’ve been doing. And now we’ve thought it good in the providence of God to take some time here over a few months and to now exposit the rest of the law of the covenant here.

And so what we want to do today is a lot of the outline is simply introduction to this section, to the whole law of the covenant, and then it’s also introduction to this particular section we just read—a section dealing with violence. And then we’ll get to a few details in verses 12-14 as we come to a conclusion today in the sermon. So that’s kind of the way we’ll work through this and you have outlines in front of you. Lord willing you have one. We can just follow through it.

So first we’ll have an introduction to this series: the law of the covenant in Exodus 21-23. Turn, if you will, to James chapter 1 in your scriptures. You see, I don’t know if I should do that anymore or not after what Jim Jordan said. Just listen. I guess turn there if you like. I don’t know if it’s good to turn or not. I mean, it’s good to read your Bibles, but sometimes it’s easier to hear if you’re not reading along. Whatever you want to do to focus on this particular portion of text—I want to just speak very generally first about the law of God in liberty.

In James 1:19-21, we read, “So then, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath. For the wrath of man does not produce the righteousness of God.”

That’s real important for a consideration of these next three or four sermons on violence. Our wrath does not produce the righteousness of God.

Verse 21 of James 1: “Therefore lay aside all filthiness and overflow of wickedness. Receive with meekness the implanted word which is able to save your souls. Be doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. If anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he’s like a man observing his natural face in a mirror. For he observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was. But he who looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues in it, and is not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this one will be blessed in what he does.”

He who looks into the perfect law of liberty will be blessed if he does this stuff.

The scriptures tell us that the law of God is not contrasted with liberty. It’s referred to here and we’ll look in just a couple of minutes at a little further down in James chapter 2. There’s no doubt he’s talking about the commandments of God here. And the commandments of God put in encapsulated form in Exodus 21-23 are to be seen by us as a law of liberty—a law that brings liberty.

The psalmist in Psalm 119:45 says, “I will walk at liberty because I seek thy precepts.” You see, we think of liberty and law as opposites. The word of God puts them together. And one reason why we have a dismal Fourth of July is because liberty—true biblical liberty in our land—is reduced as the country moves away from the law of God. Now remember that the country moves away after the church moves away first.

So, one thing to think about when it rains on the fourth is God’s displeasure at a nation that seeks to have liberty apart from the law of liberty. And a church—an evangelical church—that disdains the law of God and has virtually no knowledge of it as articulated in, for instance, Exodus 21-23, and somehow thinks that liberty is getting rid of all that terrible laws. These laws are a reflection of the character of God. And as we walk in that character, we have liberty.

Now, we normally think of this verse, and I read this at the beginning of this series first as an admonition that we listen carefully to these laws in Exodus 21-23, but that we don’t just hear them, we do them. We’re going to stare intently for several months here at Exodus 21-23. But if we just stare intently on the Lord’s day and walk away the rest of the week and forget what we saw, then we’re the foolish man.

It’s interesting. You know, usually you think of this verse—at least I always have—if you look at the Bible, it tells you what a miserable sinner you are, and if you walk away forgetting that, that’s bad. But it doesn’t really say that, does it? What it says is if you look at the perfect law of liberty of God, and you stare at it, and you then are like the man who looks in a mirror and sees who he is. If you do it, if you stare intently with the purpose of doing it, you’re like the man who doesn’t forget who he is when he walks away from the mirror.

Here’s the point. When we read that you shouldn’t kill people and you shouldn’t do these other things in Exodus 21-23, we read a reflection of who Jesus is. He wouldn’t kill people. See, and we read a reflection of who we are in Christ. Okay? If you look at the prohibition—that’s the lifestyle that we are now. We are identified with the Lord Jesus Christ.

Now, it also shows us our shortcomings. The law does. But this law is a reflection of the character. And God says that as we stare intently at that law, we’re reminding ourselves who we are in Christ in reality.

Now, we’re beginning a series of three or four talks on violence. And each of us falls short—a removal of violence from our lives. But it’s very important that you recognize at the beginning that when you commit violence—unbiblical violence—against your fellow man or exhibit unbiblical violence in your speech toward God and his providence, you’re denying who you are. You’re forgetting who you are in the Lord Jesus Christ. Your identity is found in this perfect law of liberty.

Now, I said that we know it’s the Ten Commandments and the exposition because it goes on in James chapter 2, verse 8 and following. If you really fulfill the royal law according to the scriptures, verse 8, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself, you do well. But if you show partiality, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. For whoever shall keep the whole law and yet stumble in one point, he is guilty of all. For he who said, ‘Do not commit adultery also said do not murder.’”

Now, these are the commandments that we’re talking about. And specifically today, we’re going to be dealing with the exposition of “do not murder” found in the covenant law in Exodus 21-23.

If you do not commit adultery, but you do murder, you have become a transgressor of the law. “So speak and so do as those who will be judged by the law of liberty.”

So he explicitly tells us that what we’re going to be considering in an exposition of “thou shalt not kill” should be first of all grabbed a hold of by us as the law of liberty—the law that produces liberty and the law that extends liberty in the context of the land. And by way of implication, that the removal of that law brings tyranny and a loss of liberty. Okay.

So first of all when we look at this law of the covenant, we’re looking at a law of liberty.

Secondly, we’re looking at the particular laws that are articulated for us in the book of the covenant in Exodus 24. And I know we looked at this before but I really want you to understand this. I want you to remember this point: that Exodus 24 tells us what we’re reading here. Okay. So turn to Exodus 24 beginning at verse 1.

God says to Moses, “Come up to the Lord, you and Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel, and worship from afar, and Moses alone shall come near the Lord, but they shall not come near, nor shall the people go up with him.”

So Moses came and told the people all the words of the Lord and all the judgments. And all the people answered with one voice, and said, “All the words which the Lord has said we will do.”

Okay. Moses came and told them the words of the Lord and the judgments. The words are the Ten Words—what we call the Ten Commandments. That’s the words of the Lord. And the judgments are the case law—what we sometimes call case law application found in Exodus 21-23 of some of those laws. And really, as Reverend James B. Jordan said at family camp, it’s more of a sermonic application. It’s more of a sermon on the commandments—the judgments—but it’s referred to in particular in the context of Exodus 21 as judgment.

So Moses tells the people the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20, and then the exposition of those laws in Exodus 21-23. That’s what it says in verse 3. All the people answer with one voice and said, “All the words which the Lord has said we will do.” They agree. This is what our obligations are as people of God.

And Moses wrote all the words of the Lord. And he rose early in the morning and built an altar at the foot of the mountain and twelve pillars according to the twelve tribes of Israel. Then he sent young men of the children of Israel who offered burnt offerings, sacrificed peace offerings of oxen to the Lord. And Moses took half the blood of the offerings and put it in basins. Half the blood he sprinkled on the altar.

Then he took the book of the covenant. What is the book of the covenant? Well, it’s these Ten Words with the judgments—the exposition of them attached. That’s the book of the covenant. And he read it in the hearing of the people. In the context of this worship service and the sprinkling of the blood and the people’s affirmation to follow the laws of God—the words and the judgments—then this book of the covenant, Exodus 20-23—now 20 the Ten Words and 21-23 the exposition of those words—this is read in the context of this worship service of the people. It’s read in the hearing of the people and they say again, “All that the Lord has said we will do and we’ll be obedient.”

When they have this worship service, they pledge obedience to this.

Moses took the blood, sprinkled it on the people, and said, “This is the blood of the covenant which the Lord has made with you according to all these words. This is the sign and seal of the covenant.”

This blood sprinkled on them at this particular point in redemption history. We’re going to have some baptisms next week. The sprinkling of the water correlating to the sprinkling of the blood of the Savior—the water of peace and blessing coming down from above because the Savior’s blood has been sprinkled upon the altar for us. And all these things are wrapped up in the context of covenant.

This is the book of the covenant. The blood is the blood of the covenant. The people are affirming covenantal obedience to God. Then God is renewing covenant with them. Remember, he’s already brought them out of Egypt. The blood has already been applied to the doorpost. And they’re getting the word again—that they’re accepted because of that blood of the coming Savior. And because of that salvation, they’re being told how to live.

And that way of living is defined in the law of the covenant. They’re in covenant relationship with God through the blood of the covenant. And they walk in that relationship according to the law of the covenant.

And Moses goes up with Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu and seventy of the elders. They saw the God of Israel. And there was under his feet as it were a paved work of sapphire stone. And it was like the very heavens in its clarity. But on the nobles of the children of Israel, he did not lay a hand. So they saw God and they ate and drank.

Okay, as we look at this law today then, and in these series of sermons, we look at the law that is central to covenant renewal in the context of the book of Exodus. And when we come together on the Lord’s day and we come together and confess our sin, the blood is sprinkled again—as it were, not sprinkled again, not shed again certainly, but it is applied to us again. The blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, the offer of the Savior, has affected once for all our forgiveness. And when we confess sin, we’re assured because of that sprinkled blood of the assurance of God’s forgiveness.

And then we hear the word preached to us. The law of the covenant comes again. And God is renewing covenant with us. He’s assuring us of our forgiveness for falling short of the covenant, which was never intended to be a way of salvation to us, but rather a way of life. And then we, like the nobles here, like the elders did, we eat and drink. So now everybody eats and drinks because the separate orders of sanctification are now completed in the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. So we all eat and drink.

Exodus describes for us here a covenant renewal worship service that is really one of many models thrown throughout the scriptures of our worship service and informs us of what we’re doing. We have relationship with God by way of covenant.

The official confession of faith in chapter 7 of God’s covenant with men says this: “The distance between God and the creature is so great that although reasonable creatures do owe obedience unto him as their creator—we own that obedience—we could never have any fruition of him as their blessedness and reward but by some voluntary condescension on God’s part which he hath been pleased to express by way of covenant.”

The worship of God is covenantal because our relationship to God is covenantal. He is condescended to have relationship with us through the covenant that he establishes with Christ ultimately and with us as his people. And when we come together to worship him, we worship him in the context of that covenant that he has brought us into. And we come together confessing our sins and he renews that covenant. He assures us of the fruition of that covenant—the blessedness and peace that he places upon us—and he gives us again his word to renew our mind and to help us to be transformed and to walk in obedience with this law of the covenant.

So as we look at this law of the covenant, it’s really very much what we do every Lord’s day: we preach some aspect of the word of God and it has its context in covenant renewal. And so these particular words are part of that context. Understand them in that way.

Now the law is important and we’re going to spend some time in this covenant law. But the law is a dangerous thing apart from the sprinkling of the blood that’s described for us in Exodus 24.

The old man—the Adamic nature—is tricky. And when you hear the law preached, the old man wants to turn it into a way to justify himself and a way to sanctify himself. And God says that’s not what’s going on with the law. The law is an exposition of the character of God. And it’s an exposition—it’s the mirror that shows us who we are in Christ. This is the way we should be. But to try to take that law and earn relationship with God on the basis of it, that’s a complete perversion of that law.

We get the law after the blood is sprinkled. Right? The law comes in the context of a saved people. It doesn’t come to save people. God doesn’t give us the law to save us, but he gives us the law as a reflection of his character. And the law, works of the law, are essentially works of faith in God’s word.

We look at his description in verses 22-24 of what God calls the death of an unborn child as a result of miscarriage. When men fight and a woman gets injured and God says if harm comes to the child—unborn child or the mother—it’s life for life, burn for burn, wound for wound. In other words, if the man accidentally hit this woman and caused her to miscarry, it’s murder. It’s slaying of a man.

Now, we take that and we can either just act in obedience to it without believing it. But the scriptures say God gives us faith to understand that this is the depiction of reality. The child in the womb is alive. It’s a living person and is protected by the rights of God’s law.

So the point is that as we come to the law and have it focused on in the preaching of the word, we want to understand—we should always see it in relationship to the sprinkled blood of the covenant affected by our Savior. It’s why we come forward and confess sin. God assures us of our forgiveness and our acceptance. It’s not because we’ve kept his law, but because of the work of the Savior. And then he calls us to see how he’s transforming our lives to reflect in our lives the character of the Lord Jesus Christ as exemplified in his word and in his law.

So that’s the proper context for understanding the nature of law. It’s so easy to somehow begin to think that our identity is to be found in the context of how we live our lives as opposed to the relationship we have with God through Christ.

Now, the other side is an error as well. We are supposed to live in conformity to the law of God. I hope that you didn’t break any of the Ten Commandments in their external, obvious statement this last week. Hopefully, you didn’t kill anybody.

Now, we know that there’s a deeper understanding of that—it’s sin to have hatred in our hearts for our brothers—but we are to live our lives in essential conformity to these words of God. So, it’s not as if they’re way away from us in terms of the ability to obey them. God says they’re near to us because of the work of the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. Okay.

Now, let’s look particularly. Having given an overview to the introduction to the series and seeing the necessity of seeing the law in relationship to the sprinkled blood and seeing the law in relationship to the covenant renewal services of the church, let’s now look a little bit at an overview of Exodus 21:12-36, which we just read.

And first, I want to touch briefly on the relationship of this section to the first section. If you were here a couple of weeks ago, I preached on chapter 21:2-11. The first section dealt with slavery or servitude. Remember, different relationships that a master and servant have and when he goes out free, can he take the wife with him? Can he not? We talked about the dowry. We talked about implications for marriage.

But the whole section is given over to the servant-master relationship. And now we have a section given over to a consideration and prohibition of violence.

And I’ve listed several things here on the outline for you. What we can see here is that in the covenant formulation, a master comes to the person he’s going to have covenant with, declares himself to be master, declares the other person to be his servant, and then tells him what the stipulations are. So it’s suzerain or master giving his servant stipulations on how he should live.

And so this way that the law of the covenant flows so far—by moving from slavery to laws of violence—is very much in that pattern established at the get-go. Just as the preface to the Ten Commandments references the fact that God has brought us out of bondage to sin and misery, now we’re in bondage to him in service to him. That’s established definitively in that first section, verses 2-11. And as we saw, the preeminent picture of that is the house servant who now loves his master, has his ear open to hear his word. And that’s who we are in the Lord Jesus Christ.

So the first section really points to the establishment of our right relationship to our master. And now comes along sections of stipulations or specific laws on how we’re to live.

Another way of looking at it is that we have first salvation. The master saves us and brings us into relationship with him. And then after he saves us, he gives us laws by which we’re to live that are a reflection of his character. He saves us to reflect his communicable attributes into the world. And now he gives us those attributes. He brings us into relationship and then gives us his laws by which we’re to live.

Come out of Egypt, go up to Sinai to receive the law. And the law itself pictures that again—a master-servant relationship. Here’s how you’re supposed to live and walk in terms of your relationships one to the other.

Third, another way of saying the same thing is a reversal of the expulsion. Man falls in the garden. Adam and Eve’s sin. They’re expelled from the garden, from the presence of God, in relationship to him. And then in that fallen state, they have children and those children—Cain murders Abel. So there’s first expulsion from the garden, from relationship with God, and then the devolution that occurs then exhibits itself in violence, brother to brother.

So here in the law of the covenant, we have first stressed in the section on slavery a restoration to right relationship to God—the owner of the house. And then following that we have the reversal of the violence that we are prone to in our fallen state, apart from relationship with God through Christ. That we are prone to exhibit, brother to brother.

So we’re brought back into the garden of God today in covenant renewal worship, recognizing that all the world is his. We have relationship through the servant-master relationship, through covenant and the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. And now God says he’s going to change us so that we no longer kill each other in the context of our right relationship to him. We have right relationship with the others. And as a result, we move from the first tablet of the law to the second tablet.

Remember, the first five commandments essentially are about relationships between man and God. And the second five commandments tell us about how to relate to one another. And so the servant-master relationship, while placed in the context of relationships with men, really stresses the relationship we have with God. And now we move toward the elimination of violence with the exposition of the sixth commandment—the beginning of the second set rather of commandments that begin with “thou shalt not kill.”

So there’s this movement in the structure of the law of the covenant that reminds us—as if we didn’t need another reminder but we do—to understand that the grace of God has brought us into relationship and now we’re to live out our lives in relationship to that grace in how we relate to each other—horizontally vertically reconnected to God and now horizontally rolling back the effects of the fall on our relationships one to another. Okay.

Now there’s a structure. I’ve given you a brief outline to look at this section, verses 12-36, in the context of it as you read through it and meditate on it. It’s a series of very interesting ways it’s laid out. It’s almost like a quilt kind of woven together. You could sort of say that it begins with crimes of violence that merit the death penalty and by the end of the section you’re now dealing with animals where there’s just payment of money, who gets the dead animal, that sort of stuff.

So, it starts with the worst possible case—premeditated murder—and the death penalty, and moves through a series of declensions down to milder cases of violence. And in a way that’s kind of the way culture moves. Yeah. You kind of move at the external elements and then get more and more. Apply those aspects of the law in the broader sense to our own lives as individuals.

Another way to look at it is there’s a series of declining relationships as well. The first section I’ve given you here on the outline involves fellow men and superiors sort of intermingled together. Verses 12-14 we’re going to deal with today on murder and manslaughter. And then there’s the striking of parents in verse 15. The kidnapping of our fellow man and the cursing of parents in verse 17. And then fighting fellow man in verses 18 and 19.

So we’ve got fellow man and parents kind of wrapped up together there. And parents are sort of a little of both—fellow man and our relationship to God is reflected in our relationship to our parents.

The first four of those five sections—murder, striking of parents, kidnapping and cursing of parents—are all death penalty offenses or all capital crimes. And then fighting fellow man is not. Depending on what happens, you have to pay for his time and his well-being.

So there’s first, starting with these cases about fellow men and superiors. And then we have inferiors—the violence and death of one’s servant, fighting and harm done to a woman or to a child, and major wounding of a servant. So kind of a declining set of relationships going on here.

And then finally, the last section deals with animals. Accidentally an animal killing a man, a man accidentally killing another animal, and an animal killing another animal. So violence now is talked about in the terms of the scriptures in terms of going all the way down to animal killing animal in relationship to man.

Now those last few laws we’ll get to eventually here on animals leads into the next section of the law of the covenant which will have to do with laws prohibiting theft of property. “Thou shalt not steal.” So we’re going to move from slavery—servant relationships defining our relationship to God. Now we’re going to spend time in violence and trying to root out violence in our hearts. And then we’ll try to root out theft as we move into chapter 22 of the case laws. Okay.

Having said that, let’s now go specifically to verses 12-14 and deal in summary fashion with what’s presented to us there. So verses 12-14—as I said, this is really what could be seen as an exposition of the sixth commandment: “Thou shalt not kill.”

Now, the word “kill” in the Hebrew is not the word for murder, and it really isn’t the word for kill. It’s more maybe better translated “slay.” What it means is you shouldn’t kill people either by way of murdering them or by way of accidentally killing them.

And what we’ll see is in the context of these case laws is that even the accidental death of a man brings some degree of punishment or inconvenience to the person that accidentally kills another. The point of that is to give us a high regard for our fellow man as an image bearer of God. Not only are we not to kill people, we’re supposed to go out of our way to be very careful not to harm another man or woman or child.

That’s the implication of the term “thou shalt not kill.” And it is specifically the implication of these case laws as we’ll see as we go through them.

Remember our Savior of course told us that the full implication of the law. He tells us in Matthew 5:21-22. He says, “You’ve heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder’ and whoever murders will be in danger of the judgment. But I say to you that whoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment. Whoever says to his brother ‘Raca’ shall be in danger of the council. Whoever says ‘you fool’ shall be in danger of hellfire.”

So without getting into a specific exposition of that, the obvious point is that when the scriptures tell us don’t kill each other, our Savior says that also implies and means don’t have hatred for your brother in your heart. And we’re going to look at these obvious cases of murder, manslaughter, and premeditated murder.

But you know, again, don’t let your Adamic nature get you off the hook by saying that this isn’t too much relevant to you because you don’t kill anybody. If you have thoughts of violence toward your fellow man, toward your brothers and sisters, if you have hatred arise in your hearts that then takes form upon your lips—or even if it doesn’t take form in your thoughts—you’re really in violation of this commandment not to kill, slay. Another way to put it: to offer violence to your fellow man.

Our Savior tells us that. He says the full implications are no hatred, no cursing, no name calling in anger of our brother and sister in the Lord.

Now children, I know that when we grow up, your purpose in life is to be trained away from your Adamic nature and fully reflect your nature in Christ. But in that Adamic nature, we’ll talk about this at the end of the sermon, you hate your brother. You’re just like Cain.

And this text—we pray God will use this text and this series on violence to not just make sure we don’t kill each other and not just to inform us about what the civil magistrate should do when someone is killed. That’s important. But we pray—I pray that the Holy Spirit will use these texts and these sermons to remove violence from out of our hearts, to have us confess it as sin before God, to put it away, and to be transformed by God’s word and reflect the character of our Savior who follows these laws perfectly because they’re a reflection of who he is.

Okay. First, the case is given of murder in Exodus 21:12. “He who strikes a man so that he dies shall surely be put to death.”

This is a phrase that is akin in terms of the Hebrew to God’s statement to Adam: “In the day you eat of the fruit, dying you shall die. You shall surely die.” Dying, you shall die. And that’s what’s being said here. The man who murders someone shall surely be put to death. This doubling up in the language in the Hebrew gives a two-fold witness of the certainty of this particular punishment as it comes forth to these particular criminals.

And what it tells us is that when a man murders another man, he should be executed.

Now, let me just read in Numbers 35:30-34. We read this: “Whoever kills a person, the murderer shall be put to death on the testimony of witnesses, but one witness is not sufficient testimony against a person for the death penalty. Moreover, you shall take no ransom for the life of the murderer who is guilty of death, but he shall surely be put to death. And you shall take no ransom for him who has fled to his city of refuge that he may return to dwell in the land before the death of the priest.”

The point of this is you don’t want to have defilement on the land. Okay, so what’s going on?

There’s a legal term called “composition.” And composition, when referred to in the legal sense of punishments, is the paying of money to reduce a penalty or to take the place of a penalty. Okay. When we read, for instance, later on in these laws, “an eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth.” It doesn’t mean you had to pull out the person’s tooth if you broke their tooth. That could be what’s done, but you could pay money that is equivalent to the punishment that you would have if you had that tooth pulled out.

In the scriptures this is put forth. But when it comes to murder, the point is verse 31 of Numbers 35 tells us, “You shall take no ransom for the life of the murderer who is guilty of death. He shall surely be put to death.”

So this is significant. When we deal with the law of God, we deal with statements that tell us how to live as people and then tell us judgments, sanctions if we fail to walk that way. Okay? So we shouldn’t kill somebody. If you do kill somebody, you should be put to death. You shall surely be put to death. And there’ll be no ransom taken to keep you from being put to death.

Now the implication is that when a law does not have that doubling up statement—”dying you shall die,” “you shall surely be put to death”—and doesn’t have the statement that no ransom shall be taken, what God is giving us in these case laws in the punishment sections are maximum penalties. But these penalties don’t have to be enacted just as they’re written. In other words, a ransom can be had for the eye or for the tooth or for whatever it is.

What I’m saying is, and I’m just touching on this point—it can’t, we’ll develop it more as we go along—but recognize that when the law of God goes out of its way to tell us this particular crime must be punished in this way, then the implication is that he’s giving the judges some degree of leeway in the cases where it’s not said it must be done this way. Ransom cannot be taken. You understand that?

And in fact, we’ll see as we go along that there are specific ransoms allowed for other crimes. But the point here is that the scriptures tell us that in the case of murder the death penalty is required. And so right away in terms of judging our society, we see that our society doesn’t reflect the justice of God in terms of violence done to people. Our society does not punish murder with the death penalty. Only certain kinds of murder and only very rarely is that carried out.

The scriptures tell us that the death of an image bearer of God is a great offense to God, and it must be subject to capital punishment.

The second specific instance given for us in this section is verse 13. “However, if he did not lie and wait, but God delivered him into his hand, then I will appoint for you a place where he may flee.”

Now, this is sketched out a little more in the book of Numbers in chapters 34 and 35. But the point of that language is this. He says that if you end up killing somebody but you didn’t intend to kill them—in the providence of God, you’re driving down the street and a child darts in front of your car. You didn’t intend to kill them. God put that child, as it were, into your hand and he died. Then you’re not the subject of the death penalty. That’s not the same as verse 12. This is a different case that applies.

And in this particular case, the specific thing it says is, “I will appoint for you a place where he may flee.”

And when they went into the promised land—which was the preparation. They were in preparation for that by receiving these laws. God set up six cities of refuge—Levitical cities where the Levites lived. And six of these Levitical cities were designated as cities of refuge. And these cities of refuge were safe places, sanctuary for men who had accidentally slain, killed somebody. And they would go to that city of refuge and a trial would be held by the congregation of the city through their elected representatives, the elders, to determine if the man had actually premeditatedly or tried to murder someone or if it really was an accident.

Okay? So, you picture yourself in the land. Now, you’re not driving a car. You’re driving an ox cart. And your ox cart’s going down the road and some young fellow, goofing around, doesn’t know what he’s doing. He falls in front of your cart. Your cart runs him over and he’s dead.

Now, what do you do? Well, a couple of things happen in this system in Israel after they were brought into the promised land. A kinsman redeemer—a near relative to the man that was killed—had the responsibility before God to kill you. He had a responsibility to come after you because the land was polluted by the blood and the land cried out. It’s almost like the land sends up a message to the kinsman redeemer and he comes out seeking to put you to death. That’s his job before God.

Your job is to get to a city of refuge. And the community’s job is to assist you in getting there before you’re killed. What you do is you go to this nearby city of refuge—six scattered throughout this geographic region, not so far away. And when you get there, they take you in and give you sanctuary. And then you wait and a trial date is set.

And the kinsman redeemer comes and the people that saw it came and you have a trial. And the elders hear the trial and they say, “Well, it was an accident. Can’t be killed. Okay. You get to go free, right?” No, you don’t get to go free. You have to live in the city of refuge until the death of the high priest.

Now, you could take your family with you. Probably would. Could be a long time before that high priest dies. You’d have to start a new life in the city of refuge. And you could, as I said, bring your family there, but you couldn’t leave the city of refuge. If you left the city of refuge, then the kinsman redeemer’s job is to kill you for leaving.

Well, that’s the way it was set up. Why? Because human life is exceedingly important in the sight of God because it’s a reflection of him. We’re his imagebarers, right? Crown of creation. And we are taught to be very careful about how we treat human life.

Now, if our Savior tells us that to have hatred for our brother and to speak in anger toward our brother is like murder. Think how bad that is—to have not the consideration for our brother that we end up hating him in our heart, speaking against him with our tongues, and even God forbid striking out at him with our fists. That’s a terrible thing in the sight of God. It’s bad enough when you accidentally injure somebody. God wants you to feel real bad. And in the case of the Old Testament in this particular period of time, your whole life would change.

Now that’s not the way it is today. We’ll talk about the application of this in a little bit. I mean the church now is the sanctuary. This is the city of refuge. Jesus has cleansed the land definitively through his work on the cross.

This whole system of the kinsman redeemer was tied. He was also the person responsible for keeping land in the context of the family to redeem the land and the person sold into slavery. So his work is specifically tied to the land. The land cries out for blood. He’s trying to keep people in the land. He’s trying to make avenge. He’s God’s agent. He’s not the family’s agent. He’s God’s agent for vengeance in this particular system that God had established for violation to the land.

So it’s all land centered. These are all laws that have a different application when the land, people, the land, priestly nation of Israel are now found their completion of the work of the Lord Jesus Christ, and now the gospel goes over all the earth. The application is different, but the point is that in a case of accidental death you still had to have your life go through quite a disjuncture as a teaching to us, as an example to us, of the high value we’re supposed to place upon human life because human life is the image of God. We are the image bearers of God.

Let me just say one other thing about this kinsman redeemer. He was, as I said, not the family’s agent. This was not a family feud going on. He was what God had established in the old—in this particular system—as the agent for revenge. And in the case—let’s say you really did kill somebody intentionally instead of accidentally and the judges determined that at the city of refuge, you’re turned over and that avenger redeemer, he’s the one that casts the first stone against you. He starts the capital punishment given to you.

Now, the scriptures by bringing all men, as it were, into that system—instead of abstracting it out at this particular point in time—wants us to understand the importance of taking vengeance upon men who deliberately slay other men.

In Psalm 58:10, we read, “The righteous shall rejoice. He sees the vengeance. He shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.”