Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript

Started your law as void. Sadly, it is still the state of the American church that all too many churches regard God’s law as void, out of place, not important for us, to disastrous consequences for our families and our churches and our culture. We are working our way through the law of the covenant, Exodus 21-23, a summary form of God’s judgments primarily intended for civil magistrates but with great implications for every facet of life.

We continue today with what we began last week—a consideration of Exodus 21:20-27. So please stand for the reading of Exodus 21:20-27.

“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 accordingly 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, 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.”

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for your word. We pray that your spirit would now minister this word to us. We pray that as we’ve come together to worship you in spirit and in truth, you might indeed give us a proper understanding through this law of the kind of people you are transforming us to be and help us, Lord God, not to walk away from the mirror of your scriptures reminding us of how we are to live our lives as foolish men not doing it.

We pray your spirit would illuminate the text for understanding so that we might obey it in the power of that selfsame spirit. In Christ’s name we ask this. Amen.

Please be seated.

A recent email that I read had some interesting things to say about Sinai and the coming of God’s law, and I wanted to touch on them briefly. Those comments were made by James B. Jordan in the last couple of days. The discussion he was involved with was a discussion on mimetic rivalry—mimetic coming from the word mime—how there’s this brother rivalry in the opening chapters of Genesis that plays itself through to the closing chapters. And there’s this mimetic thing going on where it seems like the son imitates the father’s action.

And so this idea of mimetic rivalry is what he’s speaking of. You know, you have Cain and Abel of course, and that kind of setting the whole thing up. Abraham ends up as being having two sons. The first one, Ishmael, he wants to live before God, but no—God says Isaac will replace Ishmael. Isaac has two sons, Jacob and Esau. And unlike Esau, whom he loved, Jacob he hated. And Isaac attempts to wipe out Jacob, but in doing so wipes out all the inheritance of Esau.

And so you’ve got Jacob and Esau struggling, and then Joseph and his brothers struggling toward the end of the book. And one of the things Jordan talks about—which I think is quite insightful—is that as we see this development of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, we see the new man who ultimately pictures the new man in Christ, developing in relationship to this mimetic rivalry idea that goes on through Genesis.

Picking it up at Isaac with Jacob and Esau. Jacob reconciles to Esau, sort of, but basically by way of distance. You know, he comes back to the land. He can be seen as restoring the portion that Isaac had illegitimately removed from Esau through his desire to completely impoverish Jacob. Remember, he wanted Esau to have everything. Jacob ends up with everything in the providence of God. And Esau doesn’t even have the portion that he should have.

So Jacob, when he comes back—remember, he’s fearful, goes across the Nile, and he sends forward gifts to you—sort of see that as you know giving back that portion that he really should have had as a son. But Jacob keeps separate from Esau. He can’t really do what Joseph will do.

Joseph, in terms of his brothers that struck out at him the way Esau tried to kill Jacob, goes through this symbolic death and resurrection. But he doesn’t just then stay separate from his brothers. He uses the occasion of the fast—the imposed fast by God, the famine that was in the land everywhere. He uses that to drive home to his brothers their guilt in murdering him, or in selling him, in what we saw as kidnapping—a capital offense—performing this capital offense against him. And so he brings them through his manipulation of the events of his brothers to a realization of their sin against him.

And in so doing, he brings them to conversion. He brings them to true repentance for what they’ve done to him.

So the opening chapter where we have brother killing brother, by the end of the message of Genesis, the brother is now ministering to the other brothers by bringing him not just a financial gift the way Jacob did with Esau, not just living kind of without hostility in the same area of land, but now actually bringing them to repentance.

And so this becomes a picture then for all of Israel being a priestly nation—the way that Joseph was the priestly brother—to bring the world to repentance. And we see later on Nebuchadnezzar coming in and killing Jews and hauling them off to captivity. And then the people of God, by speaking about God in the context of Nebuchadnezzar, and God moving sovereignly, brings him to repentance for that. Brings him to faith in the true God, Yahweh.

And so we are here in the context of this culture, the church in the midst of America. And we should see ourselves in the context of this great line that God intends to use the church not to be isolated from, raptured out of the culture in which we live, nor to see the culture in which we live totally judged and destroyed, but rather the preaching of the gospel is to affect the transformation of the culture in which we live.

We believe in long-term optimism eschatologically—not because of might, but because of the preaching of the gospel of God. We’re set as the Reformation Covenant Church here. And we should see ourselves as having a vision and a goal along with the other churches in the area—not of staying separate from Portland. I mean, we got to separate from sin, but eventually through the preaching of the gospel, saving Portland, seeing its conversion.

Now, in terms of the law, and why I’m using this now: the law comes at Sinai at the end of all those Genesis accounts with this mimetic rivalry, and what it does is it gives an objective common law. Jordan quotes from a commentator named Gerard. Jordan says this. Now Gerard—yes, Gerard again—says that the answer to mimetic rivalry, this rivalry between brothers, it’s imitated from generation to generation.

Remember, Jacob even favored some sons over other sons—Rachel’s sons over Leah’s sons. Even though he was a righteous man, he did that. So the answer to that and to basic rivalries, destructive replication through history, is the establishment of public common law with equal justice. That’s where we’re going to Sinai. The rivalry must play out until it is visible, and then the gift of the law can be appreciated as the wonderful thing that it is.

So Genesis concludes, Exodus picks up. They’ve been oppressed by the Egyptians, but they’re brought out of that. And in the context of being brought out of that as a priestly nation, they’re given this objective common law as a replacement to all the great rivalries between the Hatfields and the McCoys that penetrate history without the objective common law of God being the law of the nation.

So the importance of the lex talionis. The basic function of biblical law—remember, lex talionis comes from two Latin words: lex is law, talionis is from talon or hand. And it’s the word, it’s the base word for our word retaliate—the law of retaliation or vengeance according to God is eye for eye, tooth for tooth. The punishment fits the crime. That’s the objective common law. That is to get rid of the sort of mimetic rivalry, the rivalry between factions of peoples that, when they take that vengeance upon themselves, leads to a tremendous disruption of society.

A culture that moves away from God’s objective common law as found in the law of the covenant, among other places, is a culture that is moving toward barbarism. It’s moving toward people taking their own vengeance on other people, or the victims themselves, as we’ve seen and talked about last week, being the result of the state’s improper management of criminal justice—the victims being more victimized through the criminal justice system.

So it’s very important that we see in this lex talionis and in Exodus its placement here in Exodus 21 a very important truth of common law that is part of the way God gets rid of personal vengeance and rivalry between groups of people.

We said that this idea of lex talionis has the great broad principle behind it of the restoration of all things that’s talked about in Matthew 19:28 and Acts 3:21. Eye for eye, tooth for tooth. Don’t get hung up in just the mechanism. The mechanism is crime; the punishment fits the crime. But the goal is restoration of things back to where they were. So people are made whole, usually through monetary recompense.

The Lord Jesus Christ comes, and he’s wounded for our sake. We should have the stripes, the wounds, the bruises, the eye put out, the eyes gouged out, tooth knocked out, life taken from us because of our sins. Jesus takes that upon himself, makes full restitution for the elect to God, and then begins this process of what he referred to as the regeneration or the reconciliation, the restoration of all things with his ministry on the cross two thousand years ago.

And we sit here as a result of that, and we look forward to the future, seeing again this restoration and reconciliation of all things. In Acts, when they talk about in chapter 3 the restoration of all things, one of the first things that happens in terms of healing there is a restoration of a man who is lame and can’t go into the temple to worship. So it’s a restoration to worship. Later we see a restoration to vocation in the book of Acts. So the restoration is full-fledged, and it’s at the heart of this idea of lex talionis.

That’s why we pray when we pray the Lord’s Prayer for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. Clearly, this is a prayer for restoration of the earth from the sins that inhabit earth based upon the heavenly model and the heavenly justice. And so we pray for that every week in our church. And it should form the basis for our prayers as well in other ways.

So this principle, while seemingly some kind of arcane Old Testament truth that people don’t like, and a lot of churches today say is bad and had to be replaced by a better system of loving your enemy, that system really is at the heart of the Christian faith in terms of restoration and reconciliation and the sort of criminal justice systems we should see in the context of our land.

Now I mentioned this briefly last week. We’re now on—we’ve done a review of point one. We went through all the scriptures last week about the law of retaliation. We’d made some comments on the protection of innocent bystanders, and how Calvin, or we can go back to the apostolic fathers, the apostolic fathers quoted this particular portion out of Exodus 21 as the basis for their saying that abortion was a capital crime. The historic church has always held to this truth being found in this text.

So we looked at the context of this. And I’m going to draw another application of this at the end of the sermon—that the context for this law of restoration or reconciliation is placed in the context of a pregnant woman. Okay, so you’ve got a mother with child—the specific incident where the lex talionis is stated here. And I think we should draw from that what I said before, that the lex talionis has a dynamic that pushes toward the future, toward the restoration of all things in Christ.

And so it’s placed immediately in the context of the future—pregnant woman, child inside the woman, and the well-being of that child. The future of the race, not genetic race, but the race of Christianity, or the race of Israel, faith people—the future of that people was wrapped up in their children.

And so, I think that the implications of that, I’ll draw out some at the end of the text, end of the sermon today. But I think we have to see this legal principle in relationship to a dynamic, ongoing truth that points to the future and how Christ is restoring all things through his coming as our substitute.

And we looked at a bunch of texts where from Genesis to Revelation, literally, we saw that the scriptures teach this idea of lex talionis—retribution of judgment, punishment fitting the crime. Even Paul: “Alexander the coppersmith did me great harm. May the Lord repay him according to his deeds.” See, in accordance with Exodus 21, that’s what he’s saying, beginning to end. The saints cry out for that. Jesus does then in the book of Revelation. And our response to that, as the psalmist was, which to be praise God that his righteous judgments fill the earth.

Okay, so we’re going to pick up the outline now and finish the sermon in point C: summary comments and analysis. I went through this very briefly last week. The biblical lex talionis has relationship to the victim, the criminal, society, and God. Let me read you a quote from a very embittered jailer who saw what was going on in American jurisprudence and what was going on at the punishment of criminals.

These words come from 1895. They’re found in R.G. Rushdoony’s Institutes of Biblical Law. According to Schaeffer:

“The guilty man lodged, fed, clothed, warmed, lighted, entertained at the expense of the state in a model well—issued from it with a sum of money lawfully earned—has paid his debt to society. He can set his victims at defiance. But the victim has his consolation.”

Okay. So what he’s saying is the situation then, as it is now one hundred years later, was one in where the guilty man is the one, instead of the victim, who gets these benefits. He’s lodged, he’s fed, he’s clothed, he’s warmed, he’s lighted, he’s entertained—all at the expense of state in a model prison cell of trying to rehabilitate him. And he’s issued from it with a sum of money lawfully earned supposedly.

Okay, at that time they had people work, and some of those wages would go with him as they left the prison. But the victim has his consolation supposedly. It’s sarcastic.

He can think that by the taxes he pays to the treasury he has contributed towards the paternal care which has guarded the criminal during his stay in prison. So the consolation of the victim is his taxes have paid for all these benefits to the criminal in the context of the prison system in 1895.

What we’ve said is that the lex talionis makes the victim whole, which the modern system of incarceration—either for punishment of the person or for rehabilitation of the person—does not affect. It doesn’t affect the making whole of the victim because the criminal does not have to deal directly with the effects he’s had in the victim’s life by making restitution to that person by some shape or form.

Then he also is not served well by the system because you take away what in the God-given system becomes the means by which he’s brought to repentance for his sins. He’s brought to a relief from the guilt he feels over making another person less than whole. Restitution allows him to make him whole again and helps relieve his guilt by knowing that he indeed has done what God has told him to do.

So this system is important for the victim. It’s important for the criminal, and it’s important for the society. What do we have as a result of the modern system of incarceration or prisons? We have skyrocketing crime rates. So much so that you can’t build prisons fast enough. Much of the debate in Salem for the last couple of years is: where are we going to put the next prison? There’s no—you know, who wants these prisons? We got to build a bunch of them, and we’re letting people out. So it’s a real mess.

It hurts society to move away from God’s system of criminal justice, which is found in Exodus 21.

Now we talked a little bit last week, and I wanted to read a quote here about my points on this outline under point number two: the modern absence of biblical lex talionis, its origins and effects. And we say that based again on R.J. Rushdoony’s work in Institutes of Biblical Law. Quotes here from again this same book I was quoting from a minute ago, from a man named Schaeffer—Steven Schaeffer—in a book called Restitution to Victims of Crime. And Schaeffer says this:

“It was chiefly owing to the violent greed of feudal barons and medieval ecclesiastical powers that the rights of the injured party were gradually infringed upon and finally, to a large degree, appropriated by these authorities, who exacted a double vengeance indeed upon the offender by forfeiting his property to themselves instead of to his victim, and then punishing him by the dungeon, the torture, the stake, or the gibbet.”

But the original victim of wrong was practically ignored in the medieval period of history, when the land barons, the state essentially, and the church would appropriate the property of offending criminals to themselves instead of making restitution to the victim.

After the Middle Ages, restitution kept apart from punishment seems to have been degraded rather. So first they separated it from punishment—the civil magistrate and the church did—and then they just sort of degraded and started to found to ignore them.

The victim, says Schaeffer, became the Cinderella of the criminal law. And again quoting Schaeffer:

“If one looks at the legal systems of different countries, one seeks in vain a country where a victim of crime enjoys a certain expectation of full restitution for his injury. In rare cases where there is state compensation, the system is either not fully effective or does not work at all. Where there is no system of state compensation, the victim is in general faced with the insufficient remedies offered by civil procedure and civil execution.

“While the punishment of crime is regarded as the concern of the state, the injurious result of the crime—that is to say, the damage to the victim—is regarded almost as a private matter. Yet it recalls man in the early stages of social development. When left alone in his struggle for existence, he had himself to meet attacks from outside and fight alone against his fellow creatures who caused him harm.

“The victim of today cannot even himself seek satisfaction since the law of the state forbids him to take the law into his own hands. In the days of his forefathers, restitution was a living practice. And it perhaps worth noting that our barbarian ancestors were wiser and more just than we are today, for they adopted the theory of restitution to the injured, whereas we have abandoned this practice to the detriment of all concerned. And this was wiser in principle, more reformatory in its influence, more deterrent in its tendency, and more economical to the community than the modern practice.”

R.G. Rushdoony goes on to talk about these quotes and the development of them, and he says this:

“First, the shift from restitution to imprisonment has its roots in the shift of power, or the seizure of power, by church and state and was in its origin designed to shake down the guilty for ransom or confiscatory purposes. So that’s how it moved away from being restitution to the victim. These land barons in the church appropriated to themselves the fines.

“Second, the state made its doctrine of punishment the criminal law and relegated restitution to civil law. So it ended up with a tradition now that we have of two lines of legal remedy. Criminal law, which involves punishment, and civil law, which involves restitution to you. Thus, if an injured party seeks restitution today, it involves the expense of a civil suit through the medium of an essentially uncooperative court. So that even if the injured party wins, collection is very difficult.

“As a result, because of this division, the criminal faces prison, a institution or a correctional facility and care by an increasingly indulgent state rather than restitution.

“Third, he says, since the form of biblical restitution was the right of self-defense, that was part of it—the right, under certain circumstances, to kill the aggressor or thief—the increasing limitation on the right of the injured to protect himself means that we are returning to barbarism: no restitution to you, but through the state enforcing it without the protection—barbarism involved. In other words, freedom to defend oneself. So it’s kind of like the worst of both worlds is what culture has moved toward in the last century.

“Fourth, the system of imprisonment or rehabilitation of criminals involves, in fact, as Prince noted, a subsidy to criminals and attacks on the innocent and the injured. It is thus a further injury to the godly which requires restitution from the hands of God and man. A society which subsidizes the criminal and penalizes the godly will end up by encouraging increasing violence and lawlessness and is thus destined for anarchy.”

And as we’ve said, that’s what’s happened to us.

So the origins of why things are different today are in the medieval period. And we pray for and seek a return to the lex talionis as the biblical principle of punishment for crimes, making the victim whole, the centrality of victim’s rights, so to speak, as opposed to criminal’s rights. And as we’ve said, that would actually help the criminal—the elect criminal—long-term, because it produces guilt.

So reviewing again according to the outline: the origins—greedy church and state. The effects: movement from restitution to punishment. Separation of civil and criminal matters. Movement for punishment has now in our lifetime become a movement toward the rehabilitation of the criminal. We don’t punish him because society is to blame. He needs to be rehabilitated. And the relegation of restitution to civil courts. In order for you to be made whole, you usually have to get a lawsuit going at your expense.

Effects have been: the removal of the restitution of self-defense. Another effect has been the shift from concern for the victim to concern for the criminal. They are really the focus of everything, not restitution.

Now think of the dead-end street that gives you as a culture. As we said, lex talionis is given in the context of the future pregnant mom. But the culture that imposes instead for just punishment of parts, now rehabilitation, and becomes criminal-oriented instead of victim-oriented, loses the entire dynamic of a movement to making things whole, a movement toward the future. And so it really becomes a dead-end kind of stagnant system.

And then finally: increased theft and loss via taxpayer-supported jails. And as I said last week, uninsured motorist insurance, for instance, where the righteous now have to insure themselves essentially against a state that will not make someone pay you back if they run into your car. It’s their fault they don’t have insurance. You can’t. So you are required by the part of the civil state to have insurance for them failing to adequately provide a system of restitution for that guy to make your car whole. So the end result is quite bad.

The end result is not good in the context of our culture.

Now I wanted to read a couple of quotes here from John MacArthur’s commentary on this text as kind of a summation of the need to see the lex talionis again become the system by which our criminal justice system operates.

MacArthur says this:

“Magistrates ought to have an eye to this rule—lex talionis—in the punishing offenders and in doing right to those that are injured. Consideration must be had of the nature, quality, and degree of the wrong done, that reparation may be made to the party injured and others deterred from doing the like.”

The law of an eye for an eye was a just law. It was a just law, he says, because it matched punishment to offense. It was a merciful law because it limited the innate propensity of the human heart to seek retribution beyond what an offense deserved. Remember Dinah and the Shechemites, and Levi and his brother Simeon. You see, the human heart does that. It overreacts. So the law is just—punishment meeting the offense. It is merciful, retarding the effects of the human heart to strike out, requiring more vengeance than really is properly given.

And MacArthur says it was also a beneficent law because it protected society by restraining wrongdoing. It’s a good law because it restrains wrongdoing through the imposition of restitution—eye for eye, tooth for tooth.

MacArthur says:

“When the church stopped preaching God’s righteousness, justice, and eternal punishment of the lost, it stopped preaching the fullness of the gospel, and both society and the church have suffered greatly for it. And when the church stopped holding its own members accountable to God’s standards and stopped disciplining its own ranks, a great deal of its moral influence on society was sacrificed.

“One of the legacies of theological liberalism is civil as well as religious lawlessness.”

And of course, the implication is to recover civil lawfulness, we need to return to the preaching of God’s justice and judgment, that God indeed always moves in terms of lex talionis and requires his civil magistrates to as well.

He quotes from Arthur Pink in his commentary on the Sermon on the Mount. Pink says:

“Magistrates and judges were never ordained by God for the purpose of reforming reprobates or pampering degenerates, but to be his instruments for preserving law and order by being a terror to evil. As Romans chapter 13 says, ‘They are to be a revenger to execute wrath on him that doeth evil. Conscience has become commonplace. The requirements of justice are stifled. Modern concepts now prevail.

“As eternal punishment was repudiated, either tacitly or in many cases openly, ecclesiastical punishments are shelved. Now we would say that’s the other way around. Ecclesiastical punishments are shelved first, and then civil punishments start to get put on the shelf as well. Churches refuse to enforce sanctions and incur flagrant offenses in the context of the body of Christ.

“The inevitable outcome has been the breakdown of discipline in the home and the creation of public opinion which is mocking and spineless. School teachers are intimidated by foolish parents and children so that the rising generation are more and more allowed to have their own way without fear of consequences.

“And if some judge has the courage of his convictions and sentences a brute for maiming an old woman, there is an outcry against the judge.”

We’ve generated, he said, mocking public opinion. We have a president who polls and study group focus groups everything has a determination for public policy. We have a president who is a liar, a philanderer, an adulterer, and maybe much worse if you can get much worse than that in the context of public office. And yet we had a judge fine him for his lies, his contempt of court, lying under oath. Fines him eventually, but holds back her notice that she will find him that he is in contempt of court until after the impeachment proceedings were over, then announces what she’s going to do. And then finally, a couple weeks ago actually finds him.

And you know, that’s really criminal on the part of the judge, it seems, in light of what the scriptures say—equal justice for all.

And what then happens is that Linda Tripp, an innocent party trying to preserve herself against the incredible power of a presidential bureaucracy that regularly executes its vengeance and retribution against enemies, trying to protect herself by what she thought was a legal device of taping a conversation with this friend of hers who wanted her to lie under oath, is now indicted. And she may be the only one out of this entire fiasco that does jail time.

See, God is writing in big letters what happens to a culture when you leave these supposedly arcane, old-fashioned principles of eye for eye and tooth for tooth behind.

Now there’s good news. Late last night I decided to read the next ballot measures we’ll be voting on in November in Oregon. There are eight or nine of them, and all but one relate to criminal justice. There are things like: nobody but a judge can get a guy out of prison early—can’t let him go. The prisoner or the jailer can’t because it’s overcrowded. Only the judge can do that.

There’s two different measures that would have victim’s rights that are explicitly aimed at restoring victim’s rights in the criminal justice system. And one of those two measures actually says that the victim has a right to restitution from the criminal—the very thing that we’re talking about. And we’re going to be able to vote on that in November. And we’ll be putting out a voter’s guide explaining all this stuff in middle October, mail an election.

But here in Oregon, you see some of this stuff is starting to be looked at because of the number of Christians that have been elected to Salem over the last ten to fifteen years. A long, slow approach taking these biblical principles of restitution and lex talionis and beginning then to write civil statutes.

Now, why are they these measures that were referred to the Oregon people by the legislature? In other words, they voted and said, “Let’s send this to the people to vote on this November.” They did it because they knew that Governor Kitzhaber wouldn’t sign these things into law. So they did an end run around him by giving us a whole bunch of measures—eight or nine this year—which we don’t normally have measures in the odd years. Very few of them. So, and a bunch of them are very appropriate to this particular text of scripture and are a small incremental movement back to victim’s rights, punishment of criminals.

Another one is having criminals work forty hours a week in jail. Now, you know, that can be kind of interesting. But there’s a number of them like that’ll be quite interesting to look at as we move to the fall. So that’s good news.

Now I want to make another application, sort of summing up the whole sections we’ve talked about so far. But first, moving on from lex talionis, look at the surrounding context of these laws relative to the servants. And these are some difficult laws. But we want to now look at the surrounding context for this.

We’re on Roman numeral two of your outline. And we’re going to talk about the laws that we just read from Exodus 21 about servants. And let’s start by considering verses 20 and 21.

“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.”

Okay, the first, a little bit of explanation of the text. Okay, so we’ve got a situation. The case involved here is that the male or female servant is beaten, and it makes clear that there’s one situation, one condition by which no harm comes to the man. If he—the servant—is beaten and they get up and walk around for a few days, then there’s no, and then they die, there’s no punishment to the man involved. He is his property. And then the second case is—well, actually I’ve reversed them. But the other case is that if he beats him and he dies under his hand, he shall surely be avenged.

Let’s talk about that first one first. The Samaritan Pentateuch translates this as “he shall surely be punished” or “avenged,” as “he shall surely be put to death.” Now it is clear to commentators that when it says the dead servant who is beaten to death by his master shall be avenged, that links to the revenge that’s been pointed out for murderers or manslaughterers. That even a certain translation, the Samaritan Pentateuch, actually puts it in there: “he shall be avenged directly by being put to death.”

So verse 20 says that if you’ve got a servant serving you and you beat him and he dies, you are put to death. Capital crime. But it also says that if the servant is beaten and then stays in his bed a day or two and gets up and walks around, then dies, that you’re not held liable. In other words, it could be a coincidence—the death and the beating. The death is not a result of the beating. I think that’s what’s going on here.

John Calvin, in commenting on this text, says this:

“The smiter is only exempted from punishment when he shall have so restrained himself as that the marks of his cruelty should not appear. For that the slave should stand for one or two days is equivalent to saying that they were perfect and sound in all their members. But if a wound had been inflicted or there was any mutilation, the sinner was guilty of murder.”

So Calvin thinks that when it says if he gets up and walks around for a day or two, it means he’s been restored to wholeness. He’s got health. He’s not bedridden. He’s in good health again, and then he dies. And so I think the idea here is not that you can beat him to the point of death and let him linger a little bit and that’s okay.

The obvious first case says that if you beat a servant and cause his death, you’re a murderer and you should be put to death. But if you beat your servant and it doesn’t cause death, he gets up and walks around, now you’re not to be put to death because you’re not a murderer. In other words, there’s no punishment for you beating your servant. That’s one implication of the text.

Okay? And we’ll talk about why in a couple of minutes. Beating of the servant is not a crime. It’s not wrong, necessarily. Beating the servant as to cause permanent damage, which we’ll see in a minute, or to cause death, is wrong and must be punished with the principle of lex talionis. You take the servant’s life, you have to give your life.

Okay. The second case follows the statement of lex talionis in the middle of this text in verses 25-27. Well, actually verse 26. Verse 25 repeats; verse 25 is the end of the lex talionis. Verse 26:

“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.”

Okay, what’s going on?

Well, quite simple. If he does permanent injury to the servant, as pictured by eye or tooth, then the application of lex talionis is not that the owner has to pay eye for eye or tooth for tooth. But what the application of lex talionis is: the owner loses the slave. He loses what Calvin calls his superiority in relationship to the slave, because he has abused it. And the slave—how is he made whole? He served a master who has abused his functional superiority, and his functional inferiority is then removed. That’s how he’s made whole.

And the punishment for the one who abuses his servant is the removal of the privilege of exercising control or authority over a servant.

So you see, lex talionis is in play for the master of the servant in this context, and it shows us that the application of eye for eye, tooth for tooth, burn for burn can be complex. In this case, it’s eye for eye in terms of position. Okay, the man loses his superiority now.

I want to say a couple of things about the—well, first let me quote from Matthew Henry on this law. He says that the care God takes of his servants is given to us here. You know, people read these and think, “Well, this is terrible for the servant.” But Henry says no—God looks kindly on servants. He says:

“If their masters maimed them, though it was only striking out a tooth, that should be their discharge. This was intended one to prevent their being abused. Masters would be careful not to offer them any violence lest they should lose their service. And two, to comfort them if they were abused—loss of a limb being replaced by getting liberty back.”

Now, why eye and why tooth? Well, I don’t know exactly, but let me posit three explanations for this.

One reason it says eye or why does it talk about the eye being knocked out or the tooth lost when the other list is longer? Well, one reason it says it is to point us back to verse 24 and 25, the lex talionis. It’s a summary form—the eye and the tooth—of lex talionis: eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, burn for burn. It’s the first elements of the list, and it stands for the whole.

So it says that in master-servant relationships, lex talionis is still in play. That’s one reason for eye losing eye and tooth.

I think another reason is to contrast big injuries and little permanent injuries. I mean, I would much rather lose a tooth than an eye. There’s no comparison, particularly if you’re in a culture where oral hygiene wasn’t that great. And by the time people were forty, most of them had lost a lot of their teeth anyway. And so those as those peasant foods were always kind of mush and stuff because you didn’t have meat to chew big or didn’t have teeth to chew big pieces of meat.

So a loss of a tooth is a relatively minor thing compared to the loss of an eye. The point being made here is that a servant should not have his authority—or a master rather should not abuse his authority over a servant—in little ways or big ways. Okay. So it’s to contrast a big permanent injury and a small permanent injury.

So I think it’s another reason. So if you, if you whacked off a little finger by beating your servant, that also would be cause for his release. It doesn’t just mean these two things. It’s to point us to the general principle of lex talionis. And it’s to say both in big things and in little things, the master cannot cause permanent damage to his servant or he has sinned greatly against his authority and it’s removed and the servant is given freedom.

But let me say there’s a third possible reason why he uses eye and tooth. And he could have used eye and little finger, but he uses two things that occur on the human face. And we’ve talked how these laws in Exodus 21 focus on man as the image bearer of God. So when you strike out at man, you’re striking out at God. And that is particularly true in terms of man’s face. Man’s face is what—the sum of a man’s imaging the person of God.

To strike out at somebody’s face is a great sin. Striking out at the image of God as found in your fellow man. I believe that to be the case. And so I think this should give us pause for how we treat our children, for instance. Slapping the face, cuffing a child around the head. I think that is a bad thing to do. And I, you know, I can’t—I think that’s a legitimate application of this text that we should be very careful when we deal with one another’s face to slap, to hit, to punch, to cuff. Bad deal.

And I mentioned to a couple of you, several of you a couple weeks ago asked about boxing after my sermon on men fighting in the street. And I do believe that we have in these verses reason for pause relative to boxing, particularly the relative boxing profession.

What are you trying to do when you get in a ring? You’re trying to knock the other guy down. You’re trying to hit him in the face. You’re trying to cause temporary damage—hopefully not permanent damage, but you’re trying to knock the guy senseless. You’re striking out at another image of God.

Now, I talked to Steve Samson’s son, who’s taking boxing for self-defense. And in his boxing class, it’s mostly like karate. It’s to teach you how to defend yourself, ward off blows, hurt your opponent. And in terms of self-defense, that’s okay. I think, you know, to learn how to defend yourself that way. But to look at it as a sport, I hope I’m not stepping on anybody’s toes here, but it just has come up. I just think there’s reason for pause about looking at the vocation or profession of boxing here and striking out at somebody’s face.

Okay, so those are the two specific cases and the application of lex talionis. And as I said, while I agree with Henry on one part of it—that these laws are gracious to servants—you cannot avoid the fact that these servants are legitimately beaten by their owner, not in the face, not to death, but they’re legitimately beaten by masters. Why is that?

Well, Proverbs 29:19-21. Turn there, please. Proverbs 29, beginning at verse 19.

“A servant will not be corrected by word, but though he understand, he will not answer.”

So the problem is servants in general. This isn’t true of all of them, but a lot of times servants are not correctable by words. That servant—now think of what these servants are. These are people who either because of debt or because they’ve stolen from you and have to make restitution, don’t have money. They’ve kind of sold themselves into servitude for you for a particular period of time.

Now, why are they there? They’re there because they haven’t learned self-control. They’re there for maturation. You’re supposed to be raising them up. So in the sixth year, they go out free with money. You’re supposed to give money when they go out. Or he becomes a household servant, not a servant in the field, but a servant in the house who loves his master, and he’s adopted into your family. Either way, freedom is the goal.

But it’s the goal. He hasn’t learned to live as a proper freeman yet. And because of that, he’s usually not corrected by words. There’ll come a time when to get him to work for you, you have to hit him, because what else can you do? This is the biblical system. He’s under your control now. He sold himself into your service for a period of time to repay a debt or whatever it was.

And what’s his motivation now—for working good or bad? He knows at the end of six years he gets out, and he gets out with money. So the servant is given the rod because in many cases the servant doesn’t have proper motivation.

Now we can imagine that at the beginning of servitude, he’s going to need the rod more often. And by the end of his period of service, as he’s about to be released, less use of the rod, because he’s become hopefully a mature responsible adult. Now, even though he’s an adult before, he’s really grown up in the context of who he is through the servitude to a discipling, caring master.

So the servant, the text makes clear, it’s okay to beat servants. And this is why: because the servant will not be corrected by words.

Verse 20:

“Seest thou a man that is hasty in his words? There is more hope of a fool than of him. He that delicately brings up his servant from a child shall have him become his son at the length.”

Now I think probably the first application of that is young servants. Bring him up as a child. But I think by way of application, not interpretation of this text, I think what I just said is what’s being spoken of here as well. The servant comes in immature, childlike, greatly indebted, so he can’t pay for his own well-being or his family’s household, or a criminal who steals from somebody else in the context of the community, can’t pay back, becomes their servant. He’s immature. He’s a child. And the purpose of the master is to raise him up.

You know, some masters all they ever want to do is talk to the servants. And the text here says, “Guy that’s hasty with his words is more hope of a fool than of him.” You have to recognize that words go so far with certain people and no further. And your goal, as you’re working out a servant, is to bring him up from a child. “Bring up your servant from a child and you shall have him become your son at length.”

You know, his ear will be posted at the doorpost, or his ear will be circumcised at the door of your house because he loves you.