Dennis Tuuri

Please stand for the reading of God’s word. Exodus 22:5 and 6.

“If a man causes a field or vineyard to be grazed and lets loose his animal and it feeds in another man’s field, he shall make restitution from the best of his own field and the best of his own vineyard. If fire breaks out and catches in thorns, so that stacked grain, standing grain, or the field is consumed, he who kindled the fire shall surely make restitution.”

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for your word and we pray now that your spirit would do its work in the context of our assembly. Infuse into us, Lord God, the characteristics of the Lord Jesus Christ. Cause us to go from glory to glory through your word and by your spirit. We ask this in Christ’s name and by his authority. Amen.

Please be seated.

We have talked about how worship forms the model for our lives. As most of us are beginning school this last week—whether it’s homeschool or private school or other schools—I want to share just a thought on trinitarian education. It’s not my thought; it comes from the Biblical Horizons list serve on the internet.

Trinitarian education seeks to mold into those being educated the character of the Father. Jesus said to see him is to see the Father. We pray for and attempt to see developed the character of God the Father in our children and in ourselves. Christian education stresses the word—the second person of the Trinity, the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the Word—and it has content to it in the context of character formation.

And Christian education stresses the third member of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. Christian education stresses the beautification and glorification of the world and of the education environment itself. I think it’s proper then to have songs and worshipful attitude in the context of our schools, whether they’re home schools or private schools. And that’s what we do on the Lord’s day. We come together and God puts into us the character of the Lord Jesus Christ, which is the character of the Father.

And he gives us content from his word. And He does this in the context of singing and joy and praise to him and the beautification work of the Holy Spirit. And he changes us. And so we take that into our world.

So as we approach today again a portion of God’s word that comes from what some people see as rather arcane and archaic—the Old Testament, particularly the archaic laws of fields, et cetera—we come to it in the presence of God, in the presence of thanksgiving to him for his word, praying that he would indeed give us his character, his knowledge, and his life by the Holy Spirit, that our hearts might rejoice not just today but through the rest of this week and into the rest of our lives.

Now we’ve talked about this particular section of Exodus 22, the law of the covenant verses 1-15 or 1-17 (take your pick), but this section essentially being geared at restitution relative to theft or property. At the end of last week’s sermon I mentioned again Matthew 19:28 and Acts 3:21. These are pivotal scriptures.

I believe our Savior tells us that we are now involved in, by his work, the regeneration—is how he describes it in Matthew 19:28.

In Acts 3:21, the angel says that the heavens must receive Jesus until the times of restoration of all things, which God has spoken of by the mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began. And with the coming of the Holy Spirit, on the basis of our Savior’s resurrection, I believe that initiates the time of the restoration of all things. The book of Acts can be seen as an unfolding of the restoration of all things based on the work of our Savior.

This is tied in an integral fashion to these laws of restitution that we’ve been reading about in Exodus, in the law of the covenant contained in the book of Exodus.

I want to give a few quotes here from R.J. Rushdoony dealing with restitution, but specifically with this idea of the restoration of all things in Acts 3:21. He points out that in the papyri, the particular Greek word here translated “restoration” means, and I quote now, “the restoration of estates to rightful owners, a balancing of accounts.” End quote. Christ works, as Rushdoony says, to restore the world—God’s estate—to its rightful owner and to place man and the world back under God’s law and in the process to balance all accounts, restoring to God what belongs to God and casting out of God’s presence and realm the reprobate into Gehenna or the dung heap of creation or their particular part in it.

Again quoting from Rushdoony, he says that salvation is inseparable from restitution because God’s redemption of man and of the world is its restoration to its original position under him and to his glory. Man’s work of restitution for the sin of Adam, for his own original sin, as it is worked out in the earth, is to recognize that as a new creation in Christ, he must make the earth a new creation under Christ.

We’re a new creation in Christ, or we’re to make the earth a new creation under Christ. The work of Christ in man is this work of restitution.

And one final set of quotes, again from Rushdoony’s work in his Institutes of Biblical Law: Jesus Christ came as the true man, the new Adam, to make restitution to God, rendering both perfect obedience in his life and death as our vicarious sacrifice and substitute, dying in our stead.

The death penalty is enforced against him. By his resurrection, he sets forth his power over sin and death and overcomes the enemy for his elect and gives them power over the enemy. He restores men into life and righteousness, regenerating them out of the state of sin and death.

Second, the redeemed man in the work of sanctification must further restitution and restoration. Not only must the world be restored to its original glory, but by virtue of the requirements of restitution, it must be developed to a double, four-fold, and five-fold degree to the glory of God in his service. As man’s required restitution, man must restore to God his due—total lordship over all things.

And this restoration begun by Christ’s regeneration act, continued by the Holy Spirit and made the very life of the redeemed man, will further shall begin to become into its own only when the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the earth.

We are, I believe, in the time of the restoration of all things, and the laws of restitution have great relevance to us—not just in the restitution and restoration of us to fellowship with God but rather our calling as dominion men to affect the outworking of that in the context of the created order as well—to give back to God, as it were, a world matured and glorified by the work of the Holy Spirit working through his regenerated saints.

Now, on your outline again, in the introduction I reference a book by Vern Poythress, “The Shadow of Christ in the Law of Moses.” I do this because this may not be as familiar to you as some other works on the application of God’s law and the law of the covenant, but it is a very good work and I’ll make brief reference to it now. He speaks in this book of Christ and his restitution. And I will have one more quote.

This is from Vern Poythress’s work, looking now at this restitution that’s been required throughout these laws in Exodus, and we’ll talk about again today. The lex talionis principle—in effect, the laws of restitution. Poythress says this: “The sacrifice of Jesus Christ fulfills the principle of restoration and punishment in the fullest possible way. Remember we said that sin there’s a restoring back to the person you stole from, but there’s also a punitive action of the double restitution that you’re required to pay to that fellow. Jesus Christ makes restoration and he fulfills the principle of punishment in the fullest possible way,” writes Poythress. “Full punishment for all the sins of the redeemed and full restoration of the cosmos to God are implied. His sacrifice is even construed in scripture as like a monetary payment or a ransom,” and he quotes here from 1 Peter 1:18 and 19:

“You know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way handed down to you from your forefathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect.”

But Christ’s sacrifice, says Poythress, does not eliminate the responsibility of the state to redress wrongs on its limited human plane. In fact, if the state properly executes its responsibility demanding two-fold restitution of thieves—if the state properly executes responsibility—it produces on earth little pictures or shadows of Christ’s great work of restoration and the fulfilling of our punishment requirements in his atonement. It’ll be a positive but limited aid to the process of bringing the nations to Christ and causing God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven.

To that end we pray at this church and work as well toward that end.

Poythress has some interesting comments in his book, and the section of scripture we talked about last week as well. Remember we said that there’s double restitution usually, but four-fold and five-fold for a sheep and an ox. Well, nobody’s really sure about the four and five-fold. I gave you some ideas last week. Another idea that Poythress says is that the four-fold restitution always applies to thieves who, no matter what they stole, either destroy it or sell it.

Remember we said that the double restitution, and we’ll get to next in two weeks from verse 7 and also from verse 4 in Exodus 22, the double restitution is if the thing that he stole is found in his hand. So if he hardens his heart by getting rid of the evidence of his sin and the thing that God still has in his hands bring him to repentance, if he hardens his heart by putting it away from him, then Poythress thinks all acts like that incur this four-fold restitution talked of in Exodus 22:1. So that’s an interesting comment by Poythress.

Poythress also notes that as the thief makes restitution in a two-fold way, he experiences the loss he produced from his theft from someone else. So he gets stolen—as it were, taken from him forcibly by God working through the civil magistrates—what he sought to forcibly take in an unjust way from someone else. So the thief enters into a compassion and the grace of God for the victim of his theft by means of double restitution.

The thief also, by means of slavery or servitude, experiences restoration. It’s much like our parole system, although as Poythress says, more personal. When the thief can’t make restitution, he becomes the servant of the person he owes the restitution to. Or someone else, of course, could contract services from him and pay the proceeds to the person that he owes the restitution to. In that way, the thief again is brought to an awareness of his sin through this diligent work required to pay back what he had thought to steal from somebody else.

And the thief, by way of rehabilitation, ends up learning a profession or a vocation at least in terms of the work that he’s employed in. So you see that God’s law, far from being the strict onerous terrible thing that many people paint it as, is really a means of extension of grace even to reprobates—because that’s the gospel, is it not? We’re those reprobates and God’s word reaches to us. And he wants us not to wall ourselves off from those outside of Christ, but to reach them and to reach them by means even of the punitive sanctions of God’s law.

After all, the Lord Jesus Christ suffered those punitive sanctions for us. God thinks that highly of the punitive sanctions of his law. So we shouldn’t think that somehow in New Testament times these punitive sanctions are somehow put away from us.

Poythress quotes from C.S. Lewis. Lewis said that God whispers to us in our pleasures. He speaks to our conscience, but he shouts to us in our pain. Whispers in our pleasures, speaks to our conscience, but shouts in our pain. And when the pain of restitution or servitude—if you can’t make the restitution—comes upon a sinner, then that pain is the means by which God is shouting to a man to amend his ways and to accept the grace that God offers through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Much the way that the hunger of the man who will not work is God shouting at him. And when we get rid of that hunger that God says is the characteristic of the slothful man, we get rid of God shouting to that man and turn down the volume of God’s word.

All right. So by way of introduction—all of that and by way of pointing out this work from Vern Poythress—now let’s get to the specific case laws we’re going to consider today.

There are two of them, very simple ones. The first case law has to do with both cases having to do with inadvertent damage to property. This is sort of like the open pit, but that was a little bit different—people coming onto your property. Now, these two laws have to do with possessions of yours, whether it’s straying livestock or straying fire that you own, you start, you maintain dominion over for the sake of your fields.

When they stray to your neighbor’s field and do inadvertent damage, simple restitution is required.

So, first case law is verse 5: damage from unrestrained animals. When I say “unrestrained” here, in your outline I put “lets loose,” not “dried.” The translation of the verse in verse 5: “If a man causes a field or vineyard to be grazed.” Interesting, isn’t it? Field or vineyard, field or vineyard. Even as you go through the Old Testament case law, you have these repeated references to the communion table.

Yeah. We come to the field and the vineyard at the communion table. Well, so it puts all of property in the context of the extension of God’s grace to us in holy communion.

Well, in any event: “If a man causes a field or vineyard to be grazed and lets loose his animal.” In other words, this is not a guy who’s driving his animal over to your property to eat there. He just hasn’t restrained it. He lets it loose. He lets it have its liberty. He doesn’t pen it about somehow or restrict its liberty. And as a result, he inadvertently, but nonetheless, he causes your field or vineyard to be grazed, eaten up—either through the animal eating the stuff or through the dog running through your flowers or the horse trampling over your corn or whatever it is—destroyed, right? Eaten up or consumed and it feeds in another man’s field.

And what’s the result? Well, he makes restitution. I’m sorry, he makes restitution from the best of his own field and the best of his own vineyard.

Now, this terminology is a simple assertion again of private property rights. I’ve listed Deuteronomy 23. Those verses simply say that people can walk onto your land. People visiting can walk through and even pluck some of your fruit or grain as they go through. So there’s not, you know, this idea that your property is totally in isolation from community. But it certainly asserts your property rights for protection from damage from neighbors that might come upon it.

Now the interesting thing that I want to point out just in passing here is that in this context where you make restitution from the best of your vineyard or field. We could talk about practical reason for that. But I think one thing we want to think of when we read about this sort of restitution in light of what we’ve talked about in terms of the atonement of Christ is that when Jesus makes restitution in our stead to God for the sin of Adam, he comes as the perfect unblemished offering, as the quote from First Peter talks about, as the redemption price for us. He’s the best of the field. He’s the best of the vineyard. He’s the best of the bread. He’s the best of the wine.

This is the Lord Jesus Christ presented before us as the best and perfect offering made to God to secure our atonement. In the Old Testament system in Leviticus 1:10, the burnt sacrifice had to be a male without blemish. And in Malachi 1:14, the man who brought an animal to be sacrificed to the Lord that was blemished was to be cursed—would be cursed by God.

The offering system and restitution penalties of the Old Testament pointed to the coming of the one without spot or wrinkle, without blemish—the Lord Jesus Christ who would begin to affect that work in his bride as well. And so the basis for the atonement is a perfect man without blemish. Him and him alone can make atonement. And the Lord Jesus Christ is that one who came.

These laws speak by way of shadow of the Lord Jesus Christ and his perfection. Hebrews 9:12-14 reminds us of this connection of the unblemished offerings and the Lord Jesus Christ:

“Not with the blood of goats and calves, but with his own blood, he entered the most holy place once for all, having obtained eternal redemption. For if the blood of bulls and goats and the ashes of a heifer, sprinkling the unclean, sanctifies for the purifying of the flesh, how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God.”

We can talk about the civil application of these laws. We should. But at the center of our understanding of these texts is the work of the Lord Jesus Christ who has made full atonement—an offering without blemish or spot—for you. The end of which should be to purge your conscience, to cleanse it, that you might serve him with a clean conscience and a pure faith and you might have a love for him that motivates you in service.

A love for the one who made restitution for the fires you set with your heart set on fire by hell and your sins that create harm and damage to other people. The Lord Jesus Christ has made perfect restitution for these things.

The second case is the case of damage from unrestrained fire. It’s interesting, and we’ll get to this in a minute, but the text reads in verse 6:

“If fire breaks out and catches in thorns, so that stacked grain, standing grain, or the field is consumed, he who kindled the fire shall surely make restitution.”

Interesting—the detail given to us here and we’ll make one application of that in a couple of minutes. The fire breaks out. It then catches the thorns. What does it mean when it catches the thorns? Well, in Isaiah, we read of the hedges that are around the fields of God. In Isaiah 5:5, God says he’ll take away the hedge thereof. There were hedges around fields, not typically fences as we would think of them—white picket fences—but hedges, and typically custom tells us of thorns.

In fact, the book of Sirach, an apocryphal book, in chapter 28 talks about these thorn hedges in verse 24: “Look that thou hedge thy possession about with thorns and bind up thy silver and gold.”

Now the apocryphal books are not inspired. I do not quote it as an inspired work. I quoted Vern Poythress. I quoted R.J. Rushdoony. And I quote the book of Sirach. These were wise men, for the most part, given over to submission and submissiveness to God’s law and trying to apply it in their lives. And the book of Sirach reflects the truth certainly of the customs or culture of the day when he speaks about hedging about your possession your life with a hedge of thorns.

So the idea here is that with the forward-looking nature of God’s law—remember this law is given to people in the desert in the wilderness, but he says you’re going to be in the promised land and when that time arrives, you’re going to have fields. And you’re probably going to hedge them about with thorns to keep people and animals out, so that you know, animals don’t stray in or out.

But when you start a fire to burn off your seed—and you know farmers know about this—the way to burn off all the crop regularly and create a better crop for the next year is to burn what’s left over. So they would do this. But sometimes those thorn hedges would catch on fire and then the fire would spread to the neighbor’s field.

So when that happens, it’s okay to light a fire. It’s okay to be productive with your land. He doesn’t outlaw fire again. He didn’t outlaw open pits. But when you do it, be careful. Be careful it doesn’t start your wall of thorns on fire and then it ends up in the neighbor’s field.

It’s interesting. It talks about the neighbor’s stacked grain—the harvested grain that might be in the field—the standing grain, in other words, mature crops, or even the little crops, the field itself. It doesn’t mean the dirt. It means immature plants might be burned, the plants themselves. So whether you hurt your neighbor’s kind of the beginning of his labor or the maturation of his labor or the harvested labor, whatever it is, you’re responsible to make simple restitution, but restitution nonetheless, for kindling that fire that you did not restrain in the providence of God.

Okay, so it’s pretty simple and it’s kind of topical.

I mean, I know it’s jumping right to another case, but these things are fairly simple. I mention topical because the subject of fires and who started them and who’s responsible for them is a contemporary or topical one in our culture today. The Rush Limbaugh show this week used the Billy Joel song “We Didn’t Start the Fire” as the update theme music for the ongoing Waco investigation. Whether or not the FBI started the fire intentionally or unintentionally, Exodus law has some pretty serious implications for that, does it not? I mean, if there was inadvertent starting of the fire, still restitution must be made. You left your pit open. You didn’t cover it. A child fell in and died. Your life is required, the scriptures say. Now you can be ransomed from that, the scriptures say. But it has that level of seriousness.

And of course, there are other things going on at Waco that have that kind of level of seriousness also. But it is the one who starts the fire, who kindles the fire here, who is responsible for making the restitution.

And now, again, here as with the rest of the laws we’ve seen, individual private property ownership rights are affirmed by these cases. The understanding is when you go into the promised land it’s not the elimination of private property. It’s not communally held land. God parcels out lots of land to individual tribes, and within them different people will have particular plots of land.

Private property is the norm biblically, as affirmed by these case laws. Private property interests are to be defended by the civil government. These are judgments or statutes given to the civil government: protect private property rights from inadvertent harm. Now, stealing is certainly advertent harm, but inadvertent harm is to be protected by the civil government. And third, private property owners are responsible for their own actions and the actions of their subordinates.

Whoever they get to kindle their fire is going to have a degree of responsibility to them for hiring them and not being careful about it. Privately owned property and personal liability are here the dual tandem of God’s system of normal economic progression. And this is in an agricultural place, in an agricultural setting, but it has implications for us as well.

Gary North, speaking on this case of law, says that predictable court enforcement of private property rights is the foundation of capitalism, the foundation of the sort of system this country was based upon. We find its roots here in the case laws of the scriptures. After all, how do you know if you should have private property or not? Is it natural law somehow? Do we just sort of know this in our conscience? No, I don’t think so. The conscience is defiled. It’s in rebellion to God apart from the revealed word of God. The revealed word of God is what should dictate to us our system of economics and understanding of how property is owned.

And it dictates here private property with great responsibility to the one who exercises dominion over land.

Matthew Henry, speaking on these two verses together and talking about the need for responsibility for one’s actions, says that we should be more careful not to do wrong than not to suffer wrong. Because to suffer wrong is only an affliction. But to do wrong is a sin. And sin is always worse than affliction.

That sounds, what does that mean? Well, it means that most of us are more concerned about suffering wrong, protecting ourselves, than we are about making sure we don’t do somebody else damage. But the scriptures say that doing somebody else damage is sin if we’re not careful. We have to make restitution for that sin. Whereas suffering wrong for somebody else is merely affliction. And God says that’s part of his development of our character.

George Bush, the commentator in the 1800s, says this: “Men should suffer for their carelessness as well as for their wickedness.” Wickedness, theft, punishment. Carelessness, straying cattle, animals, or fire, punishment, restitution, simple restitution. They must suffer for their carelessness as well as their wickedness.

And again, quoting Bush: “Men are to be held accountable not only for the damages they do, but for the damage they occasion by their negligence.”

Now, we’ve grown up understanding this a little bit. If you’re my age, you remember Smokey the Bear and you know that matchstick, put it out, or whatever it was. I don’t remember the fellow’s name on the old ads, but you know, it’s camping season and the application of this is pretty obvious, is it not? We’ve got 92-degree weather coming tomorrow. We’ve got a strong wind. I don’t know where you’re going this afternoon or soon or tomorrow. But if you’re going to go out and have a fire of some type, be careful.

If you set a fire and it spreads to property that isn’t yours and you do damage, you’re responsible. Whether the civil magistrate says so or not, you have the guilt of God if you do not obey this law of restitution in your own homes.

There’s a neat thing Wednesday night at the young men’s Bible study—hearing these young guys talk about the sermon. They actually listen to it, at least now that they have to talk about it Wednesday night. I’m sure they do other times, but they listen hard. They’re trying to make application. Brian C. was talking about a construction site he was at and there was a pit and they had a little bit of yellow caution tape around it that will not work—trying to protect, you know, a little child who doesn’t understand tape or an animal from straying and falling into the pit. So they’re thinking about application.

They’re thinking about, to some degree, civil magistrate’s responsibility in terms of making sure that buildings meet some safety requirements. The law of the parapet—the fence around the roof. Arthur M. brought a nice talk to that Wednesday night to the young men’s Bible study. You know, it means that we shouldn’t just, in our libertarian conservative reaction to the statism culture, throw off all building regulations.

The scriptures say there’s a building regulation known as a parapet and you should have some government oversight of construction practices to prevent damage to the community. Not enough just to make restitution. You want to be forward thinking to try to prevent harm from coming to people in the context of the community. We don’t want to overreact away from statism. Well, here’s the same thing.

There are reasons why the civil magistrate at times says no open fires, because if you start an open fire, you can’t take care of the damage it would cause.

I remember seeing a story about a couple vacationing someplace in the Midwest and they had a big travel trailer—big thing—and one of the tires blew and they didn’t know it. And you know, truck drivers know this, but you know, on these dual tandem rigs, one of the tires can blow and the other tires are carrying the full weight of things. You don’t know it’s gone, but it’s dragging on the ground and it is rubber and rubber at a certain point ignites and then it flames and it’s really hard to put out.

So they were going over I think hundreds of miles dragging a burning tire behind them. They had no idea of it and it was starting fires everywhere they went. Thousands of acres were burned up from this couple, oblivious to their damage, driving down in this travel trailer.

Be careful, because the law—I don’t know how it worked out, but they went to that couple for restitution for all the damage done that vehicle had participated in.

Now I’m not sure that’s right or not. This law seems to have, you know, the idea is you have knowledge that the fire you kindle could cause damage and that knowledge is the basis for your responsibility. They’re tied together. When you don’t have knowledge that something you do may be dangerous, I think your liability is lessened.

The specific immediate application of the law is knowledge of liability—that an action you take could be damaging to someone else’s property. And we should apply it very easily in that way when we’re camping or whatever it is.

The Judases and Mallisters have firsthand information now about fires and how rapidly they spread and the devastation they can bring in the context of a house or a community. And it’s something we all need to think about. Fires are quite common and these verses tell us to be very careful when starting a fire for a legitimate purpose in our own homes or on our own property.

All right. Now, I want to push the envelope just a bit with point number two.

Gary North, in his long commentary “The Tools of Dominion” on these case laws from Exodus, has, I don’t know, 70 or more pages on these two verses. But it all sort of boils down to what he sees as a legitimate application of these laws in areas of pollution. You can think of the straying beast or the straying fire as pollution from an activity you’re engaged in.

Now, you’re engaged in an economic activity. You’re growing crops, you’re growing an animal, and then part of the consequence is that economic activity becomes the cost to others when your activity gets out of control. You produce fire pollution or devouring beast pollution to your neighbor.

And so, let’s say you live in an area and you’ve got some kind of operation going on that produces a lot of smoke. And now you’re watching the field burning in southern Oregon. Several years ago, there was a humongous accident on I-5. The grass crops down. You got to burn off the fields every year. They’d burn them off. The fire got out. I don’t know if the fire got out of control, but the wind came up. Smoke blew across the freeway. Could not see what was going on. Big accident.

Now, again, there I’m not so sure that the field owners—that it’s necessarily a correct application of this law to hold them liable—because the shifting winds with that kind of thing may or may not have been knowledgeable. You need judges to sort this stuff out. But the guiding principles of the truth of restitution are placed for us here.

And I think we could fairly easily see in the case of southern Oregon that the cloud of fire smoke, the pollution there, creates a problem downstream. And if you know that your smoke has stuff in it that’s going to rot away railroad tracks or something, then you are responsible for not causing that damage.

We were in southern Poland with Boo driving us to Prague in May and we went over part of the mountains there between Poland and the Czech Republic and it was no trees up there because of acid rain—completely denuded the fields. And if this is true, this really did happen. They had horrific pollution clouds in Poland in the ’40s and ’50s. And not just trees, there are railroad tracks in Poland that you can’t drive more than—they can’t take the trains more than 15 or 20 mph over them—because the tracks have been so corroded by the corrosion in the air of these pollution clouds coming from state-owned means of production.

So I think we can see a fairly easy application that these laws say: you got a factory, it’s putting off noxious smoke that’s going to destroy somebody’s house, for instance. You’ve been made aware of that. You don’t stop the activity. You’re responsible to make your neighbor right? You’re responsible to make restitution.

Now, the problem today is correctly identifying sources of pollution. And this is a very large and complicated area in terms of judicial regulations today. But what I want you to see again is that we kind of react against pollution control devices. But when you’ve got a situation where you got I don’t know how many million people are in the greater Los Angeles area and the civil government knows that the combined pollution put off from those cars is causing people physical harm, then it seems like a correct application of Exodus 22:5 and 6 is that you’re getting benefit from driving this car, but you’re passing part of the cost of the increased pollution in the area onto other people who do not get the benefit from your car.

And that’s not right. You’re supposed to make restitution.

Now, the civil government sees a situation like that. You cannot identify specific polluters. You got a huge number of people driving their cars. And North thinks—and I think he might be right—that it’s a legitimate application of the truth of this law that the civil government will say, “You ought to have some pollution control devices on your car. We got to clean it up for everybody. Everybody will bear part of the cost. If you’re going to buy a car, part of the cost of your pollution is going to be built into that car by stronger pollution control devices.”

It’s appropriate for the civil government, I believe, to tell you when you go out cutting a chainsaw in public lands or on parklands, you have to have a spark arrest on it, because you’re not supposed to start a fire. You wouldn’t be able to make restitution for the kind of fire that might be started and we’re going to stop that from happening—like the parapet around the roof.

Now, you may disagree with me, but I hope you see where I’m going. We can take the truths of this law and say there’s a section of civil law that stems from these one or two verses that really is fairly significant in the kind of culture as we have today where large groups of people are put together into a very small area.

And I believe the scriptures would have us think that way. Think: how do we apply these truths in our particular context? We don’t want to be libertarians. I mean, much of the scriptural view of government is libertarian in a way, but some of it isn’t. Some regulations on the part of the civil government seem appropriate and good.

There’s a gas tax controversy going on in the state of Oregon. Without getting into the specifics of it, the truth is if you’re going to use the roads, you ought to pay for the roads. And if the gas taxes need to be increased to repair roads and nothing else—and I know that’s a big controversy and are the trucks paying their fair share? That’s on the ballot this year in Oregon. But the point is gas taxes are some of the best taxes we have because they’re use taxes.

Pollution fines should be used to pay victims of pollution that has not been restrained in the past. It shouldn’t be going to general government coffers. And another point North makes is that pollution control should be localized, where people know the particular industry, they know the effects.

All of which puts our whole view on this quite a distance away from the present application of this. But still we are not conservative, knee-jerk conservatives. We’re saying the law of God has relevance now. Let’s push the envelope a little bit further in Roman numeral number three and make it very pertinent to us.

We’ve seen how pertinent it is: the picture of the atonement of Christ; the obvious care we should take in our property not to hurt other people’s property; the implications for civil governance enforcing pollution restitution to a degree upon people that pollute or hurt other people by their economic activities.

But now we come to a very—I think—broad application.

But first I have to set up this pushing of the envelope just a bit. And what I have on your outline here—and I know this is just going to go probably over your heads in some cases—but this came across the Biblical Horizons list this last week. One of the classes I’m going to do in my home this year is going through Leviticus and then in the second half of your New Testament survey.

And some of what I’ve got here on your outline is a reminder of what Jim Jordan taught us at family camp and what Eugene Rosenstock-Huessy—who writes kind of a Christian perspective of cultures, civilization and philosophy—posits. Rosenstock-Huessy posits that maturation occurs in this way. You move from the imperative stage to the cohortative stage to the interrogative stage to the indicative stage.

And what does that mean? Well, underneath that, I’ve got kind of an explanation of it. It moves from a stage first of command. A culture is commanded. Secondly, the cohortative stage is to do something and to do it with joy and to do it with a sense of, you know, excitement and thrill or ardor for the task. Do it with singing. The third is a course correction. As we’re been commanded, then we do with joy, we move from simple flat-out obedience to joyful obedience.

And exhorting one another, and then we do a course correction as we get going. We see where things we’ve done haven’t been necessarily right. We’ve got to correct our course. And then there’s a reflection stage that comes after the course correction and maturity. And this can happen in the context of a person’s life. Rosenstock-Huessy also thinks it happens in the context of a civilization.

I just wanted to think of it in terms of both our lives personally as well as the development of the scriptures.

So remember Jim Jordan taught us this at camp. The scriptures can be seen in one sense as moving through these phases of development from the Old Testament to the New Testament. We begin with Sinai law, the command function—simple statements of fact: do these things. Then in the middle of the Old Testament, there’s the kingdom psalm period of Old Testament revelation.

Now we’ve gotten the law and we’re doing the law. We’re singing psalms. We’re doing it with rejoicing in the context of the kingdom. And then the kingdom kind of falls into disarray and it needs that course correction. And the prophets come along to speak judgments based on the law of God—based on what they’re doing or not doing in reference to that law. And now there’s this course correction applied to Israel in the context of its development.

And as we see laid out in the history of the Old Testament, and then finally we come to the New Testament with epistles of reflection on all of these truths. It’s the maturing of the revelation of God in the New Testament. It’s the reflection on these different phases and now the completion of those in Jesus Christ.

And in a sense, the New Testament itself begins with, you know, historical command sort of stuff, to the explanation of the doing of Acts, the course correction, and then this reflection that the epistles have in them.

Jordan related this to the four faces of the cherubim: the ox, lion, eagle, and man. By the way, I’ll probably have the students in my class this year memorize this material I’m giving you. I think it is good for an overview of the scriptures.

And then finally, you can see the same thing reflected in our worship service. We are called and commanded to come. We confess our sins and God absolves us for our offense. The command, the imperative siatic law portion of the worship service. We move from that to praise and worship. We sing songs of praise to God in the context of the Psalms. We then have the sermon—course correction. That is in the words of Rosenstock-Huessy, interrogative. You think through: how are you doing in these things? Do you have any course corrections to make?

And then finally, the supper is at the end of our worship service where we sit content that we’ve been placed in the kingdom by God, reflective on the grace he’s given us through these stages of life.

And one final thing: our lives individually go through this. Our children are commanded. They reach the teenage days when they’re really, you know, anxious to do things. And they’re that cohortative stuff—they’re really enjoying it. They’re doing it with singing. Then you get to my age: midlife crisis sets in.

And that’s another way of saying that you come to a course correction. You recognize that some of the things you did in your youth and immaturity were just that—youthful and immature. You had to go through that. But now you see in retrospect that some things you did weren’t particularly useful and that there were damaging things you did. And you kind of get to a deeper element in your consideration of life. You go through a course correction and that prepares you for the last stage of your life—the elder stage of life. And you reflect on your participation in the kingdom and now you become even better in your service for God’s kingdom.

Well, okay. The point of that is we’re dealing with siatic law here. And what I think God wants us to do with this law is to think it through in a reflective manner on what it means to us in terms of our application.

There’ll be a time, I think, in the history of our church when the sermons will be shorter because I won’t have to go through half an hour instructing you and me about the specifics of God’s law. You know, they didn’t have to do that in the New Testament church. All those boys and girls were raised good Jews and they went down to synagogue and they had classes all the time on the Torah and they knew about this restitution stuff.

We don’t see—if we did that in, let’s say, some review of that quickly as we all have it in our mind what the law of God is about either in Sunday school or a very brief introduction to the sermon—then the sermon could be the reflection on that siatic law.

But I can’t do that. You don’t know the law well enough. I don’t know it well enough either. I believe that I’ve got to kind of mix these elements together in the sermon.

And what I want to do is cause us to reflect a little bit on what some other meaning or application of this text could be using biblical imagery.

Now, I’ve got a contemporary example, historical example of reflection on the law. I’m quoting here from a book called “Guide to English Juries,” published in 1682. This book is cited in a photocopy of a book I have. I can’t find my original. If you’ve got it, please give it back to me. H.B. Clark wrote a book called “Biblical Law” in 1944. And he quotes from this English book relative to jury. Let me just tell you about this book a little bit.

Let me read the reflection. This is a reflection on siatic law, prophetic judgments, and kingdom psalm singing by men who in the 1600s were trying to explicitly build a law system based on the scriptures. And what are juries about? I got to figure it out. I’m writing the voter’s guide this year. What are juries about? Where do they come from the scriptures?

Let me read you a quote from Clark’s book, quoting from this 1682 work called “Guide to English Juries.” Clark says, “The ancient trial before elders was the forerunner of the trial by jury which became established in England after 1066. For centuries the jury had consisted of 12 men. In ‘Guide to English Juries,’ published in 1682, it is said: ‘In analogy of late the jury is reduced to the number of 12 like the prophets were 12 to foretell the truth; the apostles 12 to preach the truth; the discoverers 12 sent into Canaan, the spies, to seek and report the truth; and the stones 12 that the heavenly Jerusalem is built on.’”

Now, I didn’t just quote from some, you know, origin or some symbolic theologian of the church fathers who didn’t know the application of God’s word. I quoted from a maturing English civil justice system that tried to reflect on God’s law and God’s history and make application as to how many men we should have in a jury. That’s why we have 12 guys today—because of a reflection on the law of God.

Now, this wonderful quote is found in a theocratic book. Yes, let me read you about this book. The title of the book by Clark, published in 1944, is “Biblical Law.” Here’s the subtitle: “Being a text of the statutes, ordinances, and judgments established in the Holy Bible with many allusions to secular popular laws, ancient, medieval, and modern, documented to the scriptures, judicial decisions, and legal literature.”

And what it is, it’s kind of like a written statute book with all these references to biblical law. It takes all of God’s law and his word and tries to make a statute book out of them. And then it has various citations to legal cases throughout history for thousands of years, such as the one we just read, dating back to the English jury system.

Now, let me read another thing from this book. This is from the foreword of this book. I find this really interesting. Okay, this is the second edition of the book. I have went through two editions in 1944. People bought this book.

“The approval that has been accorded the first edition of ‘Biblical Law’ by judges and lawyers, ministers and Bible students and the general public as well has justified the author’s estimate of the importance of the subject and the widespread interest therein. The Bible has risen to new heights of popularity in these distressing times—World War II—and many thoughtful persons are discovering for themselves a new the truth known to our fathers: that the Bible is not only the source of spiritual guidance, but also the most authoritative code for determining questions as to temporal conduct, whether in respect of personal, national, or world affairs.”

Theocrat, whatever title you want to put on it. This wasn’t written in the 1600s. This introduction, this book, the quote I read from the English jury system was. But this book was published by Benford and Mort in Portland, Oregon in 1944. And H.B. Clark was a state legislator, I believe, in Oregon at some point in time.

Well, it’s a little humbling, isn’t it? We think we’ve discovered biblical law. No, the church has had a witness throughout history to the truths of God’s law as it relates to various applications—personal, civil, and ecclesiastical. What a wonderful treasury we have in the writings even of Portland, Oregon in the mid-’40s. Just incredible to me.

But the main point I wanted to make is that men knew—Clark knew, and certainly the English system knew—to make reflection on the law of God.

All right. What reflection can we make upon the fact that the Bible doesn’t say if you start a fire and your neighbor’s property is damaged, you make restitution, but rather…