Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Reformation Covenant Church
Pastor Dennis Tuuri

Sermon text is Exodus 22, verses 16 and 17. Please stand for the reading of God’s word.

“If a man entices a virgin who is not betrothed and lies with her, he shall surely pay the bride price for her to be his wife. If her father utterly refuses to give her to him, he shall pay money according to the bride price of virgins.”

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you that you call us to be people of this word and we know that in our own natural abilities, we have no understanding in our Adamic nature of the scriptures.

We thank you, Lord God, for the gift of your Holy Spirit given to us on the basis of our Savior’s work. And we pray, Father, that he would do what he has sent forth from you, Father, and you, Son, to do—to teach us things of the Savior, to open our ears, that we may indeed hear wondrous things out of your law, and might praise you as we see our lives transformed by your word working in the context of your Spirit in our life.

We pray this in the name of our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. Please be seated. Nursery attendees may be dismissed.

My wife was humming the old Frank Sinatra song “Love and Marriage.” Love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage on the way to church this morning. Not sure why she doesn’t know this, but that is now the theme song—it’s been for several years—of a television show that certainly is not consistent with that truth.

The scriptures in the verses placed before us show that love and marriage are to go together, and that song from just a generation ago—as other songs of the popular age era a generation or two ago—portrayed a society that understood and had not veered so horrendously as it has now from that foundation of the relationship of love and marriage.

We return today to our continuing series going through the law of the covenant in Exodus 21-23, and we now come to the conclusion of what can be seen as the first half of that law of the covenant.

The reason we know that there is a transition here is that we have these “if-then” statements given in chapters 21 through this portion of chapter 22 with verse 18, which we’ll deal with next week. We now have a different sort of grammar being used in the presentation of God’s requirements of God’s law. So there’s a sense in which God places a marker here at the end of verse 17, and he wants us to see this first unit as somewhat complete at the end of this first marker.

What I’ve given you in the context of your outline is one way to think of this: to think of how far we’ve veered from the faith of our fathers in this country. I’ve listed “liberty, life and the pursuit of property/happiness.” A couple of references there: of course, in the Declaration of Independence, we assert as a nation that all men have this inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

We said that was a phrase that was borrowed and then transformed a bit from John Locke, as Jefferson rewrote it. It used to be “life, liberty, and the pursuit of property,” and Jefferson understood the relationship of property and happiness but saw in happiness the definition that really we can read into the Declaration was the proper use of property. So we have life, liberty, and the pursuit of property/happiness—not property in isolation, but property lived in the context of community.

And we want to add the words of another famous American forefather: “Give me liberty or give me death.” Life without liberty is not truly life in the providence of God. So we would place liberty before life.

Now when we do that, we have an outline of this first half of the law of the covenant. Well, remember that the law of the covenant began with a discussion of slavery and began with a series of statutes intended to bring men out of slavery into a position of either being a house slave—now a servant, an adopted son into the house—or being redeemed out of slavery by buying his way out of the servitude.

It moved from that to a consideration of the protection and advancement of liberty at the beginning of the law of the covenant. It moved from that to a discussion of the protection and advancement of life in various forms. Life—from two men struggling, and if you hurt somebody else’s life, you’ve got to pay for their economic loss and the loss to the employer. Life—the protection of innocent bystanders. The protection and development of life not just of pregnant women but of their unborn children as well, as protected in the law of the covenant.

So liberty and then life, and then we saw in the context of that, of course, the laws against kidnapping—a reduction of liberty. And we saw liberty in the context of God’s law correlating the kidnapping statutes in Deuteronomy to the removal or stealing of the means of dominion. The point is—you remember from that sermon—that liberty is to the end that we might exercise life in terms of vocation to God. Liberty isn’t just “we can do whatever we want.” Life to the Christian is vocation exercised in relationship to God in the context of his life.

We saw last week that our very life is connected with the exercise of dominion in terms of our vocations, our callings, but also the exercise of dominion in terms of discipling the nations. So for the life of the Christian, the protection of that life by the case laws of God—and hopefully by the laws of men that reflect the truths of these case laws—protect the exercises of vocation to the end that the Christian man and woman and household can be part of, in some small way or in some major way, the discipling of the nations.

And then the laws move to a consideration of property, going from liberty to life and then, just before these verses, a consideration of property. Their property was first dealt with in terms of isolation—that you got to protect your own property, people can’t steal from you—but then we saw the transition to property used in the context of community. So the community described in the opening of the case law as the means whereby a man comes out of servitude into freedom. That community is then developed in the context of the property laws, so that property is exercised in the context of community, giving, borrowing, etc. And that is protected and encouraged by the law of God.

The exercise of property in community—which is happiness. And now here we reach kind of the culmination of all of that. And that is the culmination of community is found in the context of biblical marriage.

So we have this movement from liberty to life to community. And it’s the same movement that we have talked about both in our Leviticus class and in the communion talks: that the book of Leviticus moves from the atoning work of Christ to laws for holy living and then to the context of community.

So the first three sacrifices in Leviticus 1-3 picture atonement. Then it pictures the need to be obedient to the king, the Lord Jesus Christ, in holiness. And then it talks about the peace offering—our relationship of community. So this idea of liberty bought through the atoning work of Christ to the end that we might live lives in conformity to God’s law and in holiness, and then do this in the context of biblical community, is the flow of redemptive history. That’s what our Christian lives are about, as pictured both in these laws of the covenant—the first half of them—as well as in the example of the flow of the book of Leviticus.

Now we say in the introduction here that community culminates in marriage, and as I said, this is the concluding portion of the first half of the law of the covenant and it deals with Christian marriage. And so the culmination of community is seen in its highest form in the context of Christian marriage.

And we want to note here the high blessedness of biblical community. When God creates man, he creates him in righteousness, holiness, knowledge, and dominion. But he also creates man according to Genesis 1:26-28 in the context of community. Male and female together in their community reflect the image of God—reflect the community that’s found in the triune God. The fellowship and the union and communion amongst the Trinity being portrayed now in the union and communion we have in biblical community and explicitly in the context of Christian marriage.

So we’re looking now at the details of this particular portion of God’s word that we might understand the relationship of seduction, of perversion of biblical marriage and community, and its resultant slavery—but then God’s law being redemptive and bringing salvation.

So what we’re going to talk about in terms of these laws of seduction is the seduction sin presented to us, the resultant slavery—which will be a theme that will work particularly at the end of the sermon—that results from sin. But then God’s purposes are redemptive to produce salvation. So really this idea of life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and property are all kind of brought together in this capstone case law dealing with seduction, servitude, and salvation.

We are people of the word and the words of God are important to us. Last week we said that we want to understand God’s word in order to have reformation in the context of our land. We want to understand and know what the word of God is all about. It’s really enjoyable this morning being in the processional and recognizing that nearly all the men now in the processional—most of them are these young men who have grown up, that we’ve known most of them as children—and now they’re growing up and they’re young men. And as young men they should be, of course, and are in an understanding of the word of God.

So whatever they can do, whatever we can do to understand the word of God, apply ourselves to its instruction, and study it is a good and proper thing to do. I don’t know what you do Sunday mornings, but if some of the young men and young women are just getting an extra hour’s worth of sleep, let me recommend you’d be better to come to the Sunday school class and receive instruction in the book of Leviticus, that we might know the word of God.

This arcane Old Testament law, as we’ll see, has tremendous significance for the restoration of men from servitude and moving in terms of biblical salvation and community. But we won’t know that if we don’t understand what this law says.

The word of God is what we are into. Last night at my house, the movie Saving Private Ryan was on. What was the vocation of the soldier played by Tom Hanks, who saved Ryan? Do you know it was a big deal in the movie? There was a bet going on, a pool as to what he actually did. And at a critical point, to prevent men from gross sin, he declares his vocation back home in the States. His vocation was he was a teacher, and specifically he was a teacher of English composition. He was a man of the word. And as a picture of the saving work of Christ, which he definitely is in the movie, he pictures that as well in being a man of the word.

Jesus was the teacher. Jesus was the word. And we as Christians are to be men of the word. And that’s the way we accomplish the salvation of the nations, the discipleship of them.

This morning I wear a gift, you know, from the foresters—from their trip they bought me a tie. It’s a picture. And when you look at it today, think of letters. Think of literacy. Think of English composition. Think about—was it Miller? Was that the guy? I don’t remember the name of the man who saved Ryan. But in any event, think about that: that’s what we’re to be—men of the word.

All right, let’s apply ourselves to the word now in terms of these two verses and look at them and try to understand the details that are given to us here. And what we want to do first is understand the text and then draw out some major themes.

In terms of understanding the text, first look at the text where we look at the sin and the penalty for the sin that’s given to us at its most obvious level. The text says: “If a man entices a virgin who is not betrothed and lies with her, he shall pay the bride price for her to be his wife.”

The sin here is seduction of a non-betrothed virgin. Now, the word “virgin” here could mean “young woman,” so it doesn’t necessarily imply virginity, but it seems to imply virginity, which is of course the normal state of young girls growing up in the context of a covenantally faithful nation. I mean, our women, our daughters are supposed to be virgins. So they’re treated that way in the context of the laws of Israel.

But this particular virgin is seduced by a young man. And as a result of the seduction, they then enter into a relationship that is sexual with each other, which is not to take place until marriage. Now, this is a young girl, and this young girl is under the covenantal oversight of her father. And according to Numbers, any vow she enters into can be countermanded by the father.

Now that is only good until the time in which she leaves the household. Numbers 30:16 says this: “These are the statutes which the Lord commanded Moses between a man and his wife and between a father and his daughter in her youth in her father’s house.”

So, you know, we’ve talked about this: at what point does the woman leave the covenantal oversight of her father? And it seems from the Numbers text that we can read into it that there is no necessary prohibition against a woman going out on her own with the father’s and mother’s approval. So the point is this verse relates first of all to a young woman who abides in the house of her father, which is the normal state of unmarried virgins in the context of Israel and would be the normal state and is the normal state in our particular period of time as well.

Now the young man here is a man who is capable of entering into sexual relationships, and as we’ll see, that is significant in looking at this action—that he is held accountable for the vow he makes in the context of this activity. But for now, the obvious sin here is that he has enticed a woman, a virgin of Israel.

Now this word “enticed” in its root word means to be open, spacious, or wide, and it relates to the immaturity or simplicity of one who is open to all kinds of enticement. It’s the root word that is the same family of this word as the word that’s frequently translated “simpleton” or “simple person” in the context of the Proverbs. So the enticement that goes on here is of a woman who is, to a degree, not a simpleton, but she is simple in the context of her being able to be enticed.

This doesn’t mean that women are any less intelligent than men. Many women are smarter than many men. But God has built into—we’ve talked about this—God has built into the relationship of male and female that men can lead women. Women are more capable of being led than they are of leading. That’s their innate abilities, because God has placed them in that context to men. And so the idea here is that this young woman is able to be enticed by the young man. So he entices her, he seduces her, he tricks her, I guess you could say, in the context of this sin.

And in relationship to that, the penalty that God puts in relationship to this sin is: if this happens, then the result is to be the payment of dowry, the threat of no marriage, and for the girl, the penalty is the loss of her virginity.

So at first glance here, the obvious implication of this law is that young men who lie with young women in the context of the covenantal community who are virgins and not betrothed—betrothal was a separate issue. The resultant penalty, what God wants to see happen as a consequence of that sin, is for the girl she loses her virginity, and that’s important for reasons we’ll see in a couple of minutes. And for the young man, he has to pay the dowry, that is the norm—bride price, so to speak, in some translations—the dowry of virgins.

And then the father of the girl can decide to either let them marry or not let them marry. So the young man’s penalty is he loses a great deal of money, which we’ll see in a couple of minutes. It doesn’t specify the money here. And he might even lose the girl whom he loves. So he’s—you know, the idea is he loves this girl. They end up doing something they shouldn’t. And he may actually lose the girl permanently, because the father can say, “No, not you,” and he’d be more inclined to say that perhaps with this activity going on.

All right, so that’s kind of a first glance look at this particular law. But let’s look a little deeper. Let’s take a second look at the law by looking at a parallel passage in Deuteronomy 22:13-30. So turn to Deuteronomy 22. And here we have a series of cases. You could see this as an exposition on the law of God in terms of the forbidding of adultery and various applications of that commandment in various ways.

Beginning at verse 13: “If a man takes a wife, goes into her and detests her and charges her with shameful conduct and brings a bad name on her and says, ‘I took this woman when I came to her found she was not a virgin.’ Then the father and mother of the young woman shall take and bring out the evidence of the young woman’s virginity to the elders of the city at the gate. And the young woman’s father shall say to the elders, ‘I gave my daughter to this man as wife, and he detests her. Now he has charged her with shameful conduct, saying, I found your daughter was not a virgin, and yet these are the evidences of my daughter’s virginity.’ And they shall spread the cloth before the elders of the city.

Then the elders of that city shall take that man and punish him, and they shall fine him 100 shekels of silver and give them to the father of the young woman because he has brought a bad name on a virgin of Israel, and she shall be his wife. He cannot divorce her all his days.

But if the thing is true and evidences of virginity are not found for the young woman, then they shall bring out the young woman to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death with stones, because she has done a disgraceful thing in Israel to play the harlot in her father’s house. So you shall put away the evil from among you.”

I read that because there’s an implication of this for the statute we’re looking at in Exodus. A young woman and young man in the Exodus law have slept together. Father says, “No, you can’t marry this guy.” The guy doesn’t get the girl. He’s got to give the dowry price to the father anyway. Now he’s really in trouble in terms of marriage, because the dowry—his whatever dowry he might have had—is gone. And if he didn’t have a dowry, there are more consequences which we’ll look at in a minute.

But let’s look at it from the girl’s point of view. She’s lost her virginity. And if her father doesn’t allow her to marry that fellow, the next fellow that comes along that wants to marry her, the father and the girl are going to have to tell him about the previous affair. You see, she’s going to have shame on her. If they don’t tell this guy that my daughter has lost her virginity, and they allow the marriage to proceed, and the second guy—her husband now—says, “Wow, you’re not a virgin,” and now he takes her to the elders, and if he goes through that process, then she has to be executed.

So the point is that the act of seduction—on the part of the girl, the fear she has—is not just that she may not be able to marry the guy she loves. The fear she has is that someone’s going to know, and my future husband, if it’s not this guy, he will know. He’ll have to be told by my father of what happened, and I may not be able to get married. So it intensifies the punishment, so to speak, the negative consequences to the woman of allowing herself to be enticed by the man.

Okay, but let’s go on to verse 22 of Deuteronomy. “If a man is found lying with a woman married to a husband, then both of them shall die. The man that lay with the woman and the woman, so you shall put away the evil from among you.” So adultery—the penalty for adultery—is not what’s portrayed in Exodus 22:16-17. Deuteronomy says that if it’s a guy who’s laying with a woman who’s another man’s wife, then both of them have to be executed.

Okay, verse 23 represents a different case. “If a young woman who is a virgin is betrothed to a husband and a man finds her in the city and lies with her, then you shall bring them both out to the gate of that city and you shall stone them to death with stones. The young woman because she did not cry out in the city and the man because he humbled his neighbor’s wife. So you shall put away the evil from among you.”

So betrothal is treated the same way as marriage in terms of sexual infidelity. It’s the death penalty for those who are betrothed and yet lie with somebody else. So there’s this connection between betrothal and then the physical act of consummation of the marriage after the marriage ceremony has taken place. So biblical betrothal is different than engagement the way we think of it today. It is a binding covenantal arrangement. The penalty for lack of fidelity to it until you’re released from the betrothal in some way is death.

Verse 25: “If a man finds a betrothed young woman in the countryside and the man forces her and lies with her, then only the man who lay with her shall die. But you shall do nothing to the young woman. There is in the young woman no sin deserving of death. For just as when a man rises against his neighbor and kills him, even so in this matter, for he found her in the countryside, and the betrothed young woman cried out, but there was no one to save her.”

Presumption of innocence to the girl. This case is a case of rape—violent rape or forcible rape. The death penalty is required in terms of God’s law, and that’s what we should pray for in this country: rape being punished by death.

Now the implication of this is if it’s in the city and the woman does not cry out, then the woman also would be guilty of fornication. She wouldn’t be raped if she didn’t cry out. She’s required to cry out if she’s being raped in the context of the city. In the countryside, the presumption is that she cried out but just nobody heard her.

And then we get to verse 28, which is the exact parallel to our situation. “If a man finds a young woman who is a virgin who is not betrothed and he seizes her and lies with her and they are found out, then the man with who lay with her shall give to the young woman’s father 50 shekels of silver and she shall be his wife because he has humbled her. He shall not be permitted to divorce her all his days.”

All right. So verses 28 and 29 I think are a parallel text to the one we’ve just read in Exodus—it fleshes it out a bit for us. Now you may be a little bit confused because it says if he finds a virgin who is not betrothed and seizes her. The word for “seize” there is not the same word for the forcing of the woman in the verses previous in the case of rape. This seizing her just simply means to grab a hold of her. It’s a word that’s used, for instance, in Genesis, of men who would grab a hold of musical instruments and play them. So there’s not the sense of forcing. There’s not the sense of compulsion by physical force going on here. He simply lays with the girl and he does that in the context of grabbing a hold of her.

So I do believe—and most commentators agree with this—in fact, everyone that I read agrees—that these are parallel passages, and what they do is they give us a little more understanding of what’s going on here. In the Exodus passage, the guy seduces the woman. In the Deuteronomy passage, it says that the penalty is imposed upon him because he humbles the girl. He has humbled the girl.

Verse 29: “He shall give the young woman’s father 50 shekels of silver. She shall be his wife because he has humbled her.” Now, of course, the implication too is that the Deuteronomy text has to be read in light of the Exodus text. It doesn’t mean they’re necessarily going to get married. The father still has authority over that relationship.

But what I want to point out here is that the woman is humbled. Now the word for “humbled” here can mean—well, let me just read a little bit here from the Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament. The base word means to try to force submission, to punish, or inflict pain upon. But as one commentator wrote—which is in this commonly used source book—the Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament is a commonly used evangelical good tool that tells us the root meaning of these Hebrew words. And here’s what one of the men that they quote says:

It means to find oneself in a stunted, humble, or lowly position. And the origins of this, the word’s origins itself, means to be cowed or to be humbled in some sense or punished. Now, it can refer to the humility that comes to the people of God either through spiritual or physical affliction. It’s used, for instance, to describe the discomfort that Sarah inflicted upon Hagar. Sarah humbled Hagar. What the lawless do to the defenseless. It speaks of the pain inflicted on Joseph’s ankles by his fetters—same word used here for “humbled.”

It sets forth what Egypt did to Israel. And it describes—can be used to describe—the physical pain of war. And it describes what God does to his enemies. But it’s also used to denote what we would commonly think of in terms of English as humbling. A young lion is not humbled—same word—at the shepherd’s voice. The shepherd’s voice is supposed to humble the lion, bring it under submission by the very words of the shepherd to the shepherd.

Pharaoh refuses to humble himself to the Lord. The Lord’s voice to Pharaoh is to humble him and bring him under subjection to God. And so the idea here is that this word for the man humbling the woman has this implication of his superiority in some way over her, and through his actions of enticing or seducing her, he has brought her to a humbled or lowly state.

Okay. So the sin here described in Deuteronomy—of this kind of action of a young man seducing a young woman, unbetrothed, and a believer in Yahweh, a part of the covenant community—the sin really is that he has humbled the woman. That fleshes out the enticement of the woman. To entice or seduce a young girl by various words or promises is to bring her to a state of loneliness and humility. And as I said, this word can be used with physical humility or affliction as well.

Now, the interesting thing—which will be important for us to remember as we go through this—is that this same word “to be humbled” is used in a positive sense. Moses was a man who was humbled to God. God uses the afflictions, he uses sin sinlessly. And what we’ll see as we go through this is that what he does to the girl is to bring her to a state of humility. But then as she repents of her sin, then he has created—using sin sinlessly—a humility before him on the part of the girl that makes her amenable to the instruction of God, her father.

So when we say this humbling goes on with the girl, it is a picture of sin on the part of the man. But it’s also a picture of God using sin sinlessly to bring about—through in various ways, physical affliction, diseases, spiritual affliction, warfare, whatever it is—it’s the way that God frequently brings about a humility before him that is spoken of positively.

All right. So the sin of the young man is not just seduction or enticement. It’s also a humbling of the woman. The penalty we find out in Deuteronomy is lengthy service as well as no divorce, in addition to dishonor or death to the woman. We’ve talked about that. In other words, we know the penalty is the payment of a dowry price. But Deuteronomy tells us that judicially the limit is set in Deuteronomy at 50 shekels of silver.

Why 50 shekels of silver? I think we want to look for a biblical answer in terms of what this payment is. In Leviticus 27:3, 50 shekels is the price of an adult male servant. It’s his vow price. It’s the value of his life, all of his life as a male, an adult male servant, in God’s valuation. 50 shekels of silver today is very little. It’s about 50 ounces, maybe what? $300 worth? $250 worth? Something like that. But in biblical times, 50 shekels of silver represented an immense amount of money. Not an unbearable amount of money—you could earn that much—but it was the value of a servant. A freeman would be worth, you know, more. But the point is that it’s a picture of the lifetime servitude of this man in some sense.

Okay. So there’s a connection to the price that he can be demanded to have paid to the father, and the idea of the value of a male servant—the value of what his life is in the context of God. Now, whether we look at the symbolic action of the 50 shekels of silver correlating to the adult male servant, or whether we look at the value of money that 50 shekels represented, either way, the clear intimation of the text in Deuteronomy is that young man is going to be in servitude, so to speak, unless he’s very wealthy—and that’s not normally the case, of course.

That young man is going to be in servitude to the father. He, in all likelihood, will have nowhere near 50 shekels of silver. He’ll have to bring himself into a position of servitude to the father, and then still may or may not be granted the hand of the father’s daughter. So in the context of Deuteronomy fleshing this account out, we’re given more information. We’re also given yet another piece of information: that a man who does this—because of the humbling of the virgin of Israel, one of the virgins in Israel—he also will not be permitted to divorce her for the rest of their married life.

Divorce was allowed in various other circumstances under various cases but not for the man who has begun the relationship with the wife in this particular way.

All right. Now, let’s take a third look at what’s going on here and try to get an even broader context of the sin that’s going on. And what I call it here in point C of the outline is that this sin represents a satanic usurpation of the authority of the father.

Normally, the way marriage would happen is a guy and a girl would enter into a vow or a covenant together to get married. That’d be the beginning of their period of betrothal. And then that vow would be taken in the actual wedding ceremony that would be made public. The vows would be exchanged in the context of a public witness of church and state and the community, and then after that, on the wedding night, the marriage is actually consummated.

And you can sort of look at this marriage covenantal relationship as being this: first, a private exchange of vows between the two parties, overseen by the parents, and then the exchange of those vows in public, witnessed by the community, church, and state, and then finally, the actual consummation of that covenantal union by the marriage act itself.

And it seems like what’s going on with this young man and young woman is that they’re entering into a relationship of covenantal loyalty to one another. They’re beginning with the end process. Now, of course, when that happens, we’re talking not now about, you know, harlots. We’re not talking about men who have no moral sense. We’re talking about what we would think of today as Christian men and women.

Now, when they enter into this sort of sin, it is frequently accompanied by statements to each other of their undying love. There’s a sense in which the couple here have entered into vows with each other by beginning with the consummation vow of the marriage act itself, usually accompanied by private statements to one another.

And as a result of this, the thing that they really have done wrong is not desiring to see their lives in covenantal union, nor is it ultimately the marriage act, which is proper after the exchange of public vows. What they’re really doing wrong is they’re making an end run around dad. Dad is not part of the process. The young man is seducing the virgin by going around the covenantal headship and covering of her father. That’s what’s really wrong here.

You see, their desire for each other isn’t wrong. Their desire to commit themselves to each other both verbally and in terms of a physical act isn’t wrong. What’s wrong is this usurpation of the father. And I think that what we can see in this is that it is a satanic act on the part of the young man. The young man is imaging the serpent here. The serpent does an end run around father’s oversight of Eve, does he not? Father—God—has pledged Eve to Adam. And I don’t know if the relationship is consummated at the time of the temptation or not, she’s betrothed. And the serpent enters into a relationship, a covenantal relationship, with her that is an end run around father—God’s—authority over her.

And that’s another reason why the serpent, when he tempts the woman, leaves out the designation of “father.” Remember we said that in the opening chapters of Genesis, God is identified as father sovereign. He’s the covenantal God, but he’s also the all-powerful God. And the serpent refers to him as “sovereign.” And then Eve starts thinking of that way too. Eve’s sin—as it were, and Adam’s sin—is ignoring father’s word in terms of this relationship.

So the young man, what he’s doing here, is not simply seducing a woman. He’s humbling her. And his payment for that is not just having to pay a dowry price. He may not get the girl. And his payment, according to Deuteronomy, is the father can demand—and usually would—a very high amount of dowry price that, both for economic and symbolic reasons, is the picture of bringing the son into servitude to the father as he administers the dowry for his wife.

Remember, the dowry is given to the father so that when the relationship is then consummated, the father, having held that money for the daughter, then gives it to her. And so the picture here becomes a little fuller: that what they’re really doing is an end run around father’s covenantal authority and oversight. The penalty is then, what? In the bigger picture, I believe the penalty is the acknowledgment of the authority of the father—particularly on the part of the young man. He must now acknowledge the father’s authority to grant or not grant the wife, and he must also acknowledge his authority by giving him this huge dowry price that represents his servitude to that father.

So the penalty fits the crime. The crime really is the satanic usurpation of the father’s authority and the oversight of marriage. And the penalty is corrective, in teaching the young people: father rules in the context of marriage.

Now, not completely or sovereignly. I believe that the father is being sinful in denying his daughter’s hand to someone. A church and state may be able to overrule him. Nobody is ultimate in their authority or complete. But father is clearly affirmed in his job of covenantal authority here.

All right. Having said that, now let’s look at some general lessons from the text that we can apply to our lives.

And the first one—I won’t elaborate much on this, but it’s worth mentioning—that in the particular verse when it says in your translation that he’ll pay the dowry price or the bride price, the verb actually “pay” means to weigh out. So the first implication is hard currency. It’s interesting—this valuation price of servants. When Joseph is sold into servitude to the Medianites who take him to Egypt, the value of him as a servant correlates to the value of young men as servants given later on in the case laws as they’re about to enter the land.

What’s the point? The point is that for 200 years—for two centuries—silver maintained its value from the time of the selling of Joseph to then the time of the imposition of the vows or valuations of servants given in the case laws of God. Hard currency maintains value. Our culture has moved totally away from hard currency and the scriptures’ positive system based upon hard currency. And every time in the history of man—we’re going through world history in one of our classes for the junior highs and high schoolers at my home two days a week. And one of the things we’re going to see throughout that is that when cultures devalue their currency, when they move away from hard currency and debase the currency, that is the beginning of the end for them economically.

So cultures can sustain… What do we do? We have 200 years of silver stability. We have thousands of years of gold stability. And what do we have? We have a market rally this month. This week that’s based upon a report that says inflation’s okay. This week the dollar is going to stay pretty much the same. So now we have a lot of confidence in that. You see, it floats from day to day and week to week. What used to drive the market was efficiencies of business. Now what is the dominant factor in market valuation? Valuations is this fluctuating currency. It’s the fiat will of the state to either impose or not impose a particular interest rate and to either go through or choke off the currency of the country. It’s state money. It’s fiat money.

Well, enough of that. Hard currency is one of the implications of this text, and one we need to think long and hard about.

Secondly, the biblical diary and its protections for the wife. Now, we’ve talked about this, but it’s important, maybe, to just draw the context for what we’re reading here. The context is that the scriptures give a great deal of protection to wives in the context of marriage.

Let me just read here a quote from R.J. Rushdoony’s Institutes of Biblical Law:

“In marriage, the woman was protected from abuse and slander by the husband. We just read the case law from Deuteronomy 22. If he slanders her, she can go, or they both end up going to the courts. And if the man is wrong about her lack of fidelity to him, he has fined 100 shekels of silver. Big penalty to him for slandering his wife.

If her impugned sexual immorality, a ritual which clearly required supernatural verification, revealed her innocence or guilt. And this is from the book of Numbers: the ordeal of jealousy, so-called. If guilty of adultery, she died a lingering death. If innocent, then God blessed her supernaturally. She shall be sown with seed, from Numbers 5:28, meaning moreover that her husband is required to fulfill his every duty to her.

If the husband slandered his wife’s character, claiming that she was not a virgin when he married her, he was taken to court together with his wife. If the charge was true, she died. If the charge was false, he was fined 100 shekels of silver payable to the father-in-law, and he lost the right of divorce. The wife thus was protected in marriage. She was legally guaranteed at all times her food, clothing, and her duty of marriage.”

We saw that in Exodus 21:10—food, clothing, and response to the husband is legally guaranteed to the wife. She also was guaranteed that her husband could neither be drafted nor charged with any further business which would take him away from home during their first year of marriage. Over and over in the case laws, we see tremendous protections for wives given, and the dowry is one of those protections.

And we won’t go over the specific cases again relative to the dowry. This is a case law though that explicitly talks about the dowry of virgins, and it clearly tells us that in terms of God’s case laws, marriage is to be seen always as accompanied by the giving of a dowry, the bride price, for the virgin. Now here it’s given to the father, but we know that the husband was to take that money and then give it to the wife upon her becoming married to the man.

And we see this in the case, for instance, of Laban, who ate up the dowry of both Rachel and Leah. And the idea there is that Jacob worked for seven years. The wages would accrue to him. They were given to Laban. Laban was to transfer those funds to Leah and Rachel at the time of marriage. But instead, Laban ate those things up.

Again, in Genesis 24:53, Abraham’s servant brings out jewelry of silver, jewelry of gold, and clothing, and gave them to Rebecca. He also gave precious things to her brother and to her mother. So the idea here is that there is dowry and gift, and the dowry is given to the bride either directly—as in the case of Abraham’s servant for Isaac—or indirectly to Laban and then eventually to the wives, indirectly, in the case of the seduced virgin to her husband to her father, who would then, upon the covenantal transfer of authority to the husband, would give them to the husband, and this is portrayed in many places of scripture.

Remember that Shechem, when he seduced Dinah—and we talked about that a year or two ago—he goes to her brothers, who are negotiating in place of the father, and he says, “Give me the young woman to wife. Ask me ever so much dowry and gift, and I will give according to what you say.” Dowry and gift. Dowry to be given directly to the girl, to the father, who would give it to the girl, and gift to the bride’s parents as symbolic representation of money.

So the giving of dowry is obviously one of the things that God demands in the context of marriage. That’s the standard he places for us in these case laws. So this dowry is given, and this dowry is one of the protections for the wife.

Now, let me add, and then I’ve got in your outline a few of the implications of this dowry.

First of all, the dowry is a covenantal symbol. And this is where the error of thinking of this as a “bride price” or as a “purchase price” for the bride comes into being. The exchange of money indicates the exchange of covenantal oversight of the wife, of the daughter. It’s not to purchase her as a thing. Clearly, she had rights. Clearly, she was never seen as chattel property in the context of the scriptures.

Clearly, the scriptures and the cultures that flowed out of the people of Israel held women in high regard compared to every other old biblical culture, old non-biblical culture who treated women as vastly inferior in terms of their natural state. The point is that the money is an indication of the covenantal transfer of headship from the father to the groom. And it’s important for that reason. And I’m pleased that in the context of our church, Christ the Sovereign, that we have a couple of people here that in their wedding ceremony have pictured this covenantal transfer not just by the exchanging of hands, rings, but also have included in the marriage covenant this covenantal symbol of the exchange of dowry, indicating the transference of covenantal authority of the bride from the father to the groom.

Secondly, the dowry is a screening device. It provides a way for the father to determine, through either a particular amount of money he demands or through a character test—in the case of David and Saul or Caleb’s requirement of Othniel—in those cases a character requirement was provided. But in any event, the dowry is a screening device for potential suitors. Dad didn’t got to worry about a guy who is not willing to provide a dowry of some sort of some means. If he’s very poor, then it could be a character test. But the other thing the dowry provides is divorce, death, and dunderhead insurance.

Doug Wilson terms dowry “Doug Wilson” provides insurance for death. If the woman—if the husband dies—the wife has been endowed. Very difficult for a widow in Israel to remarry. And it’s no probably no more easier today for a widowed woman to remarry, though it can be done. But if she can’t remarry, she’s provided a means of providing for herself by means of the dowry.

Secondly, the dowry provides divorce insurance. If the husband divorces her unjustly, as we saw in the opening case laws of Exodus 21, then the woman retains the dowry, and she’s protected from the husband who is unfaithful. And then third, it’s dunderhead insurance. You can provide for death insurance through life insurance. And you can write contracts, a biblical contract, that says the wife who is faithful gets all the asset…