Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Reformation Covenant Church
Pastor Dennis Tuuri

Exodus 23:19

Please stand for the reading of God’s word. Exodus 23:1-19.

“The first of the first fruits of your land you shall bring into the house of the Lord your God. You shall not boil a young goat in its mother’s milk.”

Let’s pray. Father, we do indeed praise you for your word as we have just sung. And we pray now that word would be illumined to our understanding by the Holy Spirit.

We thank you for the work of the Lord Jesus Christ, the one who was ultimately persecuted by all mankind and yet in that death redeemed his people. We thank you, Father, for his work and for the gift of the Holy Spirit based upon that work. And we pray now that spirit would open our eyes to behold things of Christ our savior in this his word. In his name we pray. Amen.

Please be seated. This text in the providence of God will be the text from my first sermon here at our new location.

And it seems like an odd text. I’m actually going to speak simply on the second half of the verse: “You shall not boil a young goat in its mother’s milk.” An obscure text, but one I think we will see will give us much instruction in our proper response to the word of God, our knowledge of it, and then the application of it in our lives.

This text is the basis for some Jewish laws that would have supposedly caused Orthodox Jews to have two sets of cooking utensils—one for milk products and one for meat products—because they say it’s never right to boil a calf in his mother’s milk. You don’t know where the milk came from. You don’t know where the calf came from. And so they have two complete sets of dishes. But this is not really a proper application of this. This very specifically limits or prohibits people from taking a young goat—that’s the word that’s used here—and boiling that goat in its own mother’s milk.

An obscure text, but one I think that has been commented on quite a bit to varying degrees of success.

Let me just run by you a few things that people have said about it. They said this prohibition is given because of an idolatrous practice of the Canaanites in the land. There was a scroll found in the early part of the twentieth century in which boiling a kid in milk was some sort of magic ritual of the Canaanites producing prosperity or fertility in the land. Well, I don’t ever particularly like to go to those sorts of explanations for God’s word. It assumes too much, I think, about the importance of these Canaanite practices. Plus, the Canaanite practice was not to put the kid in its own mother’s milk. It was simply to boil a kid in milk to make it tasty and then prosperous for the land. So it doesn’t really address the specific prohibition here against boiling a young goat in its own mother’s milk.

Another explanation is that it was a magical practice making the land more productive. In addition to being idolatrous, this milk that the kid was boiled in would be taken to the land and spread about and sprinkled on bushes and shrubs. Jobs and prosperity would come about from that.

Now another possible explanation given is it was considered cruel to destroy an offspring in the very means—the milk—which sustained it. Then we get that kind moves more to the meaning of the specific practice here, and this will be part of my explanation as we go through the text.

A fourth explanation is that it shows contempt for the parent-child relationship. That also I think has an element of truth to it, as we’ll see in a couple of minutes.

Another explanation is because it would profane symbolically the feast of in-gathering. And that may seem a little odd to you, but we’ll talk in a couple of minutes why people go to that explanation and the relevance of the feast of in-gathering to this prohibition.

Another was because God wanted them to use olive oil, not butter, for cooking. Quite an extrapolation from the text and probably not accurate at all.

Another is because a kid boiled in milk was too luxurious—a taste delight for God’s people who are to be simple in their tastes and desires. Again, this doesn’t seem consistent with other scriptures where we’re actually positively commanded in Deuteronomy 14 to buy things to eat and drink that our soul desires.

So some of these explanations are somewhat on target. Others seem completely off-target. And I want to use this obscure text for four particular reasons. And so we have a 4×4 sermon here—four basic points and under each of these points four sub-points.

The first thing I want to do in referring to this obscure text is to look at four evidences of the importance of this obscure command. In other words, we’ve got a command that’s hard to understand what it means to us today and maybe we should just forget about it. But this text actually is sort of reiterated in various ways as important for us to think about.

It’s reiterated first of all in being three times cited in the Torah: here in Exodus 23, again in Exodus 34:26, and finally in Deuteronomy 14:21. So this specific command to not take a young male goat and boil it in its own mother’s milk is repeated three times in these case laws of the Pentateuch. Seems important if it’s repeated three times.

Secondly, this command is the closing or capstone law of the law of the covenant. I’m really finally closing off my series on the law of the covenant here today. We had an interim break where I spoke about child-parent relationships as I wanted to give myself time to think about this verse. One of the benefits of preaching through a particular text of scripture—a book or a specific section of a book—is it forces you to deal with passages that would be difficult for you and that you would tend to ignore or never preach on. This is one of those texts. But before I preached on it, I wanted to give a lot of thought to it. So I wanted to give myself a month or two to think it through.

Now you’ll remember when we talked about the law of the covenant that after this verse in verse 20, God has this verse about how he’s going to send an angel, and there’s a long section of encouragements to God’s people given after this specific command. But if we’re talking about the laws—the specific individual commandments given in the law of the covenant, the center of the law in the old covenant prior to the coming of our savior—then those series of commands actually end with this specific command to not boil a kid in its own mother’s milk. It is the capstone command. It’s the last one. And in a list of items, the first and last are usually significant for us. So it seems important.

It’s repeated three times. It’s the concluding law of the law of the covenant, the capstone of it.

And the third reason why we think it’s important is because it is central to our festivities. Now this is a little bit complicated, not much, but you’ll remember that in those last section of the law of the covenant in the direct context for this specific law are the description of the three main feasts of Israel. So if you look in verse 14 of Exodus 23, in verse 14, as we’re concluding and moving to the end of the law of the covenant, God tells us that three times a year you shall keep a feast to me.

Verse 15 is the first of those three feasts: the feast of unleavened bread. And that’s described in verse 15. And then in verse 16, the second of those three feasts: the feast of harvest, which is Pentecost. Remember the Pentecost season—the giving of the law. That’s the first fifty days after the first feast. We have this feast of Pentecost.

And then the last half of verse 16, the third feast: the feast of in-gathering. That’s the great big happy rejoicing feast at the end of the harvest cycle when everybody’s having a great time and there’s wine and there’s good food and it is the celebratory climax of the whole year under this Old Testament dispensation.

Then in verse 17, it repeats: three times you shall come before the Lord in these three feasts. And then in verses 18 and 19, there’s a series of three specific commands. And these three commands relate to those three festivals.

Verse 18 says, “You shall not offer the blood of the sacrifice with leavened bread, nor shall the fat of my sacrifice remain until morning.” That has to do with that first feast of unleavened bread.

Verse 19 begins with, “The first of the first fruits of your land you shall bring into the house of the Lord your God.” That’s talking about that second feast as the harvest begins to come out. The first of the first fruits is offered.

So then this last clause—”You shall not boil a young goat in its mother’s milk”—that is specifically textually related to the feast of in-gathering at the end of the harvest cycle, that great end-of-year festival of rejoicing in the presence of God.

So the point is that this commandment is repeated thrice. It’s important. It is put at the end of all the laws of the covenant as the capstone. It’s important. And it is central to understanding the great culminatory feast of the Old Testament system that our savior ushers us into by his work. It’s important to understand that feast correctly to understand this command. It informs us somehow about the feast of in-gathering, the feast of Tabernacles, the feast of Booths—other names for the same feast.

And then the fourth reason why we think this command is important is it’s the flip side of the command relative to our duty to authorities. Now, again, you’ll have to go back with me, and those of you who weren’t here, that’s okay. The law of the covenant in Exodus 21-23 had two halves to it. The first half were if-then laws: “If you do this, then this is going to happen.” The last half was a series of commands without that if-then formulation.

That last half of the law of the covenant began with the obligation to not revile a ruler or God. And that last half ends here with its capstone: to not boil a calf in his own mother’s milk.

Now, I’ve given you the chiastic structure for that last half of the law of the covenant. Don’t let it confuse you now, but just recognize that it begins and ends, if I have the structure correctly, with bookends. And those bookends tell us that as important as it was to remember to have a proper attitude to our sovereign God with proper attitudes to our authorities—our rulers and the princes in the land—church, state, and family—as important as that first commandment of the second half of the law of the covenant was, that’s mirrored by the importance of correctly interpreting and applying this law to not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.

Now, why is that? Well, it’s the flip side. You see, the command says don’t use what’s to be used to nurture the calf to kill the calf, or the young goat. You see, it’s really an obligation upon the parents not to take what is supposed to be nurturing for the child—the male—and use it to kill the child.

So it’s the flip side of this command—the implication of the fifth commandment—to honor God by honoring our parents and fearing them and properly honoring the authorities that God’s placed in our lives.

Now, don’t turn here, but listen to Deuteronomy 22:6 and 7. This is a similar text to our obscure commandment. Today we read there: “If a bird’s nest happens to be before you along the way in any tree or on the ground with young ones or eggs, with the mother sitting on the young or on the eggs, you shall not take the mother with the young. You shall surely let the mother go and take the young for yourself, that it might be well with you and you may prolong your days. That it may be well with you and you might prolong your days.”

What is that? Ask the fifth commandment, right? That’s the promise added to the commandment. The first commandment with promise that we spoke about—in Ephesians, the duty of fathers to teach their children, the duty of the children to honor their parents.

So the fifth commandment is in view, it seems, with these series of laws about the interaction of mother and child. The fifth commandment—you’ll remember when we talked from Leviticus chapter 19. Leviticus 19 is the heart of Leviticus. It’s a series of seventy statements or commands. It’s like a commentary on the ten commandments. And you remember the very first one in that commentary of the ten commandments was to keep reverence for the Sabbath and to fear your parents.

At the beginning of the list in Leviticus 19 was the same thing that begins the second half of the law of the covenant: a proper respect and reverence for parents.

But later in Leviticus 19, toward the end, we had a commandment that parents were not to cause their daughters to become harlots in the land and you were to reverence God’s Sabbath. It’s the flip side. You see, the fifth commandment is a commandment to children directly to honor their parents. But it is also by implication a commandment to parents to correctly raise their children.

And so Leviticus 19 has this mirror effect. First saying reverence your parents and then later saying parents be careful how you raise your kids. This fifth commandment thing is going on here at the beginning and end of this second half of the law of the covenant.

Reverence the authorities representing God—parents, elders, deacons, your boss at work, your boss in the civil arena. And then the flip side is: parents, don’t use what’s supposed to be nurturing for your children and kill them with it. It’s the flip side.

So these things all show us the importance of this seemingly obscure command. It’s three times repeated. It’s placed as the capstone to the entire law of the covenant. Placed in connection to a proper understanding of the great festival of in-gathering—the great feast of Tabernacles and Booths—that our savior has ushered in permanently really based upon his work on the cross. And then finally, it’s important because it’s the mirror image of that first commandment of this section to reverence God by reverencing authorities and now properly telling authorities that they must have an eye to nurturing all those under their specific oversight.

So it’s important.

My second set of four things are four tests presented by this obscure command. You see, it’s important, but we don’t think of it as important. This is a verse that typically is one of those verses that people use to ridicule theocratic or theonomic sets of ethics. In other words, if you talk about the importance of the law of God in guiding our lives, people right away turn to laws like this and say, “Well, isn’t it stupid that you have this law about not boiling a kid in its mother’s milk? Who would ever want to do that?” They ridicule God’s word.

Our first test with any obscure command like this that we find quite strange and don’t know how to apply is this: it’s a test of our attitude toward God’s word.

We just recited in Psalm 56 a verse about how we praise God for his word. But his word means all of his word. It doesn’t mean those parts of the word that we find easy to understand and apply. It means every jot and tittle, as our savior says. Nothing is irrelevant in terms of God’s holy, inspired, God-breathed, authoritative, infallible, inerrant, awesome word.

What is our attitude toward God’s word? Well, God tests us. He throws along a command like this that we think is kind of odd. And what’s our attitude? Young boys and girls, as you’re growing up in the faith, this is a test of your attitude. When you come across an obscure command like this or you hear it’s going to be the topic of the sermon, do you think, “Well, that’s a stupid thing”? Or do you say, “This is part of God’s holy awe-inspiring word and revelation of himself to us. It is the word of the Lord Jesus Christ”?

And if we say we love the Lord Jesus Christ and do not love every aspect of his word, we’re really not accurately saying who we are in Christ.

So it’s a test for first of all of our commitment to reverencing and worshiping God for his very word. Do we see it with that degree of importance?

Secondly, it’s a test of our obedience to the omniscient Father sovereignly.

Now, just so you’ll understand where I’m going with this, I’m not saying this is a commandment that explicitly and directly applies to us today. I really don’t think you should go boil a young calf in mother’s milk. But I don’t think that this has the same binding force to us today as it did to then. Why do I say this? Not because I don’t like it, but because there’s a textual reason for saying this.

I mentioned that Deuteronomy 14 has the same verse repeated. Well, here’s the context. Deuteronomy 14:21 says this: “You shall not eat anything that dies of itself. You may give it to the alien who is within your gates, that he may eat it, or you may sell it to a foreigner, for you are a holy people to the Lord your God. You shall not boil a young goat in its mother’s milk.”

You see the immediate context of Deuteronomy 14:21 says that this is in the context of those food laws that provided a separation from God’s priestly people and the strangers that they’re ministering to who come out of the world to join them in the worship of Yahweh. So there were special dietary laws set up for this priestly people. And when God brings together the church with the work of the savior, and now there’s no more Jew or Greek, there’s one body in Christ, some of these food laws are no longer applicable because we’re all priests now. And so this separation isn’t in place.

And this verse seems to indicate to me that it has this connection to certain things you could eat or you couldn’t eat, but the stranger could eat. The God-fearer in your hearts could eat. So I’m not saying this is a direct commandment to us. But I am saying that there are lots of commandments in God’s word and the principle or truth behind this word that is binding upon us that we may not understand.

Children, your parents will give you things to do that you don’t get, that you don’t understand. And that’s okay. The young boys who become teenagers think they need to know absolutely everything about everything they’re told to do. That’s a deranged bent. But we’re saying no. Your parents tell you things that you may not understand.

I’m sure the children of Israel, being trained for forty—or rather thirty-eight years—to go in and conquer the land did not understand why God led them in circles in the midst of the wilderness wanderings. What is he doing? He’s saying put the wood here. Then he’s saying now put the wood over there. Now he’s saying put the wood over there. I mean, not literally, but that’s the idea.

This is a perfectly proper and actually beneficial parenting device: to tell your children, “I want you to go stack the wood in that part of the yard.” And they get done and then you tell them, “Now I want the wood stacked over there. Now I want it stacked over there.”

Now, if your motivation is just fun and games, it’s not good at all. It’s sad. But if your motivation is to train your children to obey God, whether they understand him or not, that is a perfectly proper and useful device for you as parents to give to them.

You ought to obey mom and dad. You love them. You trust them. You want to obey your deacons. You want to obey your elders. You want to obey your civil magistrates because you trust that God has placed them there. Now, sometimes they command you to do things you can’t do. But, you know, if we can’t see the sense of it, and yet God says do it, then you have to do it.

I’ve got a quote here from a movie, Big Trouble in Little China. And there’s a guy who’s supposed to save the western world from this weird oriental mysticism, whatever it is. Kind of a fun movie. And he keeps saying, “I don’t get it. I don’t get it.” And this guy who’s kind of like his mentor says, “You’re not put on earth to get it. You’re supposed to do your job.”

You see, we don’t have to get it. I mean, a lot of times we do, and it’s important to strive for that, but this is a test of simple obedience to what God tells us to do. Will we reverence God’s word even when it seems odd to us? Will we obey God’s specific commands to us even if we don’t understand them?

And third, it’s a test of our commitment to mature in knowledge. God says he wants us to understand more and more. And he wants us to do this in part by means of meditation.

Now, if you’ve been around here very long or been in my home, my kids all know this. One of my favorite verses in terms of parenting is Philippians 2:14: “Do all things without grumbling or disputing.” No muttering in the house. But children, I want you to mutter from this day forward. Not grumble, but to mutter.

The scriptures tell us that we’re to meditate on the word of God. Joshua 1:8, God says that “you shall meditate in this word day and night that you might observe to do according to all that is written in it, that your way may prosper.”

Psalm 1:2, the beginning of the Psalter tells us about the righteous man: “His delight is in the law of the Lord and in his law he meditates day and night.”

Again in Psalm 63:6: “When I remember you on my bed I meditate on you in my night watches.”

The word meditate means to utter a sound—kind of a low grumble, not grumbling, but a low muttering kind of sound. And it seems like the idea is when you’re meditating on God or you’re meditating on the scriptures, you’re actually perhaps vocalizing the scriptures or the attributes of God that you’re meditating on. You’re chewing it over in your thought and in your heart.

Well, God gives us obscure commandments sometimes. I believe that we might remind ourselves that we want to grow and mature in our knowledge of God’s word. And God says that doesn’t happen just by getting out the concordance, just by going to your Bible software or just by looking up cross references. Those things are all good. But God says we’re to be meditating, muttering about his word—not in a grumbling sense, but a proper muttering, a proper speaking of God’s word to ourselves as we go through the day.

We meditate on passages. Now, this is a lost art. We live in a rapid-fire pace world. Everything’s going quick, quick, quick, and it’s difficult for us to slow down and meditate. But your car is a place where you might want to meditate. My children, you might have time alone—time to meditate. Some of you that are involved in the more menial tasks in terms of your vocation—assembly line sort of stuff—you can meditate on the word of God at your workplace. You can meditate in the evening. Spend half an hour meditating on God’s word instead of watching the latest news or the latest sitcom or whatever.

These verses, these obscure commands, prompt us to desire to know why God put it there. You may not find out. You may never find out. He wants you meditating on his word, meditating on his truths that seem somewhat obscure.

And he also wants you meditating on what your word is. In Proverbs 15:28, “The heart of the righteous studies how to answer, mutters about how to properly answer a matter.”

Psalm 19:14: “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight.”

You see, a meditation—a proper mumbling or muttering about God’s word in a thankful sense, trying to think it through—also results in us properly meditating on how we answer a matter, that the meditations of our heart might find its way into our lips and us being careful how to approach God and the image-bearers of the people that he sends into our lives.

A calmness, a stepping back from speed, a meditation on God’s word, and a meditation on how we might answer people in the context of our lives is a God-given requirement, according to these verses. It’s what the righteous guy is supposed to do.

And obscure commands like this test us. If we just say, “I don’t get it. Let’s go on to something I do know about,” there’s another good reason to read sequentially through your scriptures and pause when you don’t understand something. Spend a little time. Don’t think you’ve got to go on to the next reading right away. Meditate. I’ve been meditating on this verse for two months. I wanted to make sure I knew what I was talking about when I got up here. And how much more as parents when we teach our children the word—to meditate on these things so we might understand what’s happening.

And fourth, it’s a test of our learning to think biblically about imagery.

This is obviously image language. Mother, calf, milk. And I’ve got a note here to myself: Sunday school promotion. Again, in order to understand these obscure texts, we want to interpret those texts by way of analogy to the rest of scripture, letting all the scripture interpret itself. And that requires a knowledge of the entire scriptures—a knowledge of what God builds into his word. And so we should be committed to maturing our understanding of the word of God.

We should go to Sunday school Sunday morning and learn more about what the word says. I know the classes were full this morning. Then the next week or two, we’ll have more classes starting up. We don’t want you to be discouraged because the class was too crowded this morning. We’ll provide more spaces, more classroom spaces. This is an excellent time to move into this structure and begin to use what God has given us—the nourishment of this new building—to nurture ourselves and our children in a knowledge of the word. And Sunday school is one way to do that.

Okay. So it’s important and it provides a series of tests.

Third, I give you here after the result of my meditation and study: four elements of a possible interpretation of the imagery of this obscure command.

First of all, Paul talks about animals in 1 Corinthians 9 and 2 Corinthians 6. He talks about laws. Laws that you couldn’t have two different types of beasts yoked together to plow in your field—unequally yoked. A law about how you can’t muzzle an ox as he’s treading out the grain. And Paul says that those laws are not about animals. Ultimately, those laws are about people. It’s about not marrying an unbeliever. And it’s about paying those men that labor in the context of ministry.

So Paul, when he gets around to meditating on these commandments from the Old Testament about animals, meditates in terms of their application to people, and he gives us then legitimacy—by the word of God—to think of the application of this to people.

Secondly, specifically applying this then in the scriptures: the kid, or the young male goat, is related to the concept of children. These three-fold occurrences of this law about not boiling a kid are preceded by two stories in Genesis where the word “kid” is used, and those two stories are, first of all, the story of Jacob, Esau, and Isaac.

Jacob is told to go get two kids to kill to give his father the savory meal that will make him think it’s Esau. And then he takes the hide of the kid and puts it on his arms to make him seem like Esau to his dad. Jacob is the kid. He’s the son. You see, that the mother—his mother—is protecting his birthright. Even though he’s seventeen years old, he’s not out on his own and married. The kid, Jacob, is being protected by his mother, but there’s a relationship between the kid and identification with Jacob or Esau.

And then there’s a story about Judah and Tamar. You remember this story? We talked about this if you’ve been at church here the last year or so. Judah fails to give his son—his kid—to Tamar in terms of the proper fulfilling of the Levitical role with her, or the levirate role rather. The story’s a little too long to go into now. But Tamar dresses up like a prostitute. And Judah then goes to her and she asks what he’s going to give her and he says, “I’ll give you a kid.”

And in substitute for the kid, he gives his signate ring and his staff. Well, see, the kid is a picture of what he should have given Tamar—his son—that should have been her husband. And Tamar directly in the text, in terms of this kid, it says that Tamar conceived, bore a son. So these two stories in Genesis relate the word “kid”—the Hebrew word here—to men and specifically to children.

And so I think we have biblical warrant here to think of this kid as being children, not just a male goat, in terms of trying to interpret the biblical language that’s given to us here.

So we have that. And then we also have references, of course, in the scriptures to milk. Both in 1 Corinthians 3 and Hebrews 5 and 1 Peter 2, milk is the pure milk of the word. The word of God begins with milk to those who are new in Christ and it becomes then meat, feeding later on. So milk is specifically linked scripturally and textually to the teaching of God’s word, to his law, to the totality of his word to us.

That’s milk—the milk of the word. And so I think we can think about this kid and milk in terms of the nurturing substance given and directly linked to the nurturing substance of God’s word to us.

And then third, of course, the mother is the dispenser of the nourishment. So there are some ways to think biblically, I think, as a result of meditating on this text and trying to draw in analogies from other places in scripture.

Let’s move then to our four possible applications of this seemingly obscure text.

Okay, it’s important. It trains us in our love and desire to understand the word of God and meditate on it. It’s to be interpreted using biblical imagery—not whatever we want to think up in our heads, but using the Bible to interpret itself. And here are some possible interpretations.

As feasters, we are prohibited from mixing life and death at our festivities.

Okay, remember this is given in the context of the feast of in-gathering. I said that specifically in Exodus 23, again in Exodus 34, and even in Deuteronomy 14. This command is specifically in the context of the harvest feast of in-gathering at the end of the year. And specifically in Deuteronomy 14, it goes on to talk about the proper use of tithes because that last feast is really the feast of tithes because all the harvest is happening. All the tithes are brought in at the end of the year.

So this picture of not using a life-giving source of nourishment to kill the kid that’s supposed to be getting that life—to mix life with death—I think is properly seen as informing the culmination of our festivities in the presence of God. When we come together in the Lord’s day and we tabernacle around the presence of God and hear his word and rejoice, I think God wants us to put off explicitly things of death. No mixture of life and death together at that great rejoicing feast at the end of the feasting cycle.

We come together today to rejoice in the presence of God. Now, we come confessing our sins. The word of God brings us to repentance for our failures. But this day is a day that we are moved to the joy of the wine of heaven and the joy of the manna come down from heaven. That’s what this day is all about.

You know, sometimes you feel a little funny because you come here and you act better than you do in your own home. You know, that doesn’t bother me so much. It would bother me a lot more if you came here and acted the way you feel guilty about in your home. What we want to do is continue to strive diligently at this day of celebration and convocation to put on our best clothes. I mean, not necessarily literally, but put on our best manners, put on our best Christian demeanor and patience and forbearance, which you all did so wonderfully last Sunday. By the way, you’re good at this.

I’m not saying this because you’re not good at it, but I’m saying it to us to encourage us to do this so that this day changes the rest of our lives. So that you don’t act quite so poorly in the context of your four walls of your home or in your yard or wherever it is you go that you feel guilty about in terms of hypocrisy relative to this day. This day forms the basis for the rest of our lives. And this day is a day to be marked by life and not a day that is marked by death.

It’s not neutral news, like Chris W. said last week. It is good news. Christ has obtained life for us. He has assured us of our forgiveness. He gives us a new mind and he feeds us with life from heaven that brings joy to us. This day should be a day of joy.

You know, pagan celebrations aren’t like that. You can go to pagan celebrations and as they’re sitting around drinking the same wine we might drink and eating the same tasty cheeses we might eat, they’re having political games going on. Usually those sort of business activities—I’ve been to a number of them—are times when work is being done and not necessarily the kind of work you would think is good stuff. It’s, you know, kind of Joab time where you’re kissing a guy and sticking a knife in his side at the same time. Plots are being hatched at some of these festivities that the world brings together.

Not so us. We want to put off things of death, things that lead to division, disunity, and struggle and trials. We want to instead move in the celebration of the day. Don’t enter into things of death, particularly this day. Our feasting should be informed by this principle: that the ultimate climax of our feast is joy and life in the presence of God, not death. He brought us here to assure us of our resurrection.

Secondly, as feasters, we’re prohibited from eating up or selfishly consuming our tithes, first fruits, and offerings.

Remember that this is in connection to these first fruits of the harvest at the end of the cycle. Our offerings are spoken of in direct connection, and those first fruits included the firstborn of the herd. So this kid is a picture of a child—a firstborn—and really it talks about the consecration of our children to God, the consecration of our tithes and offerings to God.

And in a way you can say that this relationship of this child who is being nursed by the mother. At some point in time, the mother presents that child to God the way Hannah presented Samuel to God, or the mother presents the child, turns him over to the instruction of the father primarily upon weaning. That’s true in the Old Testament.

So the child represents the best of our efforts given to God. And so one application that seems legitimate based on this is that we don’t want to consume our tithes and offerings first. We don’t want to eat up the child before he’s ready for presentation. We bring forward our offerings today and it is great sin. It’s the capstone violation of the law of the covenant. It’s the ultimate way to show disrespect to God—to eat up our tithes or offerings or first fruits before we present them to God.

Third application: As authorities, we are warned against using the source of nurture to kill or enervate the source of maturation.

Okay, so directly relating now the milk to the law of God and these children to our children. And we’re the ones who are sustaining our children through the application of God’s word to their lives. We do not want to use the law in a way that is improper and end up killing our children, enervating, sapping their energy instead of energizing them for the work of the kingdom.

I mean, again, we must be very careful because this is just what the Pharisees did. They took the law of God, perverted it, and used it to kill the Savior.

Now, we’ve come into a great appreciation for all of God’s word, including obscure commandments like this one, and we’re teaching these things to our children. But what does Proverbs say? “Let the law of kindness be in the mouth of the mother.” The law is not a severe, strict, down-pressing, depressing, down-beating thing that we bring into our homes. It is to be a source of life and nurturing to the child who understands that his relationship to the lawgiver is not determined by his obedience to the law, but rather by the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. That’s at the heart of what we teach our children about the law of God.

And when we teach them verses like this, we want to point them to the work of the Lord Jesus Christ as the source of life. And then we nurture them in the context of that.

You know, we’ve talked about how it is a great sin for fathers to starve their children by not bringing them to educational opportunities in the word of God, not ministering the word of God to them in their homes, not insisting that they be brought up in the context of the word of God. That’s to starve a child to death. And it is a great sin on the other hand to minister the word in such a way that it becomes poison to them—that the last thing they want to hear when they become an adult is more about the law of God.

Now, it could be a rebellious heart on their part, but we want to be very careful as parents that we are raising our children not in this neutral apprehension of the law of God as a means of salvation and blessing, but that we’re raising our children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. We’re bringing it to our children, perceiving them as placed by a sovereign God in our homes, perceiving them as covenantally in Christ, and ministering the word in that way and being very careful that we do not use that word to support our prejudices, our desires to be served as parents, our well-being, or our convenience.

Now, you know, parents, if you’re honest here today, you’ve done that. I’ve done it. We all do it in Adam. God says, “Put that away.” He says, “Keep this image in your mind of this kid boiling to death in the very thing that’s supposed to be nurturing to it.” Keep that image in there and remind yourselves of that when you use the word oppressively or in an improper way.

Now, the fourth application: As authorities, we are warned by the horrific counter-examples that the scriptures give us relative to this basic truth.

First: Samaria and Jerusalem and others. We won’t turn to the text, but you know, northern Israel, southern Israel, Samaria, Jerusalem, sieges at both places. And in both sieges, I’ve given you the scripture references here—mothers boil. Same word: “Do not boil a calf in the mother’s milk.” Mothers boil their own children and eat them. The scriptures say women actually did this. The scriptures say this is a horrific example, again, to keep in our minds about the implications if we fail to minister God’s word correctly to our children.

And in fact, Jerusalem herself—which Paul says in Galatians is the mother of us all—by the time our savior arrives, Jerusalem is known as the city that has killed all the prophets and eventually killed Jesus. Jerusalem is the mother that eats her own child.

In John 19:17, the Jews answered saying, “We have a law, and according to our law—according to the milk, the nourishment of God’s word to his people—they say he ought to die.” They used the mother’s milk, the sustenance that the city of Jerusalem and its leaders were supposed to use to nurture the children brought up in her. The Psalms tell us “this one is born in Jerusalem. She’s the mother of us all.”

And they use that law of nurturing—that was supposed to be the law of kindness—to the children to kill the prophets and to kill the Lord Jesus Christ. They pervert the very law and they are in direct violation of this capstone of the law of the covenant. The Lord Jesus Christ is that kid boiled in the mother’s milk as they pervert the law of nurturing, the law that is the milk of God’s word, and use it instead to kill the savior.

May it never be that we do these things in our home. The Lord Jesus Christ has suffered in that way.

And as Chris said so wonderfully last week: in that very act of Jerusalem boiling the kid—the kid, the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of sons—ends up providing atonement and redemption for the very ones who are killing him and using the law improperly.

Jesus says that he comes to us today as the victor and he says, “That’s how you are in Adam, but I am transforming you and you are to see yourselves as responsible to nurture your children through the application of God’s word and to see your life as a life of life-giving power and authority instead of death.”

We have this wonderful blessing here of 1201 JQ Adam Street. And I think it’s not too much of a stretch to say that the Lord God has provided us some milk here. He’s provided us a physical structure in which we can improve the nurture of the covenant children raised in the context of this church.

May we pledge ourselves today as we come forward with our tithes and offerings to not use this source of nurture that God gives us in a way that will harm our children. May we retire the debt as quickly as we can and not burden the next generation with having restricted Levitical ministries going on because we have not been faithful to try diligently to retire the debt in us. Let’s not leave them a burden on their backs.

Let’s not get involved in the potential contentions of what a building can bring and so bring in this spirit of death and division into this building. And instead of seeing it as a place of unity and life for our children where they see the great celebration of the ultimate feast of Booths being lived out before them every Lord’s day.

Praise God for the spirit that was here last week that moved through all of you with patience and forbearance and the deacons and their wives with so much service that they’re doing for us here already.

Times will try us here. We have successfully avoided so far the last few years this third rail of church politics—this building program and getting into the building. There’ll be new trials and temptations and difficulties. This morning we get here and the parking lot is full. Well, there was a church that has their annual get together. That’s okay. Other things will happen. We just don’t want to respond in a negative way to these things. We want to be thankful for everything that occurs in the context of this building.

We’re improving it every Lord’s day. This can be a tremendous source of blessing to our children if we get it free and clear as quickly as possible. And if we remind ourselves not to bring divisions, difficulties, strivings with one another, but to move in the context of the spirit that is life-giving.

And finally, if we use this structure to actually minister the word of God through Sunday school classes—this morning both classrooms were too jammed. Got to start more classes. We’ll do that. You see, we don’t want to lose momentum here. We want you to continue to bring your kids to Sunday school so that they might receive the nurture of God’s word and that this building might be a source of nurture to the next generation. And then classes in the fall, et cetera.

God has given us a great blessing here. And he brought us an obscure text this morning as we move into our second week here, but it’s a text that has very direct relevance to how we see the good gifts of God and how we understand our stewardship—to use them to minister life and grace to the next generation, to the covenant seed that God has in his great love and mercy to us given here at Reformation Covenant.

Let’s pray. Father, we do thank you for this text and we thank you for the many things it teaches us. And we do pray, Lord God, that as we come forward now with our tithes and offerings, that we would do so consecrating ourselves to the proper use of this facility in a way that ministers life in your word to the next generation. In Christ’s name we ask it. Amen.

Now to God our King,
Joy and strength of Israel.
Lofty anthem sing.
Glorious are his ways.
To his name give praise.
With the harp and him bring.
This our festival day.