Dennis Tuuri

Today’s sermon text is found in Exodus 21:1-11. Please stand for the reading of God’s word to us.

Exodus 21:1-11. Now these are the judgments which you shall set before them. If you buy a Hebrew servant, he shall serve six years, and in the seventh he shall go out free and pay nothing. If he comes in by himself, he shall go out by himself. If he comes in married, then his wife shall go out with him.

If his master has given him a wife, and she has borne him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall be her master’s, and he shall go out by himself. But if the servant plainly says, “I love my master, my wife, and my children, I will not go out free.” Then his master shall bring him to the judges. He shall also bring him to the door or to the doorpost, and his master shall pierce his ear with an awl, and he shall serve him forever.

And if a man sells his daughter to be a female slave, she shall not go out as the male slaves do. If she does not please her master, who has betrothed her to himself, then he shall let her be redeemed. He shall have no right to sell her to a foreign people since he has dealt deceitfully with her. And if he has betrothed her to his son, he shall deal with her according to the custom of daughters. If he takes another wife, he shall not diminish her food, her clothing, and her marriage rights.

And if he does not do these three for her, then she shall go out free without paying money.

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for your scripture and we thank you for your spirit. Thank you for the words of the covenant that are so important to us. Help us to attend to them today by the power of your spirit and transform us in Jesus’s name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

The Lord God is sovereign, is all powerful, all wise. He has decreed whatsoever comes to pass. He has used and does use the sin of men sinlessly to affect his decree and to accomplish his purposes for the world, which is a world filled with those who are grateful and thankful and who image him in their community and in their wise stewardship and dominion in the context of the world.

We are living in times when the question is asked—as it was Friday night at the men’s meeting—are things getting better or worse? And the answer is yes, they are. Clearly, we can see the difficulty, the problems in front of us as a nation and as a state. We don’t need to recite the litany again. Hopefully, we know how things are getting worse in the culture. But we also took time Friday night to look back over the last 20 years and see a lot of positive things that have happened. We would say, for instance, the 35 years since Rushdoony published his Institutes of Biblical Law—a text by the way that really I think all of our parishioners should be familiar with. Since that time many things have happened. There are many elements where positive things are occurring.

In the context of the ecclesiastical world, we have the Confederation of Reformed Evangelical Churches. We have 60 to 75 churches, growing quickly, that are like-minded to us. In education we have had Christian schools—version two. We have had a series of schools in the last 10 or 15 years—classical Christian schools, worldview schools, and schools such as King’s Academy that is distinctively different from the Christian school movement of a generation or two ago.

Economically, we’ve had really quite a bit of economic prosperity in our country. But from a theological perspective, you know, the 18- and 19-year-old Sunday school class is going through material by Dave Ramsey, a self-conscious evangelical Christian who is syndicated all across the country, does conferences and seminars even in places as libertine as Portland, Oregon, and packs the place out. His financial seminars are basically what we would say in terms of economics in the Bible. The churches in Oregon City are frequently using his material to encourage their congregations to get out of debt.

So economically there’s a movement in the context of God’s people. In terms of ecclesiology, there’s a movement in the context of God’s people that’s good. It’s wonderful signs for the future. And in terms of education, wonderful signs for the future. I could go on, but the point is we are living in exile, but we’re living in an exile situation. This is not anymore a distinctively Christian nation, but we’re living in an exile that has all kinds of signs of promise to it for the long term.

You know, when Israel went into exile—well, actually Judah, the southern tribes—and Jeremiah said, you know, relax a little bit, build houses, have marriages, you know, go about normal life in exile. I’m going to talk about exile self-consciously in a couple of weeks. I’ll start a series of sermons on life in exile. But today’s is really sort of related to that. What do we have to maintain in our community that is a cognitive minority? We could say that it is a sociological minority in the context of our culture where good things are happening and yet the culture continues to slide downhill in terms of what it’s doing.

Even that’s good, right? We hope that culture that moves away from self-conscious submission to Jesus Christ gets worse. Why would we want it to get better? That’d be the worst of all worlds—if people know the Bible but refuse to submit to Jesus Christ. Where are the judgments? God promises judgments. They’re in our land. We can see them. So you know, we have to think about things to avoid in the context of our lives and things to do.

One more note on the education arena. Don Rogers forwarded me an email, or a letter I guess, from an article by Dan Smithwick from the Nehemiah Institute called “Where Are We Going?” You know, this is the man Friday night at Dan Prentice’s house. Lovely time by the way. It was an excellent time outside at Dan’s house. Kind of evaluating where are we 20 years on or whatever it is. Smithwick is doing the same thing at this Nehemiah Institute. He has a thing called a PEERS test and it’s just a way of evaluating Christian teenagers in terms of biblical worldview or not. And so he has a sliding scale. So he tests schools—predominantly junior high, 11th, 12th graders, that kind of age.

So Christian schools will administer this PEERS test, churches will administer it. You may or may not know, but a number of our young people took this test last summer. And so he’s had data now, you know, for 20 years in terms of trend lines. And it’s interesting. He divides them up into three areas: public school students—these are Christian kids in public school—traditional Christian schools, and then worldview-based schools so-called, which you would include the classical schools and schools like ours in the context of that.

Now, the first two groups of Christian students continue to score less and less and less over the 20 years. We are living in bad times because Christian students are becoming less and less distinctively Christian in their worldview and they’re sliding into humanism pretty quickly. The lowest line of his test results would be into socialism. So that’s the trend line for those two.

But the trend line for the worldview-based schools, classical schools, et cetera, is actually positive in the last 10 years. So there’s the good news. There’s a new educational version two of Christian schools and they actually are improving. Not just holding steady with the biblical worldview, but scoring higher on his tests. Interesting.

A comment for those of you who homeschool. He says homeschool students generally have ranged between the traditional Christian school students and the worldview-based school students. Small percentage of homeschooled students have scored very well. That would be our kids. But a surprisingly higher percentage score low—less than 30, about 25%—down low scores. So the way he ranks them, if you want to think about this: public schools are the worst, and then traditional Christian schools are not as good, and then a little better—homeschools—and better yet are these worldview Christian schools, although some homeschoolers do quite well.

So it’s interesting that he has this kind of data. And based on this data he says that Christian students are consistently abandoning a Christian worldview in favor of the humanist socialist worldview. He makes some predictions I think that are significant. He says that this isn’t a prophecy. This is just a forecast based on data. He says:

“Assuming the same rate of decline in test scores the past seven years, so I guess this was comparing the last seven years, students from traditional Christian schools would score an average at negative 9.9 in the year 2016. Youth from Christian homes and attending public schools will score minus 4.5 in the same year. These results remarkably close to the view seen in 2001 would mean that the student had intentionally rejected the basic tenants of biblical theism in favor of basic tenants of humanism or socialism. In short, it means that the secularization of our culture has more successfully captured the hearts and minds of our youth than had the efforts of the Christian home, the church, or even the traditional Christian school.”

So you know, bad news box, some good news stuck away in there. By the way, pray for me. This Wednesday is Oregon City Pastors Meeting. I’m going to make copies of Mr. Smithwick’s evaluation available to them. So what we’re doing in terms of our homeschools and King’s Academy are very important and they’re important positive trends in terms of what is otherwise a declension of Christian thinking.

Now, we come here to Exodus 21. And what’s going on in Exodus? Well, we know Exodus 20 is the Ten Commandments. And then the last half of chapter 20 is instruction on how to build the altar. And 21, where we read here, begins the so-called case laws. So taking the Ten Commandments and applying their equity in specific cases. So there’s a case that happens and so what do you do? And so God gives what some have called case laws.

Another way to look at it: he gives a little sermonic instruction on how to wisely apply law in the midst of situations that you may not like—slavery, polygamy, et cetera. But how you impact a culture that has become pretty sinful in what it does. So it’s very instructive for us in terms of living in exile in our culture, both in terms of how to interact with them but primarily what I want us to think about is that it informs us who we are.

Interestingly, after the case laws (21-24) and the people say “yeah, we’re going to do it,” and then the covenants renewed—I’ll talk about that at the table—after that the rest of Exodus is mostly instruction about worship: how to build the tabernacle, the feasts, et cetera. So what you’ve got is in chapter 20 you have ten commandments for God forming up his people, then describing worship. And then what you have in the rest of Exodus is case laws—forming up his people, who you are, applying those commandments—and then he talks about worship.

So it’s a little reversed from the way we normally think about this stuff. We normally talk about it here, and it’s worth pointing out and talking a little bit about. He brings people out of slavery and by way of analogy, sin. He gives them laws by which they’re to live. Then he tells them to worship him. And then he expands those in the rest of the book, tells them how to live in a little broader number of cases and then tells them in more direct specifics about how to worship.

We say that worship, that life flows out of it. But here the worship flows out of the people. And the important point I think to be noted here is that the temple or tabernacle in the Old Testament is a representation of people, right? God builds his house and dwells in his house and his house is his people. An architectural symbol of that in the Old Testament was the tabernacle or temple. So either way, it’s God building his house.

And it’s important to understand that if we’re going to try to maintain and build the house of God in the midst of exile or a community in declension, then we’re going to want to pay close attention to these laws as well as to worship. Worship isn’t enough. God forms up his people by means of these laws. We can’t, we don’t have a lot of time to talk about them. I’m specifically talking about them today because of the deterioration of the judicial system relative to marriage.

What we have is a judicial system that for many years now has believed in no-fault divorce. And what we just read says there’s fault in certain cases. The last few verses there’s fault in certain cases, and in those cases the bride gets to keep the dower. That’s what it says. Although I guess I’ve been using the wrong word for nearly 30 years. Wikipedia says dower is what a man gives to a woman. The dower (d-o-w-e-r), not dow-er. The dower is what the guy gives to his bride. So I guess my outline’s wrong. It should be dower.

But the point is that in our culture the disposition of money and the disposition of children will no longer be made in the courts according to a Christian faith system. And in fact, they’re specifically prohibited from doing it. You know, I was at this hearing of a couple going through divorce, a mediation process, and one of the first things the judge says is: “We don’t legislate morality from the bench. You can’t insist on certain moral conduct from your spouse when he’s around your children. You can’t insist on religious education for your children if he doesn’t want it. I can’t impose morality from the bench. Know that whether you like it or not, and all that doesn’t make any difference. That’s reality. That’s the facts. That’s the sin of the culture.”

But my contention is God is using sin sinlessly to shape us up a bit, to form us up as a more distinctive Christian community and to maybe make us a little more mature.

I kind of think we’ve relied upon the judicial props way too long. We didn’t worry about covenants in marriages. We didn’t worry about contracts. They used to, you know, the artwork on the front of your order of worship and on the inside too—several pictures—you know, contracts, prenuptial agreements we call them now, were quite routine in various portions of Christian history. So you know, I guess I’m saying that we probably should have had them even if the judges were doing right. And now that the judges won’t consider Christianity, we should have contracts even more so. And it’s a good thing that God is whipping us with you know, secular judges to get us to think about our marriages in terms of contract and covenant.

And some people don’t like it. You know, that the two wedding rings tied together with the dollar bill is sort of the typical. Oh, it’s just horrible. You know, money? No, love is what binds people together and the covenant. A contract? What are you talking about? That just sounds so unromantic.

Well, it’s not unromantic for God. People have commented that what happens in Exodus at the mountain is God essentially marrying his people, Israel. And in the context of that marriage, in the context the establishment of the covenant that happens in 24, the covenant is the blood of the covenant is sprinkled upon them. He has no problem telling his wife, “This is the way it’s going to be. This is how the contract between me and you. I’m going to draw it up and we’re going to affirm it here when we make covenant together.” There’s a contract.

Reformation Covenant Church. A covenant has terms and conditions and a covenant is found throughout the Bible and it shouldn’t, you know, influence our relationships. Most of our relationships, a lot of them should have formal covenants drawn up. Okay? And marriage particularly—particularly in light of being in exile. I think we all ought to have prenups and postnups. I’ll talk about that at the end of the sermon. You can do it after you’re married.

But I want you to continue to stress that a covenant has terms. Relationship with Jesus has been used to replace the idea of law and it’s absurd. Jesus came to fulfill the law. A delivered people is given the law as a way of life. The case laws and the Ten Commandments are given not to affect redemption. They’re given to a redeemed people by way of contract. We could say stipulations, things that you should do as a people in light of your relationship to God who redeemed you.

We get soft on covenants. We don’t like them. It’s part of our suppression of the truth of God in unrighteousness to not like contracts. Even in this church, you know, we thought covenant was real important. One of the things we want to hand on to the next generation is the importance of covenants in the sense of contracts, obligations. Immaturity doesn’t like obligations.

In this church in the last, I don’t know, 10 years, a lot of people come here, sign a covenant, a contract with mutual obligations, and walk away from it without thinking twice about it. You know, it almost feels like we’re sliding back into this: “I’m a citizen of the universal church. My association with a particular church is not important. I just drift around.” Forget that. The scriptures say you should be bound by covenant, not just to some kind of idea of the universal church that you float around in the context of.

We believe here that you’re bound by covenant to a local body and them to you. We have obligations. It’s a contract. You could be sued for breach of contract if you don’t keep it. Okay? That’s what church discipline is in one sense. And for you to bring charges against us, it’s to sue us for breach of contract because we have obligations in this thing too.

So, you know, Christianity—I mean, Peter Leithart’s book, you know, Against Christianity, for the church—that’s what we’re talking about here. And the church is not, you know, restricted to the local church, but the local church represents the church to you in the context of your life.

So, there’s laws involved in covenant. There’s no opposition of law and you know, love. Love and law go together. There’s no law-grace dichotomy. If we’re going to—you know, these—what do we read at the beginning of this section? Then we read: “These are the judgments.” Judgments. These aren’t ideas what we kind of think maybe be good. These are judgments. This is a word that refers to statutes.

God says that if we’re going to live in exile successfully, we will be tempted to think of our relationship to God in terms of something other than statutes, laws, and judgments. And particularly, we’ll be tempted to think that civil government is neutral in this stuff and should be neutral. We don’t believe in theocracy. That’s those crazy Muslims over there. No, we do. We do believe that God, to a redeemed people, wants them to strive and pray to the end that the laws of the state reflect the judgments of God applied in our context.

Now, yeah, you can’t cut and paste them. That’s not what we’re talking about. The case laws give us general equity. The Westminster Confession affirms the general equity of the Mosaic judicials. It means that as we look at the Ten Commandments, you can’t cut and paste them. This side of the cross, things look a little different, but you got to apply the equity of what those things mean and what these sermonic or case laws meant to our particular situation.

And one of the things we are absolutely committed to as a church, and if you don’t get it, then you’ve missed something here. I’ve not done my job. You should sue me for breach of contract. If you don’t understand that we think the civil laws of this country should reflect Christian biblical God’s laws, okay? Now, that doesn’t mean they enforce morality in the broadest sense. There’s only certain things the civil magistrate is supposed to attend to. But when he attends to those things, he ought to be doing it by way of justice using God’s judgments and applying the equity of them.

Okay. So, this says that God’s law is important. Much as we can say that God is using sin sinlessly when the judges refuse to get involved in dispute of Christian marriages more than just saying “whatever goes. Whatever you guys agree to is fine with me.” Much as God is using sin sinlessly, our goal is that the judges get back to fault divorce in the context of our culture. That if there’s to be a divorce, somebody’s broken covenant and there’s fault to be assigned and that determines it and has an influence on the disposition of children and property.

We want that long term. We want that back and we should pray to that end and work to that end. So by way of general introduction, that’s what these case laws remind us of: the importance of contracts in our relationship with God and with each other and the importance of theocracy. God rules, not ecclesia. Muslims have an ecclesiocracy. The church rules the civil state. We don’t believe in that. But we believe that God rules everything that we do.

And so we certainly want the civil government to be theocratic, bowing the knee to King Jesus in the government. And this is not some kind of new weird thing. This goes back to what English law was all about, going way back to Alfred and its law codes, et cetera. So that’s what we believe in here. That’s what we want.

So as God builds his house, he wants us to be aware of certain provisions. Okay, let’s move through the outline quickly then.

So we’ve talked about an introduction to case laws. These are the judgments. I mentioned here slavery and Jacob and Laban. It’s not as if these judgments originated at Sinai. If you took the time, you could go back and look at what happened in Genesis and the general equity, we could say, of these laws was already being played out there in terms of slavery and in terms of dowers, in terms of all this stuff was all going on there in culture. Here they’re codified, but it’s not as if men didn’t know the general equity of these laws beforehand. So, that’s important to see.

And as I said, God’s law for civil magistrates—Jim Jordan, quoting Umberto Cassuto’s commentary on the Torah, says that what we have here are ethical instructions in judicial matters. Ethical instructions in judicial matters. So there are judicial matters that should have ethical considerations that come from the sovereignty of God and from King Jesus.

Okay? And you know, again, for instance, we could turn to Genesis 18:19 where God says, “I have known Abraham in order that he may command his children and his household after him that they keep the way of the Lord to do righteousness and justice, that the Lord may bring to Abraham what he has spoken to him—righteousness and justice.” Okay. The implication of that word is that the children of RCC, the children of faithful Christians, will also strive to see justice in their land—to have a political component to their worldview where the laws of the state should reflect justice and the judgments of God.

And then, in Genesis 26:5, again talking about Abraham, God says, “Because Abraham obeyed my voice and kept my charge, my commandments, my statutes, and my laws.” So different terms. He’s not just repeating the same thing. He’s using different words. And part of it is that Abraham attempted to build a civil structure based on God’s law and God’s judgments as revealed to him.

So I could—we could go on. That’s what these texts that I’ve got here for other texts, that’s what they talk about: the importance of saying that God talks about this book of the covenant containing judgments from God. So Exodus 21 starts with what some call the case laws. These laws should help us make good state laws. We should pray that our nation submits to God’s laws and we can make good biblical contract acts.

One of the truths is that the judges don’t get ticked off if you’ve got a prenuptial or a postnuptial agreement. They like it. They’re overworked guys. They would just as soon see couples have agreed to some things beforehand. So we’re in a situation living in exile that still allows us to enter into Christian contracts, applying these judgments and judicial wisdom from ethical decisions in our community that we live in. We can grow a parallel government. This is what the early church did in Rome. They set up their own law courts eventually because Rome was just, you know, degenerating. You couldn’t get justice there.

And this isn’t, you know, rebellion. It’s sort of like McCain’s plan to start a league of democracies, just sort of ignoring the UN over there. Over time, you know, you just wither away as some kind of appendage. So, that’s the same kind of thing here. Eventually, we want to see the civil courts of our land better. But in the meantime, nobody’s telling us we can’t write good biblical contracts with one another and change the way our culture, the way marriages for instance are terminated at divorce and what that looks like. Okay.

Now, there’s certain cases here and I don’t want to—we can’t spend a lot of time here—but first of all, there are cases involving servitude. Interesting that God starts the case laws with servitude. I mean, the immediate context is you’ve been brought out of slavery and so you know, you’re going to have this slavery thing going on and there’s different kinds of servitude. It doesn’t mean, you know, like our Confederate version of slavery. People were debt servants. They were indentured. You know, they had debts. They couldn’t pay. You’d have to work at the guy’s house for the next year to pay off the debt. That kind of thing.

Even in Plymouth Colony, same thing would happen. Some guys, criminals, you know, who are not dangerous would be assigned to a family and he would work then and he’d be sort of like—you think of jail as a bunch of prisoners, but they’re not doing anything anymore. So you know, debt servitude meant people were prisoners either, you know, for crime or debt or whatever it was, but they had a way to get out of it. That was the point. They were working and they were trying, they were moving toward redemption.

And God’s big picture is redeeming us away from the servitude of sin. And so, it starts with that. The major provision here is six-year limitation for Christian bond servants. This was what the South just messed up horribly. Their slaves would convert. They wouldn’t release them in the seventh year. They made all kinds of casuistic arguments as to why it didn’t apply to them and plainly it did.

God doesn’t like slavery. Slavery is—I mean, he likes it to mature a person—servitude—but he wants a person to get mature and he wants them to be self-governing and we should want that same thing. So increasingly, George Schuben and I were talking the way home from the men’s discussion—what we see around us in our culture, the exile state in which we now live, is one of immaturity. It’s one of you know, kind of making bad impatience. There’s lots of impatience. That’s immaturity.

A wise man becomes more patient. We see immaturity and we see more and more control over an immature population. And it’s kind of a cyclical thing. If you’re immature, you sort of want people to tell you what to do and the state has to tell you more and more what to do because you’re acting like an idiot. So it’s very related—this section of the case law—to the American experience right now.

As I said, there could be voluntary service directly. There could be wage service, theft, debt, et cetera. Lots of things that this is addressing. But the basic idea is it shouldn’t prolong past six years. Seventh year, the guy should go free. Okay? So six years and you’re out.

And one other thing here—when it says “if you buy a Hebrew servant,” well, the word “buy” there maybe isn’t the best translation. It’s a general Hebrew term for obtaining or getting something. It doesn’t mean what we think of in slave trading. Kidnapping was a capital crime in the Bible. Okay? So, the kind of slavery that went on in the South, you know, would be punished by the death penalty by God’s law—wouldn’t be upheld. So, this is a different kind of thing going on here. This isn’t kidnapping and then selling people. This, as I said, is obtaining people in relationship to a debt owed, theft, whatever it might be. So, it’s important to understand that.

And God moves people gradually into freedom. So, that’s involved here as well. Well, we could spend more time in that, but I don’t have time to spend more time. I really want to get to the dower stuff. So, let’s move quickly ahead.

Please though, if you’re—it wouldn’t be a bad thing to do on the Lord’s day to look up these other scriptural references in terms of that given you on the outline. The minor provision: So the major provision is you get out in six, seven years. Minor: if the solitary entrance then you go out. If you go in by yourself, you go out by yourself. If you’re married when you come in, then you get to leave with and have either return to, or with your wife and children.

If you’ve been living at the house of the master, if the master provides a family—no. Then you have a solitary exit. Now, this freaks people out, but it shouldn’t. You haven’t been mature enough to acquire a wife correctly. Your master has provided a wife for you. When you leave there and then you want to redeem your wife, she’s in there too. She’s another, you know, she’s in her period of servitude or, you know, working out debt or whatever it is, then you can redeem her. You can always redeem the wife. Master, it’s not that he’s got to let her go in the seventh year, too. She’s a Christian, right?

So, it’s not that, you know, but the point is he’s immature. The man who’s left—he’s getting better and when he gets fully better, he can redeem her and—or whatever. What you know, one interesting thing here: who owns the children? Well, you know, this is a question that’s been floating around our church for a while now with various strange answers. That it’s a tough question to answer. What institution is more important? These are questions that maybe aren’t quite so useful at times, but you know—one of the comments on this text—I think this was Matthew Henry—said this law will further useful to us: one, to illustrate the right God has to the children of believing parents as such and the place they have in his church.

They are by baptism enrolled among his servants because they are born in his house. For they are there, they are therefore born unto him. Ezekiel 16:20. David owns himself God’s servant as he was the son of his handmaid. Psalm 116. Therefore, entitled to protection.

We sang songs already today about the house of God and how we’re members of the household of God. So, in this imagery that’s given to us in Exodus 21, that’s what’s going on. This house of the master is an image of the house of God. And Matthew Henry says, “One of the things that’s useful here is knowing God’s ownership of our kids.” God owns the kids. And these children—the way God owns kids is he enrolls them in his church.

So you could say some have said the church owns the children. That doesn’t mean the local church—doesn’t mean Reformation Covenant Church—but it means the children’s identity is primarily first and foremost to the Lord Jesus Christ and that’s what being in the church is. It’s very important because when Christian parents divorce and one isn’t faithful or denies Christ, does he or she have any right to the children? Because they’re members of the family?

The answer is no. That’s what this law can be, you know, adduced to mean to us. No, the children belong to God. The purpose of marriage, one of them, according to Malachi, is the begetting of a godly seed. So why would the father or the mother who’s in sin and who’s not part of the church anymore have any right to the children just because, you know, he could procreate? No, I don’t think so.

So, in fact, the sort of prenuptial or postnuptial agreements we’re talking about are ones that would say that if someone is excommunicated that the other—the believing faithful spouse—it’s full custody of the kids. And that’s not because the family has ultimate authority. It’s because they recognize the children go with the faithful parent, the member who is still involved in the church of Jesus Christ.

So, you know, we don’t got to worry about this stuff. Nobody’s trying to, you know, be the—all we’re saying is the allegiance of children ultimately is to Jesus. And because of that, at times custody of children will be terminated for non-believing parents in the context of this step. Okay.

So and again, there’s some interesting verses there. Now the other case is real interesting and deserves a little bit of attention. And the next thing says: “Well, if he loves his master and his wife and his kids and he wants to serve there perpetually, he can do it.”

And so this is, you know, a lot of people—well, is this a good or a bad thing? It seems to me to be clearly a good thing. And again, it’s emblematic of who we are as Christians. It doesn’t say he gets an earring put on it. Doesn’t say that. It says that his ear is pierced at the door or the doorway of the house.

Now, we got blood on the doorway to a people—that’s just how they got out of Egypt was blood on the doorway. That’s—I mean in their minds and their Eden, you know, immediately upon exiting Egypt, they’re camped out at Sinai—blood on the doorway has some big associations for them. And to understand it correctly, it should have big associations for us, right? It’s an image. Now, it’s talking about real cases, but it’s still an analogy. It’s an image. The same way marriage is an image of Christ in the church.

This man is an image of all of us. His ear is circumcised. Well, in Jeremiah 6:10: “To whom shall I speak and give warning? They may hear. Indeed, their ear is uncircumcised. They cannot give heed.” The ear needs to be dug out. You got wax in there. You need to pull it up. You need to cut off something. You got to open that ear up to hear instruction.

In fact, in the New Testament, Acts 7:51, we talked about Stephen: “You stiff-necked, uncircumcised in heart and ears.” Ears can be uncircumcised. Psalm 40:6: “Sacrifice and offering you did not desire. My ears you have opened.” Even more dramatic imagery for us: “My ears you have opened.”

And then he says, “I’m going to obey you with all that I have—with the rest of my body.” Like that oil of myrrh or whatever it was at the baptism we did a couple weeks ago. You know, the ear is open so that the body can serve. Jesus quotes this of himself.

So the point is that you’ve got a picture here of the servant’s ear being open to love his master, serve in the master’s house—and that’s where his family is—in the house of the master again, saying the master’s house is preeminent. His house only has meaning and purpose in the context of the master’s house.

And if you read carefully, as we sing these songs, psalms, or read the Psalms, this is the thing: “Better to be a doorkeeper in the house of God, right?” So God’s house, his people, the master here is an image of God. So the man is a picture of all of us. He’s having his ears circumcised—open to hear the words of the master.

The imagery is next to that sacrificial lamb imagery. The only reason we can get our ears open is because Jesus died for our sins. The blood on the lintels or doorposts of the home reminds us of that. And the end result is, you know, blessing for this man. This is a picture of salvation for us.

See the beauty of God’s contracts? Terms that are written—at first glance, they seem so foreign and alien to us—and then but you meditate on them in their context and the Passover and all these verses about circumcising ears and it just comes beautifully open to us and we see that it really is a picture of who we are as well. So, that’s important to see.

That this is kind of the end result of the thing is obedience. We love God. We want to serve in his house as his servants, right? Paul addresses us as servants in the New Testament—doula—servants of God. We’re servants who have had the ear opened through the work of Jesus. Our ears should be open then to hear and obey our Lord’s words. That’s the imagery given to us here.

The third section here on the outline is cases involving servitude for marriage. The major provision is no seventh year release for a betrothed female servant. Now there’s still the obligation till death do us part—back going back to the slave man—but remember that’s got to be worked out in a way.

So here the major provision is no immediate release. And let me read the actual text again that we’re talking about here. So we’re in verse 7: “If a man sells his daughter to be a female slave, she shall not go out as the male slaves do. If she does not please her master—” So here what’s happening is if she doesn’t please her master, there’s a betrothal, ultimate aspect of what’s going on here.

You don’t sell your daughter to be a servant. The major provision is no servant year release for a betrothed female servant. That you know, you don’t sell her as you know somebody kidnapped and captured. The exchange of commerce involves a betrothal of this woman.

The minor provisions are: if no marriage occurs then another may provide her dower, redeeming her. So it goes on to say: “If she does not please her master who has betrothed her to himself, see that’s what he’s discussing. This is betrothal here. Then he shall let her be redeemed. Somebody else can marry her. Somebody else can betroth her. She can be redeemed. He shall have no right to sell her to a foreign people since he has dealt deceitfully with her.”

So the minor provision is: if no marriage occurs, that another may provide her dower, her dower, redeeming her. Okay. And the assumption here is that money or dower is part of the process.

And you know, if you look at the proof texts I’ve listed there, the other parallel scripture passages, you’ll see how that dower verses are laid out for us. Ultimately, in 1 Peter 3:7, husbands are to give honor to wives. And this is pictured by the dower, where a man honors his wife by giving her money upon marriage. Okay, so this is considered normal in the Bible.

In the Bible, there were two kinds of wives. There were fully vested, fully dowered wives and then there were concubines. That’s what concubines were. When Abraham married Keturah, it specifically tells us she was a concubine. She wasn’t part of a harem. He only had one wife. Sarah had died. But because of the unique nature of Abraham relative to the covenant, all the blessings then were transferred to his children. So she was unended, you see. So she’s a concubine.

So the point is there’s two kinds of wives: totally freedowed wives and concubine wives. And the difference is whether or not they receive dower—money, goods, something at the beginning of the marriage. Most wives were supposed to have a dower or a dowy. This is what the normal thing is. And that’s why this case is starting with this. The normal situation going on where there’s an exchange of money and there’s a dower paid for the girl.

“If she is betrothed to his son, then she shall be adopted into the family. So he says you can’t, you know, have her outside of the household. If he has betrothed her to his son, this is a different case. Wasn’t betrothed to him first. Now if instead this relationship is entered into—a betrothal to his son—he shall deal with her according to the custom of daughters. So even though she’s in the servitude position, she becomes full member of the family.

And that again is a picture of us, right? I mean, the father, the son, this girl who needs money, an indentured servant becomes married to the son under the father’s household. And that’s what we’ve got going on here. So again, a beautiful picture of the gospel. So she has to be seen according to the custom of daughters.

“So if she marries his son, then she shall be adopted into the family. If it’s her, now it goes back to if it’s him her that he’s marrying. If he is betrothed—I’m sorry. If he takes another wife, he shall not diminish her food, her clothing, and her marriage rights. If he does not do these three for her, then she shall go out free without paying money—without repaying the money she got as dower.”

That’s what’s going on here. So, you know, again, there’s polygamy. There’s provision for that. It doesn’t mean that God likes it. He doesn’t. But if that’s what happens, he addresses this case: is that you shouldn’t have gotten involved in this other covenant relation. But if you did, you have to still provide, you know, clothing, which is shelter. You got to provide food, which is nourishment. And you got to provide response—marriage rights.

That doesn’t mean sex, yeah. So, we, you know, it’s kind of what’s alluded to, but more generally, it means response is the specific word that’s used here. You have to have relationship with her. You have to, you know, sex is part of it, you know, but a bigger part is relationship. You got to have conversation. You got to have response going on.

And if he diminishes any of these three things, she can divorce him. She can leave and she gets to keep the dower. Okay? So, food, clothing, and marriage rights.

And what this tells us again is: while ultimately long-term we don’t want divorces anymore, in the short term, divorces will happen. And it says that when a divorce happens, fault can be assigned. It says that the guy—if she forces him because he’s not given her either enough food, clothing, or response—God says, “You’re at fault then, man. She gets to keep the dower.”

And the implication is that if she’s at fault, she’s got to give the money back. She’s got to give the money back to the husband. Okay? So, the idea is that there’s this dower. What you know, so here clearly what it tells us is this money is divorce insurance. It’s sin insurance.

If the husband’s going to sin in a grievous way that breaks the marriage covenant that allows her to divorce—properly, which is proper for the wife to do—then it’s insurance for her. You know, in those days you’re not, you know, it’s not easy to get remarried. Still isn’t probably. So what are you going to do? You know, you’ve not been working. You have been married and what are you going to do?

Well, what you’re going to do is rely upon the dowy, the dower, that your husband gave you. So it’s insurance against you know, pig dog men, is what we are apart from the grace of God. And so you can divorce them. It’s also insurance in case they divorce you inappropriately. You still get to keep the money because there’s fault divorce in the Bible. That’s the point.

It’s also insurance, if you think about it more broadly, in terms of death. Husband could die. You don’t know. So he’s provided life insurance for you. And in fact, the early life insurance company in America, the first one I’ve heard I know of, was provided for missionaries who were too young to have accumulated a dower for their wives. But still they wanted a marriage to go out in the mission field. And so they thought one way of making up for a loss of dower was life insurance. And we still, you know, counsel men to do that today here at RCC.

So the dower is important. These are this is part of the culture that God is building. See, God wants a culture where marriages are entered into with a contract like these pictures. The first one’s kind of a satire in your order of worship. The next one in it shows a joyful little thing going on maybe. But the point is this is what God sort of ought to take place. You should have provision so that the wife gets and you know, gets a pot of money or something.

It shows, by the way, the parents—they can evaluate suitors whether they’re responsible or not. Do they have a dower or not for the bride? So he evaluates the suitors and so you know, there should be a contract particularly this day and age. It says she gets the money and if you sin, you’re excommunicated, cut out of the body. She’s going to stay in the master’s house. Okay? And so are the kids.

Children and land belong to God. They don’t belong to the family. They don’t belong to individuals. They don’t belong to Reformation Covenant Church. They belong to God and to the church in a broader sense. And so God says you mess up, they stay in the household. And the same thing to the wife: if you mess up, the guy and the kids stay in my household. They’re going to, you know, you have to pay him back the money that he gave you because you’re the one who sinned.

So in the Bible, you know, this is what we’re supposed to do. This kind of communities we’re supposed to build. And you know, the civil government hasn’t approached the place where they hate us and don’t want us to do this stuff. Prenuptial agreements are common. You know, usually rich people, but they’re not—they may or may not be binding in a particular case, but they certainly inform the judge who wants to be informed.

The money helps if her husband dies or divorces the wife. It helps parents evaluate. Big word for you young kids: evaluate. Number 10 on the sheet. Helps parents evaluate possible husbands. This also helps the wife add beauty to the home. I didn’t mention that one, but the Proverbs woman considers a field. That’s the coloring sheet for today. It’s not considering a field, but can she—she’s got resources and beauty. She’s adding to the home. Why? Because she was given a dower by her husband, maybe some by her parents too. We see examples of that in the scriptures as well. She’s got some money to add beauty to the home, to consider a field.

So the home in a broader sense—to the household—she can add value and beauty to it through wise business decisions or through using money to beautify the home. So there’s lots of good reasons for the dower and we should encourage our young boys then to save money for a dower and young girls should too because most Christian guys aren’t going to have it. So, they got to kind of take care of it on their own.

Parents should write good contracts based on the Bible, the Bible’s laws for the marriage. Children belong to God, not the father and mother. The land also belongs to God and the church. So, children belong to God, land belongs to God. Parents should write contracts based on the Bible. Most Government judges like help in deciding these things. And so this is a great opportunity for the church of Jesus Christ.

As I said, contracts should be written that specify if someone leaves the house of Jesus Christ, the other spouse gets the money that they have control over. They get the kids because the kids belong to Jesus. We can’t do that. We’re in a diminished position to enter into those kind of negotiations in divorce court, you know, if we just rely upon the system today because they’re not going to enforce morality from the bench. They will enforce contracts.

So if we write contracts more, you know, they will take at least that into consideration when it comes to custody battles, money disputes, et cetera. So this is why I think every marriage that happens in the context of RCC should have some kind of contract that both the husband and the wife sign. This thing is filed at the county office and is a legal binding contract between husband and wife.

And one other thing: the contracts that Kim Frasier have written up for some of us—my two daughters have done this. And the contract involves resolution of disputes for the offices of the church, the elders of the church. Another important part of how these things should be resolved. And again, judges are looking for help. They’re looking for umpires and looking for mediators. Looking for any agreement you guys have entered into when you were sane.

So when the insanity of divorce starts to happen, you can look at that and see, “Well, this is what you guys agreed to. This is what we’re going to do.” So it’s a great opportunity.

Now, it’s not an opportunity that those of us who didn’t have them when we got married are not able to enter into either—post. I talked to Kim Frasier on Friday. Postnuptial contracts are just as good as prenuptial ones. So I think particularly if you’ve got young kids, you really ought to consider writing up a marriage contract that looks at disposition of land and children should you know horrific sin happen.

We live in a culture that is luring Christians to sin more and more. We live in a culture of rising divorce even in the context of the church because people in the church are tempted to sin in grievous ways like the culture does and that’s going to get worse. It’s not going to get better. So I believe that the course of wisdom—this isn’t, you know, commandment or anything for me, but I think that if we’re trying to build this sort of culture with contracts with proper resolution of divorces that are for fault and identify who gets kids and land and identify the elders as help in mediating disputes, if we’re going to build that kind of culture in the midst of this exile and avoid, you know, going about these things the wrong way, I think the course of wisdom is to get a marriage contract in place.

I’ve talked to Kim Frasier. He’s willing to come down spend a couple of hours with us one evening or a Saturday morning or something. He’s got forms now. His state—he can’t practice law in Oregon. He’s in Washington, which is a common property state. We’re not, so there’s some differences. But Kim has provided contracts for several families in this church in terms of marriage and he’s a great resource to us. I think if we kind of promoted this thing through the homeschool community probably be a pretty good money-making effort too.

You know, I mean, if this is such a valuable resource, and I think it is, and part of the culture, then I think that it’s an opportunity for people to get involved and provide services that I think the church desperately needs.

So, yeah, times are tough, things are disintegrating in some perspective, but there’s initial stages in economics and in education. Supreme Court—I mean, it was we were within one vote of having the death penalty for a form of rape. It’s been prohibited for rape for 30 years and we’re one vote shy now of getting that back in place which is what God’s law says. So there’s beginning signs—positive movement—across the board.

And I think this one is another one. We have a tremendous opportunity in terms of the marriages that happen in the context of this church and the families in the context of this church to talk biblically and to involve ourselves once more in rebuilding a culture based upon God’s law, his covenant, his contract with us.

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for today. Thank you for your scriptures. Thank you for the help that they provide us and knowing how to frame civil statutes. And thank you that we have the wonderful freedom in this country to enter into contracts that are usually upheld. So help us, Father, be wise people to commit at least to thinking hard about this issue today and then making decisions in the context of our families and those that are becoming married and those of us that have been married as well. Bless us Lord God. In Jesus’s name we ask it. Amen.