Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript
## Reformation Covenant Church
### Pastor Dennis Tuuri

The text is Deuteronomy 21. Please stand for the reading of God’s word. The sermon topic will be the advent of atonement and honor.

**Deuteronomy 21:**

If anyone is found slain lying in the field in the land which the Lord your God has given you to possess, and it is not known who killed him. Then your elders and your judges shall go out and measure the distance from the slain man to the surrounding cities.

Then it shall be that the elders of the city nearest to the slain man will take a heifer which has not been worked and which is not pulled with a yoke. The elders of that city shall bring the heifer down to a valley with flowing water which is neither plowed nor sown. And they shall break the heifer’s neck there in the valley.

Then the priests, the sons of Levi, shall come near. For the Lord your God has chosen them to minister to him and to bless in the name of the Lord. By their word, every controversy and every assault shall be settled. And all the elders of that city nearest to the slain man shall wash their hands over the heifer whose neck was broken in the valley.

Then they shall answer and say, “Our hands have not shed this blood, nor have our eyes seen it. Provide atonement, O Lord, for your people Israel, whom you have redeemed, and do not lay innocent blood to the charge of your people Israel. And atonement shall be provided on their behalf for the blood. So you shall put away the guilt of innocent blood from among you when you do what is right in the sight of the Lord.

When you go out to war against your enemies, and the Lord your God delivers them into your hand and you take them captive and you see among the captives a beautiful woman and desire her and would take her for your wife. Then you shall bring her home to your house. She shall shave her head and trim her nails. She shall put off the clothes of her captivity, remain in your house and mourn her father and her mother a full month.

After that you may go into her and be her husband and she shall be with you. She shall rather be your wife. And it shall be, if you have no delight in her, then you shall set her free, but you certainly shall not sell her for money. You shall not treat her brutally, because you have humbled her.

If a man has two wives, one loved and the other unloved, and they have borne him children, both the loved and the unloved, and if the firstborn son is of her who is unloved, then it shall be on the day he bequeaths his possessions to his sons that he must not bestow firstborn status on the son of the loved wife in preference to the son of the unloved, the true firstborn.

But he shall acknowledge the son of the unloved wife as the firstborn by giving him a double portion of all that he has. For he is the beginning of his strength. The right of the firstborn is his.

If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother and who when they have chastened him will not heed them. Then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of the city to the gate of his city. And they shall say to the elders of his city, “This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey our voice. He is a glutton and a drunkard.”

And then all the men of his city shall stone him to death with stones. So you shall put away the evil from among you, and all Israel shall hear and fear.

If a man has committed a sin deserving of death, and he is put to death, and you hang him on a tree, his body shall not remain overnight on the tree. But you shall surely bury him that day, so that you do not defile the land which the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance. For he who is hanged is accursed of God.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for your word and we pray that you would help us to understand it. Help us to rejoice in it, to have our lives framed by it. Help us, Father, to pray for a government in our country that would reflect the truths, the principles undergirding these laws. And help us to commit ourselves to be faithful to what we learn herein and to rejoice in the coming, the advent of the Lord Jesus Christ who brought atonement.

In his name we pray. Amen.

Please be seated.

Well, so getting fully into the swing of the Christmas time season now and you know, we’re singing songs, putting up reindeer, as they say. Got the advent thing going on in a large way. You can actually see it now with the five advent trees as opposed to the candles, which most of you can’t see. And it’s a wonderful season, a wonderful time of year, of course.

And my advent sermon today is on war brides and the stoning of incorrigible children. Okay, that such it is. That’s what God has brought us to.

Now, Advent is a time of preparation for the coming of Christ. We’re singing more and more Christmas songs over the last few years in the context of Advent. And there’s one reason for that. One is we just love to sing them. But another reason is that we want to avoid a misunderstanding of the Advent season.

You know, Advent is not a time when we pretend that Jesus hasn’t been born yet and then on Christmas Sunday we rejoice, “Oh, he’s finally been born.” No, it’s not that. That’s not the idea. We do sort of enter into the anticipation of the Old Testament saints and the people in the immediate context of the coming of Jesus. We do enter into that in a renewed sense perhaps. But Advent also looks forward to Jesus’s final coming and to his many comings to us in our lives.

We want Jesus to come to us in particular ways to strengthen us when we’re not doing well, to comfort us, to empower us for particular tasks we have, to move the world forward, not just for us personally, but for our church, for the cities that we live in, et cetera. So, the coming of Jesus, the advent of Jesus certainly reminds us of his coming in obedience to the voice of the Father and the fulfillment of all the promises that happened with the incarnation.

But Advent is also about his final coming, and it’s about his many comings to us. Jesus comes to be with us in a special sense every Lord’s day and Advent is sort of about that.

Now, the historic church has chosen to use particular colors over the years and there’s nothing inspired about this, but in the providence of God, we have purple banners up here and it’s a reminder to us that purple is the historic church color for the Advent season, and one reason for that is there’s kind of a royalty aspect to it. But probably the larger reason in church history was repentance. In fact, I learned this week from Pastor Harlo that Advent in some communions is actually called Lent minor. It’s like minor Lent. And purple is also the color of Lent.

Now in some churches, the purple in Advent is more of a blue purple and at Lent it’s more of a red purple to distinguish it. But repentance is part of the deal in Advent. And of course, with John the Baptist, he prepared the people for the coming of Jesus. And what we do to prepare ourselves for the coming of Jesus in worship is to confess our sins, right? The beginning of the worship service that we’re supposed to do. And if we look for Jesus’s coming, one of the ways we anticipate that coming and desire to see it is through personal repentance. It’s a renewed commitment to holiness on our part.

So, Advent is properly a reflection on repentance as preparation for the coming of Jesus.

We were given a gift of advent candles. I think Josiah Evans might have made them, but you know, you might be confused by them. They’re purple and then there’s a pink candle. Well, pink is Gaudete Sunday. The third Sunday in Advent, the color changes in some churches to pink because there’s anticipation of the joy of the coming of Jesus. And then it goes back the fourth Sunday in Advent to purple. And then after Christmas evening, the purple usually comes down and white is put up as a symbol that Jesus has come in purity and that white stays up until it then goes replaced back to purple until Epiphany and then green becomes the color because new life is flowing into the world. So lots of colors going on but there are all these associations and in the providence of God we’ve got purple this year up here and it’s good to think about that.

It’s good to think about repentance and particularly in the text we have today. It draws our attention I think to some areas that repentance is called for and also draws our attention to the fact that our repentance doesn’t really produce change in the world but the atonement of the Lord Jesus Christ does and so the text today reminds us of all of that as well.

Christmas is a time of gift-giving and Jesus comes as the great gift of God to bring vindication. We talked about that two weeks ago. He comes as the avenger of blood to bring vindication. He comes as the anointed of the war to lead us into conquest of the world through the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus and calling all men and women to come to unconditional surrender to King Jesus to serve him and to find that in the service of Jesus’s true life.

And today’s text, I think, will focus us on this aspect of atonement.

But I did want to mention that this Sunday and next Sunday, we have special alms offerings going on. It’s good for a community to remember those amongst us who don’t have as much as we might have. And some of you want to help others and bring their Christmas joy to a little louder tone. And some of you are struggling. And so, the deacons and the elders think it’s good and proper for us to take up a special alms offering today and next week to bring more joy to members of our community who don’t have as much at Christmas time as others might. And so we’re real pleased to do that today.

Now, the text today falls out into probably four sections or five sections. I’m going to talk about it with five sections. You know, it begins with this atonement of the heifer. And then it talks about war brides and then it talks about sons either firstborn son and what’s going on there or the incorrigible son. And then finally, it concludes with a case law and application of the sixth word—thou shalt not kill—to hanging of executed criminals on a pole and not being on the pole overnight.

So that’s the way the text flows out and that’s the way we’ll talk about it.

And the text begins then with a section dealing with the sins of a community. When a man is killed, you find a body in a field outside of the city. We don’t know who’s murdered the person. He’s been killed or slain by somebody. And what do you do? And so the particular provision here at this time in covenant history, right? These laws are for a particular period in time in redemptive history. Their application of the sixth word. Remember, the ten commandments that God gives Moses—their archive file, their zip file, their genetic code. And when the organism grows, that genetic code is reflected now in Moses’ sermons where he goes through chapters 19 through verse 8 of chapter 22 where he expounds, he teaches what the sixth commandment is and what are the implications of it.

And so here in this part of the sermon dealing with that, he says that the slaying of innocent life is a big deal. It’s a very important thing. And we’ve already seen that in chapter 19 already in Moses’ sermon—cities of refuge and all that. But here there’s a provision made for if a man is killed and nobody knows who did it and it’s out in the field, you have to first of all identify which city has jurisdiction in the context of this particular crime.

And so jurisdiction is provided by measuring, you know, physical distance from a city. In other words, the same stuff would go on if the body was found in a city and you had an unsolved crime. But the case tells us what happens if it’s outside of the city and you’re not sure which elders are supposed to be involved in this. So that’s what’s happening here. And then there’s a procedure outlined for what the elders are supposed to do.

And they take responsibility for the death that happened in the context of their city or the space around their city. They’re supposed to take a heifer, a heifer that’s not been plowed. It’s never been yoked up to plow, right? It hasn’t been worked. And then they’re supposed to take it in a valley in land that hasn’t been plowed where there’s living water, water that moves. And they’re supposed to break that heifer’s neck.

And then the blood of the heifer they wash off from their hands and they say, “Well, it’s not our responsibility. It’s a horrible thing and we’ll continue to investigate the crime.” They’re essentially saying that by implication, but we’re trying to purge the blood, the innocent blood of a person that has been murdered. And we don’t know who did it. We can’t execute the person until we find that out. We may never find that out, but we want to, God says, do this ritual.

And then at the center of the text, it says the priest will be there, too. It’s real interesting, you know, because if you look at the verses here, in verse 6, the elders take the heifer. Then in verse 7, they make this declaration: “Our hands have not shed this blood, nor have I seen it. And there’s a prayer to provide atonement for your people Israel whom you have redeemed. So the elders make that declaration.

But just before that in verse 5, the priests are there as well. But before the priests are mentioned in the text, the elders are in verse 4. The elders of that city shall bring the heifer down to a valley. So the way the text is structured: you have elders, priests who decide everything, make sure everything’s determined correctly, and then the elders. And it’s kind of an interesting inversion of tasks here.

We saw earlier in Deuteronomy 19 at the cities of refuge that the elders were at the center of the text about determining a man’s guilt or innocence. Here, the center of the text is the presence of priests. But it’s an odd text because the elders are doing priestly sort of work. I mean the priests are the ones who would take the ashes of the red heifer. They would, you know, take those ashes, mix it with water and provide purification for people in the Levitical system.

The priests are normally the people that do liturgical actions, ritual actions of cleansing. But not here. Here the priests are mentioned at the center but on either side we have the importance of the roles of the elders of the city who take this matter to heart and they’re engaged in a ritual action of killing this heifer asking for God to provide atonement and He then guarantees that He’ll answer that prayer.

So it’s interesting. A couple of comments. One, elders and priests are working together and this is the theocracy of Israel. But I don’t see any reason why we would want to see a civil government devoid of influence and instruction from ministers of the word—the New Testament priests or pastors. There’s a relationship between church and state. They’re separate offices, right? The elders are supposed to do this thing, not the priests. But the priests are there, too. They’re separate offices, but they’re working together. That’s what godly statecraft is about: seeing the proper interaction of these two groups.

Now, the other thing that’s very significant in this text, there’s a couple of things. One is unsolved murders are a big deal. Now, we have unsolved murders in Portland. I suppose we’ve had some in Oregon City. I don’t know. And what would it be like if the city councilors, the city council in Portland or the mayor of Portland or whatever it is, when we have an unsolved murder, you don’t know right away who did it. What if they got a cow, broke the neck, bled, washed their hands and prayed that God wouldn’t hold that against the city. Well, if they did that every time there was an unsolved murder, we would begin to have a sense of the importance of the violation of the sixth word in its relationship to our community.

The sixth word, the sixth commandment—do not kill. You know, either accidentally (you try to avoid that), but certainly don’t murder someone. It’s a really important thing and this law provides significance to the act that the whole community knows about. Why? Because there’s a relationship between the individual act of murder and the responsibility of the community through its leaders to search out who did the murder and to bring God’s justice to bear.

Innocent blood pollutes the land. And if you can’t find the guy to execute him, you can at least say, “Lord God, we’ve tried. We didn’t do it. We don’t know who’s done it. Please don’t hold this against us.”

Now, I’m not advocating that we start killing a lot of cows around us, but I’m not against it either. I’m not against it. I’m for whatever we can do, applying this text in our day and age to let us know the significance of murder, the significance of taking a life. Remember, that’s what this whole sermon by Moses is all about. Life is a big deal. It’s to be celebrated—fourth word. It’s to be honored—fifth word. And it’s to be guarded and protected—sixth word. And this law is another law that stresses the significance of the importance of life and the responsibility of a community to do something about that life. So it is an entire community affair.

But very importantly in the text of course, what do we see? We see Jesus, right? We see the advent of atonement. This was picturing the coming of the one—the heifer representing Jesus—that had not been yoked. In the Bible in the New Testament, yoking is related to marriage, you know? Has not been married. He’s perfect. He hasn’t been hurt by work and stuff. It’s a picture of the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ to make atonement for even the innocent blood that was shed in the context of the world.

So the text while seeming a little arcane and strange has some very practical implications for us in terms of community life. And very importantly, front and center at the beginning of this particular section of Moses’ sermon on the sixth word is the coming—the advent—of the one who would come for a particular purpose so that God’s people who are brought to repentance (the purple color) would be brought—their atonement would be effected by the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ and his death on the cross.

Romans 3, of course, which I’ll read at the communion table, is all about that—that Jesus makes a propitiation for our sins. He comes as the innocent one who will die to bring peace to those of us who trust in him. And so, this text reminds us of the importance of that.

Now, it’s interesting too—immediately the text should make us think about Pilate, right? The elders are washing their hands in innocency. And the scriptures talk about this in a couple of the psalms, but Pilate does the same thing. He takes and he washes his hands of the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, right? And he says, well, you know, “I’m innocent of his blood.”

Now, that’s a false claim because he knew that Jesus was innocent and he still executed him. But what’s significant there is what happens next. In the particular text that tells us about that, the Jews say, “Okay, you’re innocent of his blood. May his blood be upon us and our children.” That’s what they say in the context of that gospel account. So the blood is upon us. This is given to us in Matthew 27:24 and 25:

When Pilate saw that he could not prevail at all, but rather that a tumult was rising, he took water and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, “I am innocent of the blood of this just person. You see, do it.” And all the people answered and said, “His blood be on us and on our children.”

Now, I think that Jesus is obviously the heifer in this case. That’s the first implication here is that God will provide atonement through the sending of his son, the incarnation of God in human form to take upon himself the suffering for sinners and to die for us to provide atonement. But there’s also a message here that for those who reject the atoning work of the Lord Jesus Christ, it’s a reminder to us that judgment comes upon them.

Judgment came upon the Jews and upon their children. By AD 70, the entire thing was wiped out. And so in this heifer, if you reject the heifer that is Jesus, you become the heifer with the broken neck. You take on the punishment yourself. And that’s exactly what the Jews did in the context of the gospel accounts of Jesus and the washing of hands in innocency.

So the first little law in this section points to the coming of the atonement of the Lord Jesus Christ in Advent. You know, we love baby Jesus but Jesus comes to earth for a particular task—lots of them—to bring vindication, to lead us into warfare through the proclamation of the gospel. But very importantly the text today reminds us that Jesus comes to make atonement for sins. It must be in our thoughts. And when we recognize that, you see, it gets us in the proper advent spirit of purple. It should make us come to repentance for a further sense of that when we don’t just celebrate gifts and the wonderful blessings of all community and all that stuff, but we’re celebrating the coming of the one who makes atonement for our sins. So we want to leave those behind.

And I would suggest that the text in addition to pointing to the coming of the atoning work of Christ points to our need to repent of being part of cultures and cities and states and countries that take the killing of human life lightly. The country, you know, we could talk about abortion and the millions of babies, innocent life that’s been shed. That’s our country. That’s our city that innocent blood has been shed in. And there is no cry out on the part of our elected officials to stop this.

Or we could talk about murder and how people murder other people all the time in this country and they’re not brought to the death penalty for it, which is what God explicitly says to do. And as a result, that just piles up. The blood guiltiness of our country piles up. And it’s too easy for us to just sort of sit by and think it’s no big deal.

We want to try to elect officials who will properly deal with the sixth commandment, who will so honor life that the taking of innocent life is punished by the taking of that life. And so it brings us to a position, an attitude, I think, of repentance for the fact that our culture, the one that we live in and coexist in, takes the taking of human life way too lightly.

Now, the next little section is about the coming of honor. And it’s a strange story for most people. It’s one of several in the text that we’re talking about today that’s mocked, you know, and made fun of—”gee, those horrible Christians and those Jews, they could just go to war and grab a woman and then, you know, have their way with her.” When in reality, this next little section that deals with so-called war brides, you know, you’ve conquered a country, an army, you’ve taken their wives and children into your oversight, your protection of your country. And if you desire her, you can make her your wife.

But, but now listen, folks. This section is all about honor for the captured woman and the one who’s been brought out of rebellion and waging war against God and against his people into now being brought into the community of God. You know what happens normally in warfare throughout history? Women are raped. The women of the country that’s being conquered, they’re completely treated in a very despicable way.

Here in this text, you notice that it doesn’t say “if you want to take her and have sex with her.” It says “if you want to if you desire this woman, you find her beautiful and you want to take her to be your wife.” It doesn’t even say concubine. You know, there were two kinds of wives in the Old Testament. Concubines without dowries and wives that had dowries. In America, most wives were like concubines. But that’s another story.

But in this case, this captured woman is actually given full wife status, which means she had a dowry and all that stuff. Now, that’s very significant.

Now, so you got this strange thing going on where you got to bring her to your house for a month and she cuts her hair and cuts her nails, takes off her clothes, mourns her parents, the loss of her parents for a month. What’s going on there? Well, it’s pretty clear. What does the Bible else? It tells us that a woman’s hair is her glory. And clothing is given for a particular kind of glory, right? It’s not just to cover us up. We dress nice. We want to look nice. It adds glory to us. Shiny stuff, you know? We want to be like that.

And so, what’s happening here is to bring this marriage to fruition, the woman is being called to put off false glory. She’s been involved—everybody wants glory. Nobody’s involved in a culture that doesn’t want glory. But Non-Christian cultures try to attain it in wrong ways. They get false glory. They still have glory. So this woman is putting off false glory. She’s making a break with her past associations, a break with her family that were in rebellion against Yahweh. That’s the kind of nations that were at war with God’s people here in this particular setting.

She’s making a break with that so that she can have new glory. The glory of being a wife to a faithful Israelite man who doesn’t mistreat her. In fact, the text goes on to say, you know, if you then say you just want to get rid of her, forget it. You have to treat her honorably as you would an Israelite wife who you needed wanted to divorce. And so you can’t treat her as anything other than a full Israelite wife.

The whole purpose of this law is to bring morality to the conduct even of warfare. Life is important. Life is to be guarded and life is to be enhanced. And the woman is a picture of that. She’s being brought to full rejoicing life in the context of the covenant community that God has now placed her in the midst of.

Now, where do we see Jesus in this text? Well, I think that if we remember that Jesus comes, as we sang about at the very beginning of worship today, he comes as the bridegroom and we’re the bride and we’re supposed to awake and come to meet him today in this kind of marriage celebration that covenant renewal is sort of imaged as Jesus is the bridegroom. We’re the bride.

When Jesus calls us to him, he calls us to set aside false glory, ways we’ve had of thinking we’re important, false knowledge, the way we’ve had of figuring the world out, false rejoicing in life. He calls us to put all that off. And he promises that he won’t, you know, mistreat us. He will wed us and bring us to full glory, honor, and weight. That’s what’s going on in the text. That’s Jesus.

So, in the advent of Jesus, that’s pointed to in this particular text is the advent of honor. He’s going to take a world that has had false glory and take it away from sinful ways of being and lives and bring us into the blessing of covenant life, being part of the bride of the Lord Jesus Christ. And so, that’s important here.

One other point here, this text also is real important because who’s Israel? Is Israel a series of physical descendants from Abraham? Is it is God’s system of salvation even in this period of time a bloodline? No. She’s got nothing to do with this bloodline. And yet there’s provision made for these kind of godly marriages of people who had nothing to do with the bloodline of Abraham. It never was by blood. You see, the faith community is a community of faith—never a community of race.

The opposition of this way of dealing with conquered peoples to what the world does in terms of conquered peoples is gigantic. And the movement away from racism that the text also clearly points to is also gigantic in terms of the world of antiquity and even the world of present day reality. The only reason America moves away from racism is because of her Christian origins. That’s it. Cultures that aren’t Christian tend to become racist or stay racist or go back to being racist.

This text says, “No, it’s never about blood. It’s always about faith.” There’s nothing here that says the woman doesn’t have a choice. By the way, “you want to take her to be your wife.” Well, when you marry somebody, you don’t marry somebody who’s unwilling. There’s nothing in the text that says that she’s unwilling. People read that into it because of some other presupposition that they might have about what’s going on.

So, we have a full Israelite woman here with all the rights of being a wife. And that’s what God does for us. He brings us, he announces the terms of unconditional surrender that we would trust in Jesus for our lives. But he doesn’t do that and make us slaves. He makes us servants. There’s a difference. Servants of the Lord Jesus Christ. He gives us honor. He gives us weightiness, true honor and waitingness because it’s related to our relationship to him.

Now, and the scriptures, you know, talk about this in other places. In Psalm 45, we read:

“Listen, O daughter, consider and incline your ear. Forget your own people also and your father’s house. So the king will greatly desire your beauty because he is your lord. Worship him.”

And so, Psalm 45—this wonderful wedding psalm that a lot of times is sung at weddings and stuff—it’s all about leaving your old home and moving into a new home. And what that all is a picture of is just what the text talks about: a moving away from associations of false glory and rebellion against Jesus to come into being part of the bride of the king.

So advent that’s pointed forward to is Jesus’s coming as the giver of honor and dignity to women, but to all of us as we’re part of the bride of Christ. You know, the scriptures—the Old Testament is an amazing book in terms of its comparative other ways of being in the ancient world in terms of women. The dignity that is accorded to women here in this text and in other places is really quite unique in the ancient world and that’s a whole another subject.

So, you know that and so what’s to repent of there? We’re looking at each of these texts for what it teaches us about Jesus and what it calls us to do in light of the purple. Well, I think what’s to repent of there is our ongoing attempts, sinful attempts of false glory, where we want beautiful hair, beautiful nails, beautiful clothes, not related to Jesus, our husband, but because of our old man.

What’s pictured here is she’s putting off the old man, putting on the new man. That’s what we’re called to do in Jesus. And to the extent that we can continue to walk in the habits of the old man generally in our lives, God wants us to forsake those. That’s what Christian sanctification is. It’s repenting for seeking ourselves, for seeking glory, for seeking honor, weightiness in some way other than through union and mediation of the Lord Jesus Christ.

So, it’s a general call again to repentance on our parts considering this text.

Now, the third text kind of builds off the last one. So, you know, you got it’s talking about wives. And the next section, beginning in verse 15, says, well, if you’ve got two wives and one wife you love and another you don’t love so much—hate—and you got kids, the firstborn, your actual firstborn, no matter if it’s the son of the wife you love or the son of the wife you don’t love so much, the firstborn is the firstborn. And that’s the way it’s got to be.

And because he’s firstborn, you acknowledge that when you give him a double portion of your inheritance. Okay? Now, couple of things here. One, this doesn’t advocate polygamy. And in fact, if you look at the text, what’s it saying? If you’re going to be involved in polygamy, which is a sinful relationship, you’re going to have problems. You’re going to have rivalries between wives. You’re going to have different affections. It’s going to flow down into the kids. It’s just going to be a mess.

And in the Bible, consistently over and over again whenever polygamous relationships are entered into, it’s a mess. And it’s a mess that is obvious. The scriptures do not, you know, approve of polygamy. But it does say, well, if you’ve entered into a polygamous relationship, here’s what you got to do about it. Here’s how you got to work out some of those sinful things that are going on.

But, you know, really, this text doesn’t just apply to polygamy. I mean, you could have a wife who ends up dying and then a second wife and the one the child of the one—the second wife—you might love more than your first wife and you may be tempted to give that son the right of firstborn by getting a double inheritance. So it doesn’t just apply to polygamy but it does regulate polygamous relationships.

Now this is an interesting text. Best of my knowledge it’s the only place in the Bible where it says the firstborn son is supposed to get a double portion of the inheritance. And I know myself and a lot of other people early on in the life of RCC, yeah, well, gee, you know, our firstborn sons, they get twice as much money as the rest of the kids when we die. And we wrote wills that way. I don’t think that’s right.

This is the only text where it says it. Number one. And we have these examples. You always want to think of the case laws in Deuteronomy in relationship to the history of Genesis. Abraham, right? He didn’t give the inheritance to his firstborn, right? Jacob, you know, was not the firstborn, but he was supposed to get the inheritance. Jacob’s sons, he skips over Reuben because of Reuben’s sins, but he doesn’t go down to the next one. Instead, he makes another one of his sons the recipient of the firstborn status.

Now, none of those guys are bad guys. There’s no condemnation of any of that in the accounts in Genesis. So what do we have going on here? Does this mean that Abraham sinned and that Isaac sinned and that Jacob sinned and all these people in the Old Testament history sinned? I don’t think so. I think this points us in a different direction.

It tells us that at this particular time in redemptive history—in the history of redemption in the Sinaitic covenant—this is stuff that’s coming out of the covenant that God made, the Mosaic covenant with the laws of Sinai which are specifically said to be, you know, keeping people divided until Jesus comes and they’re all brought back together. There’s aspects of the Mosaic covenant that we don’t just cut and paste into modern times.

And very specifically it was in the time of the Sinaitic covenant that the firstborn—okay—the actual literal firstborn, the first one out of the wife’s womb or the first wife’s womb, this guy becomes very important in covenant history during the time of Moses. He replaces the Levites. Replace him. So he’s kind of typologically the firstborn is like a picture of the whole thing. He’s got certain rights. He’s got certain responsibilities. It’s a big deal, which it wasn’t a big deal prior to this. Prior to this, it wasn’t chronological. The fathers properly would choose whoever they wanted to—the most godly one, that’s what they were supposed to do—to pass on the inheritance to.

So this text seems conditioned by the form, right? Adam was the firstborn. He sins, he fails. He’s replaced. And then Jesus is the firstborn. And after Jesus comes, we’re all secondborns. We’re all later sons. He’s the only true firstborn of the Father. And so I think that these laws are pointing again to the advent of Jesus. And in this case, the advent of the elder brother to all of us who are in union with him.

So I don’t think this is given to us to apply in a cut and paste sort of way to us today because it is not true that this was the case in Genesis and there’s no indication that the actions of all those godly men in Genesis were wrong. So it points us in a different direction and it points us where the other texts do—it points us to Jesus. And in this case the advent of the elder brother who would come.

So you know I think that’s what’s going on in this particular text is the coming of Jesus.

Now it does by way of application, right, it does contain some very important points. It says if you’re going to have kids don’t be partial about them. Don’t play favorites. You know we want to repent. It’s purple season. We want to repent of what we do wrong. And what we tend to do wrong is we tend to favor particular children because we like them more because they’re more like us. Or if we’re a husband because it’s a son and we don’t like the girls as much. Or if you’re a mom, maybe it’s the girls cuz you don’t like the boys as much. Whatever it is, this text says, “No, don’t do that.

God has elected the firstborn at this particular place in covenant history. He’s the elect one to receive the inheritance in a double fashion during this period of history. And you just shouldn’t mess with all that. And I think that there God wants us to see by way of application that we should repent of improperly having favorites amongst our children. Okay. Christmas is a good time to do this. You want to evaluate your attitudes toward your kids and what you’re buying for them at Christmas. You know, you might be tempted to really want this one to be happy and not be so concerned about this one, right? We want to repent of that. And this text by way of application points us to such repentance.

So the advent of Jesus is pictured here as the elder brother and even specifically because of this being different from the covenants in the book of Genesis. It says somebody is coming. Jesus is coming. And in that same text in Romans 3 where it talks about Jesus coming to bring atonement, it talks about Jesus coming to bring salvation to the circumcised and uncircumcised to bring them into one. One of the big messages of the New Testament epistles is that the distinctions that the law left in place under Moses, they were there to keep distinctions in place until Jesus came because ultimately the world is healed. It’s united. Adam and Eve get together. Men and women become more united in Christ. Jew and Gentile are united.

In the New Testament church, what does it say? There’s neither Jew nor Gentile. There’s neither male nor female. Now, there’s some aspect to male and female that pertain still. But here’s one, for instance, where we look for elements of the Mosaic Covenant that maybe don’t really are now put out of place. And this may be one of those. Here’s a law that pertains to male right of inheritance. And in the context of that, that’s one of those Mosaic laws that I’m not sure we really should apply in our day and age with by giving males dominant inheritance rights. But that’s another subject.

The point is it pictures the coming of Jesus who would become the elder brother and would do all things well as that elder brother.

Now the next text talks about sons who aren’t very good—incorrigible sons. Here’s another embarrassing text like the war bride text but that’s it’s really silly. It results from people who are deliberately misunderstanding the text. This text is quite clear that the one—the child—who is executed is old. It’s not a child. The word referred to here is not a little child. Here’s a person that’s got to be a drunkard and a glutton.

And gluttony, by the way, is more than just food. It’s loss of control of appetite. You want to go after everything all the time. Okay? And then in another text, it talks about being companions with drunkards and gluttons. He’s settled in his rebellion against his parents is the implication of the text here. He’s not a kid. He’s an adult.

Now, the parents still have a responsibility to bring that incorrigible to the elders at the gate and the elders are supposed to execute him. So, this text, you know, we don’t want to move away from capital punishment. That’s what the crime—this crime of incorrigibility, we could say—that’s how it’s punished in the next section here in verses 18 and following.

Yeah, incorrigible criminals, people whose whole lifestyle is rebellion against God and the violation of good things, who repeats crimes over and over again, that guy is supposed to be executed. And if you do this, you’ll have no criminal class of people. Okay? The reason you have criminal classes in America today is because as of the about 1960, the third strike laws are all done away with. Used to be if you had third strike, you were denoted an incorrigible criminal and you know you could be executed. More likely you’d receive life in prison. And when we did away with that, we began then to have bad effects in our culture.

God’s laws and its principles should be applied in statecraft. And this law says incorrigibility has to be severely punished and in severe cases by the death penalty. We know better. We think people are, you know, reformable even though they do things over and over and over again. We think, “No, no, no. Everybody’s basically good. People just need a little quiet time in prison for a while and then they’ll come out and they’ll be a lot better. They promise.” And God knows better than that.

It was interesting. This last week I heard a discussion on the news of a three strike in your out guy. Maybe some of you heard this. You know, California has gone back to a three strike in your out law where the third felony conviction you’re thrown into prison for life, or actually 25 years to life. And there was a guy who had been convicted of two felonies and he became kind of the public face trying to get this law changed in California. He went on the Montel Williams show. He was telling everybody he’d do all these press conferences. “I’m afraid to go outside of my house. Who knows what they might think I did. And so I’ll live all my life in prison.” So he was like the picture boy as to how bad three strikes and you’re out. How bad that was. Well, and the state of California kind of went along with him. In LA as opposed to most of the state, the judges—the district attorney rather—decided not to really do the three strike thing even though it was a state law. And so he wouldn’t ask for that sort of stuff. And this poor scared two-strike guy ended up committing several other crimes and which means he should have been subject to three strikes but the DA kept saying no, he’ll be better. It’s not that bad. It’s okay. And they kept letting him out of jail after short periods of time.

And this was the picture boy. How bad three strikes and your incorrigibility laws based on the text before us. How bad those things are. And then recently he did something else, broke another law. The judge said, “Well, I know you got some operations. You got some health stuff you want to tend to. We’ll just leave you out for 30 days. You can get this health stuff worked on.” In the course of those 30 days, apparently—it’s not, you know, he’s been arrested but not convicted yet—but the police believe he engaged himself in three home robberies and killed four people. And he killed them by either strangling them to death or beating them until they had a heart attack.

Now, now that’s the kind of people that, you know, you see people like him representing how horrible incorrigibility laws are. Look what happens when you try to give those kind of people grace and mercy and oh, they’ll be okay and oh, we should let them do this that and the other thing. It’s horrific. So don’t back away from this law. Don’t let people make you feel funny as a Christian that’s in your Bible. You can tell them, well, you know, for most of Western law tradition, that’s what we did. Incorrigibility—a third felony—was either a long prison sentence or the death sentence. And it’s a good thing.

And the other thing is, you know, parents should have some limits on their compassion for their kids, right? Remember we said earlier in Deuteronomy 19: your eye doesn’t pity the man that deliberately murders somebody else. Don’t let that instinct rise. Here, parents who’ve actually saw the incorrigible criminal as a little child, they got to put that out of their minds. They have an obligation to witness to his incorrigibility to the civil magistrate. And then the men of the city, not just the elders, the men of the city have the responsibility to execute that person. So the law is important. It tells us that families have responsibilities and the love within families has a limit to it in terms of how it’s applied.

I heard I was listening to some talks by a guy in Texas who has a parenting teens ministry and he has this phrase he thinks is real important to tell yourself and your teens: “Nothing you can do would make me love you more and nothing you could do would make me love you less.” So “nothing you could do would make me love you less. Said you put up in your refrigerator, talk to your kids about it all the time. And I thought of this old punk song—uh kind of a originally punk rock group who became a rock group—and they had a song that the lyric was “Nothing you confess could make me love you less.”

So the Christian version—”nothing you can do would make me love you less”—as opposed to the pagan version—”nothing you confess could make me love you less.” The pagan version is more right. Confession is part of repentance. We believe in repentance. We believe in confession. No matter what our kids might do, if they confess and repent of it, they may still have to be executed. But we love them because we’re the same way. David, the great man of God—adultery, murder, murder of a guy that he probably helped raise in the faith or disciple in the faith.

But the Christian view—”nothing you do could make me love you less.” If that’s defined by love, not doing anything about what the person who is sinning is doing, it flies directly in the face of this particular text. So Jesus comes to restore proper relationships of family and the civil state and again to intensify the reality, the need to remove even a human life of someone when they prove themselves to be such an incorrigible criminal.

Now the other thing the text does should remind us of is the charge against Jesus. Right? This is exactly what the Pharisees charged him with. They said, “You’re a drunkard and a glutton.” They were bringing in this law. It was a capital charge against him. They weren’t just saying, “Boy, that Jesus, he’s not a very nice guy.” They were saying, “He should be killed. He should be stoned by the city.” They were doing exactly what Deuteronomy 19 talked about. They were these malicious witnesses who accused Jesus of apostasy and worse than that, being an incorrigible criminal. They wanted him killed. That’s what they were doing—referencing back to this law.

But of course what happened was the law of just justice caught up to them just as justice caught up to Ahab right with Naboth. And in AD 70 they’re destroyed. So we see Jesus here falsely accused. He’s the perfect son. He’s falsely accused of being the incorrigible son. But in reality Jesus of course is the perfect son.

And then the last text that we have before us: when a bodies hung on a tree, don’t let it lay overnight. Now, they didn’t execute people by hanging them, okay? That’s not what the text is talking about. But what they would do is when they executed, they’d stone you, right? They’d stone. Sometimes they would hang the body on a piece of wood with a crossmember as kind of a sign: “This is what happens. Learn the lesson. Hear and fear.” You know, today people hear God’s word and it’s hear and sneer because nobody ever does anything about anything anymore. But God says you hear in fear and you see this example of the end of incorrigibility and you take it to heart, right?

So they would do that and that was okay according to this law, but you couldn’t leave that body up there overnight. You had to take it down. It still was part of the image bearing capacity of a man. And God says you got to take it down or it’s going to defile the land. Now it doesn’t mean that he becomes cursed by hanging on the tree. It means he’s hung on the tree because he is cursed. Okay. Important to note that distinction.

If a guy is cursed, he’s an incorrigible son in the last example. That’s when he’s executed and hung on a tree. Okay? And so it doesn’t mean he’s cursed because he’s hanging, but you’re not supposed to leave him up there overnight.

And of course, this is another a direct reference to the Lord Jesus Christ. He was executed actually by hanging on the tree for us. And he was seen as somebody accursed, but he really wasn’t. And this text is ultimately seen in reference to the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ who redeems us from the curse of the law having become a curse for us.

Galatians 3:13—as it is written: “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.”

So Jesus was accounted as a cursed, seen as guilty of a death penalty crime. Pays the price for us by hanging on the tree but even there his body is taken down before nightfall. And so Jesus Christ has finished his atonement and the land, you know, the idea is the execution of a capital criminal. You put his body up there, but then you take it down because everything’s over. The land has been cleansed. Justice has been meted out. The land comes to rest again, having put to death someone who so violated the gift of life.

So the same thing’s true of Jesus: he pays the price for our sins. And then the text says, as this text told us in Deuteronomy, he’s buried. Jesus is buried. And then we know that the atoning work, the advent of atonement has been brought to its completion because Jesus has paid the price and he’s taken off that cross and he’s laid in a burial plot because now the land comes to rest.

And in a very real sense, although done by hypocrites, the plan of God is at work. The coming of the atoning one, the Lord Jesus Christ, had found its full fruition in him taking upon himself the death for our sins that we deserved and bringing us to a position of rest as he was removed from that place of hanging.

So here we have strange laws that don’t seem very adventish and yet they point us in some very important directions for to see the coming of Jesus and the purpose of that coming. He comes to bring atonement and by the end of the text the atonement has been brought to a rest by him being buried for us after receiving the just punishment for our sins as the perfect heifer—as the perfect sacrifice—to bring salvation to us again and more than that to bring us to the price of fruitfulness to make us part of the bride of Jesus Christ to bless us and our children as we raise them for him and to bless us with the godly culture that protects life so that it can flourish.

That really is essential to the meaning of Advent and of Christmas.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for the coming of Jesus Christ. We thank you that he comes to bring atonement, to complete that atonement and to bring the land in the world to rest. Beyond that, we thank you that he comes to bring us honor, weight, and glory and make us productive members of his body, the bride of Jesus Christ. And he gives us a view of the future and of inheritance for our children that means that his reign has no end to it. We bless you Lord God for this wonderful season. We bless you for these texts that point us to Jesus. Help us to see how we need to repent of our sins and preparation for his daily coming to us to cause us to rest as a result of turning from our sins because of his shed blood and to be fruitful and effective for him.

In Jesus name we pray. Amen.