Dennis Tuuri

# Social Justice Redux: The 9th Word (And You Shall Not Bear False Witness Against Your Neighbor), Part 3

We return to the law of God today to the ninth word. There we go again. Just like last week, I think—maybe not. Okay, ninth word. And we’re going to use the reading from Deuteronomy 24:8 through 25:3. And this will sound familiar. We actually talked about the same section of scripture when we dealt with the eighth word and social justice. But this is actually the portion of Moses’ sermon that deals specifically with the ninth word.

I mentioned that when we talked about this a month or two ago, but that is the sermon section from the book of Deuteronomy that deals with this ninth word and helps us to understand it. You have on the handouts today the printed version of this, or read along in your scriptures, or just listen. Please stand for the reading of God’s word. Deuteronomy 24:8 through 25:3, and you’ll see that the brackets of this are dealing with judgment.

“Take heed in an outbreak of leprosy that you carefully observe and do according to all that the priests, the Levites shall teach you, just as I commanded them. So you shall be careful to do. Remember what the Lord your God did to Miriam on the way when you came out of Egypt. When you lend your brother anything, you shall not go into his house to get his pledge. You shall stand outside and the man to whom you lend shall bring the pledge out to you.

“And if the man is poor, you shall not keep the pledge overnight. You shall in any case return the pledge to him again when the sun goes down that he may sleep in his own garment and bless you, and it shall be righteousness to you before the Lord your God. You shall not oppress a hired servant who is poor and needy, whether one of your own brethren or one of the aliens who is in your land within your gates.

“Each day you shall give him his wages and not let the sun go down on it, for he is poor and has set his heart on it, lest he cry out against you to the Lord, and it be sin to you. Fathers shall not be put to death for their children, nor shall children be put to death for their fathers. A person shall be put to death for his own sin. You shall not pervert justice due the stranger or the fatherless, nor take a widow’s garment as a pledge.

“But you shall remember that you were a slave in Egypt, and the Lord your God redeemed you from there. Therefore I command you to do this thing. When you reap your harvest in your field, and forget a sheaf in the field, you shall not go back to get it. It shall be for the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow, that the Lord your God may bless you in all the work of your hands. When you beat your olive trees, you shall not go over the boughs again.

“It shall be for the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow. When you gather the grapes of your vineyard, you shall not glean it afterwards. It shall be for the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow. And you shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt. Therefore I command you to do this thing. If there is a dispute between men and they come to court, that the judges may judge them, and they justify the righteous and condemn the wicked, then it shall be, if the wicked man deserves to be beaten, that the judge will cause him to lie down and be beaten in his presence, according to his guilt with a certain number of blows.

“Forty blows he may give him and no more, lest he should exceed this and beat him with many blows above these, and your brother be humiliated in your sight.”

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for your word. We thank you for your scriptures. We thank you, Father, that your law governs reality and the entire universe. One word under your word. Bless us, Lord God, as we attempt to understand this word, to give you thanks and praise for it, and to apply it in our lives. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated. About a week ago, I heard the geese. I like to Saturday evening sit out on my porch or outside and meditate on the sermon. I think what particular things in it I’d like to stress for this particular congregation. And about a week ago, and again last night, I heard geese flying overhead, and it’s a comforting sound. We happen to live where apparently it’s on the geese’s route—the geese’s route to fly south for the winter—and so it’s the harbinger of winter, of course. And then when they return, it’s the harbinger of summer coming back. And these seasonalities that we live in the context of, and things like geese flying every year, they bring us great comfort in the midst of times that are turbulent and filled with—as we said last week—we now have a warfare state, more and more, and problems exist and tremendous problems happen every week.

I know that in some of your homes you live in a warfare state more often than not, or at least sometimes times are hard and difficult. And it’s important in the midst of those times to remember the regularity of God’s blessings, his seasonality, to hear those geese, and to remember that great is the faithfulness of God.

I’ve decided to preach on the book of Lamentations for Lent. And I don’t know if most of you know or not, but that wonderful song, “Great Is Thy Faithfulness”—that’s taken from the book of Lamentations, which is strange because Lamentations is probably the saddest book of the whole scriptures, describing the destruction of Jerusalem and ultimately the death of the Lord Jesus Christ. And I was fascinated this last week with some literary talks I’d heard on it and the beauty at the beginning and the decay of beauty at the end of that book and the structure of the book itself. It’ll be fun to talk about that. I’m also writing curriculum for this coming school year on the book of Jeremiah and Lamentations. But this verse is found there. I’m going to read a couple of verses. This is sort of—I mean, not exactly—but it’s sort of the heart. It’s at the middle of the book of Lamentations, in the midst of lamentations and weeping over the destruction, or the movement away, the decay of beauty that is a Christian culture.

And we have some degree of that. Now, we hope that’s going to roll back the other way. But in the midst of that, we read these words: “Through the Lord’s mercies we are not consumed because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning. Great is thy faithfulness. The Lord is my portion, says my soul. Therefore I hope in him. The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him.”

It’s so important to remember in the midst of our times: great is the faithfulness of God. God is faithful to his covenant, to his law word, when we are faithless. Yet he is faithful, and he so works things in the context of judgments in the world to bring us back to a ready acceptance of his law. Because in the law of the Lord is liberty. And as we move away from the law of the Lord, we expect—and we actually, it’s a good thing to see the loss of liberty—because that’s what happens. We wouldn’t want blessing to happen as we walk away from the source of blessing, who is God himself.

Jesus said, “The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor. He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.” In our response to our times—our individual times, our national times—we can get angry and upset and get all out of sorts about things, or we can be passive. That’s not right either. But we can set ourselves on a determined course to restore liberty in our own lives through an adherence to the law of God, wherein liberty is found.

Our Savior’s purpose, and the covenantal faithfulness of the Father in sending him to come and to put the world to right, shall not be thwarted. It shall proceed. And the Lord God says this is a day of good news. The proclamation that Jesus has come to declare liberty and to heal the brokenhearted, and those that are in difficulty, in difficult trials and conditions, and to help the poor. And we saw that again in our text today, as we saw last week, in a section on matters of justice in court, laws, court and witnesses. Yet we have this emphasis upon the purpose of God to restore people and to have the good news proclaimed, bringing liberty and well-being once more to his people.

May we have a fixed determination as a congregation and as individuals to apply ourselves to an understanding of the law of God. We don’t know it very well, and we’re like Josiah’s generation when they found the book of the law. And we begin to realize the implications of that law, and we tear our clothes and we weep before God. Give us an understanding of this law. Give us hearts to believe it and to apply it. Give us understanding by your Holy Spirit of what it means to us.

Now, we’ve talked about the ninth commandment a couple of weeks now. This is the third and probably the last sermon. When I get back next week, Reverend Pastor Hayes will be preaching. Flynn, Chris, and I will be coming back from Minneapolis, Lord willing, on Saturday. Please pray for those denominational meetings. I’m going to mention something else about them in a few minutes. And then after that, I think I’ll move on to the tenth word.

So we’re going to try today to kind of pick up some loose ends and remind ourselves of some important emphases in the ninth word. And hopefully feathers will be a reminder to you of one of the implications. In the first two sermons, we looked at the application of the ninth word in its most basic application, which is to not perjure yourselves in a court of law against your brother. But then this has implications for our everyday speech. And last week the illustration of feathers: I don’t know how you were this week. You should have a feather index. Did you spread feathers around? Did you gossip and slander about people? Did you violate the essential application of the ninth word in your speech?

This is a word that talks about speech. It’s similar to another one of the commandments. On your outlines, I’ve given you a couple of ways to look at and meditate about the Ten Words. There are different ways to go about understanding them. We’ve talked before about how there’s a relationship between the first three laws and then the fourth Sabbath law and the next three. And then the next three kind of repeat the emphases of the first three—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And that kind of moves on then into 5 through 7, and then 8 through 10.

So that’s one way to look at them. And another way is that the next two weeks we start with the commandment that talks about the internal hard attitude that drives a lot of the other violations of the Ten Words. We kill and commit adultery and steal and lie in court about each other because we covet. And so it’s kind of the root thing that seems to drive all kinds of other things. That’s another legitimate way to look at it.

And yet another legitimate way is listed on your outlines. I think this came from John. He mentioned this to me in passing a week or two ago, and then I’ve actually found this in my computer without attribution. So I think—and it’s on your handouts today—I think this is John’s, the thing that he sent me. And if we combine the first and second words, the first and second commandments—or if we look at the first commandment as a header or an introduction to the rest of them—the rest of them then kind of line up topically with each other in a chiastic structure that’s on your handouts.

So no idolatry at the beginning matches up with covetousness at the end. And Paul said that covetousness is idolatry. And so those two are linked. And a meditation on the flow of the Ten Words gives us that as well. We’re not to take God’s name in vain and emptiness. And remember, I’ve said that this thing about bearing false witness—the word false is the same as vain in this, in the Third Commandment, as it is the same as this word in the Ninth—and they kind of match up then there. Although the Third Commandment emphasizes all of life, and the Ninth Commandment emphasizes speech, there is this commonality in terms of vanity of witness, either with our lives or in our speech.

We’re to rest on the Sabbath day and work on the other six days. And we’re not supposed to steal. We’re supposed to labor with our hands. I think we just read that verse. And so the Sabbath and labor are backed up—in terms of the violation of labor by being theft instead of working with our hands. And then honoring parents kind of lines up with adultery. You know, the parents are where children come from and they represent authority, and adultery is a violation of the family as well. So those kind of match up in a natural kind of way if we think about it.

And if you look at it that way, the center of the whole thing is don’t murder. And remember, we’ve said that in the Deuteronomy version, these last five commandments are all linked. Don’t kill and don’t commit adultery and don’t steal and don’t bear false witness—they’re ways to kill people, these other violations. And so there’s different ways of doing it. And the reason for that is because God wants us meditating on his word. If his law is the law of liberty, and if Jesus came to establish that law and the order and the liberty and the healing of the poor that is affected by it, then it behooves us to know that law and to think about it and to make applications of it.

And so meditation on the structure of it will assist us in that endeavor. So I hope you do that.

Let’s move on now. And what I’ve done on your handout is to actually list the various sections of the scriptures that are focal points in the Old Testament of the ninth word. We just read one, right? We read this text from Deuteronomy 24:8 and 25:3. Now, we’ll return to that in just a minute, but the structure I gave you there is not so much based on words. This is another text where you could sort of try to line up, you know, the fathers and the fatherless, widows and orphans, and try to make a section out of that, or line up the pledges. There’s different ways to think and meditate on the text of scripture.

Scripture is like a diamond, right? It’s got lots of facets, and there’s lots of ways to look at that thing, at the beauty internal to it, through these various facets. And now the one I’ve given you, I think has kind of a natural flow to it. And it begins and ends—this is the evidence that it’s the ninth word, in addition to the eighth word and the tenth word being around it dealing with punishments. God punished Miriam for leprosy. Because what’d she do, you know? She essentially attacked Moses. Miriam and Aaron attacked Moses with their speech, testimony that the Lord heard. That was really kind of selfish and racially biased. Actually, they were upset that Moses had married a Cushite woman. And so they said, “Well, you know, you’re not the only spokesman around here.” So they attacked God’s authority with their speech. And because of that, we have the judgment of God—leprosy.

And that matches up at the end with man’s judgments in court. We’re supposed to mirror God’s courts. Courts are a vision of God’s justice put into effect in the world through human agency. And so at the end of this section of scripture, that’s what we have. They match up—divine and human justice and how they’re supposed to match up. And then in the middle has to do with courts and then has to do with the ninth word. Interior to that is a bunch of stuff about helping people. That should remind us of last week. Remember last week we had stuff about our speech in common life and stuff about our speech in court. In the middle—love at the center, right? Helping people is in the middle of it. Helping your enemy and your person you don’t like or that doesn’t like you.

And here in the middle is grace. God wants us to see that grace and justice are combined. And that the way we’re ultimately going to help the poor in any particular place is to bring God’s word, his law, and the power of the Spirit wherein is liberty, and wherein is the vehicle where Jesus Christ said would be effectual to healing those that are broken and to helping the poor. So justice and mercy and love are all wrapped up together in these little concentric structures.

Now, elements two and three of the thing we just read are interesting because they say that the way you treat the poor—one way to paraphrase it—will be either righteousness for you or it will be sin for you. And there’s a sense in which the text wants us to see the pervasiveness of helping the poor as a theme of our lives, because it’s essentially equated to what is the basis for our right standing with God.

I mean, I didn’t write this stuff. God did. And that’s what it says. I’m astonished by it. Every time I read it, I’m astonished by it. That when we exhibit the grace and mercy of God, that’s righteousness to us. And when we withhold the grace and mercy of God, that’s sin to us. Well, actually, now that I put it that way, I’m not too surprised by it, because it’s an evidence of our knowledge that we don’t get here through our works. We all get here through the grace of God. And if we don’t show grace, you know, to certain kinds of people, that means we don’t have grace. We’re not counting on God’s grace either.

So sections two and three do that. You’re either going to have righteousness or sin imputed to you on the basis of how you treat the poor. And that’s in the middle of a ninth word section. Now, the other end—those two sections ended with the reminding of us that we are graciously given deliverance by God from Egypt. Those sections five and six both have at their conclusion, you know, God’s grace. He delivered us from Egypt. So the whole structure is a beautiful meditation on the necessity in our laws and in our actions with our hands, with our tongues, to extend the grace that God has extended to us.

And at the very middle then of today’s text on the ninth word is individual responsibility. It’s not the responsibility of the dad when the son sins. By responsibility I mean fault. Now I know there’s a lot of wiggling around on this responsibility word, but usually responsibility means fault. It means punishment is given to you. And dads and sons aren’t liable for each other. And that’s a way of saying that, you know, it’s always your fault. My fault. My own fault. My own most grievous fault.

Shall we put God to death for the circumstances that got you angry this last week? Shall we? No. Because no matter what conditions in our lives are happening, and I know there’s some tough ones—I understand that God is empathetic and we are to be too. But no matter what those conditions are, the Lord God is sovereign. He’s most wise. He’s most powerful, and he’s most loving. And that means whatever you went through this last week happened through the divine sovereignty of God. Now, there was a lot of sin involved in things in your life that might have hurt you. But God uses sin sinlessly. He’s most wise. He’s most powerful. He’s most loving.

And what that means is when you sin, it’s not his fault. Never his fault. What does it say? It says, “No sin has overtaken you, but such as is common to men. No, your life isn’t any worse than anybody else’s. Whatever temptations you go through are common to men.” And Corinthians goes on to say that with a temptation, God will provide the means of escape.

Individual responsibility. When a culture moves away from the Lord Jesus Christ, it moves away from individual responsibility. It starts to blame the group or the state or the rich or the poor or whatever it is, and we end up with a warfare state. And that’s what we’ve got. Seven hundred people arrested yesterday, you know, in New York City—a camp-out going on for two weeks ’cause the rich people are to blame—and other people say the poor people are to blame. And as the presidential election gears up, it’s a warfare state. And that’s what happens when we move away from individual responsibility, from the law of God.

So Deuteronomy is a text that articulates again a perspective on this ninth word that again puts justice right at the center of the thing. Let me read a couple of other verses. I’ve got on your outline here the section from the case laws in Exodus chapter 23. We preached on this last week, but I wanted to put them all in one place. And then the other thing I’ve given you here are the laws from Leviticus 19 that, best I can tell, relate to the ninth word.

Remember, one way to meditate on the word of God and to understand it is to look at the law. Look at Moses’ sermon on the law in Deuteronomy. Look at some of those case laws from Exodus, and look at Leviticus 19, which is a summary of the Ten Commandments. Okay? So here are the verses. And we’ve dealt with this before. “You shall not steal nor deal falsely, nor lie to one another. And you shall not swear by my name falsely.”

Both kinds of speech. You know, it’ll be a good exercise. I don’t have time today to read it, but you read the Westminster Larger Catechism for all the long description of what’s required and forbidden in the ninth word. And a lot of it is about gossip and slander and carrying a false report, etc. And that’s what’s going on here. And this is that ring of fire I preached on a few weeks ago. When we start to steal, we end up dealing falsely and lying about it. And then eventually we lie in court.

“You shall not swear by my name falsely, nor shall you profane the name of your God. I am the Lord.”

Verses 15 and 16: “You shall do no injustice in judgment.” Now, this is the heart of the ninth word. No injustice in judgment. Don’t pervert. This is a word that’s used repeatedly—was used in our text from last week. Don’t pervert justice. To pervert means to turn aside after something else, to divert out of the way. God is working out his justice through human courts, and the perversion of justice is horrible. Injustice in judgment is what the ninth word is all about.

Per verse 15: “You shall do no injustice in judgment. You shall not be partial to the poor nor honor the person of the mighty.” Both of those things were also in our text from Exodus 23. It’s important for the ninth word to understand—the center of the section of Moses’ sermon—individual responsibility, and not count someone else. You know, give them partiality in court because it was somebody else’s fault. Or because if you’re a commoner, you can identify with the poor person and you don’t like the rich person. Or if you’re a rich person, you can identify with the rich person and you don’t like poor people. That’s what we’re tended to do. That’s our sinful nature—to group up.

And the Bible, you know, preaches to our weakness. We have a great weakness in this. And that means most of the country is going to be partial to the poor if biblical law doesn’t govern. And the elite of the country are going to be partial to the rich. And when you have that situation, well, you’ve got inevitable warfare, conflict, problems. Does it sound familiar? Well, yes. It sounds very familiar, because that is exactly what this country is now dealing with.

Our problem is not each of these indicators. Our problem is a failure to have God’s law at the center of our justice system. And no justice system will reflect liberty, security, and justice when it moves away from the God of the scriptures. We have strange things happening. Well, I mean, it’s not okay to hold people in Guantanamo Bay, and we want—once we convict or once we arrest somebody who confesses and there’s corroborating evidence that he killed thousands of people—well, we want to give him American jurisprudence, fifth amendment rights. But an American citizen overseas somehow we can just take out with a drone.

Does that bother you at all? Now, it may be okay that we did it, but the hypocrisy of our existing structures is—I mean, it’s plain for all to see. These things are like Dorothy’s “go home.” They’re letters written large in the sky. And what we need to do is to call our country to repentance and back to the law of God as the basis of civil justice. And what we need to do as individuals is avoid the sorts of sins that this culture is now putting in front of us in spades.

And one of the things it puts in front of us is partiality to the poor, partiality to the rich. Choose whose side you’re on. This. The Bible says no. Leviticus 19 says, “No, do no injustice in judgment. Do not be partial to the poor, nor honor the person of the mighty. In righteousness, you shall judge your neighbor. You shall not go about as a talebearer among your people, nor shall you take a stand against the life of your neighbor. I am the Lord your God.”

And so common speech, once more, in the section of Leviticus, tied to judicial action. Judicial action. So the ninth word has both of those applications to it. And I know I just—I talk about that a lot. I’ve talked on those verses from Leviticus a lot in this series because they’re important and because, one, they’re one of the things you can do something about immediately.

Now you can’t do a whole lot about yet what’s going on in the civil courts or who runs things and all that stuff, but you can sure do something about your speech. And you can quit spreading feathers. And I preach to you and I preach to myself. We can stop doing that part at least. And the text again links those two together.

Verse 32 speaks of respect for the elderly and fear of God—Commandment 5.

Then it goes on to verses 33: “And if a stranger dwells with you in your land, you shall not mistreat him. The stranger who dwells among you shall be to you as one born among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God.”

Now that’s very similar language. Although here the emphasis is on love—Leviticus. The heart of the Pentateuch is about love, and the heart of Leviticus is chapter 19, and it’s about love. And the heart of Leviticus 19 is “love your neighbor as yourself.” And here, as we move to the end of Leviticus 19, it says, “Love the alien like yourself.”

Okay, so again, there’s a relationship here that is drawn in Deuteronomy 23 and in Leviticus 19 that makes us think this is ninth word, ninth commandment stuff. And then verse 35: “You shall do no injustice in judgment.” There it is again. And now it applies it to measurement of length, weight, or volume. “You shall have honest scales, honest weights, an honest ephah, and an honest hin. I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt.”

And then the very next verse says this is the conclusion, this is the end of it. And verse 37, the end of chapter 19, says, “Guard all my statutes. Don’t just do them. Guard them, protect them, advance them in your culture.” And so the very conclusion of Leviticus 19 and the Ten Commandments has to do with the ninth word—bearing true witness even in the measurements, weight, volume, etc. that you have in your culture.

And so Leviticus 19 is this other section that repeats these things we’ve looked at already from other texts. Now, what I want to do now is go to ten quick observations on the ninth word. Ten quick observations on the ninth word. And this is on your handout as well, on the third page. What’s that coloring sheet? That’s Ruth, right? You know, Ruth is a picture of somebody gleaning, and then the great blessings that come to the line of the Savior—his forebears coming through a converted gentile, a Moabitess—really a bad class of people. Fortunately, Boaz was an upright guy who didn’t show that kind of partiality. He loved the stranger as well as the homeborn and let Ruth glean and end up marrying her. And then he ended up having eventually Jesus.

Okay, so notes. And we’ll talk about this in a minute. But she’s on her knees there. It’s interesting. Okay.

**One: Confidentiality and Corroboration—Two to Three Witnesses and the Requirement of Witness**

This is an example of elements of our judicial system that we just don’t get anymore. In the laws of witness, that’s what the ninth word is about. You can’t put somebody to death or convict somebody on the testimony of one person. You need two or three people. Now, that is a requirement. You know, some of the laws that God gives us, they’re the same in other cultures—a lot of them—because they make sense. This one is not the same. This is unique, as far as I understand it, at least from my studies. This is unique from other law codes of the ancient world.

And the reason for this—or what this implies to us—is that you can’t testify against yourself and then be put to death. So I can’t go to a court, somebody’s dead, and tell them I’m the one that killed them, and they can then convict me just on that testimony. The Bible says you can’t do that.

Now, why? It seems like we ought to be able to do it, but the Bible says no. And if that was the case, then what does the civil state need to do to take out anybody? They just need to get hold of you and compel your testimony against yourself. If all they need is you testifying against yourself, then they can grab one person, torture him, and bring him to testify against himself. And in the scriptures and in our own constitution, the scriptures implicitly say, you know, there’s no evidences of forced confessions in the Old Testament. Achan confessed, but it was voluntary and there was corroborating evidence for his confession.

Now, that’s why we have the Fifth Amendment—because corroboration is an essential aspect of God’s judicial system, and it is an aspect of God’s law word that yields liberty and freedom from tyranny. And we don’t understand this anymore. We don’t get this anymore. And regularly now, you know, things are happening against what these things speak about.

Now I got one and two together because the other side of it is you’re required to testify, just like you are here. If the state knows you’re a material witness, they can compel you to testify. That’s good and godly, because the Bible says if you know something about a matter, you should testify. But the Bible also says that through the law of corroboration, no one can be compelled to testify against themselves. And you can’t convict a person, even if he did voluntarily or involuntarily confess. You can’t convict him on the basis of a single testimony.

So this is something, you know, that is essential to biblical liberty. And as a culture moves away from that, and as people can be compelled to testify, then we move toward torture and we move toward a civil state that compels testimony. Last week the executives of Solyndra testified before Congress. It was another dog and pony show. Congress knew that they were going to take the Fifth Amendment. Now you bring them up there, you do it once, and that’s the end of it. But so often in these sorts of cases, Congress is trying to—I believe, whether intentionally or not—incite a mob to violence by bringing people up and implying their guilt through asking them a long series of questions to which they know the person is gonna—they’re gonna exercise their fifth amendment non-self-incrimination biblical rights.

Now, what’s the end result of that? How do you feel after watching that? You feel like “to heck with the Fifth Amendment. This is ridiculous. Why are we doing this?” And if you don’t understand what the scriptures say about corroboration and the implication of the ninth word, then you don’t know why we don’t do it. But what’s happening is more and more people are being compelled to testify. And there’s a buzz being built over the last two or three decades, you know, to try to get rid of the protection from self-incrimination.

This extends to confidentiality laws as well. This is why a pastor—and this is where it relates to the CRC. The CRC, one thing we’re going to consider this week is a confidentiality policy. What does it mean, pastoral confidentiality, when you come and talk to me? Who can I tell? And you need to know that we should have a policy statement here, and so I’m glad the CRC is working on it. But do we understand the basic idea? Do you come to me and confess a crime? And you know, let’s say this is not in common conversation. This is now you say, “I want to confess my sin. I want to hear you tell me what God says about this. I want to be like that lady with the feathers and the pillow and the gossip.”

And the Bible says you can’t be compelled to testify against yourself. And when you’re talking to me, confessing, you’re essentially talking to God. It’s a conversation between you and God. I represent God in that conversation. And I talk back to you. I say, “Well, you know, if you did that, you need to repent. You need to make restitution. You need to, you know, let people know that you did this. I encourage you to voluntarily go to the authorities.” I can do all that stuff, but I can’t tell the state, “Well, so and so told me this and this,” because that’s violating this idea of confidentiality. No compelling of a person’s testimony against himself. There’s a special relationship.

Now, we don’t know anything about that anymore. We just think, “Well, it’s another guy. Church is another—like the Elks. You tell your Elk master.” No. In the scriptures, doctors are the same way. Why doctors? Because salvation in the Bible is not a fire insurance policy. It’s not, you know, guaranteed entrance to heaven. It’s wholeness. It means health. And doctors were always seen in the same status as pastors because they’re both ministers of God for salvation. This is the basis for medical confidentiality with your doctor.

Most hospitals, almost all of them, were always religious hospitals in the past because people understood the relationship of spiritual and physical health. And we’ve broke those apart. We think we can manipulate things over here on the health side and ignore the spiritual side. We can minister on the spiritual side and ignore the material side. It’s kind of a gnostic dualistic universe we’ve created. But in biblical law, you know, health is salvation, and doctors are basically the same as priests. And so a doctor can’t be compelled.

Now today, all your privacy policies you get in the mail—all these are based on some kind of right to privacy that has nothing to do with what I’m talking about here. It’s some kind of attempt to cover up for the sin of abortion primarily. But biblically, that’s what the idea was. Now, why your attorney-client privilege? Because your attorney, again, is in a special relationship to you. They used to call him a mouthpiece. I don’t know if they still do or not. “Who’s your mouthpiece? Who’s your lawyer?” In other words, the attorney—that’s all he does—he speaks for you. He’s your voice. He’s not an independent person, really. And once more, then, what you tell your attorney can’t be compelled. He can’t be compelled to tell the court what you told him in confidentiality.

So all these things are kind of tied up together, and they’re a result of an understanding of the implication of God’s word as it relates to judicial process and the fact of corroboration of two or three witnesses. And when we move away from God’s law, we move away from corroboration. We end up with very strange times in which people—those confidentiality requirements are being broken down more and more, or extended in directions that make us upset. And then we want to get rid of them altogether. But that’s an implication of the ninth word that talks about the importance of court procedures and establishing justice.

It is a perversion of justice to compel people to testify against themselves or to convict someone just on the basis of their own confession. Confidentiality in its various forms—husband and wife is one body, same basic truth as with these other groups we’ve talked about. So that’s an important deal, and it’s very applicable to us right now because of what has just happened with Solyndra as an example.

We could talk as well. Rushdoony in his book, Institutes of Biblical Law, talks about lie detectors and how evil they are. And I haven’t thought it through, but we can, you know, there’s interesting implications about this. And rather than being pragmatic and wanting to throw people that we know are bad in jail or kill them from a drone missile or something, the Bible says these processes are important. They’re important for us.

Okay.

**Three: The Law of Equivalence—The Reduction of False Matters**

We read last week, “Keep yourself far away from a false matter.” And in Leviticus, that’s directed to judges. How? Well, once more, our culture is moving us away from the way to keep yourself away from false matters, from having a court system that has all kinds of false charges brought and false lawsuits, etc. It’s the law of equivalence. And we’ve talked about this over the last few months, but in the Bible, if a witness—and the ninth word talks about witnesses—if I go to court against you and I testify, and I’m trying to get you killed as a result of my testimony, and it’s found out that I’m lying deliberately about it to get you killed, I’m supposed to be put to death.

Now, that goes right on down. If I’m trying to get you to have to lose money somehow, I should lose money. It’s called the law of equivalence. And a false witness is responsible for what he says. And there should be in the judicial system equivalence. Now, when you have that kind of a system, if I know that I bring a false charge or a false civil suit or whatever it is, that I’m going to end up potentially owing a lot of money, right, or being thrown in jail myself, or being executed myself, that tends to put a damper on it. It’s a deterrent on false matters in court.

We’re commanded in God’s law, as an application of the ninth word, to keep away—keep judges away from false matters. And one way to accomplish that is this law of equivalence. Now, once more, in our culture, that isn’t true. And in point of fact, it’s just the opposite. Our culture encourages false matters in court because everybody’s trying to hit the jackpot on a civil suit. And so our culture is actively discouraging the law of equivalence. And as a result of that, our courts are clogged and have become less and less competent.

**Four: Bribes, Crowds, and Our Incipient Weaknesses**

I’ve already talked about this, but this is who we are. We like people like ourselves. We don’t like people that are different than us. What is our culture doing about the requirement of the ninth commandment to not follow a mob, to not follow a crowd? It’s what it means to do violence, you know, to not join in the common perception that this or that thing should be done away with as opposed to truth.

We’re all prone to that, right? You know that it’s true. If a group of us are talking about something, we’re all tending—we want to be part of the group. We want to be part of the crowd, whatever it is. And we tend to be part of that. And democracy in its raw form is exactly that—it’s just following a crowd. And if the crowd does evil by instituting laws that put to death Christian converts, you know, you followed a mob to do violence then.

And related to this is the idea that, on the other side, we need to require ourselves to exhibit kindness to strangers. That word “stranger” is a strange one, right? We don’t really know what it means. There were a lot of visitors going through Israel on trade routes. A lot of people would come there because of the beautiful laws they had. Maybe the purpose of this is to just remind ourselves. We can at least at this application of these kind of words, say whoever seems strange to us, be kind to them. Go out of your way to help them. Okay? Love them.

And again, we’re tempted not to do that. Now, what’s the contemporary situation on this one? Well, it screams from the headlines all the time. It’s knocked one of the leading Republican candidates down from the top—Rick Perry—because of his statements on immigration policy. It’s “What do you do with people whose skin is brown?” And what is our culture doing? It’s setting up laws and not enforcing them. It’s creating the kind of, you know, stress and pressure that leads every state or municipality to try to do its own thing. And that generally the population who believe in law, the Christian population, gets madder and madder about the whole thing.

And our tremendous temptation is to, you know, talk about Mexicans. That’s what we’re tempted to do in our flesh. And that flesh, that natural temptation we have—if you’re white, to do that. Or if you’re Mexican, to make fun of the Anglo. I mean, racism is a fact of every race throughout history. But if that’s our natural tendency, see how much more so in a country that makes laws and then lets people break those laws with impunity. Well, it’s just setting us up. It feeds that incipient weakness that we have toward ungodly discrimination. It feeds it.

That’s what it does.

So in each of these matters, as our country moves away from the law of liberty, and from the means by which Jesus is proclaiming the good news and affecting and putting the world to rights, the world is put to wrong. It’s by the civil state, by our culture. Any culture that moves away from Jesus—it begins to be put to wrong. It divides people. It produces warfare states, and it produces a violation of our liberty and an increasing ability for the civil state to compel testimony, whether it’s lie detectors, blood tests, whatever it is. Making fun of the Fifth Amendment and trying to get rid of it more and more—whatever it is, our particular structure right now is causing us to be tempted to violate the ninth word.

And so we need to again have a fixed determination not to give into these societal pressures that play on our own sinfulness.

**The Ninth and Fourth Words in Exodus 23**

The ninth word and the fourth word. Exodus 23. I didn’t talk about this last week, but right after that section on the ninth word, it talks about the Sabbath. And the Sabbath is related to giving rest to sojourners and to widows and the fatherless—assisting the worthy poor, verse 6. And this is at the heart of the text from Deuteronomy today. Now I say “worthy poor,” and I say Ruth. Because we live in a warfare state and a state of rights that are not derived from the scriptures.

There’s increasingly—well, there’s less and less of the kind of people that the Bible would consider and allow to glean in a field. What we have are people demanding this and demanding that and feeling entitled to this or that. And as a result of that, what’s our temptation? Here’s another area. When the government and the culture subsidizes sloth, redefines poverty in a way that would never be feasible—or I mean, it would be ridiculous to call the kind of people that are poor in our culture poor in other cultures and poor historically. When the culture today does that, what’s the result? Our tendency—where does our sinfulness lie?

Our sinfulness will lie in this church, I think, and in conservative Christian circles, to dislike the poor. To dislike people that are the very ones we’re supposed to try to help, right? It’s a warfare state, and you’re supposed to choose up sides. And some people are choosing up with the poor people. There’s a lot more of them. And some people are choosing up with the rich people. And you end up defending the kind of corporate violation of God’s word that you really don’t want to be defending.

God says the way to remember how to get through this tangle, as we live in a pagan, increasingly a Christless culture, is to focus on his law. And his law says that court impartiality in court, the protection of liberty in court, and our speech are all tied up with the eternal purpose of God in sending the Lord Jesus Christ to help the poor and to heal up those that are broken and to set at liberty the captive.

Now, setting the captive at liberty is difficult work. God had a hard time with it. I don’t hope you don’t mind me saying that. But when he brought his people out of Egypt, their heart was still in Egypt. They still acted like captives. You don’t wave a magic wand or say the right word and take somebody who is captive and willingly so—to a system by which they’ve learned to survive—and turn them into a free, liberty-loving, you know, reliant, responsible individual. It doesn’t happen that way. It can. God can do miraculous things, but he usually doesn’t do it that way. And those people in the wilderness grumbled and complained and disputed, and yes, he killed off most of them, but he also led them in the way. And their descendants were then a free people ready for the freedom to go in and to govern and to conquer.

Now that’s what we have to put up with, and we have to be okay with that. We have to be okay with imperfect, baby-step results as we try to help various people in our culture that are poor, impoverished, needy, broken, and captive. But that is the heart of what God says the ninth word is about. We protect ourselves through court procedures to the end that we advance the kingdom of God, the good news that Jesus has come to do these wonderful things.

To do anything other than this—to fail to try to provide gleanable resources for people like Ruth that are kind of on their knees a little bit, right? They know their need. They’re asking for help. They’re willing to step up and work, right? That’s the kind of poor it’s talking about here. People that are willing to do at least some steps toward moving toward freedom and responsibility. But once we have those people, to fail to make gleanable resources available to them is sin. And it is a perversion—a turning aside—that’s what the word means, “pervert”—of the justice of God, which is his means to putting the world to right.

**Remember the Judge**

It’s what God says in Leviticus: “I’ll judge you one way or the other. Remember him. Do what’s right. Trust in him.” Apply these simple concepts in our own land, in our own culture, in our own families and community, and apply these gleanable resources.

Last week, Love, Inc., they handed out a resource sheet. Please make sure you get one of those surveys. If you haven’t got it, fill it out. It’s a way to directly apply obedience to the Ninth Word.

**The Power of Your Tongue and Hands**

Our tongues and our actions are powerful. The way to create peace is not through changing our hearts. It sounds weird. I mean, it doesn’t start with your heart. If you hate your neighbor, you’re still supposed to help him. And if you don’t like somebody, that doesn’t end it. You help them anyway. And you know what happens? As people give, and as people are open to receiving, and both actions are required, right?—as we do that, we move away from the emotional hatred and we move toward the love of God, which is the center of the Pentateuch, the center of his law.

Jesus is the faithful and true witness. He will indeed accomplish what he proclaimed in that synagogue sermon two thousand years ago. That’s what the Lord Jesus Christ is doing. And Jesus says we are a participant in that as we apply the equity of the ninth word in helping people and in seeing the responsibility to work for systems of courts and justice systems that keep us away from warfare.

And as we go about in our lives, as we enter into this next year—which I’m telling you, it’s going to be the worst political year, I think, in a long time in terms of urging people to warfare, class warfare, one side or the other. As we go about doing that, let’s keep in mind the ninth word. And let’s help that stay in our minds by extending grace to people who have needs and believing that Jesus Christ really is in the process of proclaiming liberty to the captive.

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for your word. We thank you for the ninth word, the ninth commandment, Lord God, and its equity. Help us to continue to put a guard on our tongues and to open up our hands to help people, Lord God. Help us, Father, to see the great gospel that our Savior proclaimed two thousand years ago being proclaimed again today. And help us to be part of that work. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.