Month: July 2012

Personal Injury in Exodus

What about how you hit me? Let’s talk about it on Deeper Waters.

It’s good to be writing again. Our home was one that was in the area of the storm. We didn’t get hit, but we had damage to our internet. I just recently was able to get back on again and after some posting, figured it was time to continue the OT look. Let’s go to Exodus 21 again.

“12 “Anyone who strikes a person with a fatal blow is to be put to death. 13 However, if it is not done intentionally, but God lets it happen, they are to flee to a place I will designate. 14 But if anyone schemes and kills someone deliberately, that person is to be taken from my altar and put to death.

15 “Anyone who attacks their father or mother is to be put to death.

16 “Anyone who kidnaps someone is to be put to death, whether the victim has been sold or is still in the kidnapper’s possession.”

For the first three verses, we in our society would not have much problem. If you kill someone, you yourself get killed. Some will object to the death penalty, but even still they could likely understand that it isn’t the barbarism that so many skeptics usually associate with the Bible. For the concept of a place to go to in case of an accident, that will be dealt with when we get there.

Note that this even includes a sudden killing out of anger as opposed to a deliberate planning. This would teach the Israelites about controlling the passions in their society and realizing that they were not sovereign and meant to take life by their own standards but were to trust in YHWH.

What about cursing a father and mother? Some of us think it is extreme to have the death penalty here. Note that this is more than just disagreement or words of anger. This is specific cursing. This is an act of uncontrolled hatred that will lead to the breakdown again of the family.

In the ancient world, your heritage was extremely important. Where you came from mattered. For us, when we read a passage like Genesis 5 with its genealogies or read the first nine chapters of 1 Chronicles, we probably have our eyes glaze over wondering why this is in the Bible. Many who start out reading the gospels can wonder why Matthew began his gospel with a genealogy.

For a Jew, this would have been one of the most important parts and a part of great honor.In looking at this, the Jew could see where he came from. It would show his position of honor in society as it would be good to have relatives who behaved well and were honorable in your family tree.

To denounce that tree is to denounce your whole family and your whole society. It would be the equivalent of what we today call treason and even today, treason in the United States can be punished with the death penalty.

Kidnapping might seem severe to us, but why should it? For the ancients, kidnapping could destroy the unit of the family as well as stealing someone’s work force and could possibly lead to taking advantage of them in order to gain land privileges. In other words, the breakdown of the society would be far easier if kidnapping were allowed. This should show us the value God places on the order in society and the family unit.

What can we get from all of this? We can get that God is not a God of wanton destruction. He wants a stable society and He’s giving strict rules to show that. These rules would also be didactic. That means, not everything would be spelled out immediately but wise judges would work them out. Today, just one of our laws can be longer than the Torah itself. The Jews were expected to have wise people amongst them who could judge accurately.

We’ll continue next time.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Exodus 21:2-11

Why this slavery stuff in the Bible? Let’s talk about it on Deeper Waters.

I developed the idea last night that so many skeptics raise up points about the Law in the OT so why not just go straight through the Torah and look at the laws that we do not understand and explain them on a point by point basis? That does not mean that we will not have diversions from time to time based on current events and such, but hopefully this will be the kind of thing that can set some matters to rest.

The text I will be looking at is Exodus 21: 2-11.

“2 “If you buy a Hebrew servant, he is to serve you for six years. But in the seventh year, he shall go free, without paying anything. 3 If he comes alone, he is to go free alone; but if he has a wife when he comes, she is to go with him. 4 If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the woman and her children shall belong to her master, and only the man shall go free.

5 “But if the servant declares, ‘I love my master and my wife and children and do not want to go free,’ 6 then his master must take him before the judges. He shall take him to the door or the doorpost and pierce his ear with an awl. Then he will be his servant for life.

7 “If a man sells his daughter as a servant, she is not to go free as male servants do. 8 If she does not please the master who has selected her for himself, he must let her be redeemed. He has no right to sell her to foreigners, because he has broken faith with her. 9 If he selects her for his son, he must grant her the rights of a daughter. 10 If he marries another woman, he must not deprive the first one of her food, clothing and marital rights. 11 If he does not provide her with these three things, she is to go free, without any payment of money.”

To begin with, slavery is not to be confused with slavery in the Civil War. In that time period, a people was exploited and taken advantage of based on their race and it was done at their expense. In the ancient world, slavery was still a necessity. You did not have a Wal-Mart around the corner that everyone could go and work at and get jobs. Out wandering in the wilderness, the Israelites had to work for someone and like today, if you have a job, it is because of a richer person. (The exception being rich people who run the companies themselves)

So what we have going on is Joe Israelite. He is poor and needs some money. What does he do? He goes and offers himself on a contractual basis to one of his fellow Hebrews to be provided for. The statement is that if the Hebrew will provide room and board for him, then he will be sure to work in exchange. What if this man is married? Then when he comes, his wife is to be provided. The wife doesn’t even have to work.

What if the master gives a wife? The master is doing that for the benefit that can come from the wife true, but also it would be a way of creating an alliance between the two families. When the two families joined together, it created a system to ensure the survival of the family unit. The only way that can happen is if the two are connected for life and if the man wishes to leave, that will break the connection resulting in the woman not being able to be provided for in the future.

Hence, if the man wants to ensure the welfare of his wife, he needs to stay with the master. Besides, the wife belonged to the master prior to the servant and that has not changed. The master would lose out if that happened and that would mean his own future family would be in danger. In the ancient world, you didn’t give something for nothing. There was always some sort of exchange going on.

Of course, a man could become a servant for life. If that was the case, then they had a ritual to bring that about. Now someone could ask “Yeah. But what kind of treatment would he get?” We will deal with that later in the text.

Now what about the last part of selling a daughter as a servant. Why would a guy do this? Because he doesn’t have the means to provide for her and wants to make sure that there will be a family that will. This was looking out for the family unit. Tying together two families would ensure the survival of both families. Notice some aspects about what would happen when the exchange took place.

To begin with, the master was expected to honor his covenant. He was not to treat her like an object but rather as a person. He is the one who has broken faith. Note that. The woman does not break faith. The man is to be held responsible for breaking his covenant with a woman. If he gives her to the son, he must treat her as if she is a daughter that is born to her. If he marries another woman, he is not to neglect her. The law at this point is entirely looking out for the woman, which is exactly the opposite of what we’re always told about this sexist society. The man will have an easier time taking care of himself than the woman would.

Now to be sure, this is not ideal for us, but that is fine. The goal was not to create the ideal society at that moment. The purpose was to begin the creation of a really good society. That was an incremental process that would happen step by step.

Hopefully this has shed light on the passage and further passages will explain the Jewish system even more.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Are The Jews Privileged?

Is there any merit for them before God? Let’s talk about it on Deeper Waters.

The good news of the gospel that was preached was preached originally to the Jews. We find this often in the Bible in that Jesus has His apostles go first to the Jews and not go into Samaria or into Gentile territory. Jesus makes His presentation to Israel first to give Israel one more chance to be the light of the world. We know that the story ends with the Jews rejecting Jesus and sadly saying that they have no king but Caesar, a direct contradiction to the desire to be ruled by YHWH.

When we read the book of Romans, part of it I think is meant to ask the question about Jews. Jews had been expelled from the city and the Gentile church went on fine without them and then lo and behold, these Jews come back and the church doesn’t know what to do. How are we to respond to these people? Could it be as some Christians have unfortunately said throughout the ages, that we ought to despise them for what they did to Jesus? Should we consider them our enemies? What is their relationship to us?

Let’s answer the question of if we should hold the Jews responsible. The answer is no. No Jew today was around when Jesus was crucified. I have the exact same stance for slavery today in America. It’s done with and the sooner we stop holding it over the heads of people, the sooner we can move on past it. The Christian worldview has no place for anti-semitism. Our Lord Himself was Jewish and we should honor the Jewish heritage that we have.

Now when it comes to the gospel, is there a special privilege in being Jewish? Some will answer “Yes! Didn’t Paul say that there is an advantage to being a Jew?” He did indeed. What was that advantage? The advantage was that it was your people that received the Scriptures and it was your people through whom the Messiah would come. The Gospel did come to the Jew first and even Paul in his evangelism seemed to follow that pattern.

Yet while there is advantage there, there is also more responsibility. Because the Jews were in a favored position with regards to receiving the Scriptures and having the lineage of the Messiah, they should have known better. We often can talk about whether people are chosen by God and see that as meaning that it is a position of greater honor. It is a position of honor, but it is also a position that comes with great responsibility. Let’s consider for instance this text in Amos 3:2.

““You only have I chosen
of all the families of the earth;”

Yeah! That’s right! The chosen ones! That can lead to shouts of acclamation! What a great joy it is to be chosen by God! But yet that same verse ends this way.

“therefore I will punish you
for all your sins. ”

It is because of being chosen that punishment comes. In Acts 14 and 17 we have Paul saying to the people that God did overlook their ignorance. Now He is calling for repentance. The Gentiles could have been said to have more of a reason for not doing what was right. They did not have it explicitly spelled out for them from on high. The Jews could not make any such statement.

Even John the Baptist warned the people of his time that God could raise up from the very stones around him children of Abraham. Don’t look at the natural descent you have from Abraham and think that matters a rip to God. God could care less about the person in your family tree that you call father. What God calls about is if you see Him as the Father. What He cares about is if you are honoring Him as God. Your blood will not save you.

What this tells us is that in our age of equality, God is fully equal with the gospel. Some might be in a position where it could be easier for them to hear, but when it comes to judging, all are equally sinful before God and condemned in His sight. No one can totally claim ignorance on the last day. Everyone will know of some good that they denied. Everyone will have their hearts laid bare before the judge.

The message to the Jews was repent, and when we look at the destruction that came on the temple, we can know that God did judge them. Being of the blood of Abraham was not enough. God is fully equal with His treatment. If you are not with Jesus, then you are against Him and if you are against Him, it is something that God takes seriously. There can be no new competition to the new covenant, and that includes the old covenant as well.

Now does this mean we are to be opposed to the Jews? Not at all. What should be our response? Humility. We need to be watching ourselves. This is what Romans warns us about. It says that some Gentiles were talking about how they were grafted into the tree when some natural branches were broken off. Yes, says Paul. They were broken off for unbelief. You’re not even a natural branch. What’s to make you think that you yourselves won’t be broken off if you don’t honor the new covenant? It means to recognize that you have a position of privilege and to not disregard the natural branches. My fellow Gentiles. We must remember that when we meet someone Jewish, they do not have the position before YHWH based on their blood and origin, but they are still the ones through whom and to whom the Scriptures were first delivered and through whom they were handed down and they are the ones that brought our Messiah into the world.

Let us seek to win them over to their Messiah with zeal and keep in mind Messiah is a term for the Jews. We are to let them know the one they awaited has come. The promises of YHWH have been fulfilled. We meanwhile should hold our place with fear and trembling. We are not here either because we are someone special. We are just those who happened to willingly submit to YHWH and His King Jesus. If we fall out of line, we are just as prone to have what happened to us that which happened to the Jews in 70 A.D. If we want to see what it means to stand in the way of the king, let us look there and realize, the king means business. Let’s hope we mean business in serving Him too.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

So What’s The Problem?

Why is there a gospel at all? Let’s talk about it on Deeper Waters.

Last night, I wrote about what the gospel is. Often, when we do our evangelism, we tell people that they are sinners and that they need forgiveness and that God loves them and wants to save them. Yes. This is true. Yet at the same time, if we approach the gospels that way, we will miss a lot.

For instance, is the story of Jesus just meant to tell us that God loves us? We can say that actions speak louder than words, and they do, but while we can say that God is saying that in Jesus, and He is, could we not say that He is saying more than that? I recall being in a Sunday School class where we were told the reason Joshua was written was so that Israel would know to obey God.

Of course Israel needed to know that, but could there not be something about the one who comes after the Law guiding the people into the land of promise and providing deliverance from their enemies all around them and in the end asking them to remain faithful to the covenant?

Quite interesting that that person in the Old Testament is Joshua, which would also be Yeshua, the name of Jesus.

You see, in the second century, there arose a heretic named Marcion who wanted to separate the God of Christianity from the wicked God of the Old Testament. He only had the non-pastoral Pauline epistles and a highly edited gospel of Luke in his canon. He wanted nothing to do with the God of Israel.

Now many Christians today would not say the God of Israel is a bloodthirsty fiend like someone like Marcion or Richard Dawkins would, but many of them are in fact Marcionite in their practice acting as if the God of Israel has nothing whatsoever to do with the God revealed in Jesus Christ.

If we start with us, we miss a lot of the problem and we miss a lot of what the story of Jesus is meant to tell us. For instance, readers of the blog know about my fanaticism when it comes to the series Smallville. If you watched the final episode without seeing the series, you could understand a good deal of it. Yes. Clark Kent must defeat Darkseid. Yes. Lex Luthor must be stopped. Yes. Clark puts on the suit and flies. You know the story ends happily. Clark Kent has become Superman.

If instead you have watched the whole series you know all about not just what Clark did there but how he got there. You understand how the battle against evil for him started at the very beginning. You understand that the meteor freaks at the start were the way Clark learned to fight and eventually become Superman. You learn about all the trials Jor-El put him through and the friendships developed with people like Chloe, Oliver, and Tess. All of these make the story all the richer for you. You can get the basic enjoyment the person who just sees the final episode gets, but you get so much more because you understand where it fits in the grand scheme.

We have enough of a problem already with this in our world. We have taken the gospel with this and made it all about ourselves. The gospel is about how God makes a wicked people to be righteous so they can be with Him. It is about how they can live forever. It is about how they can be forgiven. Here’s something to ponder. Why should God care?

In Christianity, we do know that God would have been fully justified in letting us go our own way. We all deserve hell. There is nothing special about any of us in that regards. God still cares. Why? Go look repeatedly in the account of the Exodus and the wanderings in the wilderness and see what happens.

Why does God not destroy Israel out there? Moses tells Him that the Egyptians will see and know that God was unable to deliver. His glory will be cast down because of that. See why it would be said the temple was destroyed. It would be because the people were becoming a blight on the name of God. Their lifestyles were not honoring to Him. Why are they coming back? For God’s Name sake. It is not because God owes Israel a thing. It is because He has chosen them regardless and for the honor of His Word, He will save them.

It is the same for us. God saves us for His glory and so that we can reflect that glory. It is not about doing works just out of gratitude, while that is part of it. It is also about doing them to bring about the glory and the kingdom of God, something that is absent from our gospel presentations.

When we look in the gospels, it is not a surprise, or at least it should not be, that the Old Testament is all throughout there. I’ve written much recently on how people don’t bother to understand the context of the Bible to see what is going on in the world. The Bible itself shows that is needed as to understand the New Testament, you need the Old Testament. Sure. You can get the message from just the New Testament, but you’re getting an incomplete story. Your understanding is enriched by getting the full account.

If we go to the gospels and read them like they were written to us today and have no understanding of the story of Israel, we will miss much. If all we understand is that we are sinners in need of a savior, we will get benefit of course, but we will not get all that we could. Surely we all want to get all we can out of the Bible! Then we must understand the story of Israel. It is not an accident that the gospels show us that Jesus is god with us and the Messiah. Both are essential. We can go and seek to establish the latter while ignoring the former as if being the Messiah was a side point. To take what Jesus Himself said, we should do the former without neglecting the latter!

Yet if we continue this inane approach, it will only make us more self-centered. It is already happening with several who wish to try to see where America is in the Bible or to see where “I” fit in in the Bible. To wrench the Bible completely from its time, culture, and context will make it say things it does not say and not allow it to say what it is meant to say.

If we want to understand the epistles, we need to understand the mindset from which Paul and the rest of the writers are arguing from. This is especially so in the book of Hebrews. If we want to understand Acts, we need to understand why the mission is spreading to begin with. If we want to understand the apocalypse of Revelation, we definitely need to understand the Old Testament. Revelation very rarely quotes the Old Testament, but it is alluded to well throughout the book. If you do not understand the Old Testament, you will not understand Revelation, PERIOD!

This will get us off of ourselves and onto the gospel. The gospel is not about God wanting to be with us as if we were so special, but about Him knowing we are incomplete without Him and wanting us to share His glory all the more. We are most glorious when we are in Him. Think of it as a marriage. A man and a woman can work quite well on their own, but when the two come together, they can far outshine what both of them could do separately. This is especially true in the sexual act. After all, it is only by their sharing glory with one another that they can bring about the glory of new life.

This also means that this is not about following a list of rules. It’s not about doing good just because that’s what good Christians do. You do good because it is how you win. We are told that Constantine had a dream where he was shown the cross and told that under this sign he would conquer. The reality is it was under that sign he had already been conquered. It was the cross that had overtaken the Roman Empire, not by the sword, but by doing good. This is not meant to ask if war might ever be necessary, but it is meant to show that when it is necessary, it is not as a means of evangelism.

The problem is not just your sin. That is a symptom of the problem. It would be like treating the flu by making sure your temperature stays down. You need to do that. You need to stay hydrated. The most important thing to do however is to kill the flu. The problem of your sin and mine is a symptom. It is a symptom of the disease of a world in rebellion against God. Let us be sure about how our lives are being lived. We are either advancing the kingdom of God or the kingdom of satan and if we are advancing our personal kingdoms, guess which side we’re really working for. It brings a whole new emphasis to good works when you see them as doing the work of the kingdom and conquering the kingdom of the devil.

Israel is not an accident. The whole point of the gospel story is not you. It is not even Israel to be sure, but Israel sure plays a much greater role in it than you do. If you are to know and appreciate the gospel, you will need to know what it was that God was doing in Israel in the Old Testament and how He deals with Israel in the New and what the person of Jesus really has to do with it all.

In Christ,
Nick Peters