Mapping the Law of God

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Turn with me, please, in your Bibles to Deuteronomy chapter 22.
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Yes, we are continuing our study in the Holiness Code, the
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Law of God, but we'll be looking at a number of texts this morning. And the first, when we eventually get to it, will be in Deuteronomy chapter 22.
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Before we look to the Word of God, let us ask one last time for the Lord's blessing upon our time. Our gracious Heavenly Father, we once again recognize that without your assistance we can do nothing.
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And as we attempt once again to handle difficult material, we would ask that by your
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Spirit you would be with us, you would give us the mindset that would cause us to be obedient and desirous of doing the hard work of understanding your truth and being prepared to give an answer for the hope that's within us.
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We pray in Christ's name. Amen. I didn't get a chance to see it, but I was told, informed yesterday that on a particular program on CNN, just yesterday morning,
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I believe, they were interviewing the author of the Atlantic Monthly article that made a big splash last week.
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Some of you may have seen the article, What ISIS Really Wants. And it was an interesting article, not one that I necessarily agree a thousand percent with, but it was an interesting article about the theological underpinnings of ISIS and its relationship to historic
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Islamic orthodoxy. But on this particular program on CNN, they decided to ask this author about parallels between ISIS and other religions.
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And guess what they played? Yeah, they played the very same clip that is the only audio clip to ever have been played during a sermon at the
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Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church when we began this series on the
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Law of Gods. Some of you weren't here, but let me remind you, don't worry. It's probably still back on the computer someplace, but I didn't ask that we play it again.
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It was the clip from the West Wing where the President of the
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United States mocks the Dr. Laura figure regarding the Holiness Code.
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So here on CNN, talking about ISIS, the parallel that is drawn is to people who would believe that what we are discussing this morning is actually the
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Law of God. Ah, welcome to the secular states of North America.
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That's where we are. And so we come this morning, and we have been studying the
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Holiness Code, and last time we were working through Leviticus 18. We'll go back to that this evening, but I needed to take the time this morning to present to you some thoughts, some guidelines, as to how we can examine various of the elements of the
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Old Testament Law and understand how they can have application today.
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Now, historically, there has been the division of God's Law into different elements.
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That is, God's moral law, the civil law given to the people of Israel, and the ceremonial law.
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And so we might think of moral law in regards to, well, what we read in Leviticus 18, in regards to not murdering, not selling into slavery, not stealing, etc.,
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etc. But it's very difficult to draw an absolute line between that and civil laws, because for a civil law to really have moral authority, it has to have moral weight to it.
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And so when we look at civil laws, we might think about, for example, the reality that the nation of Israel was primarily an agricultural nation, and therefore, for example, when you gleaned your field, you were not to glean all the way to the edges to allow some there, some left over, for the poor to be able to have something.
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And so there you start seeing the interface between the morality of having a means of taking care of the poor and the civil law as to, well, it's starting to touch on the bottom line and what you could be able to sell your crops for, because if you went all the way to the edges, you might make a little extra more.
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And so you see that trying to disentangle these things is very difficult. And then you get into ceremonial law.
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And the ceremonial law, well, certainly there's all sorts of things about the setting aside of the priests.
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And we read through all the stuff about the sacrifices and how the priest is to examine the skin lesions and things like this.
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And yet still, even in the ceremonial law, we see that some of the New Testament writers see things that point forward to a fulfillment in Christ.
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And so there's that aspect, too. What are types and shadows?
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And so the reality is this has been a big question for Christians down through the ages, so much of a big question that just a few days ago there was a debate here in the
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Valley on this very question from two different sides in regards to this understanding of God's law.
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And so some of the questions we have to ask ourselves, we have to allow into our minds.
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Now, you may say, I don't know that I want to think about these things. Well, again, we don't have any choice. You probably heard this week that there's a little old grandma -looking lady here in the
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United States up in the Northwest, which, just like the
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Northeast, seems to be filled with people of a very interesting perspective. And she's been found guilty by a judge of discrimination.
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And what did she do? Well, she didn't want to bake a cake for a gay wedding. And so she's been found guilty.
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And, well, it might just be a $2 ,000 fine or something, or it might get a whole lot worse than that.
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We all know what's coming in regards to those things. We all know that we're talking about counting the cost and being ready to give things up to stand for the truth.
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Well, but why would we want to stand for the truth? I mean, Rob Bell was on Oprah recently, and he says we're about to follow the culture and evolving and accepting gay marriage and all the rest of that kind of stuff.
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And shouldn't we just follow Rob Bell? I mean, he's really cool, right? No, we all know differently on that.
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And that means we have to think these things through. It can't be, well, I read somebody or I heard somebody.
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This has to be something that is a conviction that we ourselves have arrived at, or we will not stand firm.
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And so some of the things that I would like to suggest to you that we need to keep in mind and that we need to ponder in our thinking.
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Did Israel hold a place in God's economy and His historical decree that is, in and of itself, unique?
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Was there something about the people of Israel that was absolutely unique, never to be repeated?
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Once the Messiah came, would there not have to be a radical reorientation of many things so that the gospel would go forth into the world?
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I mean, you had God dealing with one single people in one small area and His prophets are sent to this particular people.
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And why that particular people? Well, because through them, this great promise made to Abraham was going to go to all the world.
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And how did that happen? Well, that happened through someone named the Messiah, Jesus, the
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Messiah. And so here you have this people and all the things we learn from God's having to deal with them and the hard -heartedness amongst so many, and yet there's this remnant, there's this remnant people and they're sensitive to God's truth and yet others, they're exposed to miracles and things like that but they're hard -hearted and all the things we can learn from that.
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But once the Messiah comes, is there not, if the gospel is going to go forth into all the world rather than just being in one particular group of people, isn't there going to be something, doesn't something have to change?
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And we know according to Acts chapter 15, a lot did. In Acts chapter 15, the church gets together.
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Well, do these people need to become a part of Israel? Is it now Israel that's just going to get a whole lot bigger?
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Is it just going to get, you know, is these the same things? And the apostles say, no, no, no, you don't have to be circumcised, you don't have to join that old covenant.
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And in fact, the list of things that they give to try to continue harmony in the church between Jews and Gentiles is really small.
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It's not a massive thing. And so we think about that. What aspects of the law were necessary and right in the theocratic nation of Israel, the people of God through whom the
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Messiah would come, that would in fact be a stumbling block if forced into application in non -theocratic settings.
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We have to be very careful. The gospel has to go in all the world. It has to be able to transcend every barrier, go into every culture.
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And so as we think about things about, it's pretty obvious, well, all that stuff about high priests, well, no, that's been fulfilled definitely.
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Well, what about the agricultural stuff? Well, a lot of Christians today live in cities.
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They never, I mean, there are Christians that live their entire lives today that hardly ever see anything growing at all. So how is that supposed to be applied to them?
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These are some of the questions that we have to consider and think through. We're also given a little bit of guidance by our
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Confession of Faith. And if you would like, you can reach up to your hymnal there.
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And you can, just to remind yourself, we can look at page 680.
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That's not hymn 680. Don't want anyone to start singing. That's actual page 680 where we have our
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Confession of Faith. And under the law of God, we read the following.
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God gave to Adam a law of universal obedience written in his heart and a particular precept of not eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, by which he bound him in all his posterity to personal, entire, exact, and perpetual obedience, promised life upon the fulfilling, and threatened death upon the breach of it, and endued him with power and ability to keep it.
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The same law that was first written in the heart of man continued to be a perfect rule of righteousness after the fall and was delivered by God upon Mount Sinai in Ten Commandments and written in two tables, the first four containing our duties toward God, our duty towards God, and the other six, our duty to man.
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Besides this law, commonly called moral, God was pleased to give the people of Israel ceremonial laws containing several typical ordinances, partly of worship, prefiguring
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Christ, his graces, actions, sufferings, and benefits, and partly holding forth diverse instructions of moral duties, all which ceremonial laws being appointed only to the time of reformation are, by Jesus Christ, the true
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Messiah and only lawgiver, who was furnished with power from the Father, for that end abrogated and taken away.
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To them also he gave sundry judicial laws, which expired together with the state of that people, not obliging any now, by virtue of that institution, their general equity only being of moral use.
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The moral law doth forever bind all, as well justified persons as others, to the obedience thereof, and that not only in regard to the matter contained in it, but also in respect of the authority of God the
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Creator who gave it, neither doth Christ and the gospel in any way dissolve, but much strengthen this obligation.
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So there we're given some discussion of the issue of ceremonial, civil, moral.
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In the civil laws there are moral precepts, and so there is a need of identifying moral precepts.
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Now, I recognize the vast majority of our critics are not going to take the time to even care about those distinctions, but they are things that we must keep in mind in handling the
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Word of God, because, as I've said before, but we have visitors, so I'm trying to sort of bring them up to speed as to why
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I'm talking about these things, we are accused of picking and choosing, we are accused of being inconsistent, we are accused of being discriminatory, because the law says certain things and we don't concern ourselves about that.
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We didn't have anyone standing at the back door, and when you walked in you had to stop so they could pull the tag out of your shirt to see if you're wearing mixed fibers.
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We didn't have anybody doing that. And so they'll say, see, you're inconsistent. If you then look at the law that says you shall not lie with a man as one lies with a female, it's an abomination before God.
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You're being inconsistent. You're being inconsistent in your being prejudicial and discriminatory, and there are certain people in our land that want to close us down for that level of, quote -unquote, discrimination.
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And so we have to be able to say, no, we have a consistent standard, and here's what it is.
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Here's how we've examined these things and think through them. Now let me suggest just a couple of things.
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And what we're going to do today, and I'm going to have to go fast. I cannot believe how quickly the hands are turning on that clock back there.
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But I'm going to have to go pretty quickly. I want to go through a few texts and just illustrate how we might approach what seem to be sort of random statements and come to understand how we can derive insight and moral application for our day.
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So, suggested keys to our study. Number one, the text should be carefully examined in context.
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Now you might say, well, wow, that's one we've never heard before, looking at context. Yeah, but have you noticed something?
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Have you noticed that even as we've read through, we're in Numbers now, we're going to be heading to Deuteronomy pretty soon, and once we get into the middle portions of Deuteronomy, there's going to be these chapters, and there's going to be a verse, a verse, a verse, a verse, and to establish a context, a flow of thought between those verses is next to impossible.
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I mean, one verse will be about something about your cow falling in a ditch, and the next thing is about your neighbor over here, and then there's something over here, and it's very difficult.
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Well, it's not like being in 1 Corinthians and saying, ah, there's a flow of thought here, and now Paul's addressing this, it doesn't work that way.
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So what do I mean then, examine in context? Well, not just discourse, because sometimes we can't do that, because the text seems to be disconnected from what comes before or after, but language, and especially the religious context of Israel when the law was given.
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So in other words, we need to ask the question, can we discern what these words would have meant to the original audience when they heard these particular words?
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So we need to look at the language. We need to look, and I'll give some examples of that today. We need to look at the language, and especially the religious context of Israel when the law was given, which is why we spent the time looking at the background, the religions that were around Israel.
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That is, the law had to have an understandable purpose and meaning when it was given.
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Can we determine what that was? There are some where it's difficult to do that.
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Secondly, laws that had time -based applications that are no longer relevant should be examined for overarching moral principles that remain valid in the modern context.
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The very first example I'm going to give you will give you this illustration. This may involve seeing that a particular legal prohibition or statement was based upon a more basic commandment found in such texts as the
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Ten Commandments, fleshing out those commands. The very first one, just mark down, we're going to flesh that out in the very first example in Deuteronomy chapter 22.
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But one other thing to add to this, New Testament revelation must always be taken into consideration for when
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Christ, the lawgiver himself, did you see our confession of faith, specifically referred to him as the lawgiver, when
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Christ, the lawgiver himself, or his apostles, provide inspired commentary upon either direct texts, by quoting them, or broad principles laid down in old covenant scriptures, this casts bright light and finality upon those texts.
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I will stand very firmly in saying, the New Covenant texts determine
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Old Covenant fulfillment. If you don't believe that, you're not going to be a Baptist for very long. There's lots of other places you can go, but you're not going to be a
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Baptist for very long. The New Covenant texts determine the scope of Old Covenant fulfillment.
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We do not take the Old Covenant and try to cram it into the New Covenant and force the New Covenant into the parameters of what we think the
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Old Covenant was saying. We have an inspired commentary upon the Old Covenant called the New Testament. And we allow that to determine things.
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Let me give you just a real glowing example of this. It's the New Testament that determines what is and what is not
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Messianic prophecy. When we look at some of the Messianic prophecies, if we had looked at that particular text, there would have been other things in the surrounding context that would not be fulfilled in Christ.
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But the New Testament provides the fulfillment of what that Old Testament prophecy was actually referring to.
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If we don't follow that, I don't know how we make heads or tails of anything. The apostles become subject to being criticized for all sorts of not doing, seeing this, or missing that, so on and so forth.
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I believe it is a given of the New Testament church that that is the case.
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So, let's take a look at our text, beginning with Deuteronomy chapter 22, verse 8.
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Deuteronomy chapter 22, verse 8. That's why I had you turn there.
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You thought I'd never get to... How in the world did I get through 25 minutes or so without getting to the text?
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But we need to have some background. Deuteronomy 22, verse 8, probably the most commonly used example of where you have what in essence is a civil law that has moral application that continues to be relevant to this day, but we have to think through what the context was to understand it.
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It's a nice, clear, simple one, but I think it's very, very useful, and it might be useful to you in your conversations with others to be able to point to this.
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When you build a new house, you shall make a parapet for your roof so that you will not bring blood guilt on your house if anyone falls from it.
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So, you're going out, you're going to build a new house, and the law says you have to put a parapet.
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You have to fence your roof lest someone fall off your roof and blood guiltiness be brought upon you.
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Now, I'd like to know how many of you here this morning have a fence on your roof?
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I don't... No? Here? No? Okay, I thought maybe you had someone down here. No? No one has a fence on their roof here? What are you, a bunch of antinomians or something?
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I mean, come on, it's right there, right? Well, most of us sit back and go, well, wait a minute, we know you,
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Pastor Fry probably remembers, back in 1991, I've been here a while, we were living in the house here and mowing the lawn and taking care of stuff, and one day
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Pastor Fry thought maybe that the drain on the unit, on the thing here, was plugged up.
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So he said, James, why don't you go up there and check it? Do you remember this, Pastor Fry? Uh -huh, yeah. I turned white, and I started shaking, and he started wondering what was going on.
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I'm afraid of heights. Now, I can ride a bicycle down a mountain hill with a cliff to the right, but if I can fall off a ladder, oh, this is not good for me.
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And so that's when he discovered that I'm afraid of heights, because I can guarantee you, there is no chance of me falling off my roof because I'm not getting on my roof.
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It ain't going to happen. But you know what? I had a new air conditioning unit put on about two years ago, and there was a guy up there, and I don't have a fence on my roof, so if he had fallen off, would
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I have blood guiltiness? Well, of course, what we need to do is we need to ask the question, what was this about?
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And in that day, at that time, they didn't have air conditioning units, and if you wanted to enjoy the cool evening, because they didn't have roads either, so it actually cooled off at night, which is an amazing concept, a lot of people spent a lot of time on the roof of their dwelling.
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It was a place where people were supposed to be. It would be a natural place. Kids would play there.
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Your neighbors would be up there. You'd watch college football up there, whatever.
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That was a natural place for people to be. It's no longer a natural place for people to be on roofs.
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So what is this law about? Well, this is a law for the people of Israel that's based upon a greater moral principle that goes right back to the moral law of God.
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Thou shalt not kill. I mean, the whole discussion of blood guiltiness and cities of refuge,
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I mean, there was a lot of serious concern about the taking of life and blood guiltiness.
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And so here you have a law. Nobody in this room believes that the physical fulfillment that was required for the people of Israel is binding upon us today because we don't live on our roofs.
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Things have changed. The culture has changed. But has the underlying moral principle changed? No. And so what do we have here in Phoenix that would be a direct parallel to this?
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You're supposed to have a fence around your pool, aren't you? Because those little toddlers just see that little thing floating in the pool and splash and how many do we lose?
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Every summer, right? And so we have laws. And what's the basis of that law?
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To save life, to not kill. And so here you have a law, and it would be ridiculous, though not uncommon, for a critic to look at us and say, you people, if you really believed the
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Bible, you'd have fences around all of your roofs because that's what it says. Well, that is what it says.
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But if you are so simplistic in your reading to not read it in its context and then to make application, it's not my fault.
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You're the one missing the point, and the point is we should be concerned to save life, to be concerned about human life.
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Now, the next one is going to be one where there's going to be disagreement, even among some of us here today.
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But let me throw it out there and explain to you. Leviticus chapter 19, verse 28. Leviticus 19, verse 28.
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Shortly after I wrote my book, some of you may remember, I wrote a book called The Same -Sex
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Controversy. Remember? It's still out there. Man, it needs to be updated. Any book you would write on homosexuality today would be out of date six months after you publish it, unfortunately.
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But in the process of writing that and in the process of defending that, I had to deal with this very issue of people saying, you are being discriminatorily selective in what you accept and don't accept in the
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Old Testament Scriptures. And one of those accusations, Leviticus 19, verse 28, you shall not make any cuts in your body for the dead, nor make any tattoo marks on yourselves,
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I am Yahweh. Someone said, there, there you go. And they quoted a number of New Testament scholars that said this was only relevant to Israel, it's no longer relevant today.
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Now, first thing I did, is you look at the text. You go to the text, and you start translating the text, to ask yourself a couple questions.
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Well, what does it mean, cuts in your body? What does it mean for the dead? What do these terms mean?
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And then you ask yourself the question, are there any parallel texts? Because, remember, what does Deuteronomy mean?
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Deuteros is second. So, Deuteronomy is the second giving of the law.
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So, one of the things you've got to keep in mind is there is a parallel, there are frequently parallels between the giving in Leviticus, primarily in Leviticus, found in Deuteronomy.
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So, I started looking carefully at this, and I started asking the question, well, okay, yeah, there are a number of New Testament scholars that just simply say, you know, this is just Old Testament law, and we hadn't taken that position in the book, though.
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Jeff Neal and I did not take the position that just simply said, you know, we're not in the law, we're under grace, we're not going to worry about that.
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So, I needed to look more closely at what this was about. A couple of things that immediately came to my mind in my study.
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Number one, something here is about the dead. The dead?
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What do you mean? What does this have to do with the dead? Well, there is a parallel to this text in Deuteronomy 14 .1.
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In Deuteronomy chapter 14, verse 1, we have a direct parallel. It's sort of the, you know, when you're looking at Mark, you look at Luke, or whatever else it might be.
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You are the sons of Yahweh your God, you shall not cut yourselves, nor shave your forehead for the sake of the dead.
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Well, I'm not having any worries with this one. And I'm like, okay, so, what is this about dead?
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And that's where I had to do some of the study into, well, I'll bet you this had something to do with the religions of the day.
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And when you look into the religions of the day, there was a fascination with the dead.
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Necromancy, contact, communication with the dead. And there's two ways that I could understand what for the dead in these two texts would be in reference to.
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The first would be honoring the dead. And man, do you see that all over the place.
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In fact, it's funny, I've used this as an illustration while traveling. And I've been shocked at how often my audience has said, you have no idea how relevant that is in our context.
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Now, most of you wouldn't be surprised that when I've talked about this in South Africa, in South Africa, they're going, man, we deal with syncretism all the time, there's so much ancestor worship and stuff, even in what's called evangelical churches here, you wouldn't believe it.
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I was in Ukraine. And they said, wow, you have no idea how much in Eastern Orthodoxy the dead, the saints and so on and so forth, are part and parcel of what's going on.
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I'm like, I guess, especially us in the West, we don't see things like that. But part of it was the honoring of the dead.
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And so there's some alteration of one's look and one's body, possibly to honor the dead.
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But there was another aspect. Fear of the curses of the dead.
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Fear of the curses of the dead. And I sort of lean this direction because whatever you do with Deuteronomy 14,
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Leviticus 19, 28, you put them together. The one thing that's consistent is an alteration of the body.
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Trying to seemingly look different. Why would you want to do that?
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Could it really be that they were actually afraid that the dead were going to come back? And if you put on a disguise, maybe they wouldn't see you?
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Wouldn't recognize you? Well, when you look at the nature of religions where your big celebration for the year is opening the idol's mouth so he can eat, yeah, maybe.
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But then I started looking at the specific terms. And the term that is translated here in the
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New American Standard as tattoo is a hoppoxlegomena. You're all going, who?
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Everybody should know the term hoppoxlegomena because it makes you sound really smart. It really does. It's a great term.
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And in Scrabble, I think it's about 400 points. So it's killer. I'm sorry.
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No one plays Scrabble anymore. It's words with friends. Is that what it is? Something along those lines. I don't know. But hoppoxlegomena is just simply a fancy way of saying mentioned once.
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Named once. It's the only time this word appears in the Bible. And what's more is a disputed hoppox.
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What does that mean? We're really not sure what it means. We just don't know what it means. And a fundamental rule that I was taught in exegesis a long, long time ago is you never make a dogmatic foundation.
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Never make a dogmatic conclusion based upon a disputed hoppoxlegomena. If it's a word that's only found once, you can't look someplace else to see what it means because it's only found once and it's disputed because we just don't know.
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It's some kind of marking. It could be temporary. It could be permanent. We don't know. We just don't know. And the parallel, what's the parallel to it in Deuteronomy 14?
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Shaving your forehead. Does that help? No, not really. So we don't know exactly what it means.
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So what's this text about? Well, a lot of folks, I think probably a lot of folks here would go just traditionally, well, you shouldn't have a tattoo.
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Okay? But unfortunately, if you just take that, I think you're missing what it's actually all about.
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What's it really saying? What's its real continued application to today? Well, when you look at its parallel in Deuteronomy 14 and you bring it over here, and there's also one other parallel.
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I'm sorry. I forgot there was one other parallel that I wanted to give to you real quickly here. It's Leviticus 21 .5.
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And this is the parallel. This is showing a little light on Deuteronomy 14 .1. They shall not make any baldness on their heads, nor shave off the edges of their beards, nor make any cuts in their flesh.
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So here again is this alteration of appearance, but here it has something to do with the corners of beards.
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And I only see one gentleman here today who might skid past this one, brother.
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You might make it. But the rest of us clearly have been shaving the corners of our beards.
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So what is this all about then? I came to the conclusion, A, what we're really talking about here continues to be extremely important, even if it's not something we talk about much in our culture.
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And that is, these texts tell us, do not live your life in light of the dead, either in honor of them or in fear of them.
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And you might say, big deal for us. Yeah, but it's a big deal for a lot of folks, even in our culture.
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I encounter some scary folks. I don't want to get into details, but I got a call within the past week from someone about someone who had passed away.
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And they were saying to me, and you know, I know everything is well because he came to a relative of mine in a dream.
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It had nothing to do with faith in Christ or anything else, but an appearance in a dream of someone who had died.
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And I did enough grief counseling in the hospital to know that this is actually quite relevant to our day.
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God is God. God is sovereign over your life. And you do not do anything.
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You don't try to honor the dead. And you certainly don't try to alter your appearance to hide from the curses of the dead.
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The dead cannot curse you. I'm not getting any amens because nobody here has ever been afraid of that.
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Go just a few miles south. Go just a few miles south where you find
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Roman Catholicism in a very degraded form mixing with the pagan religions.
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And you'll find out how important that is. Go to Ukraine. Go to South Africa. And there are a lot of people that need to have it really applied to them.
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Do not fear the dead. Now, before I move on to the next one, there's an obvious question that everyone's asking.
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Well, what about that then? I think it's Romans 14. I think it's under the Lordship of Christ. I know some godly men.
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I know that there are people that would say, nope, can never do it. Well, all you've got to do is ask yourself a question.
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If that is a disputed hot box, then you need to come up with another ground for saying, nope, that's never a possibility.
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I believe it's Romans 14. You may disagree. I leave it up to you. The point is this.
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You don't have to just throw the text out like most people do and say, eh, it's only about Israel.
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No. I think it continues to speak to us today. I think it still has relevance, but you have to look at what its context was and what the foundation of it is to see what the real relevance is.
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And sometimes the traditional reading hides the actual true relevance.
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And that's a concern. Turn to Deuteronomy chapter 23. Deuteronomy chapter 23.
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Now, again, I could have... I had a whole list and I had to try to winnow it down to something that would be survivable because what
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I wanted to do was give these illustrations and then tonight we've got to go back to the tough stuff.
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We've got to go back to Leviticus chapter 18. And we need to look specifically we looked last time at what
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Toeva meant, remember? Abomination. But I came to the conclusion that it would be inappropriate to look at just that one reference in Leviticus 18 and then go through 19, you finally get to 20, and then we have the second reference and now they've been separated by all this time and discussion.
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We need to look at both of them together. And hopefully do so applying the same standards that we've applied here.
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Because remember, reason with me back to the very first time we talked about this subject. I played the clip from the
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West Wing. What was the argument? You're picking and choosing. What did the President do? Well, you know, my daughter, you know, she's a graduate of such and such
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Ivy League school. I'd like to sell her into slavery. What do you think a good price would be? Well, we are going to have to look at the slavery passages.
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I was reading some on it just last night and interestingly enough it was addressed to people who would choose to sell themselves into slavery.
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And it was about why they would do so. And it was about how they were to be treated when they were to be set free.
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And it was all about someone who basically the only choice they have is death or selling themselves as your servant.
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That was the only choice they had. That's a different context than how slavery is normally addressed today.
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But you see, we're being consistent. We're asking what's the context? What was it about? How is it different than the modern context?
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And so let's look here in Deuteronomy chapter 23 beginning verse 24. When you enter your neighbor's vineyard, then you may eat grapes until you are fully satisfied, but you shall not put any in your basket.
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When you enter your neighbor's standing grain, then you may pluck the heads with your hand, but you shall not wield a sickle in your neighbor's standing grain.
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For many, for most in the church today, interesting insight and utterly irrelevant.
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I mean for most, law of Moses, we're not under the law, la la la, la la la.
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Well, our confession does talk about the different kinds of laws.
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And if you were to say, look, this is simply civil law for Israel, and when there's no longer
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Israel, then there's no longer civil law. Okay. Obviously, I look at this and I ask the question, is there a relationship between what is clearly a law for an agricultural people?
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There weren't, you know, when you talked about the cities and towns of that day, they would barely be wide spots in the road in comparison to what we are accustomed to.
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And even in the cities and towns, agriculture was still the central issue.
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You could not, you could not have a city that was so large that the surrounding countryside could not support that city.
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For example, I've done some study of this because of the situation in Mecca, in my studies of Islam.
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Why is it that Muhammad is so well known for raiding caravans? Why did they need caravans?
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Because Mecca could not support itself. It simply could not grow because of the climate sufficient food for the population.
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And so caravans, I mean, were the only, you cut off the caravans, no more Mecca. Everybody's got to leave because you cannot support that particular city.
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And for us today, most of us don't know where our food came from. Well, except for Brother Callahan. He knows very intimately because he killed it.
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But for the rest of us, we don't know where our food came from.
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We know it probably came in on a truck. Right, Josh? Came in on a truck. Josh keeps those trucks rolling.
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It might have come in on a train. Very rarely, you know, if you eat caviar or something, maybe it was flown in on a plane.
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But we have these amazing systems of transportation, which if they all broke down, we would all be leaving this big asphalt jungle very, very quickly.
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I don't know where we'd be going, but we'd be leaving very, very quickly. Well, that's just simply not the way things were in the past.
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And so the people of Israel would be living next to their neighbors.
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And it's interesting. I don't know. We're so used to fencing everything up that this sounds a little weird to us.
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I mean, if I found my next -door neighbor, well, I don't have one, so I know
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Pastor Fry has fruit trees and garden stuff in the back area.
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You still got fruit trees and garden stuff? Okay, still got fruit trees and garden stuff. Would you find it a little bit odd if you woke up one morning, you look outside, and there's your neighbor in his bathrobe munching on stuff off of your trees?
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He would find that odd. Most of us would, too. That's why you have a fence around your yard,
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I think. Yes? Okay. We're a little less communal, evidently, than the people of Israel were.
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And so there was to be an openness, an openness regarding your possessions, because, look, those grapes,
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I mean, if you were sitting there watching them all grow, and you have your little clay tablet, and you're walking, ooh, that's a good bunch there.
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There's a new pair of shoes, and you're calculating exactly how much you're going to get for every bunch of grapes.
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If that's you, and all of a sudden your neighbor comes along, and he goes straight for that cluster of grapes.
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Oh, no. Might bring up some hard feelings. So, the idea was, you know that you're in your neighbor's vineyard, and he's not to be so stingy that you can't have some grapes.
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In fact, you can eat your fill, and I don't know about you, but that's not too many. Grapes can fill you up pretty quick.
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But, you shall not put any in your basket. In other words, that's his crop.
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You don't get to take any home. If you're hungry, okay. And for us, we'd understand that, because if you're hungry, you go to McDonald's, if it's really that bad.
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But there weren't any McDonald's's. That's a completely different context than what we are accustomed to.
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You shall not put any in your basket. When you enter your neighbor's standing grain, okay, now we're growing wheat, we're growing some crops.
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You may pluck the heads with your hand, but you shall not wield a sickle in your neighbor's standing grain.
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Both verses are saying the same thing. What? Well, first of all, there's something here about our stinginess.
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There's something here about being so concerned about our stuff that we can turn away our neighbor.
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We can have a division between even the people of God. But at the same time, there's to be a responsibility.
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There's to be a recognition that that is his, not mine. And so,
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I don't bring my sickle and take down a quarter of his crop and drag it back to my place.
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I don't bring a, you know, I don't bring, I don't wear my big, huge pair of jeans and shove all the grapes in my mouth and then fill up the pockets and then waddle back to my house.
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That's an abuse of that individual's kindness and openness towards you.
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So, what can we learn from that? Is there some, you know, is this, I suppose you could argue that there's certainly a recognition of individual property rights.
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Thou shalt not steal. What would it be if you brought your sickle? What would it be if you brought your basket? You'd be stealing.
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And so, there is a recognition of another person has done this work and therefore they should profit from the labor of their hands.
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But I think also we see amongst the people of God that there is to be an openness toward one another.
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These are supposed to be the people of God. And what did the prophets, especially the minor prophets, repeatedly criticize the people for?
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But for building up their walls and their little kingdoms and making themselves rich while other people around them suffered and bring disrepute upon the name of God.
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So, in each one of these instances, and they're very different. They're very different from one another.
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What have we done? We've first asked, what's the context historically? Can we figure out in the context of the narrative?
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Is there a flow of thought? But if there isn't, if we have individual laws that have been put together, sort of grouped in general, but not necessarily related to one another.
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We've looked at the language and mainly we've asked the question, how would this have been understood at the time?
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And if it's talking about something that's no longer the case in our experience, we haven't just gone, oh, good.
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You know, we could have a much smaller Bible if we just sort of got rid of some of this stuff.
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No, we can't do that. We're not supposed to do that. We look at the moral principles that are found and we make application.
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And we recognize that some of the application might be different in different places.
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And this is what makes some people very uncomfortable. In other words, if in South Africa, you are planting a church amongst a particular people group that has an extremely strong attachment to ancestor worship, you are going to emphasize certain things and you are going to keep an eye out for anyone who would engage in any activity that would demonstrate that they are either fearing the curses of the dead or honoring the dead.
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Because that's the context that you're in. That's probably not going to be nearly as an important thing to someone in a university town in a suburb of Copenhagen.
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But that doesn't mean that these texts then become irrelevant. We look at what they meant, we derive that moral principle from it.
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And so, with that, when we go back to the Holiness Code, were we fair to notice the beginning and the end?
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Says the nations before you? They did all these things. Land spewed them out. We looked at context.
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We looked at Toivah. We looked at what it means. We looked at its use in the Old Testament. We'll look at some more. We're going to look at parallel passages.
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And we're going to ask ourselves the question, and here we are able to especially, and this is what
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Christians do, bring the whole council of God together because the
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New Testament does not ignore this subject. The New Testament will shine a bright light upon this subject.
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So are we being consistent? Are we handling these texts in the same way?
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Are we asking our critics to do the same thing? How many of them do that?
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Well, that's another issue. That's another issue. But here are some thoughts. And as we go through some other texts, and especially, you know, as we look, for example, at the issue of slavery,
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I realize massive emotional topic.
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Same thing with homosexuality and everything else. But if we're going to honor the
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Word of God, we're going to have to realize it talks about and regulates slavery. Now you better recognize it's a different form of slavery than the
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Romans had. And so when you go and look at what Paul says about it, you need to recognize there's a difference.
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Paul recognizes there's a difference between the slavery that was in the old law and the slavery now.
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So what do we do about that? And completely different than slavery in the American experience, can we not talk about what the differences were?
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Can we not talk about the fact that in the Old Testament scriptures there were times when it was a difference between death and that, and hence it actually saved life?
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It was supposed to be temporary. It was supposed to be temporary. But it saved life?
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Some people would say, no, as long as you use the word, you can't talk like that. That is not allowing the
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Word of God to speak for itself. A lot of stuff today. Between Sunday school and this morning's sermon, some of you are going to be looking for the
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Advil before you have lunch. I understand that. But tonight, tonight we normally have fewer people than we have today, in the morning.
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But tonight's when we're going to spend the most time looking at the two specific
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Old Testament texts on the subject of homosexuality. We started last time. We're going to be focusing upon them tonight.
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So, for those of you who will never, never think you're ever going to have to address that subject, don't worry about it.
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If you might have to address that subject, well, we might see you this evening. Let's close with a word of prayer.
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Our great Heavenly Father, we do thank you for the freedom we have had this morning to address these things. And Lord, we do ask that you would help us to always approach your word with respect, a desire to handle it aright, to recognize when we have traditions, and Lord, when we interact with the world, when we give an answer for the hope that's within us, we want to be consistent because we want to honor you.
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May we always do so first and foremost with you as our primary audience, and only secondarily anyone else.
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Help us to remember, help us to think clearly. Lord, give us strength to be witnesses for you in a crooked and perverse generation.