And Justice for All - Exodus 23:1- 9

Well, good morning. Welcome to Faith Bible Church. By way of encouragement, I just wanted to read Philippians 3, 12, 13, 14.

And it reads, this is Paul speaking, not that I have already attained or am already perfected, but I press on that I may lay hold of that for which

Christ Jesus has also laid hold of me. Brethren, I do not count myself to have apprehended, but one thing

I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead.

I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. And Paul is really exerting his absolute determination to cross the finish line strong, to finish that line of what's called

Christian maturity. It's pursuing Christ. And that's with all the things that are going on in our world around us, and there continues to be a lot of uncertainty, we can stand solidly on Christ.

And he is our rock. He is our foundation. And we need to pursue him as an

Olympian in a race to keep striving towards the goal of Christ. Because it can be discouraging, it can be, you can have bouts of depression and anxiety and fear, and all those things can enter in, but we need to push those out, confess them before the

Lord, and have him lead and guide us and care for us, because he does, and he promised to.

So, okay, would you please join with me in prayer? God, we thank you, Father, for bringing us together, together this morning.

Lord, we ask that you would guide us and lead us and shepherd us, Father, that we might press on towards the goal of the prize, for it is worthy of that journey.

You are a worthy and holy God for us to strive after. God, we pray for those that are not feeling well in our church,

Lord, that you would care for them, that you would heal their bodies, that you would give them spiritual strength,

Lord, through it, but in addition to physical strength, Father. God, bless this service, that as we offer up to you our words of praise and song and prayer and in preaching and in the message of the word,

Father, we pray that you would bless Pastor Cho, Pastor Ilgen, that you would help him as he gives that message that you have laid upon his heart,

Father, that we might be receptive to that, to those words, and that our lives would be changed.

So, God, we thank you for this morning. We pray that you would be honored in all that we do, Father, for we commit it to your care.

In Jesus' name, we pray. Amen. And our Lord Jesus Christ, he is our

God. He is excellent, and he is in, his excellence is in all the earth, and he has set his glory above the heavens, and let's stand and sing.

James chapter 2, verses 8 through 13. As James chapter 2, verses 8 through 13, if you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

You do well, but if you show partiality, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors.

For whoever shall keep the whole law and yet stumble in one point, he is guilty of all.

For he who said, do not commit adultery, also said, do not murder.

Now, if you do not commit adultery, but you do murder, you have become a transgressor of the law.

So speak and do as those who will be judged by the law of liberty, for judgment is without mercy.

To the one who has shown no mercy, mercy triumphs over judgment. May the

Lord add his blessing to the reading of these words. Nothing but the blood of Jesus, how precious is the flow that flowed

Jesus. Please turn with me to the book of Exodus, chapter 23, verses 1 through 9.

You shall not circulate a false report. Do not put your hand with the wicked to be an unrighteous witness.

You shall not follow a crowd to do evil, nor shall you testify in a dispute so as to turn aside after many to pervert justice.

You shall not show partiality to a poor man in his dispute. If you meet your enemy's ox or his donkey going astray, you shall surely bring it back to him again.

If you see the donkey of one who hates you lying under its burden, and you would refrain from helping it, you shall surely help him with it.

You shall not pervert the judgment of your poor in his dispute. Keep yourself far from a false matter.

Do not kill the innocent and righteous, for I will not justify the wicked.

And you shall take no bribe, for a bribe blinds the discerning and perverts the words of the righteous.

Also, you shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the heart of a stranger, because you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

This is the word of the Lord. Let us pray. Father, we're thankful for who you are and thankful for your care for us.

And we're also thankful that you make clear what true justice looks like.

Thank you that your justice is pure and untainted, and that we find justice at the cross.

That you would declare the sinful people like us righteous, because our sin has been atoned for.

We pray that your word would cleanse us this morning. In Jesus name. Today's text is on justice.

Justice in the judicial sense. The judicial system of Israel must look like this.

Justice among God's people must look like this. This is little bit different from the case laws we've seen.

Case laws that dealt with individual specific scenarios of if your donkey does this, you must do this.

If a bull gores another, you must do this. But rather, many of these laws are not case laws, except for the two in the middle, but rather they are apodictic laws.

The laws about the general statements about justice.

And this text is important to us this morning, because if you talk about justice with anyone, people will normally agree with you in a vague sense of what justice is.

However, God specifies what justice ought to be among God's people.

Justice isn't whatever I want to see the world to be.

That's not what justice is. Justice isn't whatever my emotion drives me to believe.

That's not justice. Today we're going to go over what justice actually entails.

What does God's justice entail? And it will be surprising to many of us, because it will look different from what the world cries out as justice.

First, God's justice depends on the truth, not the influence of others.

God's justice depends on the truth, not the influence of others. Verse 1 starts with, you shall not circulate a false report.

The first command regarding justice is that God's people must not spread false information.

False reports can be directly translated as empty or vain.

So, empty report or vain report, right? It is a report that has no substance.

It is a report that is not based upon reality. It's empty. It's nothing.

God's people must always operate on what is true.

And that means whatever comes from our mouths must be true.

This is not just limited to a judicial setting of testifying what is true.

Of course, it includes that. But anywhere we go, what comes out of our mouth must be true.

We must not spread any lies about anyone. While the first command protects the truth at the individual level, the next command protects the truth at the corporate level.

Do not put your hand with the wicked to be an unrighteous witness. This command prohibits

God's people from associating with the wicked to maliciously testify.

In a corporate culture like Israel, it was especially life -threatening because if two or three wicked witnesses agreed to testify a lie against someone, they could frame an innocent person to death.

They could frame them to a heinous crime like idolatry or blasphemy and that innocent person could be led to death.

And this evil act occurred in 1 Kings 21. There's Naboth, Naboth, right, a godly man.

He owns a land that has been given to him by God and that land has been passed through to his generation.

And there's this evil king named Ahab, the king of Israel. And Ahab wants this land.

At first, Ahab offers anything he would like. You can have anything you'd like.

Just give me your land. But Naboth, being a faithful man, being a faithful steward of God's land, he refuses because he wants to steward well what

God has given. After all, in the end, the land that Naboth is working on, it does not belong to him, but it belongs to God.

And Naboth wanted to honor that and pass it on to his future generation. But Ahab could not take a no for an answer.

So, Ahab and his heinous wife, Jezebel, they set up false witnesses to testify against Naboth, 1

Kings 21, 13. Then two scoundrels came and sat opposite him and brought charges against Naboth before the people saying,

Naboth has cursed both God and the king. So, they took him outside the city and stoned him to death.

As we mentioned before, stoning to death was a corporate activity to get rid of evil in the society because it affected the whole society.

If this evil claim of someone cursing God is true, that would be an evil in the society that affects the whole country.

So, they took Naboth outside the city to stone him to death. However, Naboth was not guilty.

He was innocent. He was a godly man that these two scoundrels conspired together to put an innocent man to death so the king could have his land.

And it only took two false witnesses to murder an innocent, righteous man.

And God's law sought to prevent such a perversion of justice in the land of Israel.

The next two commands protect justice from the influence of the mob.

You shall not follow a crowd to do evil, nor shall you testify in a dispute so as to turn aside after many to pervert justice.

Mob justice, according to the Bible, is not justice at all.

Justice is based upon what is true, not on democracy.

This is because what is morally correct only depends on God's view on the matter, not on the number of people.

And this flies against so many arguments made today. The majority of the people in the

United States support abortion. You might read such in the headline. But this verse tells us, these verses tell us that justice is not determined by the number of people, but rather determined by what

God says is right. It does not matter if the 99 % of the world believes something evil is right.

The only person's view that matters is God's. In the

Bible, the might doesn't make right. And for God's people, we must proclaim the truth from God's word firmly, despite whatever the world screams around us.

Justice is not decided democratically, but rather decided by God.

And he makes it clear in his word. Then, this verse warns

God's people against our emotions taking over justice.

Verse three, you shall not show partiality to a poor man in his dispute.

Now, this is the opposite of what we would normally expect. Normally, partiality, when we talk about it, is actually favoring the rich, right?

Favoring the rich at the cost of the poor or at the cost of justice.

However, God's law here takes into account of the opposite, partiality favoring the poor.

This is because God's people are commanded often to be compassionate, right?

They must be compassionate for the poor. And we went over many cases, many case laws in which how

God's people ought to be protective and also providential toward the poor, towards the most vulnerable in society, whether strangers, the poor, the widows, and the orphans.

However, compassion does not mean altering the truth of the matter.

Compassion does not overrule justice. Before the court of law, one's circumstances, one's dire needs do not change the fact of the matter.

For justice, the only thing that matters is what is true. Justice for God's people is factual, not emotional.

And when we look at these three verses, it clearly paints to us what justice system, what godly justice system ought to look like.

It discerns and pursues the truth, no matter how inconvenient or uncomfortable it may be.

It seeks the truth, no matter how much it costs.

Perjury and slander will be punished, no matter how influential or powerful the speakers are.

And justice is not intimidated by the pressure of the mob. No matter what kind of violence is threatened against the judge, how many people show up with the picket signs, a godly, godly justice system is not swayed by the number of the dissenters.

That's what justice looks like according to God. And lastly, it is not driven by emotions.

He sexually assaulted a woman, but he is only a college student with a future.

So, he'll just spend a week in the county jail. That's not justice. Emotions do not drive justice.

It's the truth of the matter. The crime has to match the punishment.

The punishment has to match the crime. And in fact, this is how

God judges. God does not judge according to the judicial trends of our days.

God will not be persuaded by lies about us. If you're worried about what other people think of you from the latest gossip or rumors, you don't have to worry about God thinking that's true.

God knows what's true. God is not swayed by the number of people standing against him.

In fact, on the judgment day, most of the world will stand against him, but he will still do his job right.

And God is not moved by emotional manipulations. He is the most compassionate being, yet he will not be manipulated to commit injustice because he is righteous.

God judges based upon what is true. And this is actually a good thing.

This means God does not judge you based upon sins you have not committed, because that's not true.

Sins you have not committed is not based upon reality. But we live in a world that shames people for sins that they have not committed.

I call that toxic shame. And they feel guilty and ashamed of sins that they have not committed because they're blamed for it wrongly.

Something goes wrong. Someone says, that's your fault, but you had nothing to do with it.

But if you feel guilty or ashamed of it, you can always go to God, because God will not charge you with anything that you haven't committed.

God does not judge you based upon things that he does not call sins. In a conservative church setting, there's always the opposite where we go further than what the

Bible says. And we draw lines way too forward where the

Bible is silent on. We get dogmatic on things, on the things that the

Bible doesn't even touch. And when that's the case, you do not have to feel guilty, because God will not charge you with anything.

This might be, this might sound something like this. You lose someone who's precious to you, and you're grieving.

And you're grieving, not just a month, but a year, two years, even a decade.

The Bible does not put a time limit on a grieving process. But you might hear

Christian brothers and sisters say, hey, are you done with that yet?

It might not happen after the first month. It might not happen even after first year.

But we must not draw a line where the Bible's silent in. We can't do that.

We can't put an extra burden that God doesn't put it on us. And most importantly,

God does not condemn you if you have been justified by faith in Christ. As Christians living in this rebellious world, we do sin.

That's the reality. But when we dwell on our sin, we're forgetting that such sin, whatever it was, has been taken and been dealt with on the cross when

Jesus faced the wrath of God for us. And I say this often, when people think they're being punished for their sin by God, something goes wrong.

And I tell them, well, there's no longer any leftover wrath for you.

It's been poured on Christ. For those who are in Christ, who believe, who trust in Jesus as the

Savior and Lord, God no longer condemns you because justice was done on the cross.

Second, God's justice is unaffected by personal vindictiveness.

God's justice is unaffected by personal vindictiveness. The following two verses are case laws, unlike the previous three verses, that show that justice does not have an ounce of personal vengeance.

If you meet your enemy's ox or his donkey going astray, you shall surely bring it back to him again.

First, an enemy is someone who hates you. Now, the case shows that his livestock is wandering off and you happen to see it.

And God's law places a moral responsibility on you to return it back to him.

And for many people, when they see their enemy's livestock going astray, or generally one's enemy facing an unfortunate event, they would often welcome it or justify it.

Right? Oh yeah, he deserved it. It serves him right. I saw it coming.

However, God's law prohibits us from passing judgments upon our enemies, ourselves.

Because when we do that, we dethrone

God from His judgment seat. In the end, God is the judge.

He's the one who makes it right. He is the one who punishes evil, not us.

That seat's already taken. So instead, we must help our enemy when he faces an unfortunate event.

We are not to pass any judgment out of our personal vindictiveness.

And verse five illustrates a similar scenario. If you see the donkey of one who hates you lying under its burden, you would refrain from helping it.

You shall surely help him with it. When his donkey is heavily weighed down,

God's law commands us to help him with it. We're not to leave the struggling donkey under the heavy burden, even if it belongs to someone who hates you, someone who wants to see you destroyed.

These case scenarios may be slightly too far for our modern minds.

So I have thought about a similar scenario for the 21st century audience in America.

Let's consider that you have an atheistic neighbor, an atheist neighbor who calls you names, who calls you a bigot all the time, puts signs on his lawn that's offensive to not only you, but to God, and will debate with you and yell at you and get angry at you all the time.

It's not a fruitful relationship whatsoever. Now, one day you see him calling his lost pet dog, you know, and shaking a bag of treats, right?

Lucy, Lucy. At first, you just watch out of curiosity. What's going on out there?

Then you realize what's happening. And you also remember the latest argument you had and how he blew up at you.

He mocked Jesus, right? It's not just you anymore. He criticized

Jesus. In your mind, you debate whether you go out to help or just let him be.

And at one moment, in one moment, you might even justify letting him be. Well, he did mock

Jesus the other day. He calls me a bigot and a homophobe. God's law here tells us, go help him.

And in the New Testament, Jesus intensifies this command on the Sermon on the Mount.

You have heard that it was said, love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.

That you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his son to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.

In the end, when we love our enemies, we are doing what our heavenly

Father does. When we love our enemies, we reflect what kind of God we worship.

One who loves his enemies despite their hatred toward him.

That's who he is. And this applies not only to our enemies, but to our very selves.

When something bad happens to us, a tragedy strikes, whether a disease or loss of your loved ones or loss of goods, wealth.

We falsely believe that God is out to get us.

That he is personally vindictive against us. Oh, it must be because I forgot to tithe last month or I didn't tithe last month.

Oh, it's because I skipped church last week. Oftentimes we catch ourselves falsely thinking that something bad happened as a result of our sin against God.

And that can't be farther from the truth. Because God's justice is not personally vindictive.

When we do this, we are imagining God to be like us. We are recreating

God in our image. We're our image of personal vengeance.

We would be more than willing to punish if we had the opportunity to punish any of our enemies if we had the right opportunity to personally pay back.

That's not God's justice. God's justice is not defiled like ours.

When God judges, he judges perfectly. No personal vindictiveness in sight, but according to his perfect will.

And for Christians, as I mentioned just prior, God isn't punishing you for your sin because he's punished

Jesus for all of your sin already. When something bad happens to you, it's the reality of living in a broken, sinful world.

And God graciously uses that to shape you into the image of his son,

Jesus. Second, how

God loves his enemies is best seen in Jesus, the

God incarnate, the son of God who does what his father does at all times.

When Jesus came to die on the cross for your sin, Jesus did not die for his loyal followers.

Most of them were gone. Jesus did not die for his closest family.

They didn't know who he really was. On the cross, Jesus died for his enemies.

When Jesus died on the cross bearing the sin of the world, the world was not repenting and ready to obey.

The world hated him and crucified him. His own people, the

Jews, rejected him and betrayed their own Messiah. None of us was born in perfect obedience that we may earn

Jesus' atoning death on the cross. But rather, we were all born as Jesus' enemies with treasonous and rebellious minds.

We were all burdened with the weight of our own sin. In fact, some of you may experience this now.

I can't bear my own sin. I can't stand it. I feel trapped.

I'm enslaved. Or even your past sins haunt you to this day, and you cannot stand on your own.

You cannot bear to consider how messed up you are. And to you,

I share with you the gracious God who loves his enemy, the merciful

God who came down from heaven to bear your sin on the cross, to take on not just some of your sin, not just the hardest of the sins, but all of it.

He didn't just take some of your sin to lighten the load, but he took the full force and faced the full wrath of God.

He faced the full judgment that we deserved so we may be forgiven and cleansed so that you may not be trapped in your sin anymore, but to live free.

Third, God's justice must not be perverted in any way. God's justice must not be perverted in any way.

Verses six through nine share different laws that prevent perversion of the judicial system.

First, you shall not pervert the judgment of your poor in his dispute. This covers the other side of the coin of partiality that we went over in verse three.

While verse three prevented the judicial system from favoring the poor, this law prevents the judicial system from abusing the poor, taking advantage of the weak, those who cannot afford to fight for themselves,

God's law will fight for them. That's the comfort that all the poor in Israel must have felt.

Verse seven expands the implication of rather verse one. It comes back.

There is a chiastic structure here, a sandwich structure. Keep yourself far from false matter.

Do not kill the innocent and righteous, for I will not justify the wicked.

God prevents his people from killing the innocent and righteous with false information.

Killing those who do not deserve to die is a horrible case of injustice in God's eyes.

And for those who partake in such injustice, God himself will not justify them.

God will not declare them righteous. They will have to face

God themselves. Verse eight prevents bribery.

And you shall take no bribe, for a bribe blinds the discerning and perverts the works of the righteous.

For God's people, justice cannot be bought. Justice cannot be influenced by favor or familiarity.

Just because the judge is fond of you, you will not get a sentence. Just because the judge is familiar with you, you will not avoid the punishment.

And in our justice system, judges are supposed to recuse themselves when there's a personal connection with a defendant or the plaintiff in any way.

And that is particularly from the biblical worldview. Bribery, familiarity must not sway justice.

Justice cannot be bribed. Verse nine prevents the opposite scenario.

Justice cannot be affected by estrangement. Also, you shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the heart of a stranger, because you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

While verse eight prevented the swaying of justice due to familiarity, verse nine prevents injustice arising from estrangement.

Injustice against strangers, because you don't know them. You're not familiar with them. Just because the judge does not know the defendant, when the defendant is from another nation, the

Jewish judge must not mistreat him in any way, because he himself, an

Israelite, would have experienced oppression from Egypt. They know personally what it was like to be mistreated just because they're strangers in the land.

Among God's people, justice is guaranteed for all, not just some.

And this is an important matter because that is how God judges all. His justice cannot be changed at all.

His justice cannot be perverted by anything. He is perfectly just.

You can't bribe him, and no one's a stranger to him. You can't buy your way into heaven.

And this is important because you will hear people say, rest in peace, to someone who never knew

Jesus or wanted to have anything to do with Jesus. And you may, you might push and ask, what do you mean?

Well, he's in heaven. How do you know? He was a good person. He gave a lot of money to charity.

He volunteered many hours on the weekends. But what about his sin?

What about his sin? And this is a big theological issue. What happens to one's sin before a just God?

If you can't purchase your way out of justice through good works, what chance does anyone have?

And that's actually the problem, the biggest problem, in my opinion, of Islam.

If you ask them, how do you get to heaven? They say, well, you believe in Allah, and you have to be good.

Oh, and then you push. What about a good person who never knew about Allah? They would even say, yeah, then

Allah will judge and say, yeah, he can go to heaven too. Well, but what about his sin?

He couldn't have lived a perfect life. What happens to his sin? To that answer, they say, well,

Allah just says that it's okay. It's gone. Allah can get rid of injustice by fiat, fiat as in by saying so.

And that's a big problem for us. If God can just wish your sin away, then what, where is justice?

If God can wish my sin away, why can't he wish Hitler's sin away? Is he not merciful enough?

That's because such a God does not exist. A God who can wish human sin away does not exist.

The true God is absolutely just and can not let any sin pass by.

And we live in a world where people will riot if there's an injustice in the court system.

If human's broken sense of justice drives them to riot, how much more so with God who has a perfect justice, perfect sense of justice.

And this is why Christianity makes the most logical sense.

How does this God deal with sin? He doesn't wish it away.

He carries it with him. He carries it himself.

He takes it upon himself to bear all of our sin and face the full judgment that we deserved on the cross.

At the cross, justice and mercy meet because justice was never stopped in order that mercy could be freely given.

We worship that kind of God and the law points to that kind of God.

A God who is perfectly just and cannot magically erase our sins away.

But a God who is perfectly compassionate to bear upon himself all of our sin so we may be forgiven and adopted into his family.

And that's how we can have justice for all in Jesus Christ. Let us pray.

Father, we're thankful for your attribute of justice. Without Christ, such attribute would be the scariest thing in the world.

But with Christ, we can have relief. We can praise you.

We can find comfort, our utmost refuge in you because of Christ. Thank you that you've never paused justice in even for a second, but you always show mercy.

That mercy and justice do not contradict each other, but complement each other in Christ.

We pray that we would honor our Savior and Lord. In Jesus' name, amen.