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March 27, 2010
Exodus 23:1 – 24:1 “Do not spread false reports. Do not help a wicked man by being a malicious witness. 2 “Do not follow the crowd in doing wrong. When you give testimony in a lawsuit, do not pervert justice by siding with the crowd, 3 and do not show favoritism to a poor man in his lawsuit. 4 “If you come across your enemy’s ox or donkey wandering off, be sure to take it back to him. 5 If you see the donkey of someone who hates you fallen down under its load, do not leave it there; be sure you help him with it. 6 “Do not deny justice to your poor people in their lawsuits. 7 Have nothing to do with a false charge and do not put an innocent or honest person to death, for I will not acquit the guilty. 8 “Do not accept a bribe, for a bribe blinds those who see and twists the words of the righteous. 9 “Do not oppress an alien; you yourselves know how it feels to be aliens, because you were aliens in Egypt. 10 “For six years you are to sow your fields and harvest the crops, 11 but during the seventh year let the land lie unplowed and unused. Then the poor among your people may get food from it, and the wild animals may eat what they leave. Do the same with your vineyard and your olive grove. 12 “Six days do your work, but on the seventh day do not work, so that your ox and your donkey may rest and the slave born in your household, and the alien as well, may be refreshed. 13 “Be careful to do everything I have said to you. Do not invoke the names of other gods; do not let them be heard on your lips. 14 “Three times a year you are to celebrate a festival to me. 15 “Celebrate the Feast of Unleavened Bread; for seven days eat bread made without yeast, as I commanded you. Do this at the appointed time in the month of Abib, for in that month you came out of Egypt. “No one is to appear before me empty-handed. 16 “Celebrate the Feast of Harvest with the firstfruits of the crops you sow in your field. “Celebrate the Feast of Ingathering at the end of the year, when you gather in your crops from the field. 17 “Three times a year all the men are to appear before the Sovereign LORD. 18 “Do not offer the blood of a sacrifice to me along with anything containing yeast. “The fat of my festival offerings must not be kept until morning. 19 “Bring the best of the firstfruits of your soil to the house of the LORD your God. “Do not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk. 20 “See, I am sending an angel ahead of you to guard you along the way and to bring you to the place I have prepared. 21 Pay attention to him and listen to what he says. Do not rebel against him; he will not forgive your rebellion, since my Name is in him. 22 If you listen carefully to what he says and do all that I say, I will be an enemy to your enemies and will oppose those who oppose you. 23 My angel will go ahead of you and bring you into the land of the Amorites, Hittites, Perizzites, Canaanites, Hivites and Jebusites, and I will wipe them out. 24 Do not bow down before their gods or worship them or follow their practices. You must demolish them and break their sacred stones to pieces. 25 Worship the LORD your God, and his blessing will be on your food and water. I will take away sickness from among you, 26 and none will miscarry or be barren in your land. I will give you a full life span. 27 “I will send my terror ahead of you and throw into confusion every nation you encounter. I will make all your enemies turn their backs and run. 28 I will send the hornet ahead of you to drive the Hivites, Canaanites and Hittites out of your way. 29 But I will not drive them out in a single year, because the land would become desolate and the wild animals too numerous for you. 30 Little by little I will drive them out before you, until you have increased enough to take possession of the land. 31 “I will establish your borders from the Red Sea to the Sea of the Philistines, and from the desert to the River. I will hand over to you the people who live in the land and you will drive them out before you. 32 Do not make a covenant with them or with their gods. 33 Do not let them live in your land, or they will cause you to sin against me, because the worship of their gods will certainly be a snare to you.”
Matthew 27:45-56 45 From the sixth hour until the ninth hour darkness came over all the land. 46 About the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?”– which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” 47 When some of those standing there heard this, they said, “He’s calling Elijah.” 48 Immediately one of them ran and got a sponge. He filled it with wine vinegar, put it on a stick, and offered it to Jesus to drink. 49 The rest said, “Now leave him alone. Let’s see if Elijah comes to save him.” 50 And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit. 51 At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook and the rocks split. 52 The tombs broke open and the bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. 53 They came out of the tombs, and after Jesus’ resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many people. 54 When the centurion and those with him who were guarding Jesus saw the earthquake and all that had happened, they were terrified, and exclaimed, “Surely he was the Son of God!” 55 Many women were there, watching from a distance. They had followed Jesus from Galilee to care for his needs. 56 Among them were Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Joses, and the mother of Zebedee’s sons.
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Books: Exodus, Matthew 2 Comments »
2 Responses to “March 27, 2010”
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March 27th, 2008 at 5:44 am
It is interesting to read the ethical laws in Exodus in the light of some of the studying I’ve been doing for my preaching series on reasons to believe in the God of the Bible. One problem the atheist has, if you do away with God, is the question of human rights and where they come from. After all, if we are merely a product of nontheistic evolution, then the guiding principle of all of nature is survival of the fittest: the strong – those best adapted to their environment – survive and the weak – those not well adapted – do not. Yet here we are as humans crying out against genocide, against racism, against seeing the rights of the minority trampled on by the majority. If there is no god, why do humans operate contrary to the rest of nature?
But with the laws being set up here in Exodus, many of them are to protect the rights of the minority – the poor, the immigrant, even one’s enemy. Obviously God thought that a society that operating strictly by majority rule would inevitably trample on the minority, so there must be laws in place to ensure that they are protected.
Interestingly, though, looking at 20-33 shows that, as important as it is to protect the rights of the minority, the Israelites are to be uncompromising when it comes to foreign gods, even if it means destroying the other nations. In some ways this seems contradictory, but God must have known what would happen to His people and His plan of salvation if the Israelites fell away from the true God and began to worship other gods. It seems that we must not allow protection of the rights of the minority to turn into an all-out tolerance of everything that causes us to lose our faith in God.
March 27th, 2008 at 7:21 am
23:9 “Do not oppress an alien; you yourselves know what it feels to be aliens, because you were aliens in Egypt”. This is interesting. I lived as an alien for almost 40 years in two countries, in one of which, I could be expelled for a small infraction at 24 or 48 hours notice; and I knew of people to whom that happened.
However, use of the word “alien” for the Israelites in Egypt is interesting, they were there 400 years, all were serveral generations there and knew nothing of another home except Egypt; so what made them alien? It must have been that they were a distinct racial and cultural minority, that the majority thought of as “not one of us”, and should not be treated with all the rights and priviledges of the majority. That majority would have included many poor and underpriviledged that still thought of the Israelites as “aliens”, and treated them as such.
It might be good for the identifiable majority in America to ponder the above. What should my christian response be? I am in a strange possition, because although recently an alien, I was able to immediatly jump into that identifiable majority, and share all of its priviledges.