“Whoever strikes a person so that he dies must be put to death. But if he did not intend any harm, and yet God allowed it to happen, I will appoint a place for you where he may flee. If a person schemes and willfully acts against his neighbor to murder him, you must take him from my altar to be put to death. . . .Whoever kidnaps a person must be put to death, whether he sells him or the person is found in his possession.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

We talked a couple of weeks ago about God’s command regarding murder. Just as a reminder: He doesn’t want us to do it. What we find here and in the rest of the chapter are some additional laws related to personal injury including murder, but also in several situations that fall short of there. Rather than trying to take the whole group all at once, we’re going to break them down into smaller bits. Some of the next few posts may be a bit shorter than usual, but I want to give each of these laws the attention they deserve. Let’s talk about God’s concerns when it comes to how we treat one another.

I think perhaps the first point to make here is one we have talked about before and which we will keep coming back to several more times as we work through the various laws in this chapter and the next. None of these laws apply to us. These laws are all part of God’s old covenant with Israel, not His new covenant in Christ. That doesn’t mean this covenant didn’t and doesn’t still work. If someone were able to keep the whole law of Moses and remain within the bounds of that covenant their entire life without deviating from it even once, they’d be set with God. Paul and James both made that clear. The trouble is, we can’t do that.

Chasing that particular rabbit trail just a bit further, One of the concepts we find spread across the Scriptures from start to finish is sin. The idea of sin isn’t a terribly popular one today. If Christians raise the idea of sin, they usually get blasted for being small-minded and judgmental. Sin is not something limited to the Christian worldview, though. The word simply means “to miss the mark.” Let’s say a person totally rejects the whole of Christian morality in favor of another system that she designs for herself. That doesn’t mean sin isn’t something now foreign to her. She misses the mark on her own set of standards. We all have a set of boundaries that we believe should define our behavior, and none of us stays perfectly within those no matter what they are. God would be theoretically fine with your adopting whatever standard of right behavior for yourself that you would like as a means of being right with Him and right with other people or even just right with other people and you can ignore Him completely, and if you could keep that perfectly, you’d be right with Him too. Whatever that is, though, you don’t keep it perfectly. Thus we are, all of us, sinners.

In any event, God’s old covenant with Israel worked just fine to accomplish the purposes He intended for it. But we couldn’t keep it, so He gave us a better one. Because followers of Jesus today live under the authority of this new covenant, the old one is irrelevant in terms of telling us what we should and shouldn’t do. We nonetheless are right and wise to study it because it gives context that can help us better understand the new covenant and Jesus’ teachings as well as revealing a great deal about God’s character that has not changed. What all this means is that when you encounter one law or another that really rubs you wrong, that’s not a law we’re expected to keep any longer. And, when you really start to dig into the context of the culture, the parts that seem to cast doubt on God’s character prove not to be problematic as they first seemed.

So then, what’s going on here? One of the standards God wanted the people to operate under was that life was sacred. If you purposefully took the life of an innocent person, your life was forfeit as a consequence. But what about in cases where the killing blow was accidental? God’s answer is that He will provide a place for the person who is guilty of innocently taking the other person’s life to go.

One quick thing before we unpack that. The people of Israel viewed God as the absolute author of life. Whether someone lived or died in any given situation was His prerogative. They accepted that they didn’t always understand why He allowed what He allowed, but they trusted that He had a just reason for it. They gave this trust because they believed Him to be a just God. He never did anything that was unjust. And before you go wondering if it was just because He did it or if He did it because it was just, neither of those options are correct. God’s character is just. Justice is fundamental to who He is. Justice is part of His ontological foundation. He only does things that are just because it is in His nature to do so. It is from this frame of reference that Moses wrote “yet God allowed it to happen.” If a person accidentally struck another and that blow resulted in their death, then God allowed that to happen. Why? We don’t know. But we trust that He does.

When Moses talks about God’s creating a place for this person to go, he’s talking about sanctuary cities. This idea will be fleshed out in a whole lot more detail in Numbers 35. Culturally speaking, when one person killed another, it was customary for the deceased person’s family to take vengeance for the killing themselves even if it was entirely accidental. This often resulted in a blood feud that could go on for years. This still happens in some cultures around the world today. Albania is one country that comes to mind. God did not want the people getting stuck in unjust cycles of killing and death. So, He set the just punishment for taking another person’s life as the forfeiture of the killer’s life, but had the people create cities where an innocent person could go and be protected from the victim’s family’s vengeance. If, however, it turned out that the killing was indeed a murder, the offender was to be made to pay for his crime. Even if he ran to the Tabernacle, or later the temple, to cling to the feet of God by hanging onto the altar itself, his just punishment was to be delivered. The whole concept seems strange to us, yes, but it represented a pretty giant leap forward in terms of human justice and pointed the people forward in the direction God was trying to lead them.

The last part simply assigns the death penalty to cases of kidnapping. In other words, God wanted the people to know that He took this one really seriously. And if it seems strange that God would put so much emphasis on this one crime, consider how often groups today in various parts of the world use kidnapping as a means of income for their criminal efforts. Muslim majority nations commonly do this with non-Muslim westerners. The Russian government does it with American citizens. Drug cartels across Central and South America do this with anyone they can get their hands on. And none of these efforts are new. God didn’t want the people even touching this practice. So, He made the penalty pretty steep.

So, what’s the takeaway here for us? God was putting in place a system that aimed to justly hold people accountable for their actions. Now, this was not the only system that sought to hold people accountable for their actions. There were systems both formal and informal that were put in place before this one, around the same time as this one, and subsequently to this one, none of which had much bearing on this one, nor were they necessarily directly influenced by it. What those systems lacked, however, was the kind of justice God baked into His system from the start. As far as we are concerned today, it was not perfect. Some of the punishments for crimes spelled out in the Law of Moses seem horrible to us, and not for no reason. But God wasn’t putting in place a system that would be acceptable to people 3,500 years down the road. He was putting in place a system that met the people where they were, with all the cultural assumptions they had in place, and moving them a few steps in the right direction. Once they got used to those, He would move them a few more steps down the road. And He would keep doing that until Jesus finally arrived to pull back the curtain on the destination all these efforts were really heading. We’re still working to get all the way there, but we’re a whole lot further down that road than they were here. We’ve made the progress we have, though, because of God’s patient, steady approach. Thanks be to God that He is still as patient with us today.