“When men quarrel and one strikes the other with a stone or his fist, and the injured man does not die but is confined to bed, if he can later get up and walk around outside leaning on his staff, then the one who struck him will be exempt from punishment. Nevertheless, he must pay for his lost work time and provide for his complete recovery. . .When a man uncovers a pit or digs a pit, and does not cover it, and an ox or a donkey falls into it, the owner of the pit must give compensation; he must pay to its owner, but the dead animal will become his.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

We live in a world of cause and effect. When one thing happens, something else happens because of it. Sometimes there is a clear and direct line from the one to the other such that the cause of a particular effect is obvious. Other times, a given effect has such a complex tapestry of causes that no one could possibly trace it back to a single event. One of the perils of sin is that it seeks to convince us that we can disconnect effects from their causes, that our actions will not eventually have consequences. What we see in this next law is that God wanted to help the people resist this particular temptation. Let’s talk about how this command helps with that goal.

I think it is once again worthwhile to remind us that these laws almost certainly were not given as a block. Moses almost assuredly did not just stand in front of the people one day and read down a list God gave him and that was that. These all came out of actual cases he dealt with while he was serving as a judge over the people. If you want to think about it this way, a great many of these fit into the category of case law. At one point, two guys got into a fight and one of them won. The other guy, though, while he survived his injuries, had a long path to recovery. And although I’m struggling a bit more to imagine why the Israelites were digging pits, there are some weird laws from around the world that nonetheless came out of actual circumstances. That’s how most laws come into existence.

One of the things I have tried to emphasize pretty regularly over the years here is that we have to get God’s character right. If we don’t, then there are a whole bunch of places in the Scriptures that we aren’t going to be able to make any kind of positive sense out of. Well, one of the aspects of God’s character we see throughout the law is that He is just. He always does what is right. He is also holy. That means there is no trace of evil in Him and evil cannot exist in His direct presence. One more fundamental characteristic of God is that He is love. He is intentionally committed to seeing us become fully who He made us to be.

When you combine those three characteristics, one of the truths that results from the blending is that sin will be punished. Sin is unjust and evil and demands to be made right. God will punish sin. But, He will always punish it in a manner that is proportional with the actual fault. God’s judgments are just. They are also always enacted with mercy in the mix and redemption and restoration as the goal. This is something we see in particular throughout the Hebrew prophets, but it is always how His judgments work.

In the particular case of the first law here, an assault that isn’t fatal won’t be punished like it is. The culture in that day very often operated differently than that. We’ll talk later this week (or maybe next) about the famous lex talionis, or the law of the tooth. While we recognize it as an incomplete pointer toward the richer and fuller justice of Christ now, in its time, it represented a fairly radical revolution in human justice. The natural response of many in that day would have been to seek bloody vengeance for an injury like this. God said no. The victim’s life was not taken and so the offender’s life is not forfeit. That being said, the crime will still carry consequences. The offender must now provide compensation for the lost work time and take on the financial burden of the complete physical recovery of the victim.

In the second instance, if a person digs a pit – and I don’t know why they would be digging a pit – and somebody’s animal falls into it and dies, they have to provide compensation. The owner of the now deceased animal can’t go crazy and start wiping out the offender’s flocks or herds. There’s just the single animal that is owed, but at least the single animal is owed. The offender also now must deal with the dead animal in the pit.

On their face, these two episodes don’t seem to have much to do with one another, but there is a common thread running through them. Actions have consequences. We take this as a matter of course, but how often today are a person’s actions sufficiently separated from the consequences of those actions such that it appears there aren’t any consequences at all? What’s more, if we can find a way to escape the consequences of our actions, we’re generally pretty ready to do that. When people think they will not be held accountable for their actions and specifically the impact of those actions on the people around them, they will do all kinds of things, most of which won’t be good.

When I know that harm caused to you when I am in pursuit of my interests isn’t going to have any sort of consequences for me, I’m pretty likely to pursue a way without regard for the impact it is going to have on you. That’s how people have always behaved. God wanted the people here to understand that there would indeed be accountability for their actions. He still wants us to know that today.

That’s part of why the crucifixion of Christ was such a graphic punishment. It was intended to help us understand just how awful sin really is. Sin caused that. That’s what our sin deserves for the harm it has caused those around us. But the good news is that God in His perfect love took that punishment for us so that we don’t have to face it. As the apostle Peter put it, He bore our sins in His body on the tree so that we might die to sin and live for righteousness. By His wounds we are healed. Let us rejoice today that we serve a God who is holy and just and loving.