“When a man lets a field or vineyard be grazed in, and then allows his animals to go and graze in someone else’s field, he must repay with the best of his own field or vineyard. When a fire gets out of control, spreads to thornbushes, and consumes stacks of cut grain, standing grain, or a field, the one who started the fire must make full restitution for what was burned.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

It’s no fun being held accountable for your actions. It’s awful having to be responsible for the choices you have made. This is true when we are young. Believe me. I know. I have kids. It’s not any less true when we are old. We’ll look for just about every way imaginable to get out of having to pay the piper when we’ve done something that carries negative consequences. The God we serve, though, is just. That means our choices have consequences. Sometimes the various laws Moses gave were complex or even profound. Other times, they simply espoused what should have been common sense. Let’s talk about one of those here.

After the last several laws we have talked about, it’s kind of nice to be able to come up for air with one like this. This pair of laws is really pretty self-explanatory. If a dude isn’t very responsible for managing his own field, it’s not okay for him to steal from his neighbor’s field to make up for it. And, if a dude starts a fire and that fire burns out of his control, if the fire then goes on to burn up his neighbor’s stuff, he’s responsible for compensating his neighbor for whatever got burned up. The principle is pretty clear: You are responsible for the choices you make. If you make a poor choice that has unfortunate consequences, whether by intention or accident, you’re going to be held accountable for that choice.

Again, that seems like it should be a pretty common sense idea, but think for a second about all the ways we try to avoid responsibility today. Some of these ways are individual and personal, but some of them are institutional and even federal.

There was a lot of political drama last year when the Biden administration announced that it was going to forgive billions’ of dollars worth of student loan debt. The question was fairly well rushed to the Supreme Court which responded that, no, they couldn’t do that as the action was nakedly unconstitutional. Since then, though, the administration has quietly found a whole variety of other legal loopholes to do it anyway. The problem here is that not only is this administration teaching the people to not have any respect for our constitutional system, but it is also teaching millions of young people that if the consequences of a choice you made (in this case to take out a huge loan to pay for their college education) get too burdensome, the government will step in to help you pay for it. The matter here can be framed and justified in all kinds of different ways that make it sound like a good thing (and it is no doubt received as a good thing by the people who are no longer responsible for paying back the full value of the loan they took out), but the lesson that some actions don’t have the consequences they were advertised to have at the outset will eventually prove a dangerous one to have taught.

Or think about the abortion debate that is still raging. With the exception of cases of rape or incest which should be considered separately on this particular question (but in which I still don’t think abortion should be legal for reasons of moral consistency), the whole existence of abortion as a practice is all about separating actions from their consequences. Sex makes babies. Anytime a man and a woman have sex, there’s a chance a baby could be conceived. Even surgical intervention is not a totally foolproof way to avoid that. I’ve heard several stories over the years of babies conceived after vasectomies and tied tubes. Abortion says, you can have sex without, to borrow a former President’s phrase, “being punished with a baby.”

Or consider another topic that flies way under the radar most of the time. Our nation produces waste by the tens of billions of tons each year. That has to go somewhere. Recycling efforts deal with some of it, but not very much proportionally speaking and not very effectively. Another portion of it can be incinerated, but only some of it as burning some kinds of trash releases harmful chemicals into the air that aren’t safe for the communities in which they are released. What happens to the rest? We don’t know. I mean, some people know, sure, but most of us don’t have any idea and furthermore don’t think about it. Most of it goes to landfills that make huge tracts of land unusable for just about any other purpose for a very long time. And old trash has a way of coming back later on. I know this. My house sits on a piece of land that used to be part of a farm where they buried their trash, especially their glass. I can’t tell you how much glass I have picked up out of my dirt backyard where grass refuses to grow in the years we have lived here.

Sin leads us to try to disconnect actions from their consequences. Because if sin has no consequences, then it’s not really sin at all. But it does. And it should. And our God loves us enough to help us understand that just like any good parents help to teach their kids this principle so they don’t make choices that will eventually cause harm to them or the people around them when they grow up. Love requires us to understand this concept. Love requires us to think through the potential consequences of our choices and how those consequences might affect the people around us in negative ways. Love requires us to not make those choices because we wouldn’t want someone else making them to our detriment.

So today, as you go throughout your day, give a little bit more thought to the consequences of your actions than perhaps you normally would. As you make each different choice, pause for at least a moment and consider what impact this could have on someone else. Be forewarned that this could quickly become overwhelming as we make a whole lot more choices than we might imagine we do. Many of the things we do happen on autopilot. Disengage your mental autopilot some today so that you can give more attention to these matters. Pay attention to how knocking down one particular domino can trigger all sorts of movement in other places in the world around you. You’ll perhaps be surprised just how much more considerate and thoughtful of a person this can make you. That’ll bless the people around you, and it will glorify the God who is always thoughtful in His actions and made you to reflect His character in this way.