“You must not spread a false report. Do not join the wicked to be a malicious witness. You must not follow a crowd in wrongdoing. Do not testify in a lawsuit and go along with a crowd to pervert justice. Do not show favoritism to a poor person in his lawsuit.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
Justice is hard to obtain. It’s so hard that when someone manages to achieve it, we tell those stories. They get splashed all over the newspapers. Well, that’s not really true anymore. They get splashed all over the Internet. They get made into movies. They become urban legends. Yet this isn’t how things should be. We serve a God who is just. How do we know? Well, because we keep running into passages like this one. God cares about justice and wants His people to care about it as well. Let’s talk through yet another example of this in a law He gave to Israel.
This week we are in the third part of our series, Authentic Church. We have been talking about how we can tell when a church is a real church and not just a club that does some religious things on the side. As we talked about last week, authentic churches are active in proclaiming the Gospel to those who haven’t heard it, in inviting people to get into a relationship with Christ. But once we see someone cross that line, our work isn’t done. We have to help them grow. Let’s talk this week about the next thing that makes a church an authentic church: Growing people in Christ.
Growing Up
When I was in seminary, one of the courses we had to take was about practical ministry. Technically, the course was called “pastoral counseling,” but that basically translated how to be a good pastor in the day-to-day of ministry work. The professor tried to touch on a few different areas that we were going to face in ministry and which all the theology and language study and apologetics courses in the world weren’t going to prepare us for. One of the topics we covered in class was some best practices for how to do a funeral. That sounds kind of morbid, I know, but it’s part of the work, and an important one at that. We learned a variety of things the teacher—who had been a pastor for decades at that point—identified as “do’s” and “don’ts” in class, and those were pretty helpful. I don’t remember any of them in particular now, but I remember thinking this was probably actually going to be useful stuff then. But do you know when I really learned how to do a funeral? When my pastor and mentor took me along and involved me in the funeral of a man in the community who died during that semester. I listened to him, watched him carefully, and when I found myself having to do a service on my own a couple of years later, I just did what he did.
“Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her…Fathers, don’t stir up anger in your children, but bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
Have you ever gotten started off on the wrong foot only to get back on track once things got up and running pretty well? I think about the NCAA Men’s March Madness championship game from a couple of years ago. My Kansas Jayhawks were playing UNC for the title. The game didn’t start very well. At the half we were down 15. We weren’t shooting well. They were. It was a pretty dispiriting beginning. But then things got back on track and the game went entirely more smoothly in the second half…unless of course you happen to be a UNC fan in which case this illustration completely fails. Just focus on the win over Duke in the Final Four and you’ll be fine. Let’s jump to something happier for you. The CBS sitcom Young Sheldon is coming to an end. As it does, one particular storyline is getting up and running really well. It’s become for me the best part of the show. Let’s talk about it this morning and why it’s such a good thing.
“Be my holy people. You must not eat the meat of a mauled animal found in the field; throw it to the dogs.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
I remember visiting Yellowstone National Park when I was growing up. It was pretty incredible. I look forward to being able to take my own family back there someday. Everywhere you looked there was an almost overwhelming natural beauty. We saw so many amazing things that by the end of the trip we had actually started to get tired of it. My parents would announce something from the front seat, and we would hardly look up from our books in the back. At one point on the trip, we took a short hike to see a small waterfall. I had a bottle of water with me that I finished on the hike. When we got to the falls it was empty and I was still thirsty. So, I filled it in the beautiful river in the pristine-looking wilderness and took a nice, long drink. It was satisfying in the moment, but it could have also been deadly if there had been in bacteria in it from further upriver. I got lucky, but I should not have done that. Knowing how to get along in nature and not die from something foolish like drinking in the wrong place is important. Sometimes Israel’s laws had an obvious religious bent to them; sometimes they were really just about good hygiene. Let’s talk here about one of the latter kind.
“You must not hold back offerings from your harvest or your vats. Give me the firstborn of your sons. Do the same with your cattle and your flock. Let them stay with their mothers for seven days, but on the eighth day you are to give them to me.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
There’s an awful scene from the beginning of the movie Braveheart where William Wallace has just gotten married and some English soldiers arrive in town and learn about the wedding. The soldiers demand their rights of jus primae noctis (“the right of the first night”) as extended to them by King Edward “Longshanks” the ruler of the land. This meant they were entitled to sleep with a woman on her wedding night before she and her new husband have the opportunity to come together. The actual history of the practice is a bit murky, but it was basically part of a ruler’s demand of the first and best of his people. Reading this next law, I’m reminded of that scene. God here demands the first and best from His people. How is this any different from what the English soldiers in Braveheart did? Let’s explore that together.
The Nexus 