“You must not blaspheme God or curse a leader among your people.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

We are in the midst of what will likely prove to be one of the most polarizing election seasons in recent memory. We are officially down to Joe Biden running against Donald Trump with an assortment of also-rans, none of whom have a chance, but whose actual impact on the outcome of events remains to be seen. The two main candidates are running for second terms which is the first time that has ever happened. Both major sides are convinced that if the other guy wins, that might actually represent the beginning of the end of the country as we know it. The acrimony that is waiting to be unleashed will be tremendous. We are going to wind up with a leader who by survey most of the nation doesn’t want because most of the nation doesn’t want either of them. This means that whoever wins is going to be cursed by a lot of people. This next law speaks to how we talk about people in authority of us. Let’s think through what we should do with this.

In the growing absence of religion in the Western world generally, and in the United States particularly, people are going to fill the gap left by religion’s being shown the door with something else. What this other thing turns out to be more often than just about anything else is politics. When religion wanes, politics rises. This isn’t to say that politics somehow disappears in the presence of religion. It very obviously does not. But its importance fades a bit. In the presence of a strong religion, politics becomes a means to an end rather than an end in itself. When religion fades into the background, however, politics becomes ultimate. And when politics becomes ultimate, political fights get ugly. Again, they can still get ugly with religion in place, but absent religion they tend to get a whole lot uglier.

The reason for this is fairly simple to understand. We are a tribal people. We have always been so. It’s just part of our nature. It’s how we survive. We put ourselves in groups in order to have strength in numbers to face the various threats of the world around us. From the safety of our tribe, anyone who comes along from another tribe and makes a move on territory we have claimed for our tribe, we must defeat them in such a way that they don’t consider making such a move again in the future. Our own future depends on it (or so tribal thinking goes).

In this case, a political opponent when politics has become ultimate and tribal is not merely a person who feels differently about this or that issue that you do, they become an enemy trying to take territory your tribe has claimed for itself. And enemies must be destroyed. At all costs. In this kind of situation, we not only start to think about our political opponents as enemies, we start to treat them as enemies and talk about them as enemies.

The way all of this translates into actual living in a world where politics is quickly becoming ultimate for many, many people is that we are willing to think and say awful things about our political leaders these days. If you put yourself out there as a candidate for an office of some sort, you might as well paint a bullseye on your back and on the backs of your family members. Do that and stay away from social media at all costs. At the very least, don’t read the comments. Anywhere. They’re bad. Because you’re the enemy of the other side; an enemy who must be vanquished. At the very least, you must be convinced by every legal means available to your opponents to give up your campaign and slink back off into the blissfully ignorant anonymity you lived in before establishing yourself as an enemy.

This kind of thinking and acting is bad for a society. It weakens its social fabric and draws lines where they should not be drawn. It sets one people against itself in the kind of division that will only sow chaos and pain. Now, this does not at all mean that criticizing leaders is or should be somehow out of line. Leaders are fallible, and when they make mistakes whether intentionally or not, they need to have that pointed out to them and they need to be held accountable for it. But actively cursing leaders, pronouncing them as somehow possessing less dignity as a person than you do or than someone else does accomplishes nothing for nobody. God understood all of this, and so He instructed His people not to go down this path. It would not end well for them.

The other part of this law deals with blasphemy. Definitionally, blasphemy is a crime of religious speech. It is saying something about the deity in question that is either false or offensive. The nature of the offense will vary and is necessarily going to be defined by the followers of that God. This makes blasphemy a really interesting crime. Essentially, to accuse someone of blasphemy is to say that what came out of their mouth was sufficiently offensive to the deity that the deity wants them punished for it. Additionally, it is the accuser’s job (or the council to whom the accuser has referred the one accused of blasphemy) to dole out that punishment on the deity’s behalf.

The problems with this kind of thing should be immediate and obvious. Why is saying that particular thing so offensive to the deity? Who decided that this particular thing was sufficiently offensive to the deity to warrant punishment? Is it written down somewhere? Who first wrote it down? Why did that person or group choose to draw those particular rhetorical lines? Was he inspired to do so? How do you know? Was there something going on in the culture at that time that made those lines make sense? Do they still make sense? If the deity is so grand and powerful as he is presented to be, shouldn’t he be a little more confident in himself so as not to be so offended by something a measly human said about him? How do we know saying those things is really offensive to the deity in the first place, and not just about a handful of people looking to make a power play for themselves at the expense of those they have deemed their enemies?

Really, if you think about it, the charge of blasphemy says a whole lot more about the person making the charge than it does about the deity in whose defense they are making it. Also, blasphemy is a charge that only makes sense to the people who are making it and who believe like they do. The person who is allegedly guilty of blasphemy obviously doesn’t agree or else he wouldn’t have said it in the first place. Yes, there are times when someone blasphemes on purpose, but that’s pretty rare. Generally, if someone believes in a particular deity, she’s not going to intentionally say something to offend that deity. What blasphemy reveals more than anything else is that two groups have conflicting beliefs.

In the context we are dealing with here, what God’s prohibition on blasphemy is likely really about is directing the people of Israel to not say things about Him that aren’t true. Okay, but why would this matter enough to give a law about it? Because of what blasphemy could do to the people of Israel if it was allowed to go on without recourse. Blasphemy charges are generally taken seriously and punished not so much to defend the honor of the deity in question (although that may very well be the stated reason they are taken seriously), but to convince other people to take the god more seriously than perhaps they are inclined to do.

If I take God, His character, or His commands lightly by something I do or say and don’t go on to pay any kind of a penalty for it, someone else is going to see that and become convinced they can do the same. Another person sees the two of us getting off scot-free and conclude they can follow suit. Pretty soon, no one is taking God seriously. Focusing back on the context at hand, yet if God was real and if the things He was saying were true, then blasphemy put the whole culture at risk of experiencing the judgment that He promised would come with not taking Him seriously. If this judgment was comprehensive enough, then people who didn’t have anything to do with the offense, who were in fact taking Him with all due seriousness, might have fallen victim to it. That’s not fair or just. So, God had them create a context in which everyone understood why and that taking God seriously was worthwhile.

Okay, but where does all of this land for us? Well, it is worthwhile to take God seriously. It does not mean we should try to construct blasphemy laws of any kind. Those aren’t necessary anymore. God doesn’t need us to defend His honor like that. He can hold up under the weight of human silliness just fine. It does mean, though, that we should take regular stock of our own lives and whether or not we are communicating through our lives and our words things about God that are true. Even when those things are hard, it is better to communicate things that are true than to make up things that aren’t. This needs to be done in ways that are gentle and humble and kind, but truth is always better than non-truth.

This also means we are wise to take stock of what is going on in our hearts. Blasphemy is just words. While words are obviously not insignificant, they are never more than a pointer to what’s going on in our hearts. If we are thinking thoughts that aren’t true, those will eventually result in our doing things that aren’t good. Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have victims. Bad, that is untrue ideas in our minds and hearts will eventually create victims out of the people around us. We won’t likely mean it, but that won’t matter. We need to commit ourselves to living in light of what is true so we don’t have to worry about it. Truth is always better than not.

When we as an entire culture are willing to live in light of what’s true, bad leadership becomes a much smaller concern. Of course, this just begs the question of what is true in the first place. That spawns a whole other conversation that we aren’t going to try to touch right now. Personally, I think the Christian worldview offers a better case to fit that bill than anything else does, but we’ll have to save that for another time. For now, pursue truth and live in light of that.