The Importance of Truth and Justice in God's Law

There is one verse sort of hidden in the middle of this chapter. The first section talks about the cities of refuge, and in this discussion it is talking about safety, so if you did something so that you committed, not a crime, but if you accidentally kill someone, how you could provide safety for yourself to go to the cities of refuge. All the first part of this chapter is about that, to make sure that someone who is involved in an accidental death would not be subject to being killed without a due process of being tried. So you go to the city of refuge and there you could be tried and found whether or not you were guilty. If you were innocent, then you would be able to go back to your hometown. If you were guilty, then you would be returned to face the judgment in your home community. If you were innocent, you would be able to stay in the city of refuge until the high priest died, and that would set you free. Now all that, and then in the middle of it is verse 14. Do not move your neighbor's boundary stone. Your predecessors and the inheritance you received in the land the Lord your God is giving you to possess. Now what he's talking about is when they settled the land of Israel, every family was given a particular piece of property, and the markers for the property were set out when they went to possess the land. Those markers would tell what property was actually yours. There are a couple of places in the Bible where the references are made to the problem that came to pass with these boundaries. In Isaiah chapter 5 verse 8, Isaiah is warning the people about the things in the nation that are contrary to what God wants. Woe to you who add house to house and join field to field till no space is left. You live alone in the land. The Lord Almighty has declared in my hearing, surely the great houses will become desolate, and you will find mansions left without occupants. He's talking about building their large estates so that they have house after house after one person would, and field after field after another. He's charging them with the responsibility to make sure that they don't take other people's property. The Bible is constantly concerned about people in vulnerable economic circumstances. You don't find very many passages in Scripture that suggest that the wealthy people need to be taken care of, that the wealthy people should be allowed to prosper. Constantly through the Scriptures, the vulnerable people, whether it's sick or whether it's aliens or people, immigrants in the country, or whether it's poor people, are constantly seen as the subject or the object of God's care. Now here he's talking about the sin of multiplying your estate until you consume the property that belongs to other people. Again, the same thing is said in Micah chapter 2. Micah, another of the prophets that lived at the time of Isaiah, and he is prophesying concerning what has happened in the nation of Israel. Go to those who plan inquiry, to those who plot evil on their beds. At morning's light they carry it out, because it is in their power to do it. They covet fields, and seize them, and houses, and take them. They defraud a man of his home, and a fellow man of his inheritance. Here he's addressing the same issue of violating this command. You go to someone who has this land, and you change the boundary stone, so you have a field next to his, you move your boundary line over until you take a part of his. You cheat and take advantage of people to provide your own prosperity. Now how this comes to pass in the middle of this discussion about the cities of refuge, there's not much of a logic to it except this. The land that people received in biblical times was the source of their life. You couldn't live unless you had a way by which you could make a life, an income for yourself. Now we don't have much of a culture like that today, but I can remember my mother talking about her life growing up, and they lived on what they grew in their garden. If they had a cow, they used that milk. If they had chickens, they ate those. There wasn't very much that they needed apart from what they simply raised themselves. This subsistence living was common to the people in biblical times. To take their land away from them was to take away their life. You are not to take advantage of someone just because you have the money and the power to do it. Because the boundary lines that God has drawn out for the family are divine boundary lines. No one is to mess with those. And if you have the money and the political influence, you know the story of Ahab the king that wanted the vineyard, it was nearby him, and he wanted to take it, the man didn't want to sell it, and he was very upset because he couldn't have that vineyard. His wife came in, used to what kings do, just take it, don't worry about him, take it. That was the pattern of pagan kings. But Ahab knew that this was contrary to the laws of God. Because God said, this ground belongs to this family in perpetuity. You are not to take it. And whenever they violate this, they are violating God's great plan for providing for His people to remember the covenant promise. If you are my people, I will be your God, and I will provide for you. The land was God's provision. And someone with enough influence, like a king, or money, like a wealthy person, to come in and take the land from that person was a violation of God's covenant promise. That's why it was so critical and so important. In fact, in the end of Deuteronomy, over at the back, last part of Deuteronomy, as they are getting ready to enter the land of promise, Moses has them to repeat a series of curses. If you do this, you will be cursed. And verse 17 of chapter 27 says, Cursed is the man who moves his neighbor's boundary stone. Then all the people shall say, Amen. That means, so be it. We accept the fact that if any of us moves a boundary line, we will be cursed by God. That's how critical and important this was. It's a matter of life and death for the family. That's why it's included in this section about the cities of refuge, and why it's included in the section where it talks about justice and witnessing, for witnesses. So I want to move to verse 15, where it picks up a different subject, but the subject is the same in this sense. It is a matter of life and death. How do you deal with people who have violated the law? One witness is not enough to convict a man accused of any crime or offense he may have committed. A matter must be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses. You will find this throughout the scripture being a pattern, where anything that takes place, there are two or three people who see it, even the resurrection of Jesus. There's a long list of people given who see Jesus raised to let us know that it's the truth. The testimony of one person is not adequate to convict anybody. Even if you see them do it, your testimony alone as an eyewitness is not adequate to get a conviction. What God is concerned about here is the very issue of justice. God is a God of justice. He wants to make sure that His people live with lives of justice so that the right things get honored and the wrong things get rejected. He wants to make sure that people who move across the line and do those things contrary to what God wants receive God's judgment. But the judgment must be certain. He would err always on the side of being too lenient as opposed to the idea of making any mistake that would convict someone of a crime that they didn't commit. And so He says, one witness is not enough to accuse a man of crime or an offense he may commit. A matter must be established by the testimony of two, minimum, or three witnesses. So He starts out by talking about the significance and importance of truth in justice. Now, the Bible describes truth in a very important way. It's a key ingredient in God's life. Jesus said of Himself, I am the way, the truth, and the life. Jesus called Himself the truth. That's one of the titles He gave for Himself. He honors truth. And God honors truth. So telling something that's not true dishonors God. It dishonors the person who's a follower of God. And God is interested in the truth being told when justice is given. And all of us are responsible for making sure that we do it. The truth is a critical thing. Now, that's really important, because saying the truth marks you as a person like Christ. And I just warn you, you know, if you go on the Internet and you read stuff on the Internet, just a bunch of that stuff isn't true. And when you pass it on without checking to make sure it's true, you violate this kind of principle. Because the Bible values truth. You don't want anybody to say anything that's untrue about you. And we as a person don't want to say anything that's untrue about anybody. And the Internet has created an atmosphere in which when you read it and you think it's true and they tell you it's true, we just believe it. So many lies are perpetrated by this about people, the circumstances and events that take place. Of all the people in the world, unless you see it yourself and it's verified by people you know to tell the truth, you shouldn't tell it. Because the Bible values truth. And we as believers and followers of Christ in the church are most likely to follow these rumors. I find it everywhere. We read it and we believe everything we read is true in the newspaper, in the Internet or on TV. And it's not all the truth. God wants his people to be sure that what we tell is true. Every time you go to court, you must make sure that two or three eyewitnesses to something before you count it as the truth. Now, if a malicious witness, and the word malicious is a word that means violent or destructive person. So if a person is a witness whose intent is to hurt someone, then that person takes the stand to accuse a man of a crime. The two men involved in the dispute must stand in the presence of the Lord before the priest and the judges who are in the office at the time. The judges must make a thorough investigation, and if the witness proves to be a liar, giving false testimony against his brothers, then do to him as he intended to do to his brother. You must purge the evil from among you. The rest of the people will hear this and be afraid, and never again will such an evil thing be done among you. Show no pity for life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot. He starts off saying that you'll find some people in the court of justice who are malicious. They just want to hurt other people. They want to make sure that other people's lives are destroyed, and their intention is to hurt and damage, and we should never be that kind of person. The person who is a malicious witness stands to accuse someone of a crime. The two men involved in the dispute must stand in the presence of the Lord before the priest and judges who are in the office at the time. Now here's the circumstance he's talking about. There's one person that says this is true, whatever it is, that you stole something or you killed someone or whatever it is you did. So one person comes to bear witness to that truth. What you do is you're a judge hearing this, and you have one person who says it's true and another person who says it's not true. What do you do? In the local courts, this is not adequate for you to be able to make that decision. So you're stumped because there's not two witnesses, and yet there's been a charge made. So there's a method by which you're to do it. You're to go to the temple where the Lord's presence is. They haven't established a temple yet, but that was to be done. You go to the place where the Lord's temple was, where the priests are there, and the people are to stand before them, and a thorough investigation is to be done by the priest. Are you telling the truth? Are you telling the truth? If the charge has been that you killed somebody who is a relative of yours, and the result would be the death penalty, if the person charging you of that crime has lied, then the person bringing the charges is to be killed. God takes false accusations very, very seriously. If the thing you did was you said they stole this, and the punishment for stealing would be to pay back five times what it's worth, the person who charged you with stealing it, and you hadn't done it, they would be responsible for the crime, the punishment for the crime they accused you of doing. You can see it would change a lot in our court system if that were true. You go to court and you say, I want to swear to God that this is true and it's proved not true. What the person was going to get as a result of your testimony comes back to you. What God is interested in is the truth. He's interested in justice, and He takes very, very seriously the fact that someone would say something to damage another person's reputation or character, so much so that He brings the same kind of consequence to the person who makes that charge when it's not true. This is an issue of gossip, telling something you don't know to be the truth. There's a good rule to have, you know, if somebody tells you something about someone that's done it, don't ever repeat that until you know for sure either you've seen it yourself or you have two eyewitnesses that tell you it's the truth. If you say anything without those, then you've gossiped. You haven't told the truth. Not that you know the truth. God is very concerned about His people and our relationship with each other, that there would always be the truth and that there would always be justice. I would imagine there's not a person in this room that hasn't had someone at some time tell something about you that it got back to you and it was just not the truth as you knew it. It hurts. It's painful. It's damaging. And we are not to do it. Even if you see someone and you think something's true about them, don't say it until you know it's true. People can be seen in circumstances and situations that you could draw different conclusions. One time we took our baby to the doctor and he said, well, what you need to do is just give this baby a little bit of half teapoon water with whiskey tonight so he'd go to sleep. And Carol said, you know, we can't be seen going down to the store coming out with a jug of whiskey. He said, well, I can write you a prescription, you can go to the pharmacy, it's going to cost you five times more than a bottle of whiskey, but you can go down and do that. But you come out of a store with whiskey, you see me come out of a store with a bottle of whiskey, you drive by, puzzles you, say, you know, I saw Doyle come out of a store with a bottle of whiskey the other day, it's your friend. First thing you know, I'm in rehab. It's just easy to see something and think you know the truth. You've seen it in your own life and what God asked us to do is be careful with each other. Now, here he's talking about taking a person to court, but there are different kinds of court. There are courts of public opinion, where everyone can come to have the same opinion without any basis in reality. It could be just the people in your family who misunderstand each other. It could be the people in your friends who misunderstand each other. It could be people in church who misunderstand each other, could be in a community misunderstand each other. I mean, you read the paper, the long letter to date about the city commission or city whatever it is they have down there. One side of them, I mean, think they're all bums and the other side thinks the other bunch is bums. You know, there's truth somewhere in all this. But we just have to be careful because God wants to make sure that we are never on the side of making an accusation about people that are not true. If this story is right, then God's judgment to us is to turn back on us what we've actually done to others. So if you don't want that kind of thing happening to you, don't do it to anybody else. For God does bring justice. He didn't have to wait for the court, and I'll guarantee it won't do any good to get you a lawyer. He knows the deal. And what he's asking us to do is live lives of integrity so that our word always, always is reliable. And here he makes sure that we understand that he wants to be able to settle the final score. The judges make a thorough investigation if the witness proves to be a liar giving false testimony against a brother, then do to him as he intended to do to his brother. You must purge evil from among you. Now in verse 17 it says, the two men involved in the dispute must stand in the presence of the Lord before the priests and judges who are in office at the time. What this passage is indicating is, it is the Lord who brings the justice, not the judges that are there. You're standing in the presence of God, and he brings justice to us. God is the final arbiter of justice, not the courts. A lot of people get distressed about what happens in the courts because they don't always make good judgments. Sometimes you hear people that have gone to court and you sit down and you think, I think you could take ten high school kids and they'd come up with a better answer than this one has. But we have a great promise from God that he's on our side and that he's going to give us justice. We don't look to the courts for that, we look to our God for that. And the courts can't overrule God. So if you ever feel yourself in a circumstance where there's injustice, all you do is sit down and say, God help me to live the right thing before you, and God in the end will take care of you. That's his promise. I will provide for you. And a part of that provision is his care to protect us from the dangers of people around us. That's what gives us peace in the middle of all kinds of turmoil, is God is going to take care of me. Why? Because I've given him my life and it's now his and he's not going to lose the life that belongs to him, nor the reputation that belongs to him. Because our reputation is important to God. He wants everyone to see our lives and know what he's like. And if our name is besmirched in a lie, he has a far greater interest in clearing our name than we do, because it reflects on him and his kingdom. So we stand before God for justice. That's where it comes from. Now in the end of this, he says the rest of the people will hear of this and be afraid and never again will such an evil thing be done among you. He says it stops people from doing bad things if they see justice coming to you. And then in the end he says, show no pity if a person's guilty, if they've lied and this person they lied about was to be punished in some way, show no pity on the person who's been lying. Life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot. This in the Bible goes by a fancy name you may hear sometimes, lex talionis. It means the law of retribution. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Now a lot of people use that as a way of saying, well, if you poke me in the eye, I've got to poke you back in the eye. The law of retribution was given to limit the result. You poke me in the eye, I can't kill you. That's what the issue was. You break my arm, I can't kill you. I can only do what damage you've done to me. There should be nothing more than whatever I've received. Justice comes when equality is given. Whatever the damage to me, you settle it by the damage to you. So you limit the punishment that you give. Show no mercy and you don't exceed this. Make sure that you don't, because of emotions, end up doing worse things to someone just because they've done something wrong. Limit the justice so that it's fair to everyone. But justice must always be given. Now Jesus in the New Testament didn't limit this law of retribution, but he let us know that it was in his hands. It's just hard sometimes to know whenever you've been fairly treated. I know sometimes couples in marriage think, well, I got hurt here at a level of 6, so it's fair for me to hurt that person at a level of 6. But you know, what's a level of 6 to me when I'm being hurt is a level of 3 to someone that's mad at me. So it's really hard to judge those things exactly right. So what Jesus taught us in the New Testament was don't worry about that. They're near the cheek. I will take care of paying them back. So he took us out of the business of the law of retribution because he told us, I will settle the accounts. You don't have to do that. We don't have to punish people for hurting us. We don't have to punish people for being mean to us. We simply return to them what God said. Forgive them, pray for them, and try to return good for evil. He's not suggesting that if someone is mean and nasty to you, you just sit there and let them do that for the rest of their lives. You can get out. But he's limiting returning retribution.