Tonight we have heard the reading of this chapter which is full of the so-called case laws of the Bible. And to introduce the subject of case laws to you tonight, I want to state a few principles that I will follow in dealing with them. You may be aware or you may not be aware of the fact that there is a considerable controversy in the Reformed community today concerning the authority of these case laws. There has arisen a movement which has been called, I think mostly by its opponents, theonomy, and there has been written against that Quite a bit of literature, a new book has just come out from the faculty of Westminster Seminary taking a negative view of this movement. But you know, it seems to me that the Bible itself only allows us one attitude toward these case laws of the Bible. And I say that because of what Paul wrote to the young pastor Timothy. When Paul wrote that to Timothy, the only Bible that God's people had was the Old Testament. And speaking of that Old Testament, Paul said to Timothy, and I quote, "...all Scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be perfect thoroughly furnished unto all good works." Now, of course, we all recognize that life has changed in a great many ways since the time that Moses lived on the earth. In this very passage, we can see that they had a recognized institution of slavery in their social order, and we do not have that today. It's also quite clear that they used oxen for the heavy work of their farming in those days, and today we use tractors. So as far as I know, no one argues that all of these case laws of the Bible are to be directly implemented by everyone in the social order of today, just as they were then. As far as I know, no one holds any view of the case laws of the Bible like that. But historically, it has been the Reformed conception that every one of these case laws of the Old Testament contains within itself an abiding principle which is relevant to God's people throughout all the ages, in every culture, without any exception whatsoever. John Calvin regarded the Ten Commandments as a summary of the entire will of Almighty God. But in that massive work in which he unfolds the meaning of these case laws of the Bible, the interesting thing is that he organized all those case laws in his commentary under the heading of the Ten Commandments. In other words, he saw every one of these case laws to be simply putting into application principles contained in a general way in the Ten Commandments of God. And I'll say further that without the case laws, we never really could understand the Ten Commandments themselves. Take, for example, the Sixth Commandment, which says, you shall not kill. Now just suppose that you had no case law revelation of God in the Old Testament. What would you take that commandment to mean? Would it mean, for example, that even killing a criminal who has killed a hundred people would also be another act of killing and that you shouldn't do it? Would it mean, for example, that we were not allowed to kill beasts in order that we might eat their flesh? Well, we know that that's not what the sixth commandment means, but how do we know that? We know it because God himself in giving the revelation of the Old Testament case laws showed what the meaning of that principle was by the way in which he instructed his people to apply that law in the various case laws that we have here in the Old Testament. And you see right here in this passage, he who strikes a man so that he dies, verse 12, shall surely be put to death, but if he did not lie in wait, But God delivered him into his hands, then I'll appoint for you a place where he may flee." In other words, it was not an act of conscious and deliberate killing in this case, but an accidental homicide. God does not treat that as a violation of one of the Ten Commandments. Or again, he says here, when someone comes at night and breaks into your property, If that person is killed in the middle of the night, breaking into your property, he is not to pay a penalty for that. And that sort of thing in the case laws of the Bible clearly show us the meaning of the principle, which really is, you shall not kill with premeditated and unjust killing that we usually today would call the act of murder. And so in every one of these case laws there is a principle which really does have everlasting validity and universal application. And we're going to see this as we look at some of the case laws of the Bible. But now today I want you to just think about all of these case laws that we have read tonight and think about some of the importance of the variety that we have seen in this 21st chapter of the book of Exodus. What does that in itself teach you? I would say, first of all, it teaches us that God Almighty, the God of Israel, The God who by supernatural signs and wonders brought his people out of the house of bondage, out of the land of Egypt, led them by a miracle across the Red Sea to safety in the wilderness, that God is very much concerned Not only that his people believe in him as the one and only true God, but he is very much concerned with their daily practice of godliness. To me, that's a very significant thing. You know, all the way through the Bible we are taught in a variety of ways that faith without works is dead. You can believe everything in the Bible after the manner of the demons. They believe. They have no doubt whatsoever that the living God exists, that the day of judgment is coming, and that they themselves are going to be tormented in everlasting fire, the devil and his angels. But it is of no profit whatsoever, and if we only believe and do not have works that go with our faith, it profits at nothing. That's why the Bible says, faith without works is dead. And that's why God, after bringing his people out of the house of bondage, out of the land of Egypt, feeding them manna in the wilderness, giving them water out of the rock, bringing them to Mount Sinai for that great revelation of His glory, right away goes to work and gives them instruction about the various details of life. And that's because our God is not only concerned with our faith, but also with our practice. It is the Old Testament expression of that great principle stated by Paul the Apostle when he said, whether therefore you eat, or drink, or whatsoever you do, do all to the glory of God. That means that everything in life, your business, the way you farm, the way you deal with people who break the law, the way you deal with an employee, or in that day with a slave or a servant, every single thing that you do from morning till night is under the scrutiny of God and He wants you to live His way according to the wisdom revealed in his word. The second thing that I would have you to notice is that God doesn't call his people to change the social order in order to make things better, but rather he calls upon his people themselves to change within that social order to make things better. And that's what we call anti-revolutionary but rather reformational. God calls his people to the reformation of life where they are within the institutions that they find themselves historically. Take, for example, the institution of slavery. Slavery was a part of the social order of all the ancient world at that time, including Israel. Now why didn't God just come along and say, look folks, slavery is wrong? So I want all of you slaves to just take off and leave and rebel against your masters. Why didn't God do that? There have been those in the history of our own country, especially toward the time of the Civil War, who argued that slavery is in and of itself, per se, evil and wicked. But it's quite obvious that that is not the way God looked upon it. And the reason is that God understands the problem of evil far more deeply than we do. And he knows that you do not really change the situation at all by way of revolution. You know, the liberal theologians of the modern age have all talked endlessly about changing the evil structures in society. They're always talking about changing the structures which they say are inherently evil and unjust. They want those structures to be changed in order to bring in a kind of social millennium. And I say to you, the greatest lesson of the 20th century is that this is a false idea from the word go. Seventy-five years ago and a little more, there was a revolution in Russia. The Tsars were overthrown. Lenin came to power in the Soviet Union, and many people even in the West were deluded. This was going to usher in the new era and a virtual social utopia. And now we know. And all of those people, after 70 years of that, they know The changing the structure only made things worse. It did not improve anything. Indeed, it only increased the severity of their bondage. And that's why God came to his people and showed them how to apply the Ten Commandments in the social order in which they found themselves in a reformational way, not by way of revolution. changing things from the inside out, instead of imagining that you will make any basic change by just manipulating the outward structure. That's wonderful because God said to that slave on Monday morning, life can be different for you. You can start as a slave under that master, you can start to change the whole situation. by showing love for your neighbor and, above all, love for your God. And God said to that master on Monday morning, you don't have to wait for all the structures of society to be changed. You can start right now, today, and you can show a new kind of love for your servant. And so these laws of God are not revolutionary, they are reformational, and that's of great importance in understanding God's way in this world. The third thing that stands out in these case laws of the Bible is the fact that they clearly teach us that God's authority is totalitarian. Now we hate the word totalitarian when we think of men. We don't like the totalitarian government of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. We didn't like the totalitarian government of Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany. And we do not like any other totalitarian government of men on earth. But one thing is quite certain here in the case laws of the Old Testament, God is, and rightly is, the supreme authority of the greatest totalitarian government in the entire universe. And he says to his people, I am Lord. I am the only Lord. And whether you eat or drink or whatsoever you do, what you're doing with your ox, what you're doing with your slave, what you're doing with all of the activities of your daily life, When you dig a hole in the ground, even then you are to do what I tell you to do according to my holy commandments. Now the fact of the matter is that every human being is driven in the end, really, to choose between one kind of totalitarian government and another. People don't realize this, but that is the case. You're either going to have to choose to live under the absolute and total life-encompassing authority of Almighty God, and then you'll be free from all the tyranny of men, or you are going to have to reject that totalitarian authority of God, and then do you know what you're going to end up with? You're going to end up with some totalitarian government that is human. Sometimes that totalitarian government will be yourself. You become God in effect. We call that sheer autonomy in which you, ato, are a law, namas, unto yourself. Sheer autonomy. You do your own thing and let the devil take the hindmost. But Paul in his letter to the Ephesians says, if you're living that way, you only demonstrate the fact that you are really a dupe and a slave of the devil, because his whole temptation at the beginning of history was for no other reason than to get man to rebel against the totalitarian authority of God and to substitute for it his own imagined autonomy, which is really subservience to the devil. A lot of other people in our social order today, and in the world today, live under another kind of human authority. I would call it anthroponomy. Anthropos meaning man in the collective sense. And that is what you have in the humanist system that now dominates even much of the Western world, where the so-called collective wisdom of man is put in the place of God and the Bible. That's what worries me at the present time about the government of our country. I hope some of you are listening to the debate in the U.S. Congress. The sad thing that's lacking in that debate is a real recognition of the sovereignty and the authority of God, and the limitations on all human pretensions by the law of God. How I wish we could have heard more reference, as we would have in the early history of our nation, to the limitations placed upon the pretensions of man by the sovereign authority of God. You know, under the old way of life that characterized our nation, we had a large measure of what I would call theonomy, the law of God. I can still remember when I was a boy, when John Dillinger was roaming the Midwest, and we had stern laws in those days, and when they caught John Dillinger, he was put to death. Now they let killers go free to seek out other victims. Under the old system, with a large measure of theonomy in our social order, an abortionist could be put to death for killing unborn infants. Today he is licensed and free to destroy unborn children in the womb. And it is called a compassionate concern for these people. But I say, where is the love and compassion in that? As C.S. Lewis, the noted English writer, once said, the humanitarian theory, that's what this is, collective man, the humanitarian theory wants to abolish justice and substitute mercy. But then he went on to say, quite rightly, the recipient of that so-called mercy will feel it to be abominably cruel. You see, the fact is that every social order in the history of the world, our own included, has some kind of law. And under that law, no matter what social order it is, some will be protected and others will be killed. Humanitarian law doesn't stop the killing, it just changes the victims. Either way, someone will be killed. It's a question of who will receive the compassion and mercy. I therefore conclude that what we need today is much more of the law of God based upon an intelligent understanding and culturally translated principle of the case laws of the Bible throughout the entirety of the social order under which we live. I maintain that we had a lot more of it than we do today and we will continue to go down as a nation until there is a restoration of the law of God in the laws of the land. But it seems to me that the number one thing that we need to keep in mind as we consider these case laws of the Old Testament, this, I would even like to say to some of the scholars talking about these laws today, I would like to say to them, don't you ever forget that these laws came from God. And the moment you start showing that you bristle with a dislike for any one of those case laws, I say there's something wrong with you, not with those laws. Jesus said he didn't come to abolish the law or annul it, he came to fulfill it. And what troubles me so much today, even in the Reformed churches of America, is the antinomian spirit that tends to dismiss these Old Testament case laws as almost unworthy of Almighty God Himself. What this fails to see is the constant teaching of the whole Word of God. concerning the final goal of God's people. For what is the final goal of God's people? It is nothing less than absolute conformity to God's holy will, which is revealed in these commandments. You can see that if you look at chapter 22, verse 31, where he says, and you shall be holy men to me. You find that many times woven through the case laws of the Bible. God wants his people to be holy. You find it also in Christ's reaffirmation of the laws of God where he says, therefore you shall be perfect just as your Father in heaven is perfect. Now the fact is that there is no man in this present life who has ever reached perfection except Jesus. But one of the certain marks of God's real, genuine people is that they strive toward that perfection. And they're never satisfied as long as they fall short of it. The Heidelberg Catechism says that God's people, God's genuine people, with earnest purpose begin to live not only according to some but according to all the commandments of God. Like Paul who says, I don't count myself to have attained, but one thing I do, I press on that I might lay hold of that for which Christ Jesus laid hold of me. I press on toward the goal of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. I am so impressed by the fact that when the Reformation came in the 16th century, they paid attention to the case laws of the Bible. John Calvin spent years of his amazing ministry expounding the case laws of the Old Testament and preaching on a book such as the book of Deuteronomy, full of the case laws of the Bible. And it brought about a renewal of the whole of Western culture through the application of the principles of those case laws of the Bible. And I'm here to tell you that they're just as relevant today. I remember one time in our New Zealand church We had had a flare-up of serious rebellion among teenage young people in the church. And I really got worked up about that, so worked up that I came to church one day and I looked them in the eye and I read out of the case laws of the Bible where God says young people who do what those young people had been doing should be taken out and stoned to death. I wish you could have seen the look on the faces of those young people. I didn't have to preach a sermon on it. I didn't even have to apply it. You know what? God himself bore witness with his word in such a way that their own conscience accused them. And it really shook them up to realize that they deserve to be taken out in stone to death. I didn't say that to them. They made the application themselves. And I will never forget the remarkable change that came soon after in some of those teenage young people. They had been confronted with the Holy God and they knew it. I didn't have to tell them. Their own conscience told them that's right. He who curses his father or mother shall surely be put to death, is what the Bible says. Now, in our culture today, that horrifies people. But those young people, it didn't horrify them so much because they didn't like what God said, but because they didn't like what they had done. And God used it in a wonderful way to bring repentance. I say to you then that the case laws of the Bible are just exactly what Paul said. Inspired by God, profitable for doctrine, reproof, correction, instruction in righteousness. And we need to understand them, we need to meditate upon them, we need to think them through. And when we realize that this is so, there will be a burning zeal in our hearts also to live by these wonderful precepts of God's Word. That doesn't mean you have to go out and sell your tractor and get an ox. But it does mean you have to learn the principle in that case law and apply it today in your life to the glory and honor of God. May He grant that we should do this. Amen. Let us pray. We thank You, O God, for all of Your Word. We know that It is all inspired and it is all profitable, and it grieves us that there are many today who scoff at, ridicule, even dismiss part of your law, the part they don't like, the part that is out of harmony with our degenerate social order today, which calls that mercy which is really injustice. Lord God, we pray that your people might be called back again to that holy zeal for holiness, righteousness, and perfection of which our Lord Jesus spoke. And we pray that through the case laws you will show us more and more of your glory and of our responsibility as your children. In Christ's name we ask it. Amen.