I invite you to turn to Exodus chapter 22. We'll pick up at verse 16 and carry on through Exodus 23 verse 9. We will see that we are again working over some similar territory. Things that Jared covered last week will rise up again. which is of course no surprise because all of this is well integrated. This is not just random bits of advice stuck together, but it is an expression of the infinite wisdom of God himself as these ten words of God continue to be fleshed out in this case law, this this book of the covenant. So give your attention to the reading of God's wholly inspired in inerrant word, Exodus chapter 22 verse 16 to chapter 20 verse nine. If a man seduces a virgin who is not betrothed and lies with her, he shall give the bride price for her and make her his wife. If her father utterly refuses to give her to him, he shall pay money equal to the bride price for virgins. You shall not permit a sorceress to live. Whoever lies with an animal shall be put to death. Whoever sacrifices to any God other than the Lord alone shall be devoted to destruction. You shall not wrong a sojourner or oppress him for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt. You shall not mistreat any widow or fatherless child. If you do mistreat them and they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry. My wrath will burn. and I will kill you with the sword and your wives shall become widows and your children fatherless. If you lend money to any of my people with you who is poor, you shall not... If you lend money yet, you shall not be like a money lender to him, and you shall not exact interest from him. If ever you take your neighbor's cloak and pledge, you shall return it to him before the sun goes down, for that is his only covering, and it is his cloak for his body. In what else shall he sleep? And if he cries to me, I will hear, for I am compassionate. You shall not revile God nor curse a ruler of your people. You shall not delay to offer from the fullness of your harvest and from the outflow of your presses. The firstborn of your sons you shall give to me. You shall do the same with your oxen and with your sheep. Seven days it shall be with its mother. On the eighth day you shall give it to me. You shall be consecrated to me, therefore you shall not eat any flesh that is torn by beasts in the field. You shall throw it to the dogs. You shall not spread a false report. You shall not join hands with a wicked man to be a malicious witness. You shall not fall in with the many to do evil, nor shall you bear witness in a lawsuit siding with the many so as to pervert justice. Nor shall you be partial to a poor man in his lawsuit. If you meet your enemy's ox or his donkey going astray, you shall bring it back to him. If you see the donkey of one who hates you lying down under its burden, you shall refrain from leaving him with it, you shall rescue it with him. You shall not pervert the justice due to your poor in his lawsuit. Keep far from a false charge and do not kill the innocent and righteous for I will not acquit the wicked. And you shall take no bribe, for a bribe blinds the clear-sighted and subverts the cause of those who are in the right. You shall not oppress a sojourner. You know the heart of a sojourner, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt. Grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever. Let's go to God in prayer. Our Heavenly Father, we give you thanks for these words and we thank you, O God, that you care for the many relations in our communities and you care in many different ways in which we express our own lives in relation with one another. Would we then, O God, have ears to hear and eyes to see? your goodness in this text. And would you, oh God, point us to Christ who shows us the way to full life-giving communion. And we pray this in his name, amen. Now a wise man once observed that each one of us is born from the community of others and lives for community. It is true in one way or another that, as this man says, that our bread is prepared by others, our clothes made by others, our language was taught to us by others, our thoughts, even our thoughts, are initially presented to us by others. Therefore, we must immediately from birth stand in a certain relation to society. This relationship is the basis of our social life of willing and feeling. There is then a certain social order that does and even must exist. But we are all, at least in some respect, acquainted with the fact that the history of the world from the fall of our first parents is the history of how people have subverted, that is turned upside down, this social order for their own success. It is no surprise then that in the development of the Mosaic Law, this expansion on the 10 words, we would encounter judgments or rules that pertain to the ever-present inclination to subvert the social order such as we see in our text this morning. And it's also no surprise that in the fullness of time, when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared in Christ Jesus, he would subvert the subversions in what he said and what he did. I thought it was interesting, and we didn't prepare this, plan this ahead of time, but when John was introducing our gospel reading, he mentioned that God's kingdom turns the world upside down. We could say it right sizes an upside down world. So when I say that Jesus subverts the subversions, what I'm saying is that he takes something upside down and he puts it right side up again. I'm still gonna use the subversions to see if I can tongue tie myself throughout the sermon. But that's what I mean, and you've already seen in a way how Jesus does that through his walk through humility to glory. And how he then calls all of us to be last, to be those who serve rather than those who are served. So hopefully that makes sense. Hopefully we don't get caught up in my overly clever attempts at alliteration. I'm going to stick with them because that's what I wrote though. My main idea then, if we're going to summarize all of this together, is this. Jesus subverts the subversions of the social order and supplies what we need to mend, support, and unite in life-giving Christian community. Jesus subverts the subversions of the social order. and supplies what we need to mend, support, and unite in life-giving Christian community. Now, to develop this idea, we're going to take our text, break it into three different parts, these broad categories, where we can see similarities in the ways in which the human heart is inclined to subvert the social order. That will provide us with the material that we see in Jesus's word and works getting turned upside down in what he says and does. Let's begin here with this first category. And we'll be looking at Exodus chapter 22, verses 16 through 24. And these verses deal with relational subversions of the social order, relational subversions. We begin with verses 16 and 17, and these two verses, scholars will say that these are probably somewhat related to what came before, the restitution idea. You can see there's a principle here of restitution embedded in here, but at the same time, It's not as though the woman, this virgin, who is taking advantage of his property. And so there's a transition then, rather than going from how do you deal with your personal property in relation to others, now we're going to something much more personal. Now we have a person who is violated. And the question is, how do you deal with this subversion of the social order? And that's why I'm taking verses 16 to 17 and I'm bringing it into what we're doing this week rather than leaving it for Jared to flounder through. Not only because the ESP doesn't really help us, right? It does. But because I think it's more important that we see the version here. as a person whose own life and the fabric of society around what's going on here with young women has the potential to be subverted. So just to explain that in case you hear somebody else say, well, those are not, what's your pastor doing playing fast and loose with the text? That's what I'm doing. So how do we then see what's going on here with these first two verses as far as the fabric of social life is concerned? Well, first thing we need to note here is that there is still a connection to what came before because there is a price that is paid for the violation of this woman. Now that might initially bring up some concerns. Is the bride price then a degradation of the dignity of this woman? But here we have to remember that we're coming at a social life that is not the same as the one that we live in today. One commentator has pointed out that the bride price is not equivalent to the worth of the woman. And if you just do straight logic here, if we were to equate the bride price with the worth of the person, no money is paid for the husband. Does that mean he's worth nothing? We don't want to do that. We don't want to monetize or commoditize in how we understand this. Rather, a different way of understanding this is that whether it's money or whatever means of exchange we have, the bride, though she pays zero for her husband, the bride price would be the way in which these families are enmeshed even more deeply than we see in our society today. After all, one commentator points out that the bride price requirement necessarily involved the families in substantial formal negotiations. You didn't have a chart that you got out to determine what the bride price was. You negotiated. You talked about how this was going to happen based on what you had and how this relationship was going to come together. The price, this commentator continues, showed that something serious and important was at stake. I mean, there's just a general principle here that if you don't pay for anything, you oftentimes, we oftentimes don't feel the value of it. But when we have to pay for it, then we can better appreciate its worth, or we might take care of it better, so on and so forth. So this commentator concludes that the bride price elevated marriage accordingly because people instinctively value what is hard and costly to get. Or, as one songwriter has put it in the terms of relationships, when I was a young boy, my mother said to me, find yourself a pretty lass, don't take her love for free. That's the idea that we have. The whole point then is that in verses 16 and 17, the subversion of the social order is warning, these verses are warning against a subversion that would tear the fabric of family life if this were to go unaddressed. The behavior described in these verses subverts the social order by minimizing the honor and value of the institution of marriage. Now with these verses, we have a fairly straight line application through Christ to us, namely that the institution of marriage today ought to hold maximal honor and value, and especially in the Christian community because marriage is one, a type of Christ's love for the church, Paul says so in Ephesians 5, and two, marriage knits the community together in literal life-giving love. Devaluing marriage, on the other hand, tears the fabric of family life and subverts the social order ordained by God, leading to an allergy to commitment, an objectification of bodies, a vacuum of moral formation in broken families, and much more. Now, I'm not going to try to chicken-little you about the state of marriage in our society today. Really, all I'm doing is noting what many other even secular commentators have noted about the destruction of the institution of marriage. Not secular, but on my reading list is a book by Brad Wilcox called Get Married. And I could only read the preface before I got to the sermon, so. I don't know exactly what it says, although I did read as much as I could. It's on my list. It's been well regarded, well recommended to me. If you're interested in reading more, I think this is a good place to get started on this topic. Okay, that's the first aspect of these relational subversions. We turn to verses 18 through 20, we have three laws in quick succession that broaden out our view of relational subversions in ways that stretch how we understand relationships and social order. That is, the vulnerability of the fabric of society being torn apart. After all, sorcery tears at the very order of spiritual and material reality. Bestiality tears at the natural order, and false worship tears at the religious order. And I think it's only because of the triumph of secularity and individualism, that potent combination together, that we question how these verses might relate to the social order. If we have a holistic view of nature as both spiritual and material, if we have a view of the created order as originally made good, if we have a view of the relation of man not only to the world but also to God as something intrinsic to reality, all these things help us to see how these three laws, though they may seem disjointed, actually combine to warn against the subversion of the social order by really an undermining of the natural order. Now, I flesh my thoughts out on this point in the reflection. That's all I'm going to say at this point, but you can read that some other time. We move on to verses 21 through 24, we have one more relational subversion that we need to address, and it's the mistreatment of the most vulnerable. The mistreatment of the most vulnerable. The typical representatives of the most vulnerable in Israelite society would be the sojourner, widow, and orphan because, precisely because they did not have any other protection in a society that was family and clan based. They are, by definition, the outsiders. without family and not in a clan. These verses then are very simple for us. Don't mistreat those who are outsiders, the most vulnerable, the ones who don't have the protections. Two reasons are given to us furthermore. One, because Israel ought to know and remember what it was like to be mistreated. to be an outsider as sojourners in Egypt. And second, because the Lord himself will advocate for the widow and the orphan and he will bring strict justice against those who oppress the outsider, the vulnerable. Now the effect of these verses appears to be the generation of sympathy and solidarity with the outsider, with the most vulnerable in society. To willfully disenfranchise the widow and the orphan is to risk having the same judgment fall on you or on your own family. And so we have something of this principle coming back up that Jared preached on last week. That we have a certain responsibility, not only to our own property, but also to our social relations within the wider community. And the golden rule applies. to oppress or to torment the sojourner is in fact to become like the very Egyptians that had oppressed and tormented God's people. And we know that God judged them for their hard-heartedness because that's what we read in the first 15 chapters of this book itself. So with sympathy and solidarity, society as a whole can flourish, and the social order is not subverted. So then this first part of our text, it's dealing with the relational subversions. We need to turn to the second category, broad category in verses 25 through 31, economic subversions. Now here let me begin with a proverb, because I do like proverbs. Proverbs 28.8 says, Whoever multiplies his wealth by interest and profit gathers it for him who is generous to the poor. Now as I see it, this proverb is founded on the very teaching presented in verses 25 through 27. Because those verses are warning against exploiting others in the community. And we can note in these verses that the Lord declares how He will advocate for the poor for a very specific reason, translated in the ESV as compassionate, but the idea of the word itself is because I am gracious. For I am gracious, the Lord says. And just as the Lord is gracious, so lenders are called to be gracious. They should not sink their fellow brothers and sisters with burdens that are too heavy to bear. Now, as we move on to verse 28, admittedly, this one's hard to fit into the scheme. One commentator points out that this verse here dealing with cursing addresses the way a verbal attack by way of curse can represent a serious sort of assault. And in that sense, it's hard to see the economic subversion there. But I think we can say that curses contribute to the economic subversion of the religious aspect of social life by sinking the esteem of authority in general. And that then leads to the sinking of religious esteem. And that, if you follow on to verses 29 and 30, has a social implication because we have to remember that the Levites ate, didn't have their own land, so they had to eat in some way. They had to receive their wages, as it were, through the religious system. So if you sink your esteem for the authority and the religious aspects of social life, then the priests go hungry. Because they are dependent on the people esteeming authority and religion. There is very much a social implication to this warning against cursing God. Now, all of this is then brought in verse 31 into a summary conclusion. Holy people stay within the social limits prescribed by the Holy One of Israel. Now, this particular verse, yes, People might say that there are some health issues associated with eating roadkill and that's why you shouldn't do it. That's kind of what we've got. That's what some people would say. But think about it more broadly. There are religious implications. The blood would not have been drained from the animal properly according to God's law. It's a further sinking of the esteem of the system that God has put together. And so it all hangs together. The priests, the Levites, they depended on society functioning to subvert authority and religion is to sink the priests and the Levites in a kind of poverty. Now if we pause here for a minute of reflection, these rules do offer some useful limits here to the corrupt inclinations of humanity. The reminder that Israel itself was a mistreated sojourn in the land of Egypt was really calculated to train the spirit of the people to appreciate the redeemed life that they now lived. Not as individuals, primarily, but as a whole, as a people redeemed. And that's not really natural. for us, which is why we have these limitations, these laws presented. G.K. Chesterton has once said, if we wish to protect the poor, we shall be in favor of fixed rules and clear dogmas. The rules of a club are occasionally in favor of the poor member. The drift of a club is always in favor of the rich one. Now let me address our third category here. The first nine verses of Exodus chapter 23. These are legal subversions of social order. Legal subversions of social order. Now again, we have a lot going on in these verses. Let me try to sub-categorize these here. In verses one through three, we read about untamed tongues and the great damage that untamed tongues can do, especially in the context of a legal foundation. Whether it is through gossip or false testimony or peer pressure or partiality, these verses here are highlighting the threat to the foundation of legal proceedings largely by way of a tongue that is untamed, one that is undisciplined to speak the truth. And these verses are presenting a legal subversion of the social order because they are warning against prejudice even before a case is heard. And there's no hope of a fair trial before it starts if the untamed tongue is let loose. Now, one might then think that the alternative would be to take justice into my own hands. Well, that's covered in the next set of verses. Verses 4 and 5 warn against a vigilante kind of justice that, again, is fracturing this legal foundation. What I find amazing about verses 4 and 5 is that they are deeply contradicting Cain's response to God when he asks where his brother is. Am I my brother's keeper? Verses 4 and 5 are saying, absolutely you are, even when you hate his guts. And more so, even if he hates your guts. There's a depth to these verses. Not only are God's people required to help their enemies, in verse four, that's what we see, they were also supposed to help the people who hated them. And those are two different categories. Between these two verses, when you put them together, you can't pass anybody on the street and be satisfied in saying, Well, that's a natural consequence for your sin. Good luck with that. Yes, it might be a natural consequence of someone's sin or folly. But these verses are telling God's people, you are not allowed to consider that as justice has been served, the sentence has been passed, now I can carry on with my own life. Because we cannot disentangle ourselves from the community, therefore you are called to help even your enemy, even the one who hates you. These verses are really ruling out vigilante justice. And even in the category of non-action. You are not allowed to take up the mantle of judge, evaluate your enemy's situation as he wallows in his misfortune, and consider that justice has been served. Instead, if you have a dispute, the idea is, not contradicting what Jared said last week, but the courts existed, and they existed for a purpose, to adjudicate in the right way. The courts were the proper place to find justice and to have it rendered. But the problem is that even in the courts, because of that ever lingering corruption of the human heart, certain protections had to be spelled out. And so we get in verses six through eight, a warning against how corrupt courts themselves will fracture the whole system. Once again, partiality is presented as this ever present temptation. But now it's couched in the terms, in the context of formal legal proceedings in verse six. Then verse seven highlights the importance of due diligence and careful attention to the law so that justice is not miscarried. There's a striking parallel here with Proverbs 17, 15. Which says, he who justifies the wicked and he who condemns the righteous are both alike an abomination to the Lord. And it's worthwhile to note that the word abomination is not a frequent word in the Bible. But when it is used, it is used to describe that which is totally outside the bounds of what is proper, what is fitting for someone who is going to carry the name of the Lord with them. And that makes it all the more interesting to me that justice is a central concern, a central aspect of the character of the Lord, so much so that in Proverbs, In Exodus, there would be these strong foundations. Do not let the whole system go off the rails, for that is an abomination to the Lord. And finally, to help ensure that true justice is rendered, verse eight reminds us that a bribe distorts judgment and will itself turn justice on its head. We saw several weeks ago in Exodus chapter 18 that there was great wisdom in this provision and accounting for this inclination of the human heart. I referenced Proverbs 17, 23, the wicked accepts a bribe in secret to pervert the ways of justice. Hopefully, we see that in all these verses, the push is against the tendency of corrupt courts to fracture the whole system itself, legal system itself, and subvert the social order. And then, to cap it all off, our text returns to the theme of solidarity in verse 9. Essentially, this verse is summarizing the basic idea of remembering whence you came and the potent antidote that is to mistreating others. One theologian draws on this idea when he says, the ideal of society which arose from the exodus was that of a people always mindful of the fact that they had been slaves. And so they operated, they were supposed to operate in the opposite, do the opposite of whatever the Egyptians did to you. So that's a text. How does it relate to us today? What can we draw out from this? I think of first importance here, we must remember that in the history of redemption, Israel failed to follow this law. The prophets regularly railed against the people's subversion of the social order. Go read Amos. Go read Micah. Regularly calling the people back to a righteous social order. But ultimately it is only in the fullness of time when God sent forth his son, that Jesus Christ opened the way for us to truly and meaningfully value the social order as God intended and to maintain the integrity of our moral religious life in community. And so Jesus is the one who fulfills this law and enables us then to follow in his footsteps. How does he do this? Well, if the inclination of the human heart is to tear the relational fabric of society, then Christ subverts this relational subversion by proclaiming the golden rule, as Jared pointed out last week. So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the law and the prophets. We just heard from Mark's gospel. essentially the principle that the first shall be last and the last shall be first. And Paul encourages us to outdo one another in showing honor. This is what it looks like to subvert the subversions, the social order, relationally. Second, if the inclination of the human heart is to sink others with unmanageable economic burdens, then Christ subverts this economic subversion when he pours out even his own life freely for the good of all those who would believe in him. We don't, furthermore, greedily hold back for our own profit, but we give generously. We give righteously. we give completely. When Jesus says, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and render unto God what is God's, he means that we render everything to the one whose image we bear. And we accept and uphold the social order in society as well. So that our whole lives are a generous offering of love of God and neighbor. Third, if the inclination of the human heart is to fracture the legal foundation, then Christ subverts this legal subversion by upholding the utmost integrity, even within a corrupt legal system. Just think about what was going on. Sarah and I were talking about something this week, and it struck me that when Jesus was celebrating Passover and instituting the Lord's Supper, We're told in the gospels that when they were all done, they sang a psalm. Well, traditionally, the psalms that they would have sung would be the halal psalms, the praise psalms in the 100 teens-ish of the Psalter. Well, if you go and you read those, imagine Jesus. singing those psalms as he knows that his buddy is about to betray him with a kiss, and he's about to be brutally tortured and humiliated on a cross. And he's singing, praise the Lord for he is good. All the while knowing that the legal system he's about to go into is corrupt beyond repair. And yet he does it anyway. And he turns that upside down world right side up by going through this way of humiliation and suffering in order to get to glory, not the other way around. That's a significant subversion of the subversions of the social order in how Jesus deals with a corrupt legal system. Moreover, Jesus exemplifies for us what it means to love our enemy when he died for us while we were still enemies of God. He didn't wait for us to seek reconciliation with God, it never would have happened. Rather, he has reconciled God to us through his atoning self-sacrifice, all while we stood in alienated rebellion and hurled insults at him, as it were, as he hung on the cross. Such is the way that Jesus turns the world upside down so that it is right side up, according to the way in which God intended us to live in community. We have no choice. We're going to live in community. but our God who is good has presented a particular way for us to do so, to live in community with him and one another. So I want to end here just very briefly with some hopefully practical questions about how or suggestions on how we can pick this up and run with it as we are enabled by Christ to imitate him and to mend that fabric, that social fabric, to support those who might be sinking, to unite, repair the fractures that are inevitable in this fallen world. Just consider a few thoughts along these broad categories with me. Beginning with these relational subversions, how might we bring to bear the peace of Christ from mending the fabric of social order? How can, for example, older married couples mentor younger single folk on the honor and value of marriage? Or even younger newly married folk on the honor and value of marriage? How can we orient ourselves to the spiritual slash material and the natural order such that we see appreciate and abide by the beauty and satisfaction of the way that God has made things. How can we support the worship of the church to the best of our ability? That we don't undermine one of those God-given institutions in society. We might also ask ourselves how we can support those who are in material need. that they might be protected from exploitation elsewhere. How can we give generously to our deacons fund and encourage our deacons to give generously to those in need? How can we revere God and ordained authorities such that our worship and the work of the church at large may continue? With few distractions from worldly needs, that the work of spreading God's gospel can continue. It is at this point here that I have a note that says, I'm very thankful for this church's generous giving, and that is the truth. Finally, we might ask ourselves, how can we foster the unity of the church? First, through the self-discipline not to gossip. How can we walk the extra mile even with people we don't like, even in the church? Because we all know that there are people we don't like even in this building right now. So you didn't laugh because you know it's true and it's uncomfortable, but it's the reality. And we have to acknowledge that before we're able to actually build up beyond that. How can we uphold the value of church courts even? Not even talking about society at large, but just within the church, of church courts as a worthy organ for forming the organic church into the beautiful bride of Christ that it is called to be. Or, that's very complicated, let me try a different way. How do we appreciate discipline within the church? And how do we, together, support one another in the building up of the church through whether it's formal or informal discipline. You know, Chesterton talked about a club. The church is certainly not a club. We are something far better than that. We are a community of saints. And in this community, we can realize, we can, because of Christ, realize the life-giving qualities of true community because of who Christ is and what he has done. May we then give ear to the good design he has declared to us in his word that he might be glorified in us as we live in community. Let's go to God in prayer. Our Heavenly Father, we give you great thanks that when you sent your Son, you turned the world upside down, but really you turned it right side up. And we thank you, God, that in our own crooked hearts you have made them straight through the Lord Jesus Christ. We confess, oh God, that the kinks in our righteousness are still being worked out. by your spirit. We pray, oh God, that you would continue and you would even complete your good work in us, and that our Christian community would be a light, it would be salt, it would be life-giving, and that you, oh God, would be glorified in it all. And we pray this in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.