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Follow Justice
Follow Justice Deuteronomy 16:18-17:20 Key Verse: 16:20 “Follow justice and justice alone, so that you may live and possess the land the Lord your God is giving you.” Last week we had a wonderful message from Shepherd Daniel on Exodus 19. In it we learned that God has chosen a people for Himself, to be His treasured possession, His kingdom of priests and holy representatives in this world. I believe with all my heart that God has chosen each one of us here to be His chosen people in this generation and He will carry us as on wings of an eagle to Himself and to all nations with the gospel message. Now it is time to return to the study of the book of Deuteronomy. Two weeks ago we learned about how God wanted to set apart His people as a kingdom of priests and a holy nation by requiring all the men to come together in one place three times a year to celebrate festivals to Him. No other nation had gods that required this of them, so by doing this the Israelites would be showing the world that their God was different from all the other god’s that they worshipped. By coming together in this way, the Israelites were not only showing the world who the one true God really is, they were given a time to share joyful fellowship with God, remember all that He had already done for them, and to look forward to His ultimate promise to Abraham to bless all people on Earth through him. God would accomplish this by sending Jesus, and as we studied about these three festivals, we saw how they all pointed to God’s fulfilled promises in Jesus. In today’s passage, we will look at three more ways that God wanted to set His chosen people apart from the rest of the nations. First, they were to establish a society based on justice and justice alone. This is one of God’s primary concerns throughout the Bible and once again God’s perfect justice is revealed in Jesus. Second, God forbids them to worship any other God besides Himself. This was absolutely necessary if they were to show the world that there is only one true God, and that is the God that chose the Israelites out of all nations on Earth to be His treasured possession. Finally, God gives them very clear instructions about how the king that they appoint should be different from the ordinary kings of the world. In doing this, God was once again trying to set His people apart as different from the world to reveal His glory among the nations. May God bless our study of this passage and give each of us clear sense of being God’s chosen people and how we should live in this world. First, appoint judges and officials to establish a society based on justice alone. (16:18-20, 17:8-13) Look at verse 18. “Appoint judges and officials for each of your tribes in every town the Lord your God is giving you, and they shall judge the people fairly.” If you go back and look at Exodus 18, you will see that it was actually Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law who first made this suggestion to Moses. The Bible says that the day after Moses’ father-in-law came to visit Moses, he watched Moses go to his seat to serve as judge for the people and he saw how the people crowded around Moses from morning to evening bringing their complaints. Jethro told Moses that this was not good and it would only wear him out and lead to frustration among the people. Therefore, Jethro suggested that Moses, “select capable men from all the people—men who fear God, trustworthy men who hate dishonest gain—and appoint them as officials over thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens. Have them serve as judges for the people at all times, but have them bring every difficult case to you; the simple cases they can decide themselves. That will make your load lighter, because they will share it with you.” Under this system, Moses, and later the priests, would only have to decide the difficult cases, so they would be able to stand the pressure of ruling the people. However, just before making this suggestion to Moses, Jethro told Moses that he had a more important role to play in this system. Exodus 18:19b and 20 say, “You must be the people’s representative before God and bring their disputes to him. Teach them his decrees and instructions, and show them the way they are to live and how they are to behave.” Under this system, Moses, and later the Levitical priests, were to be God’s representatives for the people and they were to teach the people and show them how they were to live and behave. I want to mention one final thing about Jethro. Does anyone know who Jethro was or what his job was? In Exodus 3:1 we learn that Jethro was “The priest of Midian.” Jethro was not just an ordinary guy – he was a priest and a teacher of his own people. Apparently, he was a man who had wisdom from God. If we return to our passage today, we can see that Moses followed his father-in-law’s advice and established this system of judges for Israel just as Jethro described it in the book of Exodus. In verse 19, Moses warns the future judges not to pervert justice, show partiality or accept bribes because bribes can blind the eyes of the wise and twist the words of the innocent. Moses is careful to give them these instructions because God wanted them to follow justice and justice alone. Let’s look at our key verse. “Follow justice and justice alone, so that you may live and possess the land the Lord your God is giving you.” Justice is one of the main attributes of our God – He is a God of justice. This can been seen by doing a simple concordance check. If you use a simple concordance like the one found at biblegateway.com, which simply searches for the word you type in Bible verses, you will get 130 verses where the word justice is mentioned in the Bible. However, if you use a more sophisticated concordance search engine like Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance, which searches not just for the word, but for other verses and other Biblical resources that deal with the topic associated with the word, you will get 5829 reference for the word “justice.” Justice is very important to God and a central theme of the Bible. God seems to be particularly interested in justice for the most helpless of society. If you look back at the book of Exodus again, you will see that God heard His people crying out because they were not receiving any justice in Egypt. God answered their crying out prayer and He brought His justice on the Egyptians until they let His people go. As I read through the book of Deuteronomy, I also noticed that God takes special notice of certain groups of people. These are the widows, the fatherless and the foreigners living among the Israelites. A search on biblegateway.com reveals 11 mentions of these people in the book of Deuteronomy alone and most of these have to do with not denying them some form of justice. Deuteronomy 27:19 is a good example. “’Cursed is anyone who withholds justice from the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow.’ Then all the people shall say, ‘Amen!’” If we look at Jesus we can also see this same sense of justice offered to the most helpless people in society. Jesus was constantly reaching out and showing compassion to people who were never shown any type of mercy or justice in their life. A good example is the man with the shriveled hand that Jesus had stand up before the Pharisees and teacher of the law in synagogue on the Sabbath. Jesus didn’t use the word justice, but he asked them a simple question to reveal how their stubborn hearts were withholding justice from these people. Mark’s version in chapter 3 states it this way, “Jesus said to the man with the shriveled hand, ‘Stand up in front of everyone.’ Then Jesus asked them, ‘Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?’ But they remained silent. He looked around at them in anger and, deeply distressed at their stubborn hearts, said to the man, ‘Stretch out your hand.’ He stretched it out, and his hand was completely restored.” Jesus is God’s perfect representation of justice. Jesus took upon himself God’s justice for our sins on the cross. He paid off the debt we could never pay back to God. Here we learn that God is a God of justice and His people should live in an absolutely just society to reveal this characteristic of God. Second, do not worship other gods. (16:21-17:7) From establishing judges and officials to ensure a just society God returns to another of His other most talked about themes in the Bible. That is, the Israelites were forbidden to worship any other god besides the one true God who had delivered them form Egypt and brought them to this Promised Land. Look at verses 21 & 22. “Do not set up any wooden Asherah pole beside the altar you build to the Lord your God, and do not erect a sacred stone, for these the Lord your God hates.” These and words just like them are repeated throughout the five books of Moses. They are repeated so often, that you would think the Israelites would never forget them or turn away from them, but this is exactly what they do time and time again. In fact, if you carefully read the historical books and the prophets, you will see that this is the most common sin committed by the Israelites throughout the Old Testament. This resulted from them not having a right relationship with God or a right attitude in worshiping God. Look at 17:1. “Do not sacrifice to the Lord your God an ox or a sheep that has any defect or flaw in it, for that would be detestable to him.” When I first read this verse, I thought it was kind of out of place. However, God led me back to His Ten Commandments and to the prophet Malachi to help make this more clear to me. The first four commandments all address the proper relationship we should have with God. As I thought about them, I realized that keeping these four commandments in the center of our hearts are the only way that we can follow God’s other commandments or live a life that God can use. God must always have the first place in our heart and we must fear and love Him with all our heart. It is only possible to truly love our neighbor if we first love God because God created our neighbor and loved him/her enough to send His one and only Son to die for them. But even more than this, we must have a right attitude when we worship God. When we bring something to God as our offering it should be the very best we have. After all, we only have something to offer God because He has provided it for us. So, as I began to wonder why the Israelites constantly fell into idolatry and the worship of false God’s, I realized they didn’t have a right attitude in worshiping God. In chapter 1 of the book of Malachi, the prophet severely rebukes the Israelites for defiling the Lord’s table by offering blind, lame and diseased animals as their offerings before the Lord. If you look at the book of first Samuel, you can see that there was already contempt being shown to the offerings made to the Lord by Eli’s sons, the priests of the people. From the very beginning, many of the Israelites didn’t have the right attitude in worshiping the Lord and so they fell away from worshiping Him and began to worship the gods of the peoples around them. In verse 2-7, Moses imposes the death penalty for anyone who is found to be worshiping false gods or not worshiping God in the right way. We may think this is a very harsh punishment, but we must remember that God was trying to establish a kingdom of priests and a holy nation among the pagans of the world so that they could see the one true God and come to worship Him. If the Israelites acted like all the other people of the world, there would be nothing that set them apart to reveal God’s glory to the nations around them. So, they had to purge the evil among them right when they saw it come up. It is interesting to note that even in this command we can see God’s idea of justice being established. No person was to be condemned on the testimony of just one other person, because that witness might simply be an enemy of the person they were condemning. The witnesses also had to be the ones to cast the first stones at the condemned person, so they would have to take part in the killing of one of their fellow Israelites. This would definitely discourage people from condemning their neighbor for no reason. Third, regulations for the king. (17:14-20) When I read this section of the passage I was amazed. I was amazed because of events that took place about 400 years after these words were written. Let’s begin by looking at verse 14. “When you enter the land the Lord your God is giving you and have taken possession of it and settled in it, and you say, ‘Let us set a king over us like all the nations around us.’” God knew what was going to happen once the Israelites settled down in the land that He was giving them. It is not what God wanted to happen, but He knew it was going to happen. Remember, God wanted his people to be set apart and not to be like all the people around them. However, God knew His people would want to be like all the other people around them, so that they would fit in. Now I want to jump ahead in the Bible about 400 years to 1 Samuel 8:5. Listen very carefully to what the people say to Samuel. “They said to him, ‘You are old, and your sons do not follow your ways; now appoint a king to lead us, such as all the other nations have.’” This is exactly what God said would happen – the people would ask for a king so that they could be like the other nations around them. God knew it was going to happen, so he gave them very specific instructions about the king that they were to place over Israel. Again, I was amazed at what God knew was going to happen. In verses 15-20, God’s gives very specific instructions about how the king should be appointed and what the king should and shouldn’t do. These instructions began to be broken after just the second king of Israel, e.g. after King David. When David was about to die, one of David’s own sons set himself up as king. He didn’t wait for God’s choosing or appointment, he just gathered people around himself and declared himself king. That is not the way God said it should be done in verse 15. Furthermore, when Solomon became king, he proceeded to collect more horses, chariots, gold, silver and wives than any other king. (See 1 Kings 10) Of course, much of this was because God had blessed Solomon because he had asked for wisdom in ruling God’s people. Solomon amazed the people by his wisdom and they all brought him gifts, but he didn’t use his wisdom to stay close to God’s word that we read here. Why? I think it might be because he neglected verses 18-20. Solomon clearly knew the Lord and he was familiar with His law, but he clearly didn’t keep the words of this passage close to his heart. He didn’t meditate on these words day and night and these are the words that God directly spoke to him. If you read 1 Kings 11, you will see that God became angry with Solomon toward the end of his life because his heart had turned away from the Lord. God raised up enemies against Solomon and when his son became king, God used Jeroboam to take northern Israel away from the rule of David and his descendants. Sinful human beings all like this – we want riches, glory and honor – but the Bible tells us that we should be content with the blessings that God provides us. More than that, we must study his word day after day and keep His words at the center of our heart if we want to remain in His blessing. Today we thought about three more ways God wanted to set His people apart from the world so that they would reflect His glory to the nations. Today, we are God’s chosen people and we should be set apart and be different from those living around us. Day by day, as we meditate on God’s word and offer up our prayers, we should grow more and more in the image of Jesus and reflect His glory to the people around us, so that they can come and worship God together with us. |
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