Sanctuary Cities

I told you to buy a hymn book yourself, and I'm not going to brag here, like I literally just bought hymn books for my house this year or last year. I finally realized, well, why don't I just buy five of them, you know? And now I have the custom-made ones that Alexandra helped me make a while ago. So now every week we sing the songs we're singing at church, and we're learning them, and you guys can also thank God we do that, because there's a lot of trial runs of some of these songs before we get to Sunday, and we do them as well as we do.

But get a hymn book, sing at home, daily worship. If you want to turn to Numbers 35, so for the sake of our visitors, I will humbly assume you didn't sit down and listen to all my sermons previously, so you may not even know exactly where I am right now, which is okay. We've been going through the Ten Commandments since about July, about August maybe we started.

And we are now in the Sixth Commandment, Thou Shalt Not Kill. And this is only the second week that we're into that commandment right now. And so let me read from Numbers 35. So even though we're in Exodus 20, that's where thou shall not kill is. We're in Numbers 35 today. So verse 16.

But if he struck him down with an iron object so that he died, he is a murderer. The murderer shall surely be put to death. And if he struck him down with a stone in the hand by which he would die, and as a result he died, he is a murderer. The murderer shall surely be put to death. Or if he struck him with a wooden object in the hand by which he would die, and as a result he died, he is a murderer.

The murderer shall surely be put to death. That's a reading of God's Word. And we're going to look through a lot more of this chapter. But I hesitate to read 30 verses as an intro, especially with the length of my sermons anyway. So I'll spare you that. But we will look at almost 30 verses here, Lord willing.

Or else I'll just be here a long time if I don't keep track well. But we talked last week about murder and killing being the intentional, you know, thou shall not kill refers to the intentional killing of a human being by someone. And we read through the confession slightly, and we'll look at it again today. And the confession reminds us that murder is not simply just killing someone, that the commandment itself, I guess I should say, is not simply about not killing people, that it has to do with actually doing what you can that's legal and reasonable to actually protect other life.

That's why even in wicked countries, like the one we live in right now, just probably could be classified as wicked if you compare, you know, the Bible. Even our country has laws against what's called negligence, right? Or depraved indifference, where your indifference towards somebody else's plight is considered to be depraved, that you didn't stop to rescue someone.

And so we've seen, recently I've seen it in videos that people showed me where somebody's getting beat up on the street or they've been injured somehow on the street and the people just walk right by. And it's a sad world we live in when that's your inclination. It's also a sad world we live in where there are people who would fake some kind of fight or injury or something to get you to come over to help so that then they could do something to you.

So the fact that that's even on our minds is really sad. but as Christians, especially Christian men I think the exhortation is you should be ready to go and help people wherever you are and if it means your demise then you do it because the Lord put it on your heart that you're going to help and you're going to be a helper and we'll trust that more often than not you'll actually help somebody that needs it rather than get conned or something like that but that's for our men's group. We'll do that exhortation I guess. In Genesis 9 we see that God says in verse 9, verse 5 and 6 He says, surely I will require your lifeblood.

He says, from every living thing I will require it and from every man from each man's brother I will require the life of man. He says, Whoever sheds man's blood, by man his blood shall be shed. For in the image of God he made man. So having established what it said in Genesis 9 about what should happen after blood is shed, what can we evaluate from that?

And then we'll see what happens in Numbers 35. The thing that's important to understand is that murder, killing somebody else is so bad that it requires that the person who did it pays with their own blood. So if you steal from somebody and you steal $200 we'll say realistically if you give them the $200 back and I know there's some fourfold and some different things people have to do in the Bible but realistically you can pay it back eventually.

If you kill somebody there is no way you can give them their life back. And so one of the things I want to make sure that we can understand having a Christian worldview is that we are and I don use this phrase all the time because of the baggage but we are in one sense pro okay So we have our issues with what we'll call the pro-life movement, and if you don't know all about the history of some of those things, I can explain it, and I gave you a book about it, in fact, already. But we're pro-life in the sense that we believe in life.

We want to promote life, all right? And I'm not saying I agree with everything that the people that call themselves pro-life and abortion call themselves. But the argument has been made, well, if you're pro-life, how can you be for the death penalty? And it's not a bad argument to make if somebody's trying to work these things out. Now, a lot of times it's just one of those questions where the person isn't really honestly asking a question.

They're not honestly trying to discuss it. But a lot of people are trying to figure this out, and they don't have the futility of mind yet that Romans describes. and maybe some of them are even new Christians. Maybe some are honest, investigatory, like philosophical non-believers who are willing to discuss things with you. And they see a logical inconsistency between saying, I'm pro-life, therefore I want abortion to be criminalized.

But the same person saying, hey, I think that guy should get the death penalty. and I don't think it's a horribly easy thing for people to work out especially apart from the revelation from God if we didn't have God's revelation explaining capital punishment we would have no basis by which to have capital punishment and so for all your rationalistic friends I don't even know what they call themselves these anti-preceptive, evidentialist guys for all these guys, I don't know how they'd ever come up with a death penalty apart from the Bible. But the idea is this. Once a person kills another person and takes their life, and then there's certain other offenses that are as egregious that it deserves their life to be taken.

They have forfeited their life. And God, by His commands of Scripture, has informed us how we can know when this is the case. This is why we don't just... A guy is driving down the street and he breaks the speed limit, we don't give him the death penalty. And if anybody wanted to, we would have to stand up as Christians and oppose it and say, no, that's an improper use of authority as even a God-appointed government.

But a government that will not punish evil the way God has said is the right way to punish evil is making itself at least a wicked government. And what they do is they want to come across as the kind and loving and gentle, the amnesty international type people and what they do is they go find one guy who was falsely accused or whatever the case is and we regret that that can happen but we don't throw away something as important as the death penalty because mistakes have been made in a legal system the reason why the death penalty is essential to being pro-life is because you're pro-life because you love life anyone who thinks they can take it they are the ones who need to have their life taken from them according to God, not us so we don't try to be smarter than God we don't try to be more wise than God or we shouldn't we certainly think we're nicer than God and kinder than God because we would let a man that brutally murdered a family of four we would let him not get the death penalty because we think somehow the death penalty is cruel. As if the suffering that he put his victims through somehow didn't deserve any kind of retribution, right?

And so we're going to see that here, that God will actually punish a land or a nation for not taking care of this kind of business. And this is why Christian thinking people, for several years now have been utterly concerned, not in an anxious, we don't trust the Lord to take care of us way, but we've been utterly concerned about the United States of America that indiscriminately, well, I shouldn't say indiscriminately, because we discriminately murder more black babies than any other one. So we're quite discriminatory in our murder.

But this is why we're afraid of what God could do to a country like ours. When you read about the desolation of lands, trees won't even grow, people are eating their own placentas or whatever. When you read about that in Scripture and you think, well, that's what we deserve. Because we haven't just stood up and fought for the lives of people who need to be rescued from their perishing.

Let's look at Numbers 35 as I lead into this. But the themes here that we're trying to understand, because again, I try to go verse by verse. and we did that with 1 Peter, and we even did it with Psalm 51 and the section in Samuel about David and Bathsheba. But going through the New Testament law, or the law of God, going through the Ten Commandments, it's not like a narrative, and it's not like a letter.

It's basically ten separate topical series, right? And so it's not as smooth for me even, that's much harder for me to even preach through. So it's easier for me to try to find one section that I think relates, and then try to go through that section. Does that make sense? And so the themes are, one, the blood crying out to God from the land. Do you remember that last week?

Whose blood cried out to God? She knows. She doesn't even hear her. He said it. Abel's blood, right? God says the ground.

The blood is calling out to me from the ground, so he cursed the ground. McCain literally couldn't grow vegetables anymore, which was his talent, because blood hit the ground. And God made it that way, and God can make it so we won grow anything here or have any prosperity And then the second theme I want you to consider is the seriousness of murder based on why God does what he does that we see here in the death penalty itself And then finally, the other thing I want us to understand is that murder, we'll see this again here, murder involves more than simply something happened and someone died. murder begins with your heart it's important what your motive was when the event occurred and as well Jesus tells us later you're already guilty of murder in the eyes of God if you simply hated someone or called someone a fool or insulted your brother so although the Old Testament was perfect and it was the word of God the judicial requirements of how to respond to murder we're not even close to what Jesus is saying you're going to need on the day of judgment.

So back to verse 14. Well, here, I'm sorry, go to verse 10. So God's giving the Levite cities to live in. The Levites are the priests of Aaron, and he's giving them cities to live in. And I don't want to get into all the 48 cities, because that's one of those little rabbit trails that will take me off the course here. So I'm just going to gloss over it.

But six of these cities he's going to design as cities of refuge or sanctuary cities. Now don't get that confused with people in California thinking, let's make a city where criminals can just come hang out. That's not a sanctuary city, and people are abusing the scriptural terms by even using that word in the 21st century. Also, by the way, we do not mind the babies making noise or anything.

That's all up to you how you react to that. We love it. So verse 9, that Yahweh spoke to Moses directly from Yahweh's mouth. Speak to the sons of Israel and say to them, when you cross the Jordan into the land of Canaan, then you shall select for yourselves cities to be your cities of refuge, that the manslayer who has struck down any person unintentionally may flee there.

So if you read that verse, And you can't immediately see the distinction between what they're trying to do in all these liberal states in the United States, and you're missing something. This is a person who unintentionally kills somebody. This is a person who, although guilty of bloodshed, isn't guilty of murder. Accidents happen, right? But he says, and the city shall be for you as a refuge from the avenger.

Now I got Jude's attention. I said Avengers, right? We're reading all about Avengers, Jude. You should listen. These are the original ones. So that the manslayer will not die, listen, until he stands before the congregation for judgment.

And the cities which you are to give shall be your six cities of refuge. You shall give three cities across the Jordan and three cities in the land of Canaan. they are to be cities of refuge. These six cities shall be for refuge for the sons of Israel and for the sojourner and for the foreign resident among them that anyone who strikes a person down unintentionally may flee there.

So this is what's going on. You've got this big area of Israel that they're taking over, the promised land, right? And they're going to go across the Jordan and they're going to designate six cities that are where Levitical priests are basically living. They're going to have 48 cities for the priests, but six of them are going to be designated, geographically based, so that if somebody in this much larger region accidentally kills their neighbor before their death occurs because somebody avenges the other guy's death, they have a place they can flee to for sanctuary.

So an example might be you're out working with your buddy and you guys are hitting something hard and your buddy bends over and you hit him by accident, right? Or you're pushing something heavy and all of a sudden it starts to roll down a hill and there's a guy there. There's a number of ways that you can be the person who caused somebody else to die but it wasn't your intention.

It was an accident. And in fact, you weren't negligent. So we're not talking about gross negligence. Like drunk driving, you kill someone. Nope, I would probably think that in God's eyes that's murder because we have the information now to know that you can't really responsibly drive drunk. So if you kill someone driving drunk, it's because you were doing something that intentionally could have been a threat to somebody's life.

This is one of the reasons why we tell people, especially Christian women, that you should never take the birth control pill. The birth control pill is an abortifacient. What that means is that women take a pill that is supposed to control birth. What it really does is it regulates hormones and it tricks the body into thinking it's either already pregnant I don't remember all the details, and I'm not into the details sometimes.

But the point ends up being that the birth control pill prevents implantation, is what it does. It's not contraception. Contraception would make it so that you couldn't conceive. So there's various things that you could call contraception that you guys can argue about if they're legal in Christian context or not, that legitimately don't kill children.

But the birth control pill can, on occasion, allow a woman to ovulate. And then if a woman ovulates and then there the thing that happens that makes them pregnant the birth control pill simply makes it an unsafe home for the child that been conceived and created by God in that woman body And so the baby ends up not having any place to attach to, and ultimately, for lack of a better medical term, the baby starves to death. Because the baby can't attach an implant on the inside of the uterine wall and get the nutrients that babies require. and so if you are a Christian and you are taking a birth control pill maybe you've been deceived into thinking it's necessary for some medical reason which is I would say probably a lie most of the time I can't say 100% that it never does anything but it's a worthless endeavor and you are doing the thing that could get you pregnant you are willfully now with knowledge doing something that could kill a child that God grants you.

And as a Christian, at the very least, I'd hope you'd abandon that as quick as possible. I also wouldn't trust a general industry whose job it is to prevent children from coming into the world, and if they do happen to make it to conception, that it'll kill them as quick as they can. I wouldn't trust that industry even to give me a band-aid that fit right on my knee, okay?

It's just that simple. I'd rather bleed out in some sense and accept a band-aid from that type but anyway I can get off on tangents we did abortion in December if you want to know more about abortion that sermon has been posted we're definitely anti-abortion in this church though we think all churches should be anyway so you've got your sanctuary city and the idea here is that and we don't see this is hard to conceive of and it's actually still hard for me to understand because, again, I don't see consistent agreement across all the different guys that are supposedly the guys you can go read and get all the right answers from. But this Avenger guy, he's a family member of the person who died.

And so you have this person who's been killed, right or wrong, how it happened at this point. And somebody in that person's family is literally responsible to go and take the other man's life. So it's not like a vigilante thing. This is the way it was. This is the way things happened at the time. This is one of the reasons why when, oh, I don't remember which kid it was.

One of the ladies in scripture, a kid killed one of the other kids, and then she said, he's got to get away before I lose two sons in one day. I don't remember who it was right now. But she was worried somebody would come and do, you know, basically Code of Hammurabi type stuff, right? And so you've just killed somebody. It's an accident. You know it's an accident.

That dude's brother is about to come and take you out. And he's allowed to. Like, this is inconceivable to us right now because we have government systems that are now set up that are supposed to handle this stuff. And so it doesn't make sense sometimes to us. But that's what's happening. We'll say right or wrong.

That's how it's going. your refuge that you could take would be to run to one of these cities get to one of these cities one way or another so that you can be safe from this Avenger guy. Alright? And this is God's provision so that people who accidentally cause the life of someone else to cease would have some protection from basically being murdered themselves.

And then if you think about it for a second, if you've ever sent an email and somebody gave you an out-of-office reply, but then your out-of-office was on, and then it went back. And I don't know if you've ever seen that. I've seen email systems completely broken because they couldn't figure out that this is an infinite loop. So if you think about it, though, you accidentally kill somebody, their brother comes and kills you.

Well, then your brother's like, well, I've got to avenge my brother's death. And it's just going to keep going, and you're just going to have barbarianism going on. So as bad sometimes as governments can be, and as much as we can complain about ours, and I know Elijah knows all the secret things that we don't all know that ours is doing. He'll tell us.

Governments are also very good, and they're given by God. And for the most part, even a pretty bad government is going to be better than no government. And a bad government is still a step away from a tyranny. It may be multiple steps. So be careful. I've called people tyrants that I shouldn't.

What I should have said is they're acting like a tyrant right now. But Mike DeWine's not a tyrant. He's done two things maybe that are really tyrannical in nature, I guess, or outside the Constitution. But so you go to this city of refuge, and now you're safe. And the idea is that now you get a trial. So instead of Elijah's brother coming and taking me out because I accidentally conked him on the head, I go to this city and I get a trial.

So if you look at Joshua 20 real quick. I love when I say real quick and every time I think, I wonder what the people are thinking. Joshua 20 says, Yahweh spoke to Joshua saying, Speak to the sons of Israel saying, Designate the cities of refuge of which I spoke to you by the hand of Moses. That the manslayer, notice he doesn't call him a murderer. He calls him a manslayer.

This is why you have involuntary manslaughter laws. He says that the manslayer who strikes down any person unintentionally without premeditation may flee there and they shall become for you as a refuge from the avenger of blood. And he shall flee to one of these cities and shall stand at the entrance of the gate of the city and speak his case in the hearing of the elders of that city. and they shall take him into the city to them and give him a place so that he may live among them.

And so, it wasn't just like, you just start running, and then all of a sudden it's like, Oh, Canal Winchester, city limit, I'm safe. You know what I mean? It wasn't like that. You went there, you stated your case, you explained, Look, I'm coming into this place, and trust me, you're the Levitical priest living in this city, you're going to be wanting to make sure you're not just letting murderers in.

Alright? And we're going to see why later, because God promises to basically punish those whose land is polluted by murder. That's just later in the chapter. And so you go there and you're stating your case. And you're trying to say, look, I really didn't mean to kill this guy. This is what happened, right?

And now you have a chance for what we would just call a fair trial. And if the manslayer makes it into the city of refuge, the person who is coming to take care of them isn't allowed to do that. He has to give them the fair trial. but here's the thing and I am all about seeing how Old Testament scripture points to Jesus in fact I just did it with Proverbs 8 and I've heard people say like well these sanctuary cities they're like Jesus because we flee to him for refuge and then we're protected right but when we're looking at typology we want to be careful that it's really what God intended for the typology to be.

And although Jesus is a refuge for us, let's think about this for a second. And you can keep thinking they're pictures of Jesus if you want. But the sanctuary city is a place where people who actually aren't guilty of something can go. Jesus is a place where guilty sinners go, right? the sanctuary city is a place where if you're found to actually be guilty you're kicked out so that the other guy can get you Jesus is a place where when you get there you can't get out and it's because you're so guilty he holds on to you I don't like the whole sanctuary cities are Jesus thing that much I probably said it once and you see pictures of it if you walk outside the sanctuary city the avenger is allowed to kill you.

You can see that in here. Okay, so if you're going to step outside of Christ, it's dangerous ground. I get that. What I prefer, and we'll see this in a minute, is that it's the high priest who's the picture of Jesus here. The high priest in the sanctuary city whose very life is what allows you to maintain life, that's the closest picture of Jesus. And it's his death that actually sets you free from the blood guilt that you hold.

Even though you're not guilty of murder, you're still guilty of another man's blood is what we'll see. So that's just a side note from a guy that loves seeing Jesus in all scriptures. So I'm not anti that. But so now God gives us some parameters to follow to decide if it's murder. So God comes in the sanctuary city. You're a priest.

There's some other priests. You're the elders of the city. And you've got to decide, hey, are we going to keep this guy here? Because let me tell you, you're going to keep him a long time if you decide to keep him. Are we going to keep him in our city and then he's going to do whatever dirty deeds that he's doing somewhere else, he's going to do them here, or are we going to say, we don't think this guy belongs here?

So you've got to decide, do we really think he's innocent? Because I'll tell you what, if I was a murderer, I'd run to a sanctuary city. So the fact that you ran to a sanctuary city doesn't mean you unintentionally killed someone. It just means you killed someone. Right? And so we have to be able to know how to evaluate it.

Well, God gives us some ideas. He says if he struck down with an iron object so that he died, he's a murderer. So the idea becomes you're using some weapon that could intentionally kill someone. I don't think he means you were swinging your kettlebell that's made of iron and it accidentally hit your buddy because he was working out with you. You know what I mean?

I don't think that's the intention of this section. I think the intention is you're using a weapon that's obviously used to kill. I don't think this has... But also, accidental things will be prevented if you take more care because of this threat. So if he struck him down with a stone, he's a murderer. So the Bible doesn't have any problem calling people murderers.

And yet we do. We're afraid to actually call people murderers. there's a pretty famous I'm using quotes if you're listening Christian woman out there named Karen Swallow Pryor who actually made a big deal years ago and wrote an article saying it's un-Christ-like to call someone a murderer so you have a woman who was designed by God to provide nourishment and love and care for children that's got a womb with a child in it and she's going to go pay somebody else to rip the child apart or burn him to death and this woman's telling us we're on Christ's lake if we tell her that she's a murderer if she does that. And yet, you know what?

Every single woman that has killed one of their children is going to be begging for that mean-spirited preacher on the day of judgment when she stands before a holy God and she finds out from him that she's a murderer. And so we go and we tell people the truth about their sin and we use the words that the Bible uses to describe sin because that's the only way anyone's going to get saved. And if God ends up saving nobody, as a result, he's glorified because we use his language and we defend what he has said.

But if he struck him down with a wooden object by which he would die, and he died, he's a murderer. The murderer shall surely be put to death. So when I first read this, I thought, okay, so if he holding a club now you can put him to death without a trial And now I understanding that this is like examples for the people trying the person to go by to try to determine their guilt You're not going to open someone's heart and look inside and say, oh, you had hatred in your heart.

This was premeditated. We have to try to determine motive based on the evidence that we can actually collect. And so God's giving people examples, right? Jason's found dead. I'm standing there with a gun in my hand. Jason's got a bullet in his head well there's some reasonable assumption that like an intelligent human being should have known that that gun would have killed him so even if it was an accident we've got a big problem right you're not going to say the same thing about a little kid that accidentally killed somebody with a gun that doesn't understand yet right and so we evaluate the evidence so he says the blood avenger verse 19 now himself shall put the murderer to death.

He shall put him to death when he meets him. So basically though, this is the evaluation for the trial. Verse 20, it gets a little bit less severe maybe. And if he pushed him of hatred or threw something at him lying in wait and as a result he died. Well now you have an interesting thing. so you didn't maybe even try to kill the guy maybe you were just trying to do something mean to him maybe you just pushed him right and he fell and hit his head on a hard stone and died maybe you weren't holding a weapon that was intended to take his life but you were not doing all you could to actually preserve his life at that time but also in fact you were doing things that threatened his life so this goes to the drunk driving analogy I bet you it's an extremely rare drunk driver that was thinking, I'm going to kill someone, and particularly a particular person.

But it's the indifference you have toward the life of others because of your actions. But it's as if he pushed him of hatred. So somehow, God expects us to actually look at other people and try to determine motive. So this whole, you can't judge my heart, only God can judge me. Okay, it's true. I cannot perfectly judge your heart.

And a jury of 12 peers of yours cannot perfectly judge your heart. That's for sure. But God expects us to try. He expects us to look at the outward actions that people have. He expects the testimony of witnesses that are going to come about about who you are to help us to determine these things. It even says later, we'll get there in a minute, but it even says if there was a history of hatred between the two of you.

It's like if somebody's found dead and they have a known enemy, who's the first suspect? Even that person doesn't have a history of murder. Hey, that person had motive. Motive is extremely important when it comes to legal murder charges in the United States even, but in God's eyes too. Some of you have never murdered anybody physically. You've never even come close to it.

And you've murdered more people in your heart than real murderers and serial killers. And somebody has to pay for those sins of your heart. Either you're going to pay for them for all eternity on the day of judgment you're going to start, or they all have been cast on God's only Son for every evil thought you had. Where if you had had the power and the passion and the weapon at that moment, somebody would be dead.

Or if God hadn't have kept your car from swerving in the wrong direction because you were driving with a little road rage one day, a family of eight would be dead. Think of homeschool families here, right? We're Christians, so we don't talk about families of four. We talk about families of eight and ten, right? Okay. so if he struck him down 21 with his hand in enmity and as a result he died the one who struck him shall surely be put to death he is a murderer pay attention when God repeats things it's just so clear he wants us to know this the blood avenger shall put the murderer to death when he meets him so in a sense God is sanctioning this blood avenger concept that was going on.

And you've got these sanctuary cities that we're talking about. What's interesting about it all is that if you're post-millennial and theonomic, which usually go together, I don't understand what you do with sanctuary cities and Levitical priesthood. I guess you have to continue the Levitical priesthood if you're going to follow this letter by letter.

So I'm not theonomic and I'm not post-mill. And also I think they go together. If you meet a post mill that's not theonomic, I think you'll find an inconsistency. Anyway, I don't want to get into that. And I'm going to have to define all these words for people after, so that's fine. Ask Elijah.

He's the expert on theonomy and stuff here, right? I love picking on Elijah. It's just so everybody knows. In case you didn't notice. But if he pushed him suddenly, verse 22, so now it changes directions, without enmity, or threw something at him without lying in wait, or with any stone, by which one might die, yet without seeing, and it fell on him and he died, but he was not his enemy, nor seeking his injury, then the congregation shall judge between the slayer and the blood avenger according to these legal judgments.

So there's a provision in there to help people think through, well, what if it really was an accident? You were shoveling dirt and somebody walked up behind you and you hit them with the spade shovel. There a lot of ways people accidentally die You could be a doctor trying diligently to help people and they die And you may even make a mistake Do we want doctors to quit because they made mistakes Or do we want people to continue to advance in medicine and things, right?

And so there's provision here for the accidental manslaughter. You're driving your car, your tire blows out, it starts to spin you hit ice any number of things that can happen that we understand in this cursed world stuff's going to happen so you have a chance for this trial to happen and for this congregation to decide you know what I know he took your dad, I know he took your brother but we don't actually think he's guilty of murder in the eyes of God and that's the job of the congregation that's the job of us as Christians even with one another to help one another with sin and it's the job of the civil government to decide is this truly murder is it really murder if a 13 year old girl who's been sex trafficked for 3 years starts having her period and then gets pregnant because of this thing that they're doing to her and then they take her into a Planned Parenthood and they give her an abortion do you think she's guilty of murder if she doesn't even maybe know where they're She just does what she's told in that sense. She's a slave.

She doesn't have the control to say, no, I refuse. That's not a murderer. That's actually a secondary victim of the whole situation. Or even a primary victim of one. And so the law is supposed to have judges and juries or whatever the different circumstances could be that are able to think through things with reasonability, listen to evidence and then do the best they can to try to determine motive to try to determine what really happened and trust the witnesses that tell them what happened so we'll see that in a minute and the congregation shall deliver the manslayer, verse 25, from the hand of the blood avenger listen, and the congregation shall restore him to his city of refuge to which he fled so you go to the city of refuge then you get sent back to where the murder happened where the congregation of that place evaluates you so they're the ones deciding hey do we want this guy in our city anymore based on the testimony he's giving is this a guy we want around is he guilty do we need to avenge his blood and then if they find out he's not guilty he goes back to the city of refuge and he shall live in it until the death of the high priest who was anointed with the holy oil so you accidentally kill somebody you flee to the city of refuge most likely the one closest to you and let me tell you what, there weren't many this was not like every couple hundred feet there was a city of refuge you were far from home you were away from your family, you were away from your job all your ways to make money, all those things and you flee to the city of refuge and now you're found innocent of the crime of murder and it's like okay go to the city of refuge still it seemed backwards to me when I first was thinking about this well once you're innocent why don't you get to go home right well first of all it could be dangerous the blood avenger guy might have a little passion in his veins where he's not going to give up that easily alright this stuff happens quick enough you're going to have some people still very angry that you're alive but you think about it from the perspective that we are obligated in the catechism to do all that we can to preserve the lives of others.

Now you start thinking about it like, okay, I'm getting ready to throw heavy stones over a fence, right? If I accidentally hit somebody and they die, I just lost my livelihood, my kids lost their dad, and I don't even get to come home for who knows how long. I might be a little more careful. I might be a little more thoughtful, not just to make sure that I don't murder people, but I may actually be more thoughtful to try to preserve the lives of others.

To try to do things that are safe. To try to go beyond just not murdering and starting to go into the realm of actually protecting and preserving life. So it actually starts to make a lot of sense when you see it that way. But it's an interesting sentence. and so now you're stuck in this city so the Levites were motivated to make sure you weren't truly a murderer the people in the original city are motivated to make the right decision everybody has the proper motivation in every phase of the situation to do the best they can and the person who accidentally takes the life of another is the person who really becomes the most unfortunate person because now they have to leave for a while.

And that's sad, and that's hard, and we wish it didn't have to happen, but it's God's way of showing us the value of human life. Even the accidental shedding of your neighbor's blood has to have a price paid for it. And until a high priest dies, you're basically in prison, in a sense. Not in prison the way we think of it, but you're imprisoned in this city.

You're stuck there. Because look, if the manslayer at any time goes beyond the border of his city of refuge, to which he may flee, and the blood avenger finds him outside the border of his city of refuge, verse 27 and the blood avenger kills the manslayer he will not be guilty of blood Because he should have remained in his city of refuge until the death of the high priest So here where I see Jesus prefigured Jesus is the high priest who he protects his people. And Jesus is the one that we hide in.

But after the death of the high priest, the manslayer shall return to the land of his possession. So there's two ways you can think about this. One is, Jesus died, right? But I think of it this way, Jesus lives forever. So if I'm thinking of Jesus at all as my high priest, who's somehow my refuge, he can't die. There's no way at this point that I leave the city of refuge that I'm now in.

But you should have remained. So you start getting a little squirrely. A few years goes by, you have a young high priest maybe, right? A healthy guy, you see him out jogging. maybe your family can come visit you I don't know how it works I'm glad I don't have to do it but that's got to be tough but he says and these things shall be for a statutory judgment to you throughout your generations in all your places of habitation now remember this was for Jew and Gentile right just kind of neat but he says if anyone strikes down a person in verse 30, the murderer shall be put to death at the mouth of witnesses.

He says, but no person shall be put to death on the testimony of one witness. So now it's interesting, because now you start to see, hey, you have to have witnesses. And you can't have one witness, right? Hey, that guy's wife says he didn't do it. You can't have one witness. But also, we'll see this in a few weeks or a few months, I suppose, false witnesses and it now becomes an extremely evil thing.

It's one thing to say hey, somebody told their kid there was a tooth fairy and we call that lying and so they probably violated the ninth commandment or something. Right, okay. We can have arguments about those things. But it's a whole different thing for false witnesses to rise up. And for a man's life to be on the line because you want to change things a little bit in your testimony. and so multiple witnesses helps ensure that the people judging can get an accurate view of things and they can start to detect things like differences in the testimonies that's the goal do these testimonies accord with one another where we can accurately decide that we think this guy deserves death or doesn't because it's serious either way if he deserves it and we give him life we've now violated God and we haven't done justice and our land's polluted if he doesn't deserve death and we give it to him that's a travesty of judgment and now we're actually guilty of polluting the land so false witnesses becomes a real serious issue and so you have to have more than one the best thing about false witnesses is they came and they accused Jesus and Pontius Pilate couldn't even believe them like they brought people intentionally to lie about Jesus and they were as organized as they possibly could have been, I'm guessing, and Pilate saw right through it.

There's six things the Lord hates, seven are an abomination to him, and a false witness who breathes out lies is one of them. Moreover, verse 31, you shall not take ransom for the life of a murderer who is guilty of death, but he shall surely be put to death. wouldn't it be nice if we could get a new rec center? And if a rich murderer could give us a million dollars to go free, we'll just call it like paying a fine, right?

Then we could buy the new rec center we wanted, right? God's trying to prevent that kind of thinking. There is no price that you can pay for murdering somebody else. You deserve death. It's that simple. This is one of those black and white, not super complicated things in Scripture.

It's one of those ones where when you're talking to your non-believing friends and your neighbors, you don't have to feel really squirrely about it. Like, well, I don't know exactly how some of this stuff worked or whatever. This is pretty simple. You can't buy your way out of it. You get a speeding ticket, you pay a fine, right? You steal something, you're supposed to pay it back.

I don't think we have to do that anymore. The taxpayers pay it back if it ever gets paid back. you murder someone, you can't just pay a fine to get out of the consequence of it. It's serious. He shall surely be put to death. Verse 32, You shall not take ransom for him who has fled to his city of refuge, that he may return to live in the land before the death of the priest.

There's no going against the way God has prescribed for this to happen. And this is because God shows no favoritism. So if God's going to bless you with amazing wealth, which he does with lots of Christians, and praise the Lord for that, that he's given a lot of people good wealth, and they help the church with it, they help missionaries, they help the poorer people, but your wealth is not so that you can buy your way out of murder.

And it's not even so you can buy your way out of the city of refuge concept. imagine the preferential treatment people would have gotten. How easy would it have been to have people know you were guilty of murder to say, well, we'll just send them to the city of refuge. We'll make a deal with the priests. You know, 50,000 of these, 50,000 of those. It can't be that way.

And here's why. You shall not pollute the land in which you are. For blood pollutes the land. Remember Cain's blood or Abel's blood? and know Satiation can be made for the land, for the blood that is shed on it, except by the blood of him who shed it. You shed blood in your land, the person who shed it, their blood has to be shed. That's what God said in Genesis 9, and it hasn't changed.

As long as you see rainbows, Genesis 9's provision for capital punishment is true. That's simple, and we see rainbows all the time still, double ones. you have to shed his blood and if you will not do it if you will not vote for people who are going to do it if we will not advocate for it if we will not speak about it then we deserve polluted land we deserve to eat fruit of that land that pollutes us then it makes us sick hurts us or is desolate we have to stand up for it there's a principle here that we have to remember too we're not Gnostics creation is real and it's good. God made it.

And the land is real. And some of us like to think, well, I'm too spiritual. Think about earthly things. Well, you know what? The land God gave us has a spiritual relevance here, doesn't it? It's related to the murder that happens in that land.

He says, you shall not defile the land in which you live in the midst of which I dwell For I Yahweh am dwelling in the midst of the sons of Israel He doesn want it polluted because he belongs with his people And God who too holy to even look upon evil he's not going to come hang out in the place where you're murdering people. Read Isaiah 1. He absolutely cannot stand their holy convocations because of their bloody hands.

This is why a lot of people don't think God can... Now God's omnipresent, so don't get me wrong here, but that's why a lot of people think God doesn't even visit a lot of churches on Sunday. Because those same churches, half of them are pro-abortion or pro-choice. Whether it's in practice or it's in thought. I'm not going to say your church has to be a Planned Parenthood twice a week or they're not anti-abortion enough.

I don't get that far. But you have to have some stance about some of the things going on around you. God who wants to be amidst his people says don't defile the land in which you live no propitiation can be made for the land for the blood that is shed on it except by the blood of him who shed it so the beautiful thing here is that even though you have shed somebody blood and if you haven done it physically you done it spiritually in your mind every one of us is guilty of this and even some of the little kids I seen you hate your brother I seen you insult your brother But Jesus Christ, His blood was shed on your behalf.

Well, how is that possible? It has to be the blood of Him who did it. It says here, Jesus was treated as if He did it. It's not like Jesus just was there and God just said, Okay, crucify him and it's all my plan and then we'll do something magical. Jesus became sin for us, right? He was treated as if he had done the things you had done.

So all the almighty wrath of God that you deserve for all eternity, Jesus actually paid for every single instance of it. So if you could sit down starting today and spend the next million years trying to write out all the outward sins you've already committed, your hand would fall off before you even got halfway there. We're not even talking about all the ones God knows you've committed in your heart, and Jesus personally paid for every one of them if you're a Christian.

And if you're not a Christian, you better decide that you're going to follow Jesus. You better think about the fact that you cannot pay that penalty yourself We going to come to the table in a little bit And we going to talk about Jesus giving up His body and His blood because He loved His people. Because Jesus loves life. He's not a murderer. And yet He was treated like one and murdered so that murderers could go free.

So pray with me. Father, thank You for the life of Jesus. Thank You for the love of Jesus. thank you that we have a certain hope in Jesus today. And Lord, forgive us for all the times that even just in our minds, we have hated somebody in such a way that is indistinct from murder. Help us to have a truly pro-life attitude, where we value life so much that we would do all we could to preserve others' lives, where we would do all we could to rescue those that are perishing, where we would do all we could to protect innocent life, even if that means that we would have to take life ourselves.

Help us if we ever face these types of situations to do them lawfully and reasonably. We thank you for the forgiveness that Christ offers for how many times we've failed at all these things. Amen.